My Own Personal Weirdness – Page 16

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Saving Money

“Don’t Just Talk About it, Do It” Challenge

Beginning in just a little bit, I’m starting a new January challenge. I really loved the one over at A Bowl Full of Lemons last January, but haven’t been able to find anything like it this year for the month, so I’m making one of my own.

Here’s the plan, each weekday I’m going to tackle a project that I’ve been talking about forever, but never get to. I’m going to assign a day to each project and just work at it until it’s done or my time is up. If you’d like to follow along and link to your own similar projects, I’ll include a linky at the bottom. If you’ve got nothing similar, but just felt inspired to do something, anything that’s been on your list forever, link that up, too. The more the merrier!

Week One starts now:

Thursday 1/5 Tidying up the computer area

Friday 1/6 Peeling up the remaining wallpaper in the bathroom

Week Two starts on Monday, it’s theme is basically “Starting with my own mess”

Monday 1/9 My bedside table is scary

Tuesday 1/10 My closet tries to eat stuff

Wednesday 1/11 My reading nook has crap under it

Thursday 1/12 Under the bed the drawers have found friends

Friday 1/13 The shelving units could be emptier

Week Three starts the following Monday, with it’s theme being “Places we hide stuff when company’s coming”

Monday 1/16 My eldest son’s closet has mostly my stuff in it

Tuesday 1/17 My youngest son’s closet is scarier than my bedside table

Wednesday 1/18 My middle son’s closet holds all the games

Thursday 1/19 The front hall closet I’m suspecting of having parties without me

Friday 1/20 Someplace else messy that’s not a closet

Week Four’s theme will be “All the Stuff in the Universe:”

Monday 1/23 My craft desk is overflowing

Tuesday 1/24 My memory stuff is taking over

Wednesday 1/25 The garage needs tidying

Thursday 1/26 The media cabinet could be emptier

Friday 1/27 The piano & music center wants a shelf

Week Five is short because that’s all that’s left of January and I only have two bathrooms:

Monday 1/30 The kids/guest bathroom needs spiffying

Tuesday 1/31 My bathroom towel situation

On February 1st I’ll do a round up of before’s and after’s of all my spaces and then collapse into a heap for the rest of the month.

Around the House, Computers and Internet, My Own Personal Weirdness, Saving Money

In the mail…

Over the winter break, I entered into a give-away over at Embracing and Being Embraced. I don’t normally enter give-aways, as I never, ever win anything, but this time the give-away was for something I really wanted, so I thought I’d give it a try. So imagine my joy when I got a message from the lovely Shanda saying I’d won! 🙂 The prize: a $20 credit towards merchandise from DaySpring. I had to use it by December 31st, but I waited until after Christmas to try to get some post-Christmas-sales goodies. I went and agonized for literally days over finding just the right items and placed my order December 30th. I had the option to get FedEx or USPS to ship it for the same price and as I’d never tried FedEx before, I decided to be bold and try it.

Fast forward to today. The doorbell rings and I hear a “thud” on my doorstep. Look closely at the note, it’s funny:

(For those that didn’t click on it: the note, which I’m assuming should have been stuck to my front door, said that my package had been delivered to my front door. Hilarious!)

I brought it in, happily finding a pair of scissors to open it right away, and not even slicing myself open along with the package. 😉 Here’s what I saw:

It looked good, really good. (But wait, there’s only one spiral bound item in the box! I accidentally ordered the wrong journal…but this one is super cute, too.)

I totally heart Holley Gerth, can you tell? I used my credit towards: 1 thing for me (the journal), 1 thing for the family (the perpetual calendar), 1 thing to share (the book), and 1 thing to bless others (the inspirational cards). I think I did pretty well. Thanks so much, Shanda!

Exercise, health, Music, My Own Personal Weirdness, Writing

Happy New Year!

I was thinking the other day about resolutions and what mine should be this year. I think mine from last year are still on the fridge, actually, but rather than look at the past, let’s look to the future, shall we?

This year I plan on losing 50 pounds. Yes, fifty. 2011 was the year that I gained 25 pounds and I started out the year needing to have lost at least 25. So that puts me at 50 pounds this year to lose. My plans include a) having acquired a bunch of lovely to look at, but not in my size-range-yet clothes to spur me on, b) having rejoined Sparkpeople.com to chart my diet and exercise, c) having enlisted my husband into the process to help me keep on task and d) having filled up my netflix DVD queue with exercise titles solicited from friends that exercise-but-aren’t-exercise-fiends.

This year I also plan on returning to daily journaling. I haven’t kept up on daily writing in a few years, so I thought that rather than make a word goal or a page goal, I’d make just writing a goal. I’m going easy on my self this year and including any words I write go towards that, be they in a paper journal, here, on my RA blog, in poetry form, or fiction. Just getting back in the writing habit.

I’m continuing on with my piano lessons this year, but that isn’t really a goal, is it? So here’s a little goal: I plan on playing something for church every third month this year. How’s that?

Last but not least, my husband and I have gotten ourselves a daily devotional to work on through the year. This one is a Bible-in-a-year Couples devotional. We’ve never tried doing something like this (reading a book let alone a devotional) together before, so that should be interesting.

There you have it: my plans for the year in a nutshell. Hope y’all are having a great new year!

Someday I’ll be back again with tales of our last week of Winter Break.

Around the House, Crafts, My Own Personal Weirdness

Pinterest Addiction

I fully admit to it: I am addicted to Pinterest. I haven’t posted much craft-like since I really started looking around there, I know, so here’s my round-up of what I’ve done inspired by things I saw on there.

I saw some baby pacifier moustaches and made those (pictured in the previous baby shower post), then adapted them for big boys as well. They’ve been quite the hit.

I posted this one to Facebook, but this was the T-shirt scarf I made. I’ve since made it in two other colors. I have to say: 1) it looks so much better with a new t-shirt rather than an old faded one and 2) make sure your fabric is absolutely regular t-shirt material. I did one that had extremely subtle ribs in the fabric which I didn’t notice until I did the stretching. It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t as cute, in my opinion. I also tried the other one linked here where it’s manymany stretched bits of cut shirt, but it was not cute at all, so I took no pictures.

I got the idea for placing the poster board on the TV screen and tracing my cartoon character to make a poster off pinterest. (Yes, you’ve seen this before on the birthday party post, but I didn’t give pinterest the credit.) I didn’t keep the link or I’d post it here.

I made a reading nook for the kids (& their friends) behind Greg’s bed using the edge of the shelf and the edge of the nearby dresser for the curtain to spring-rod into. The curtain is kid height, so parents can look straight in, but they are curtained off from brothers. 🙂

I had this old cork board that has lived various places in our house for years. It was never quite big enough for hanging regular sized pieces of paper on, but it’s perfect as a board for notes on who we’re praying extra for this week. 🙂

Used my Pinterest-enhanced spray painting skills to paint this TV tray so it can go with my living room in my new reading nook. 🙂

Ok, so you can’t see it too clearly, but I had never thought about hanging extra seasonal stuff from my chandelier before Pinterest. Sad, but true. I don’t have a link to go with this. I’ll post another photo later of it decked out for winter.

I did my hair differently for Thanksgiving, using a suggestion I found on Pinterest. I think it turned out cute. 🙂

I thought these signs were so cute, so I made one of my own. I used an old project (the scrapbook-paper covered cookie sheet with clothespins I made in MOPS a couple years ago, but never used for anything) and made it new with a little sign and socks. Sadly, these were the cutest socks to be found in our household. Also sadly I still have a whole basket of mismatched socks in my bedroom.

I saw lots and lots of glitter painted branches on Pinterest. I thought I’d grabbed a can of silver glitter, but alas it was red inside. It’s a really subtle look, very hard to see or photograph. The branches are sitting in the broken-topped compost bin. (Nick bought a new one already that’s bigger and easier to clean.)

I know most of you see something like this every day, but I’ve lived in this house 8 years and never had a vehicle that fit into our ridiculously short garage. (I’d hoped to get this done after the garage sale in August, but the garage was still too full.) I read an article through Pinterest on just getting over yourself and getting the work done. So I did. 🙂

You might have seen this in one of the other photos, but I found this image on Pinterest. The link itself lead to nothing (sometimes they do that), but the image was cute, printed out okay, and looks nice matted & framed in my hallway. (Sorry for the bad photo.)

We discovered on Pinterest that you could use regular metal cookie cutters as pancake shapers. We used a moose cutout for this one, but the legs fell off as we took it out. I say “we” but really it was Ben poking the moose out. 😉 He was a great helper! 🙂

I made these t-shirt pom-pom necklaces for friends this year. (Sorry if you’re seeing this before being gifted. We had a random extra mom at playgroup this week and it felt awkward to gift the old friends without gifting the new one. ) They were a wonderful use of the extra bits of shirts leftover from the scarf making.

I made these from another one of the dead-end posts on Pinterest. I saw the pattern, but there were no instructions, so I made it up as I went along, adding leaves, beads, & pins on the back. The first couple were made out of tail ends of other projects, but the rest were made to purpose. They’re for teachers gifts this year (well, all except one teacher. David reminded me that a man probably wouldn’t appreciate these. *sigh* )

Another kind of dead-end post activity. This one was linked to a blog in another language. I think this may have been something she purchased. In any case, no instructions there. I made mine out of a cardboard box that was destined for the recyclers, some silver paint from another project, recycled ribbon from a gift bag, other ribbon that I never could find a use for due to it’s weird color, and a photocopy of the Sugar Plum Fairy music for easy piano, one of my favorite childhood pieces.

We made these shrinky dinks from #6 plastic, the kind you generally find pastries in at the grocery store. It can’t be recycled in our area, so up til now we’ve been tossing these on the rare occasions that we buy pastries. (My parents buy them more often, so I’ve been dumpster diving over there. I’m not ashamed to admit it.) Anyways, the kids have LOVED this activity, so we’ll be on the lookout for bigger pieces so we don’t have to use the crinky edges again (those weird looking ones in the middle.)

This last one was probably the least successful of my Pinterest inspired things. The instructions said to use a protractor, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t have one. That’s not what bugged me about it, actually. What bugged me was the super fine glitter I used. It went everywhere, stuck to everything BUT the snowflake. Then the leftovers didn’t want to go back into the jar. So, the moral of the story, don’t buy cheapo Wal-Mart glitter. (Also, I need a better way to hang it from the brick.)

So there it is. You’d wondered where I’d been: Pinterest. Looks pretty good, yes?

My Own Personal Weirdness

Fall is almost over…

…and I can’t believe that I never got around to sharing my fall decor this year. I put it up early, like the 2nd to last week in August. I had a house full of kids that day (literally; at least 2 kids for every one of mine) and for some reason I decided that was the time to do the decorating. *shakes head* Have I mentioned that I had two concussions this year? Yeah. I blame that.

Here’s the entry way:

those plants used to be pretty & alive.

Here’s the foyer. That little guy on the trike falls over every three seconds. He’s a gift from my mom, though, so I must keep him. The leaves and acorns were an art project I did with Greg. They were originally glued to paper and destined for wall art, but they refused to stay on the paper, so they became scatter art instead.

Here’s the fireplace. The little pictures taped to the mantle were not part of the original plan, but I found them taped up there by some sweet boy one morning and decided to leave them there. They’re little animal fact cards. The glass holders I made way back in January and I’ve been stuffing them with seasonal stuff as the year goes on. The big frame was something I got for $3 on sale years ago and made the scrapbooking thing inside it last fall. It never got photos in it, but the big multi-frame thing mysteriously made its way out one day and since the photos in i where fall photos, it stayed out. At the bottom is some art that used to be on the wall before the giant TV took over the room as well as the little items that used to be on the buffet the TV is now on.

Last but not least, the laundry room. I love this little shelf above my washer. It was from the old kitchen and I just love how it’s got four colors of paint on it from all it’s years of service. I know it would drive some people crazy, but it makes me happy. This is the first year I’ve used it for seasonal decor. It used to house the random junk that came out of pockets (that now lives in a basket in the cupboard above this.

That’s it! I mean, I have a few random little pumpkins and turkey drawings here or there, but that’s about all for this year. I left about half our decor in the box because honestly, I’m a bit worn out this year. (Plus since we moved David into the spare room and we decorated the bathroom in the theme of Aggieland, we’re down quite a bit of space to decorate).

My Own Personal Weirdness

Leading up to Thanksgiving

(It’s really hard to come up with titles these days. Apparently I’ve been blogging too long.)

Tuesday I went and got my eyes checked. It’d been a while and my left eye has been behaving oddly. They set me up with the new doctor, as my old doctor is easing his way into retirement. The new doctor was young, perky, and talked a lot. I told her about my eye weirdness (pulling feeling, twitching, verynearlypain) and she took a look. Apparently nothing’s going on there. She adjusted the prescription a bit, that’s all. Then she looked at my good eye (I’ve always thought of it that way, don’t know why) and saw something vaguely interesting there. She started looking through my old test results and noticed that the weirdness had always been there, but it was definitely growing, little by little each year. I asked about it and she said it was a “hemihypertrophy” of the cells. I was intrigued, as “hemihypertrophy” is what my son David has, but he has it all over his body (leg, arm, hand, tongue, stomach, etc.), not just in his eyes. She hadn’t heard of that disorder and said it was probably not the same use of the word. *shrugs* So we’re going to keep an eye (I couldn’t think of something not punny here) on it and see what it looks like next year.

I also went in and worked my volunteer hours at the library. The librarian had a new toy this week, something she’d won at convention: a vhs to dvd converter. So I got to set up the equipment and try it out. It worked well and the librarian would like that to be my special project in the future (they have a lot of teachers that want to use vhs tapes that the library owns, but there are no more vcr’s in the building besides the one in the library after the new building was built.). In any case, I get to take the thing home and learn all its ins-and-outs over the break, and incidentally get to record some of our old home videos to DVD. I’m looking forward to that!

Wednesday we had A. over. We took him on an already-scheduled playdate with us over at the local community center. The kids had fun, the other mom brought lots of interesting snacks (basically she cleared her cupboard of all the stuff her kids wouldn’t eat. genius!), and a good time was had by all. After A. went home, Greg and I headed over to the new Panera Bread and joined my friend E. for lunch. Panera was overcrowded and there was quite a wait for food, but it was the first week they were open and the food was yummy. E’s daughter did not join us, which may have been the first time in our 7 years of lunch dates that she didn’t. I really missed her.

Thursday Greg’s MDO had a little program in the morning. He’s been singing the songs for the last couple weeks at home. It was so cute seeing him sing them with his friends on stage.

There is, of course, a video

Greg’s MDO Thanksgiving Program

, if you’re so inclined. They also had a little party at lunchtime.

Then it was off to piano for me again. The lessons are going pretty well. Learning lots of chords now. That night was the Box Car Derby with our cub scout pack. We had a lot of kids make their own cars this year, which made me so very happy (in years past we’ve had a lot of parent made cars, which is against the rules).

I have no idea when Ben came home with this hat, but have a cute picture of Ben:

Today we had another playdate at Southside Park and we even got to walk the trails. Oh the excitement!

Greg used to be scared of the bridges, but he wasn’t at all frightened with his sweetheart nearby.

Afterwards we hit Chik-fil-a for lunch and more playtime:

And now I must dash because it is time to get the bags all packed up for our Thanksgiving trip tomorrow.

Around the House, Family Time, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Parenting

B’s 8th Birthday Party

This day has been crazy. I got up, had breakfast with Nick, then picked up my mom and went out to Hawkins to get the kids. We got the full tour of the house remodel as it stands (bedrooms & bathrooms done, walls up but not sheetrocked for the rest of the house) and got to see G driving the tractor. Sadly we had to leave quickly to get back home in time for B’s birthday party. But wait, there’s more. My mom told the kids “let’s stop by the bagel place” which I took to mean “let’s pick up bagels.” Nope, we ended up stopping, eating bagels, visiting with G’s friend that we saw there, and then finally going back to my mom’s house. I left the kids there and went home to clean. I got it all done, got the cake decorated, got the party supplies out, and then the kids came back home.

I bought a cake from the store and added the giant Pokeball by hand, which actually saved me money as I didn’t have to buy all those different colors of frosting and little ball shaped confetti, nor did I have to pay for a custom cake:

Our kids came back to our house not too long before the party. While waiting for other kids to arrive, we decorated goodie bags with Pokemon stickers (that we already had and never used!). After all the kids arrived, we had Pokemon Training in the Battle Arena:

Then we had Pin the Tail on Pikachu, a game thought of by my B. (And another money saver, as I had all the supplies on hand)

After that we went fishing for Water Pokemon cards (for their goodie bags; the cards were purchased new for the event, the “fishing poles” were made of kid yard tools, string, and magnets we already had on hand):

Then we took the kids back inside for a Pokemon Trivia game while other adults hid stuff in the backyard for the scavenger hunt. The kids made up all the trivia questions and I made the screen saver for the blu-ray player. If they paid attention to the screen saver, they got hints about the answers.

After trivia we went back outside for another game: Rocket Relay Challenge. The challenge was to get the balloons to hit the target after launching them in the air. We used the “pond” from the water game and put a target in the middle.

Then we played the Pokemon Evolution Game, which involved coccooning your Pokemon completely before they erupted out a newly evolved creature. (I bought toilet paper at the dollar store for this purpose and we didn’t even use it all)

"Your Pokemon needs to evolve. Help him get into his coccoon!"

Then we started the Scavenger Hunt. We hid Pokemon related things around the backyard and had clues to get them to the next place.

At each place they got a piece for their goodie bags, like a “pokeball,” a “pokemon,” some “berries,” and then “training tools.” (Balls, animals, candy, and bubbles all came from the dollar store.)

After all that we had cake

and presents

and played Pokepark (B’s present from his grandma) on the Wii until parents came to gather up kids. It was a great party! 🙂

My Own Personal Weirdness

Tea & cameras & boys, oh my!

Over the weekend we had gotten gifts from various people. One of my best friends gave me an awesome lightweight tea cup and the other one gave me tea from Teavana with a special tea filter thingiebobber as well. Greg got a camera as a belated birthday gift. Yesterday we made a whole bunch of different batches of tea and Greg took blurry pictures of all the precedings. It was a rainy, coolish day, so we took a nature walk as well. That night was scouts. Nick made tin can phones with the Bear cubs

and the webelos met afterwards.

Today was sort of an eventful day: MDO was closed due to flooding! Aie! I took Greg around with me on my errands and skipped my library duty at school (I couldn’t keep him there 2 hours bored out of his skull then and then take him for another hour of boredom during piano lessons later today).

Music, My Own Personal Weirdness, Saving Money, Television & Film

Happy November!

Did I say that the other day? I do love November, though. It’s one of the nicer months of the year. Here in Texas it is finally getting crisp and nice outside. The boys and I spend as much time outside as we can. I also like that for us, at least, it is one of those months that doesn’t have any family disagreements built into it, holiday-wise. My in-laws do their Thanksgiving a few weeks after, just in time for their anniversary, so that just leaves us one family to do Thanksgiving with. 🙂 (Of course there are still multiple celebrations: my son, my niece, my sister-in-law, and my mother-in-law all have birthdays this month. Whee!)

Catching up on life: We had a great vacation. We went down to Galveston Island (about 5.5 hours from us) and stayed in a condo near the beach. We got up later than we normally do and watched the sunrise on the balcony or on the shore every morning and went back out there again for the sunset. We listened to the seagulls cry. We walked nearly everywhere: restaurants, church, the beach. We had time with friends. We went to Schlitterbahn Water Park (just the indoor part) and Moody Gardens. The weather was perfect. I really did want to stay there forever, which never happens for me on vacation (usually I get more and more stressed and want to go home). It was a delightful trip.

Since getting back home I’ve tried to work a little more of that laid back vacation attitude into regular life. I head out onto the front patio with my tea in the morning and sometimes even make it back out onto the back patio in the evenings. Nick and I made a joint decision to watch a little less TV than we had been, so we deleted a few shows off our DVR, just in time for the World Series. So I’ve watched less TV, at least. (Things we dropped: Raising Hope, Fringe, & some of the new stuff we’d recorded but never watched) I’ve spent that time reading or doing crafts, which I love. I have a secret project I’ve been working on for a friend, so I’ll post about that after the gifting has been done. I was hoping to add some more walking into my schedule, but that hasn’t worked this week yet. After this week I’ll have more time, so maybe Greg and I can go take some long walks at the park trails.

Another new thing in my life is piano lessons. I took piano from the time I was in 3rd grade until my senior year of high school. I was considering going on to music school in college, but got extremely burnt out on everything and quit taking lessons and went on to be an English major instead. But I’ve kept up with music; I sang in choirs at church, taught beginning piano and clarinet lessons for a bit while in college, played my clarinet in various community groups throughout the years, and have been doing piano duets with my mother-in-law at church lately. I can still play well from sheet music, but I wanted to learn to improvise and accompany. My kids piano teacher had mentioned that the system she uses with beginners (the kids will be starting it soon) had a corollary program for “professionals” and she also had a time slot open. I figured out a way to fit it into the budget (no more lunches out and no more fancy beverages pretty much did it; the added bonus is that theoretically that will help with weight loss, right?) and off I ran with it. I started last week in David’s time slot while he was away at camp with a school program. I’ve already managed to memorize 3 chords and their minors & 7ths, which had totally eluded me in the past (perhaps because while my teachers always told me what kinds of chords things were during lessons, the chords themselves weren’t what I was practicing, not in my mind). I have my second lesson today. I’m very excited. 🙂 Unfortunately all the practicing is making my hands more twingy and achy, but I’m trying to figure out the best way to deal with that and I think I’ll go back to doing my hand stretches in the morning again.

health, My Own Personal Weirdness

Day 8: Food, Fitness, and Faith

Happy Mother’s Day!

Since it’s Mother’s Day, I didn’t get up and do my exercising right away. I got up, threw on clothes, and took my family over to wish my mom a happy day & give her our presents (a book full of prompts for her life story and a pink bromeliad). She suggested that we go to Einstein’s Bros. for bagels, so we took her up on it. I had a whole wheat bagel with onion & chive schmear and a cup of coffee (450 calories).

After we played a while in the backyard, we had lunch: leftover pizza (380 calories for 2 slices, I didn’t finish my entire portion, though).

Nick had to work today, so the kids and I played in the backyard a while, then did some shopping for my mother’s day gift (jewelry from the $1 jewelry store), and watched Battle for Terra on Netflix. We had a little snack: sweet tarts and Reese’s mini eggs. I had a small serving (8 sweet tarts= 60 calories and 1 Reese’s mini egg = 21 calories).

Then Nick came back and took the kids to the grocery store while I did my exercising. Today I didn’t follow a video. I got some medium strength tube bands and did 10 reps each of the chest/arm exercises. After they came back, a friend of David’s showed up unexpectedly, so I took another walk (I don’t get why D’s friends keep appearing out of nowhere uninvited) to calm down, about 30 minutes.

Dinner was beef & barley soup, bread, and a bit of cheese, with some wine for the grown-ups. I don’t have calorie totals for this particular meal, but based on some internet research of similar soups, I’d guess it was around 250 calories for the soup, another 100 for the wine, 100 for the bread, and about 50 for the cheese. After dinner I had a tiny little serving (measured on our food scale) of ice cream for another 250 calories.

So all in all, I was a bit high today, but I did do 2 bouts of exercise instead of one (that “calm down” walk was a planned one, just made more frenetic by my lack-of-calmness.)

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