Preparing to be a 45-year-old Man

This is my son at Ms Em's birthday party yesterday. We had the grandparents over for a little birthday party, and my child spent the entire day in his underwear. My mother told him all he needed was a football game and a beer gut and he could pass for a 45-year-old man, lol. I'm just glad he at least wore the underwear. You see that line of green crap on his forehead? It's a roll of spiderweb tattoo's he put on himself. It's been there for 3 days. He loves it and refuses to remove it. He looks like he rubbed a giant wad of snot across his head and it dried there. Yuck. Boys are so gross.

I had to rewrite my story, but it wasn't as good as the destroyed version. That one was like magic, the way it just flowed. I tried to remember it and recreate it, but I don't think I could. I'm going to work on it a bit longer and hope I'll get a flash of memmory.

OMG!!!!!

It's official, I am going to kill my computer with some kind of blunt force trauma. ACK!!!! I just lost my whole blankety blank blank story. The entire story!!!!! I was even saving it as I wrote it so something like this couldn't happen, and it just went crazy and killed it. It's now full of question marks instead of words. This one I was so happy with, I was going to let people read. The fates are against me, dammit.

Okay, going to back slowy away from the computer and then I'm going to go eat some chocolate before I beat it to death.

Fun Stuff

I'm leaving you with some of my favorite places to laugh when I'm pissed.

My personal favorite is Passive Aggressive Notes. After reading over there, I think people are officially crazy.

And this one I just found recently, Overheard in NYC - the things people say in public where someone else can hear you, you can't make this up it's so hilarious.

Can I just say this is one of the best headlines I've read in a while. When the Sex Coupons aren't from your wife. Do you read Dear Margo? She's Ann Lander's daughter, and she can be hilarious sometimes. But after this one, I've decided people are idiots. Why do you need to write an advice columnist and ask what to do if someone other than you gives your husband sex coupons?

Happy Birthday!!!!

Here she is my sweet little birthday girl, when she was only 3 yrs old and fell asleep in the laundry basket. I remember she went to the kitchen to get something, and when I didn't hear anything after a few minutes, I went to check on her and found this. I had to take a picture. But tomorrow, Ms Em is turning 9 yrs old. Where has the time gone? Wasn't she just this little tiny baby in my arms yesterday? I'm going to blink and she'll be a teenager. Can we please stop the time flying by?

So to celebrate, we are going to the American Girl Store in Dallas to the American Girl bistro for lunch, and then do some fun shopping in the store for her dolls. The bistro has all kinds of stuff, even heart-shaped ravioli and pink lemonade -- how cute is that? And they have little highchairs for your doll to sit in at the table with you. This part she knows about, but I have a secret present she has no idea is coming, and I think she's going to be thrilled about it.

This is her secret present. She has this weird Barbie mp3 player, it's shaped like a barbie and you can play with it online, sort of like a webkinz. But for the actual mp3 player, I have to convert anything from iTunes into a cd before I can load it with songs, such a pain in the rear. So while we were at dance clinic today, I had her dad go get a purple iPod shuffle, and then I had him fill it with songs from the loves of her life - better known as the Jonas Brothers, lol. According to Ms Em, all music is inferior to the Jonas Brothers' music. I think she's going to die when she sees it. She's been complaining about my tastes in music. Excuse me, but who doesn't love Jason Mraz and Coldplay? So I'm hoping that maybe this will help.

My Weekend

So I screwed off a little bit these past couple of days. I finished my school work, and now I only have one test left and I'll be done and totally finished. I will graduate by Labor Day if it kills me, and then I swear to you I will have a party and melt those CDs with the horrid assignments, that or I will rip them apart and create altered art pins.

So I didn't make my ATCs for my trade. They aren't due for quite a while, and I'm not really worried about finishing them. However, I've been pushing around my book idea for like a year. I finally took the plunge this week. In the past 2 days, I've already written 32 pages. I am so thrilled! And the weird thing is, it's taking on a life of it's own, and I like it. At first it kind of freaked me out because I've read about writers who say when they write it takes unexpected turns. I kept thinking, yeah right, how can you be writing something and it does its own thing. They were right. My book has its own life. I can't believe the things that are coming out of my brain into this book.

Now for my premise. This is a bit embarrassing, but it's based on series of dreams I had. You know John Mayer? I lusted after that man big time, even now I blush when I see him on television - how stupid is that, lol? But his little fling with Jessica Simpson kinda turned me off of him, but I do still like his music.

So anyway, back to the dreams. I used to have these dreams about him, and I would have these dreams all the time. We would meet in the most strangest places, and the entire dream was either him trying to get to me, or me to him. So one morning I'd woken up from an extremely wonderful dream (that I refuse to go into details about since my mother is a reader here, lol), and I got to thinking about what if 2 people could somehow have some accidental connection and fall in love in a dream and then meet in real life and they realize they've been dreaming of the other one. So I went looking to see if there was a phenomenon like that, where people were both in the same dream. I discovered it's a whole weird psychic thing called mutual dreaming, but as I kept thinking about it for days on end, I decided that would be a neat idea for a novel. I went looking for any fiction books with this type of theme, and I really couldn't find anything.

At first I was going with a more adult type of fiction, but then I felt it fit better with young adult fiction, so instead of the main character being in her 30s, she's now a teenager. She's going to have to run away on a whim to get to him, and I felt it was more feasible with a young girl than some 30-something mother of toddlers.

I'm just so excited, I have so much to weave into the story with clues on how to find each other.

I'm really trying to get my nerve up to post an excerpt on my blog, but I am the biggest chicken in the entire world, so I'm not sure when I'll get the guts up to do it.

The Waves

Thank god I finished the Twilight books. Those characters are like haunting my every thought. I am forcing myself to start reading something else right now to get them out of my head. But I thought they were great books. It was a really fast read too. I'm really not sure what people were complaining about in the last book, I thought it summed everything up just perfect, but I'm all for happy endings.

I'm working on some ATCs I'll post tomorrow hopefully. I received some in trade today that are just gorgeous. I gotta find the camera to take pictures.

So here is my current obsessive song, it's by Elisa called The Waves. She's an Italian singer, so her stuff is not really well known here, but it's just beautiful. I just love her songs, Rock Your Soul is other fave by her. But a word of caution, the video storyline is utterly stupid. The song has such a great story to it, and they did nothing with it. The video is just bizarre because it seems to have nothing to do with the song.

Twilight Obsession

I have been sick for 2 weeks with some kind of horrific bronchitis that I think is bordering on pneumonia. I just switched antibiotics at the doctor yesterday and now I'm an another one for 2 whole weeks. So...I'm exhausted and basically work and crawl into bed with books. I barely have the energy to fix my children meals and their dad is on a week long business trip in Newfoundland.

So since Sunday, when I picked up Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, I have become somewhat obsessed with this series. I read Twilight in a day and a half and I was like a drug addict - I had to read the rest of the story. Right. Now. So I forced myself to wait until Tuesday to go to Walmart of all places, and bought New Moon and Eclipse, books 2 and 3. I started New Moon last night and finished it earlier today. It was so good!! And now I can't wait to read what happens next in book 3.

So, tonight I finally found book 4, Breaking Dawn, at Target and picked it up. I am itching to get through Eclipse because I've read the spoilers online and know what's going to happen in Breaking Dawn and I can't wait!! I don't know what I'm going to do after I finish the last one. Hopefully, it will have some closure or I'm going to go nuts until November when the movie comes out.

I have never felt this way about a book or series before. I loved reading The Time Traveler's Wife, and I put it down frequently because I wanted to savor it and knew it would soon end, but this has really turned into a drug, I can't put the books down.

It's so embarassing. I think my obsession is because it is so easy to fall inside the story in just a matter of words. Don't you just love it when you fall into a story so quickly?? I don't know, I have never met anyone else who does that. Of course, I've never really met anyone who was as big of a bookworm as me either. My family looks at me like I have 3 heads when I ask them if they ever fall into a book or a movie and everything around them disappears. They have no idea what I'm talking about. Does anybody else do this or am I really that crazy?

Paper Dress

I signed up over at swap-bot for a paper dress swap. It looked like fun, but I had never made one before and was a bit worried it would end up hard to make, so I made a practice paper dress last night during a bout of insomnia to see how difficult this task would be, and it's so much fun! I even made a little wire hanger to put it on. I needed a thicker wire so it would be a bit sturdier, but all I had was 26 gauge, and its doing ok, but next time I'm using 20 or 22 gauge. This one was so much fun, I plan on making a few more and creating a little paper dress garland to hang above my corkboard to dress up my crafting studio.

If you haven't read any of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, you have to read it. I was skeptical over the whole vampire love story thing, especially since it was targeted for "young adult" because those kinda books usually just aren't my thing, even when I was the target age of young adult books, I had already moved to adult books, but this book is addictive, so addictive, I read 200 pages last night and forced myself to go to bed. If I didn't have children, I would have read the entire thing in one sitting, it was that good. It's a hard book to pull away from....so I plan to finish it tonight, and I already purchased the second book so I don't have to wait after finishing the first one. I am now dying to see the movie.

And I went to my jewerly making class yesterday. It was fun, and I finally learned how to do crimp beads. I made an awesome beaded bookmark and bought extra bookmarks to make even more, and I made a pretty bracelet. I'll post pictures later tonight or tomorrow after I finish my work.

Baby Kimono

So I was searching for a template to make paper dresses, and I happened upon this adorable little kimono top for babies over on Martha Stewart's site. At first I was thinking it was made out of paper, then as I looked at it, I realized it's a cute little top for your newborn baby. They are so adorable and quick to whip up for newborns. There is a pattern you print out and then tape together and the instructions have pictures included for easy sewing. I just had to share for those of you looking for free baby clothes sewing patterns. There is a mini picture of the entire pattern after you piece it together, and that you can use to make paper t-shirts or a baby kimono top for scrapbooking and altered art purposes.

Now I'm off to do some school work (almost done forever!!), then indulge in some paper dressmaking before bed. I found some adorable templates for paper dresses for scrapbooking and altered art that I'll put up when I upload pics of my paper dresses. You would not believe how hard a time I had finding these things. I thought I was going to have to competely go from scratch, which sometimes scares me. I am very visual, and I like to look at examples to get my inspirations a lot of times if I have never made something before; otherwise, I feel like I'm going into it blind and will totally screw it up.

Chinese Takeout

So I finally caved in and bought Twilight by Stephanie Meyer at Walmart today. The movie preview looks interesting, and I love to read the book before the movie (and if you haven't seen Memoirs of a Geisha - read the book first, they leave out so many things in the movie, it's annoying). Usually I wait forever to buy popular books as I don't like all the hype, but it looks good.

My newest obsession as you may have noticed is ATC swaps over at Swap-bot. I just love them. So I have several swaps in the works. I forgot to take pictures before I mailed out some bookmarks I made for a swap where you send a list of 10 favorite books some bookmarks, but I did remember to take a picture of this one.

This swap is for ATCs made out of only a Chinese restaurant menu and a fortune. My favorite chinese buffet had this beautiful design with dragons and goldfish on the front. You couldn't use anything else on your ATC, which was hard, I'm an embellisher by nature so I had to really hold myself back. One is called Lucky Goldfish and the other is called Go For It.

Now I'm off to make paper dresses for another swap.

The Butterfly Fairy

So this is the second ATC in my Fairy ATC swap. I call it Butterfly Fairy. I'm thinking it needs something in the upper right corner, but I'm not sure what. It still looks kinda naked to me, lol. I think my swapper person will like it because her username has butterfly in it....hopefully she will. This vintage picture is from a collection I bought of magician vintage posters from Lunagirl. She has all kinds of collage pictures, and great quality stuff. I get the ones that are digital downloads so they show up instantly to print, as I have no patience to wait on a CD in the mail.

I'm so excited about my jewelry class this weekend with my mom, she's so much fun to go to stuff like this with, and I never get to do it. I

Ok, gotta get back to work, today is the last day of pay period. I'll post pics of my cool new jewelry makings from my class this weekend.

Twinkie Sushi

I have an obsession with sushi made out of other things like rice krispies, felt, yarn, and now, Twinkies. I found this recipe for Twinkie sushi on the Hostess website and had to include it with my other sushi finds.

Did you know Hostess has all kinds of recipes for their products? They had some cute ones for their coconut snowballs. I don't like the snowballs as I hate coconut. The whole texture of it just doesn't do it for me.

I was at the Hostess website because I opened a package of mini choclate chip muffins and popped one in my mouth and it had hard little pieces of plastic in it that looked chewed up. So I sent them an email just now. I'm kinda grossed out over this. I don't know if I can eat a chocolate chip muffin ever again.

CraftStylish

I am so excited! I just found out I'm going to be in the CraftStylish magazine in October for their Holiday Makeover issue!! I've been having such a crappy week, this has definitely made my day!!

One Word Quiz

I got this from Emily Adam's blog and it looked like fun. You can only have a one word response to each question. Post a link in the commens if you do it too!

1. Where is your cell phone? CHARGING
2. Where is your significant other? WORK
3. Your hair? PINK
4. Your mother? QUILTING
5. Your father? WORKING
6. Your favorite thing? SLEEPING
7. Your dream last night? EYEBALLS
8. Your dream/goal? GRADUATE
9. The room you're in? FAMILY
10. Your hobby? CRAFTING
11. Your fear? WASPS
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? MOVED
13. Where were you last night? WORKING
14. What you're not? AWAKE
16. One of your wish list items? FABRIC
17. Where you grew up? DALLAS
18. The last thing you did? BLOG
19. What are you wearing? PAJAMAS
20. Your TV? OFF
21. Your pet? LABRADOR
22. Your computer? DESKTOP
24. Your mood? SICK
25. Missing someone? NO
26. Your car? MINIVAN
27. Something you're not wearing? BRA
28. Favorite store? GOTTA SCRAP
29. Your summer? HOT
30. Love someone? ALWAYS
31. Your favorite color? PINK
32. When is the last time you laughed? YESTERDAY
33. Last time you cried? SUNDAY

Fairy ATCs

So I've been swapping over on Swap-Bot and I joined my first ATC swap. If you don't know what an ATC is, it stands for Artist Trading Card. It is basically a little piece of art you create the size of a baseball trading card, and people trade and collect them. There are even yahoo groups dedicated to collecting and trading. Just do a search on google to find all kinds of sites on how to make them. When you da a swap for one, there is usually a theme, and the theme for this swap of ATCs was fairies.

I had never made one before. I have admired many, but just never tried it. Well this weekend, we went over to my mom's house and I made one. I need to make a second one for my swap since we are to send 2 before I send it, but just wanted to go ahead and post this one because I really like how it came out. My flash kinda washed out the bottom of the card, but it still looks pretty good. I'll post my second one, when I finish it later this week. I'm still deciding on what kind of fairy to use.

For this one, I used embossing powder and then stamped over it, and the part you can't see is that I sprinkled a tiny bit of embossing powder, like a dusting across the entire card, to give it a sparkly feel, and then used the heat gun to set it - that part came out just perfect, so when you tilt the card just slightly it sparkles.



And the person sending to me already sent my fairy ATCs, and they are hand drawn fairies! They are really beautiful. I really like the one up on her tiptoe, doing an arabesque, reminds me of my own ballerina.

So...boring

God, I'm so boring these past few weeks. I haven't done any crafting and I feel like there is just nothing to talk about here. I'm trying to work on my school work so I have no time for crafting or crap, even taking a break to watch TV anymore.

I have 3 sections to finish and the first one is due tomorrow and I have done about 10% of it. And you know in high school and college I prided myself on not being a procrastinator. I was that weirdo that began working on a paper the minute they were assigned and turned it in early. And now...I'm literally inches from quitting. I hate it so much...that's not entirely true, I more than hate it, I loathe it. Is loathe a stronger word than hate? I know if I quit I will feel guilty, especially being like 2 1/2 assignments from graduating, that's just stupid. But dang it, I hate this crap. I think I'm burned out and need a very long vacation. I haven't had a day off in forever.

I don't know. Seriously, this is not what I want to do with my life. It makes me more marketable, that is the only reason I'm doing this course. But really, I feel like I'm wasting my brain.

Well crap, I guess this turned into a rant, sorry. I don't know what I want. Well, that's not entirely true, what I want is to go take a writing class and learn how to get the stories in my head out on paper. But in the last year, I've learned a few things. It's better to fail spectacularly than to never even try. And you have to take risks, that is how the most successful people in the world got where they are now and doing what they love. But it's so hard to just let yourself go like that.

Ok, enough ranting. We are taking the kids bowling tonight while I once again ignore my school work. Bye!

Free Day for Mommy

So today we got up early (as in before 2 in the afternoon, as we are a family of vampires), and met Gramma halfway between our homes at a cute little scrapbook store, and she took the kidlets all day to do fun stuff. They were not sure if they were going to spend the night, but decided they couldn't live without me, so we met again at 10:30 tonight for the pick up.

So first we met at this scrapbook store, Gotta Scrap. It's in Rockwall, if you are in the Dallas area. I love that store! They have such great product lines, and....they have Art Girlz stuff! I don't have to order it online anymore. And you know the adorable sock monkey fabrics from Moda? Did you know they made it in a scrapbook paper line too? I didn't, but I had to buy it. Not sure what I'm gonna do with it...But I spent mucho dinero in that store, and that didn't include the jewerly making class my mom and I are taking together in a couple of weeks. I can't wait, you make a cute little bookmark and an adorable bracelet.


Ms Em is obsessed with anything related to Ripley's Believe It or Not and Guiness Book of World Records, so Gramma took them to the Ripley's/Wax Museum. They got their own wax hands made, which I think are totally cool. Mr E chose 2 colors while Ms Em just wanted one. It was a big day, so he was already asleep before I could snap a picture.

But I had the rest of the day to myself, so I did a little clothing shopping for me. Isn't it great when you have a dressing room all to yourself and no one is there to crawl under the other stalls to scare the crap out of customers?

Then I picked up an online order of some cute postcards at Kinko's for my rustic tart recipe to send in a recipe postcard swap over at swap-bot. The front is a picture of the tart itself and the back is my recipe I'm handwriting - which I have to do 7 times which is a bit of a hand killer, writing so small, lol. Oh, and if you homeschool, get yourself a Kinko's educator savings card, I think it's a 15% discount.

Then I went home and worked a little and took a very long nap, where nobody woke me up and I could watch whatever TV show I wanted. If I hadn't been so tired, I would have worked on a new tutorial I'm slowly finishing on how to make a pattern from your favorite shirt, but I just couldn't stay awake, lol.

My Etsy Shop!!

So I finally got my act together and have put up my Etsy shop. This way instead of having a box of crafty things I've made, I can actually sell them too, lol. My store is called TipToe Fairy Designs based ever so creatively on my website name.



Over the next few days I will be adding a few things. I'll post a big ol' announcement when I'm having the official grand opening in the next week or so and will have a coupon code.

Gotta get back to work, I've been seriously screwing off for the last hour creating my store and stuff for my Etsy store.

Sitemeter can take a flying leap

So I thought there was something wrong with my computer because I couldn't edit my blog and my obsession with Perez Hilton wouldn't work either (gawd, lately he's been annoying me and I haven't been reading hardly at all). So...I switched to my other computer and it wouldn't bring up either site, it kept saying "abort - blah, blah, blah". Apparently, my counter which a TON of blogs use as well called Sitemeter updated something and it's totally farking up the internet. So I've decided Sitemeter can go to hell for all I care and I need to find a new counter and stat site.

So I have taken the Sitemeter counter off my site, and it should open just fine now for Internet Explorer users. Or...you could use the wonderful never a problem Firefox, like I've now permanently switching to.

Sorry for the delay, I just realized the problem about an hour ago. I was awarded the Bad Mommy Award in the ER tonight with my poor sweet little Mr E. He was standing in his chair at dinner and fell off and busted his chin, so now he has stitches. He was covered in blood and so was I. He had a fork in his hand and when I picked him up off the floor, I just knew I was going to see a fork stab wound in his throat. Scared the crap out of me. Thankfully he just hit the table corner and had a large but superficial gash.

I'm such a bad mommy for not telling him to sit down. In the ER, the anticipation and waiting to get the stitches was the scariest thing for him. He would just start crying and asking me how bad it would hurt. So at midnight or so when we finally were discharged, he and I were at Walmart buying lots of Batman toys and donuts to celebrate his bravery.

Uh what?

Ok, so I was reading blogs and came across this YouTube video over on Suicide Food. What. The. Hell. I laughed hysterically until tears were streaming down my face. I can't even describe it, you just have to watch it and wonder.