Thursday, March 31, 2011

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

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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.
  
   

Monday, March 28, 2011

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!!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

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.
 

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

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.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Travel Log 3-17: A bit O' the Blarney

 Bust out the green beer and get drunk till you can't even stagger straight it's St. Patrick's day!
    This (and sometimes Valentine's day) is one of those holidays that makes me pause and think. To look at what we do and what we mean. I know today isn't one that is usually associated with deep thought or meditation, but hey why should I start conforming now?
   The pagan community's confusion and general discord with almost any mainstream holiday makes me stop and look at them from multiple perspectives while I sort out my own feelings about them. I can see both sides. I can see the small,  underdog pagan community (though all the trolls and general whiners seem to be packing on the weight for us) railing against the mainstream bulldozer that has flattened and rearranged the "traditional" holy days. I love the anthropological drive that is behind a lot of people's faith and belief and I feel that remembering where these days came from is very important.
     And here comes the but ( and just like when we see ours in the mirror, it's always bigger than we'd like, lol). BUT this isn't centuries ago when those holidays were, in fact, relevant. The majority of us wouldn't know how to survive in the world as it was all those hundreds of years ago ( I know I would be crying in a corner for my mommy after about a day and a half of the work that had to be done for survival back then) so to say we understand and can duplicate the driving forces behind the original traditions and holidays on anything more than an allegorical level is disingenuous.
     Every time a holiday comes up there is a lot of talk about why it has to be celebrated a certain way, and what the "right" meaning for it is (from just about every religion on the planet in some cases). Well I don't honestly think that there is a right way to celebrate a holiday. I think that what someone did in the 12th century was nice, and knowing about it makes me feel connected to the continuity of time, but I also don't think I need to do what they did, in the way they did it, or even celebrate for the same reasons.
    When I hear people complaining that traditions are being lost or polluted these days I just want to scream at the top of my  lungs that HISTORY IS NOT STAGNANT!!
    Things change with time and society. That is how the human race moves forward (or backwards as the case may be *cough* teaparty*cough*). There is so much to be learned about who we are as a culture in the evolution of these traditions that it is a crime to bemoan their change. The very season's we are celebrating are proof that nothing was meant to stay the same- not even holidays. We should honor what was, then lift up our green beer (or whiskey if you've got the taste for it or a little Irish in ya') and celebrate what is. That these holidays did not become stagnant and die, but have found a way to exist and thrive and be relevant in a time that is so alien to their originators as to be fictional.
   

Monday, March 14, 2011

Travel Log 3-14: Holes in the Walls and Nervousness

Well, we're home again, and yes there are hoes in our walls. Not a lot and not too badly, but I did go nuts with the spider spray just in case (I know that as someone who respects nature and loves the earth I should find a place in my heart for the little eight legged creepy crawlers but to me that place stops at my property line- I'll respect the little buggers in somebody else's house). I'm a little phobic about them. Now comes the waiting game over when the walls will be fixed and the new carpeting put in so that we can actually get he house back in order.
   And today is parent teacher conferences at my midgets current school. I have no idea why I'm always nervous when I go to a school for a function. I'm not being judged or rated. Maybe it's just my natural aversion to confrontation and my usual feeling of needing to yell at the Monkeyman's teachers. But nervous or not I have to go and hear how they shall rate my offspring's efforts over the last few months. And I shall refrain from doing a happy dance through his classroom and singing "ding dong the witch is dead" in reference to him going to the other school next year. It has not been all bad at this school, and he has had some great teacher's and staff working with him, but it's so hit and miss. One year he'll get a good teacher, and the next it'll be absolutely horrible.
    So we'll see how it goes, hopefully I won't have to get upset and go crazy mom on anyone.