Travel Log 4-5: Children's TV Tuesday

Seeing as I have 2 small savage creatures sweet little boys living in my house, I see probably more than my fair share of children's tv. Now as an adult, watching these shows is a completely different experience than my little monsters little sweetlings are having. Being an adult I am beset by questions and critiques that would never occur to a child and they generally make me want to sit down with the writers of these shows and shout WHY???!!! at the top of my lungs.
    So now I'm going to share it with you.

   Here's this weeks installment, sorry it's a little late-

   Special Agent Oso from Disney Jr.
          This is a cute little show about a turquoise and yellow stuffed bear that is a trainee at an elite facility that provides special agents to help kids with their problems. Now we're not talking about life changing issues like death, divorce, or anything like that. We're talking packing a suitcase, tying your shoes, or making a salad (you have no idea how hard I snorted tea out my nose the first time I saw the episode where they told him he only had 8 seconds to toss the salad) and he has to do these things using 3 simple steps provided by his cyber helper PawPilot. Basically it tries to instill in kids that if they just identify 3 steps to get something done, and follow those steps, they will get it done.
     Now here's my problem with this little scenario- Oso has no idea what he is doing. EVER. He has no idea how to actually accomplish the task the child needs help with and generally relies on PawPilot and the child themselves to actually figure out how to do it. I have no idea how this bear gets himself out of bed in the morning, let alone became a secret agent.
    And then how secret is this agency anyway? Every single kid knows this guy on sight, and so do their parents. Most of the time the parents check on the kid, see a walking talking jet pack wearing stuffed bear helping them with whatever task the parent set them, say hi Oso, and keep walking. Apparently every person on the planet knows about this secret agency, and there must be some sort of memo they send out with the agent's pictures and bios. Cause without something like that I might just be a little concerned to see my kid chopping vegetables in  the kitchen with a TALKING STUFFED ANIMAL.
   Ahem.
    With that said, it's kinda a cute little show with some pretty funny Bond references and it does show kids that it's easy to start doing things on their own if they just follow the steps.

Travel Log 4-4: Finally The Holes Are Patched!!

   As you  can tell I am excited, because after 4 MONTHS of living through repair hell, the holes in the wall are patched up and we were able to move the boys furniture back into their room!
    Even did a little furniture rearranging and fit the Monkeyman's new desk in so he can do his homework in his room in relative peace instead of at the kitchen table with the little guys running around him like hyperactive jumping beans.
    The walls aren't painted, and if the way that the owner has been on top of getting things done in the past, I don't think they ever will be, but it's good for now. Honestly I think she's going to have some wicked bad karma coming her way because she got paid a couple grand from the homeowner's insurance to get the walls patched back up and she ended up having her nephew do it( and I know she did not pay him 2 grand). She also had the gall to have her daughter tell me that we need to keep the house cleaner because there was too much furniture cluttering the place up. To which I promptly pointed out that all the extra furniture was for the room that we have not had the use of for 4 months due to her negligence. I was quite peeved.
   However we had some great news last week as well. My hubby and I have not always made the best financial choices and figured that we were pretty far from ever being able to buy our own home. So we went to a credit counselor last Wednesday and she had some awesome information for us! Turns out we are not as far off as we thought. She told us as long as we can get all the money sucking crises in our life to hold off long enough for us to get some money saved we should be in a great place to buy a house in about a year or 2. Needless to say this was great news. Especially with all of the hubby's student loans. But it turns out that a bunch of stuff is set to drop off my credit report this year and next year, so with a little work to add some more positive on we'll be in a good spot!
    So yay us!
    But on the down side I've had the plague for about 5 days now. I feel like warmed over crud. Time to see if any grandparents would like to take 2 small torture devices lovely little boys out for a while.
  

Travel Log 3-31: There's Something Happening Here...

   Now you all know I'm shy and retiring when it comes to political issues *snort*, but I felt the need to comment on something here.
    If you haven't checked out Harvard's Folly  or Mrs. B's event then you need to. Many of us, me often included, think that the burning times are over and it's just all about getting into the world religion knitting circle now. Well that is not true. There are still angry terrified idiots out there, and there are still poor innocents being loaded onto the pyre.
     And truthfully those of us who are in a position to do something about it are being woefully silent. I honestly think this is because we are under the impression that here, in the US, we are safe. Our rights are protected and we can scoff at the small minded idiots and get on with living our lives. That is not, in fact, true. In our country we get only the right we defend. Every time we skip an election because it's just one of the "small ones", or we think that something is horrible and something should be done about it and then turn back to the casserole and put it out of our minds those rights get erroded little by little. The window gets opened to the extremists and bigots, then they jimmy the lock on the door to let all their crazier friends to come join the party.
    Which has lead me to a song that has been increasingly playing in my head since I read that article about what's happening at Harvard- in Massachusetts, here in the USA.
     I may have been raised in the 80's-90's, but I've always lived more in the 60's-70's. So here's the song that I think sums up how I feel about all of this...
          There's something happening here
            What it is ain't exactly clear
          There's a man with a gun over there
             Telling me I got to beware

          I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
             Everybody look what's going down

         There's battle lines being drawn
             Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
         Young people speaking their minds
             Getting so much resistance from behind

         I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
             Everybody look what's going down
        What a field-day for the heat
             A thousand people in the street
        Singing songs and carrying signs
            Mostly say, hooray for our side

         It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
            Everybody look what's going down

        Paranoia strikes deep
            Into your life it will creep
        It starts when you're always afraid
           You step out of line, the man come and take you away

        We better stop, hey, what's that sound
            Everybody look what's going down
        Stop, hey, what's that sound
            Everybody look what's going down
        Stop, now, what's that sound
           Everybody look what's going down
        Stop, children, what's that sound
           Everybody look what's going down

Travel Log 3-29: Chldren's TV Tuesday

   Seeing as I have 2 small savage creatures sweet little boys living in my house, I see probably more than my fair share of children's tv. Now as an adult, watching these shows is a completely different experience than my little monsters little sweetlings are having. Being an adult I am beset by questions and critiques that would never occur to a child and they generally make me want to sit down with the writers of these shows and shout WHY???!!! at the top of my lungs.
    So now I'm going to share it with you.
    We'll start with the one that gets to me the most and see how many Tuesday's we can eat up with them, shall we?
     Here we go-
    Max & Ruby on NickJr.

    A sweet show about a pair of brother/sister bunnies and their adventures in a cutesie 1950's-esque town full of other bunnies. Ruby is the often managing older sister that cares for her slightly mischievous little brother in between her tea parties and Bunny Scout activities. Their approximate ages are about 6 for Ruby and somewhere between 3-4 for Max. Which leads me to my main question-
     Where are these kid's parents?????
     They live in their own house with only 2 bedrooms, occupied by themselves, and no one else. No adult lives with them. Now these two seemingly orphaned bunnies are not without relatives. Their grandmother lives right down the street in fact. She pops in on them periodically, or has them over to play in her attic, but is not an everyday part of their lives. There are various other adults that the kids see periodically but NO ONE mentions their parents, or lack there of. Which drives me nuts and really makes me want to know what the heck happened. Were they caught by lucky charm vendors? Since it's 50's themed maybe they were in the war and died. It just drives me nuts not to know.
     Besides my devouring curiosity about  these bunnies parental units, the show is pretty cute. There are a lot of old fashioned activities and games, as well as a little peek into 50's social activities (Ruby learns quite often how to be a "proper hostess"). And Max's antics can be pretty funny. As advanced as he is with various rube goldberg style set ups he's already a physics prodigy and therefore needs to get in the MIT preschool pronto.
  
   

Travel Log 3-28-2: Thrifty Witch

 Well here is the craft post I warned you all would be coming, lol!
    While out and about in the thrift stores yesterday I got a bit of inspiration and decided to try something I hadn't personally seen anywhere.
    Now I spend a lot of time online drooling over all the pretty ritual tools I see all over the place. They are beautiful and awesome and I look at them and think how much more witchy I would be with them. Then I see the price tag and snap out of it pretty darn quick. Things are going pretty good here, financially wise, but we still aren't at the spending on non-essential level yet. So spending 20-30 bucks on a ritual tool just isn't something that I can justify- especially when there are so many books out there I can rationalize spending the money on instead, lol.
    But besides the financial aspect, I truly feel that the best tools are the ones that we have some personal investment in, that in some way we infuse with a portion of ourselves. Like how a lot of people dedicate their tools. While I don't do that, I do feel I can achieve the same thing by making as many of my tools as I can.
    So here's my how to on the bit of inspiration that struck yesterday on how to make your own customized offering dish for under $5.
    What you will need:

1. A glass bowl the size you want for your altar. I got mine from the thrift store for 58 cents. Make sure it's clean and dry.
2. Patterned paper that you like and would like to have the bowl look like. I just printed some out which made my paper one sided so I needed 4 pieces, but if your paper is double sided you only need 2.
3. Modge Podge or a decoupage medium (hence forth known as modge podge because I'm kinda lazy like that) of your choice and a brush to go with it.
4. Scissors to cut things!
    Now here's what you do:
Step 1.
      Lay your bowl down upside down on your paper over whatever part of your pattern you really like and trace around the rim. Pick up the bowl and cut out the circle. You'll need 4 of those circles if you're using one sided paper, 2 if you're using double sided. Then put the bowl on the paper right side up and trace around the base, then cut out 2 of those circles.
Step 2.
      Take your big circles and fold them into quarters like this-

Then cut along the folds to have 4 "pizza slice" shaped pieces (everything makes more sense to me when referenced to food, lol) for each circle.
Step 3.
    Here's where it gets a little different depending on if you're using one sided or 2 sided. I'll do 1 sided first.
1 sided-
    Now grab your modge podge and brush and paint up the outside base of your dish and take one of your small circles and put it on with the pattern you want to be visible from the inside of the dish facing down and pat it until it's smooth. Then choose 4 wedges that you like and position them like the 4 points of the compass with the "pointy" ends over your small circle and your wide end over the edge of the glass. Secure them in place by painting modge podge where you want to put them and then pressing them into it until they are flat.
  It should look kinda like this-

     Then take 4 more wedges and position them to fill in the "blank" spaces until your back  like this-

 2 sided-
     You'll take one of your small circles and use your modge podge to paint the bottom of the bowl and press the paper into it with the pattern you want to see from the inside of the bowl down. Now take 4 of your pizza slices and position them around your bowl like the points on a compass, with the pattern you want on the inside of the bowl facing down and the pointy bit on the bottom of the bowl. Paint the area you want them with your modge podge one at a time and then press the pieces down until they are flat. Once your first 4 pieces are in place repeat the process with your other 4 wedges until all the "blank" spaces are filled in. Now skip down to Step 5

Step 4.
     Not you have a great looking inside of your bowl, like this-

 but the outside is all white.
    This is why you needed those 8 other pizza slices.
    First you'll flip your bowl back over and grab 4 more wedges. You'll begin positioning these around the outside of the bowl just like you did in the last step, but with the pattern facing outward, like this-

Once the first 4 are in place you'll repeat again filling in the blanks until no white is showing except on the very bottom (for me this made a cool star shape that I proceeded to not get a pic of, lol).

 Step 5.
    Now it's time to use that second small circle you cut out. Paint the bottom of the bowl with your modge podge and place the circle with your chosen pattern facing out and pat it down until it is smooth.
    Take your scissors and trim the excess off around the rim of the bowl until all the paper is "flush" or smooth to the edge of the rim with none above it.
     And now you should have something that looks like this-

  Step 6 (optional).
     Now I didn't like the mat finish on the paper, and because the modge podge I got was the glossy kind I just painted the outside all over with it and let it dry shiny.

So now I have this lovely offering bowl for less than $2.00!!

Travel Log 3-28: Thrifty Thrifty Thrifty

Well it's been a busy weekend over here. We hit the thrift stores and I came away with some pretty cool finds.
    Our kitchen walls are covered in cabinets except for this one corner by the doorway and I've been wanting to put a shelf there for my cook books for a while. Well guess what I found this weekend....

   My lovely hubby put up this newsed (a term I picked up from my days in the car business, lol) corner shelf for my cook books! Guess how much this lovely cost us?  Go ahead, guess. Under $5.00 including picking up the hardware from Walmart.
   We also picked up this lovely silverware box for $7.00

  I'll be painting or decoupaging it at a later date (mainly because I can't pick what I want to do with it). Oh and the box on top of it is one of the boxes I got from Micheal's on sale a while ago and currently houses my dried herbs.
    And my personal favorite find, that the hubby snagged out of a random jumble box of kitchen utensils..drum roll please...

 
A BREAD SLICER! I've been looking for some way to make slicing my home made bread  easier to slice, and here it is for $2.00. Woot!
   I also came up with a pretty nifty craft that is super cheap and turns out pretty darn well if I do say so myself. I'll have a tutorial and pics tomorrow. I gotta go finish making my bread and whip up some muffins for breakfast tomorrow.
   Feels good to be back to myself.
 

Travel Log 3-23: What the Hades am I doing?

I have been pretty absent on here for a while, and mainly that's because I've been letting my hubby decide what activities we're going to do in our spare time (mainly at night, after all the kids go to bed) and it's almost always play World of Warcraft and it has left me so tired I haven't been able to think straight let alone write coherently (as I'm sure some of you have noticed with my recent posts).
     Now I like playing WoW, have played it from the beginning (all 6 years, lol), but I don't really like the majority of other people who play the game. They, in fact, piss me off pretty badly and generally put me in a bad mood.
    So for the past couple of months I have been spending the majority of my nights getting pissed off by random internet jerks that have an inflated sense of self importance because they have wasted even more of their life obtaining completely imaginary items and skills in a completely imaginary world. These hours have included ones that I should be sleeping, thus leaving me sleep dep'd for the next day..and thus the cycle goes. While this makes my hubby happy, it is making me miserable.
     Half a year ago I was cruising along. Crafting, working on my meditation, becoming more balanced and working out the groove of being a stay at home mom. Now I am a sleep deprived mess that is stressed out over purely fictional situations. This has to stop.
     What precipitated this revelation? Well last night the hubby and I had reached what he was sure was the culmination of what he had been working for the past few months. We're in a guild of friends that broke off of a group of friends and is slowly going nowhere (there are these group activities called raids that you do to get better gear and see more content) and he's been chomping at the bit to be able to do raids and climb up the WoW ladder so to speak. Well last night we went on a trial run with a new guild that he was stoked to join. I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to a new group, but I was willing to give it a shot for him. Let's just say it didn't go well. In fact it was a disaster, and according to the people that were judging us it was pretty much my fault because I suck.
      This interaction actually sent me to bed crying last night. Which was so ridiculous I want to slap myself. What the hell do I care about what some jerk that cares way too damn much about a game thinks of me? I wasn't even sure I wanted to join their group anyway. Rejection in any form hurts, but it was more that I was so mad that I could only let it out by crying. I'd given up the stuff I really wanted to do to play this stupid game night after night, and I wasn't any damn good at it. Months wasted so that some little prick could judge me and claim I was worthless. My husband doesn't get it. He gets that I was upset, but he thinks it's because we aren't going to join this group, he doesn't understand that I'm just seriously pissed off at myself and the loss of time.
    So it's time to stop. It's time to let him play the game if he wants but I'm going to go back to what makes me happy. I'm going to pick up my crafting again. I've conquered wheat and white bread. I can make my own jam and preserves. I am an accomplished adult who is damn good at a lot of stuff, not just some dumb little game.