Firelight

Tomorrow when the rest of the world is lining up to watch New Moon, I'll be watching this..

Love this...

This blog speaks to me.

Swedes Just Wanna Have Fun

Jipped by the Phantom...

You know that totally fun tradition of the "Halloween phantom"? You know when your neighbors around put together a plate of store-bought cookies and leave them on other unsuspecting neighbors' doorsteps? To ward off other phantoms you put a picture of a ghost in your window. Well, the other day I started thinking...

Who in their right mind doesn't want to get more treats? So what did we do?? That's right, when the phantom came to our house we did what any other treat-hungry person would do--not put the sign in the window and see how many people bring us treats!

Today, we had the phantom come to our house...again. Hehehe As soon as they left the treats on our doorstep we devoured like half of the chocolate-covered pretzels right there. Ya, we don't waste ANY time. Literally 3 milliseconds later we heard the doorbell ring again. More goodies? No! The phantoms returned to take back their treats! They said they didn't mean to put them on our doorstep. Oh the irony!

Finally!

It's going to be great!

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Who Invented Frosted Windows?

I have these wonderful neighbors who have their bathroom on the side of their house close to our upstairs playroom window. We can literally string one of those telephone-can-things across and talk to each other. We are that close to each other and that straight across that every night around 8:30 we have to hurry and shut our blinds before the kids see a little too much of the neighbors (if you know what I mean :-p)
So this brings me to the moral of the story...

How do you tell your next door neighbors that those frosted windows are just NOT going to cut it!

Summer-Time Pics

Poor Millie sitting in a homemade grass seat.








Wish they stayed this way forever.




First Egg!!!

Dear ?

Dear Mystery Man,

It's been 12 months and 13 days since our first meeting ... that I don't remember. Look, I'm sorry I never called when you came in the library and left me that very flattering note. I honestly don't remember what you look like or anything about you at all. You must have given me the note while I was conveniently busy and didn't notice your attempt to flirt with me. You sure left in a hurry. I later found the note crumpled up in my jean's back pocket. I'm sure you're a very nice person, but alas it will never be. I'm sure that you are so distraught by the lack of response that you received from me, that you probably come in the library everyday to see the beauty before you that is the librarian and wonder if I will miraculously remember you and fall in love. Most likely not.

It must sadden you that you will never experience dating me. You will never have the opportunity to ask me to a really scary movie (which I hate) and afterward have the audacity to invite yourself over to my house where you stay for the four longest hours of my life. You will never have the opportunity to finish up said date by spending the last two hours watching Harry Potter with my family while I'm upstairs lying on my bed pondering if I can escape by shimmying down the drain pipe. You also won't be able to take me to a dance and while there, find the real true love of your life, and ask her for her phone number while I stand by and watch this match made in Heaven. Or, you won't get to experience the fun of taking me to a park for a picnic, and during the Frisbee game going on all around us ask me to offer a prayer on the food.

Oh, what excitement you have missed out on in this past year or so, all because I was too engrossed in my work and oblivious to the going-on's around me to notice the writing on the back of that library slip with the phone number. It's likely I wouldn't have called anyway, I still like the whole boy calls girl thing. Call me old fashioned. So I guess you'll never know what you really missed out on.

Sincerely,

Miss Oblivious.

GUESS WHAT!!

CHICKEN BUTT!!!.... OR HUMAN BUTT



We're almost done with probably one more day to finish up details.



Our funny chickens are going to have a hard time sleeping in their new coop because they are used to living in that gross box.

Coop Update

So not much has happened on the coop but there are walls on and my mom and I have painted ourselves to death!!

Chicken Coop

So, I guess we were tired of smelly chickens sitting in a box next to our kitchen so my parents are building a chicken coop where we used to have our dilapidated playhouse. It's going to be pretty cute. I'll keep updated pictures on here. Also the pic at the bottom is of my new garden boxes. Look at the peas coming up!

Some Weird Requests For My Birthday...

These are some very distinguished things that I have wanted for my birthday in previous years..

-Bonsai Tree
-Kipper Snacks Sardines
-Krispy Kreme Tee shirt
-Kids Almanac Book

and this year.... Wellington Boots (aka "Wellies")

Early B-Day!!

I have gotten a couple of really awesome presents early for my birthday. In our attempt to be more rural we went to the local farm store today and picked out three baby chicks. We used to have one chicken a couple years ago. Stella,our chicken was like a person who would follow you around the garden and wait for you to dig for worms. He also roamed the neighborhood and unfortunately was eaten by a dog.


My other cool gift is something that I've been begging and begging for. It's a bookshelf that has a fluorescent light above it screwed in the top and holds growing seedlings. I know- I'm weird. Finally my dad surprised me when I got home from work with it in my room.

ME: the Organic Gardener

Ever since I read the book Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards when I was about 10 years old I've been obsessed with planting my own garden. The story is about an orphan girl who finds this abandoned cottage and fixes it up with flowers and makes the little house her own. We have had a little piece of our property that we use for vegetable gardening and ever since the 6th grade I have taken over the horticultural business of planting the garden. For the past couple of months I have been intensely reading about growing my own seeds indoors. I have checked out book after book after book from the library about propagation and watched many movies about starting my own seedlings.
Evidently since it is 12 weeks to our last frost date it's time to plant broccoli--which I have done. I planted them last Thursday and they miraculously poked their heads out Sunday morning! I was so excited! I started the little seeds in soil that you just add water and the pellets plump up and placed them in egg cartons. Meanwhile I was also getting guidance from the Master Gardener Jerry Baker on my laptop.


Four days later the seedlings surprisingly came up.


I made this crude contraption to put the new seedlings under. My little brother made the wooden chair and I somehow fastened the shop light to a bamboo stick and stuffed the broccoli underneath. The only draw back is that I can't raise the light now that the plant is touching the light... A project for another day I guess.

Story of My Life...

Dan in Real Life is my favorite movie! My lovely family actually believes that the first line in the song is the story of my life. ha

Fickle Appliances

Here are some examples to find out if your appliances hate you too:

- Our temperamental oven beeps every so often yelling at us "F3, F3!" We think it might be the change in air pressure or we have ghosts.

- The satanic DVD player refuses to play any sort of LDS movies.

- We've gone through 3 TVs in the past 6 months. The first we had since the dinosaur age when my dad was a teenager (circa 2 million B.C.). Its faux-wood paneling and weighing as much as my car was a lovely sight in our family room. It literally had to wind itself up before we could see anything. Eventually it would freak out and the screen would just pulsate.
Another one that we had would humm constantly so we needed to have the TV full blast just to hear the movie and then the screen's light went out so we would need to sit in complete darkness to see what was on TV.

- If you're keeping track, those are only a few examples of rotten appliances. For the time being we are also without vacuum, washing machine and Mom's blow dryer.

We are so sharp-witted, brilliant, bright, knowledgeable, all-knowing and any other word meaning smart.

My family never gets into the game of Scrabble or Wheel of Fortune or any game that involves any use of the brain. I guess we just don't want to feel too stupid, so we stick to games like Uno, Candyland, or Tic Tac Toe. Those are great games! No thinking WHAT.SO.EVER. That's why it's funny that my family and I have been totally addicted to puzzle games in the newspaper.
Everyday my mom pulls out the paper and heads directly to the comic section where the crossword puzzle is. We have accomplished two full puzzles in about two weeks because we finally resorted to using the internet thesaurus and good ol' google. A good thing has come out of our addiction (or fixation, enslavement, obsession)to crossword puzzles. We have learned a lot of random things things that we never would know. For example, I am currently searching to see who the heck a "Musician Stan" is.....

Beautiful Hands

I believe that hands are the most expressive parts of the human body as well as the most interesting. You can tell so much about a person just by looking at the hands. Are the fingernails dirty? Or long? Are they worn? Are they old and wrinkled with age? Hands can be used in language as well as in creating artwork.

Hands tell a story of our lives. Hands intrigue me with their beauty and strength. Hands illustrate each individual's life and what they have done with it. Hands show emotion and character, good or bad. Hands show intimacies such as holding the hand of a loved one. Hands can portray what occupation a person is involved in. The hands may show frustration when a fist of anger. Hands show age, experiences and habits. From an artists' perspective, they also show color, texture, form, and the elements of design. Hands are versatile and amazing.

It's All Up From Here!

I'm surprisingly happy right now as I look outside at the, once again, SNOW. Day after day.... more snow. No blue skies... just snow everywhere. This fact causes me be grateful that it is almost spring. The only good thing about winter is to make you appreciate the amazing springtime. Thank you winter!

I have to realistically remind myself that it's not spring yet, but in the meantime, I planted my first plant of the year. I named him Wall-E because there was a free order for an evergreen tree with our edition of the movie Wall-E. It arrived the other day and I was able to rummage around my gardening stuff and find the right pot to stick it in. It's all up from here!


*p.s. I wish this was my own Wall-E artwork but I thought it was cool anyway.

My Creation

I love to create things. I think that people are most happy while they are in the process of creating things. For example: artwork, quilts, memories, babies (haha), aprons. For Christmas my family picks another family member's name out of a hat and we have to give that person a gift. We also pick a theme every year. Last year we had to buy (or create) something that had to do with a room in our house. Last year I had my sister in the bathroom (with the wrench... haha jk). This year we chose the theme of colors. I gave to my mom with amazing color of .....orange. Ya, orange. Gross. I know.
Anyway, I racked my brain for a cute thing to create because I have no money at all. I miraculously made an apron from an idea out of a library book. You must know that I have never sewn anything in my life unless you count the time in 7th grade home-ec class when I made shorts, and on the way home--they unraveled.

It's reversible!

Above is a pattern of some kind of vase with a flower sticking out of it that I made up. The original idea came from the book Simple Sewing by Lotta Jansdotter. I also wrapped it in a Macey's ad that had oranges on it so it fit perfectly with my theme. I was so proud!

Librarian Perks

I work at the library. Along with that job is a perk called: "I-get-to-see-a-lot-of-books-before-other-people-have-a-chance-to-check them out!" It's not often that I check out a book that I love enough to actually BUY but I will definitely buy this one. I have read (and will continue to read) a book called The Creative License- Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are by Danny Gregory.

The point of the book is to persuade the reader to become the artist we all are and can be. Danny Gregory has filled the book with very fun illustrations that just inspire me to draw more and gives me the confidence to do... art.

I especially liked this story he writes about in the book-

" When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

-Howard Iremoto

I love the idea that we were all artists at one time in our lives but most of us digress to become business men or accountants. Art is now looked at as "out there" or not worth the time to pursue. I wish that more of us could be like my six-year-old brother who loves to doodle, draw and think of his own stories. He intensely sits at our living room table for hours finishing his latest drawing of our family. If only we could keep the child-like artist in us.

This was done by my brother at age 4. It is a drawing of our family eating dinner from a bird's perspective. The rectangle is the table with round plates of food on it. The outer circles are our plates with broccoli on them. I think it is a very creative viewpoint and is awesome for someone his age to draw!

ASL

I am in a Sign Language class. I really love it but it is really hard for me to grasp language concepts. I took two years of spanish, now I can't remember anything. I am in the 2nd semester of Sign Language and I feel like I don't learn it as well as I should but I really love it anyway. In hopes of becoming more motivated to learn, I am posting a video on here that we went through in class by this really cool guy on YouTube. Maybe someone can understand it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qpsbHPn1qk



For my class I also had to attend a "deaf activity" of some kind. In other words, I had to go to some function where there were deaf people present. My mom and I went to Sanderson Community Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Annual Bazaar a couple months ago. We (more like I ) felt totally out of place. My mom knows a little sign language from her friend from twenty years ago and I had only taken a semester of the language. It was funny because people could tell that we were hearing and they signed a lot slower to us and signed more in English than they normally would.

I just think that unlike any other language, Sign Language is a cool artform and very visual. I am a visual learner and like to think of myself as artistic so I figured that it would be easy to learn Sign Language rather than Spanish. I have a lot of work to do and then maybe one day I can post a video of me on YouTube.