Wednesday, December 31, 2008

{Happy New Year!}


I don't know how the [crazy] people who venture into NYC for New Year's do it! I heard that it is going to be, with the wind chill, -6 degrees there tonight, no thank you! We are going to enjoy a quiet evening, we plan on going to see the movie Bedtime Stories, I am not a fan of Adam Sandler, however, this movie looks funny.

One of my New Years resolutions includes getting organized, I think that is a resolution that is on-going, I have that one every year. About this time of year, I start to wonder into the bin/stacked drawer aisle of Walmart. I just wish that the actual organizing came with the product! I am also down-sizing. We have way too much stuff, I have a bunch of stuff on ebay right now, trying to get some stuff sold and out of here!

I'm wishing everyone a very Happy and Safe New Year! Goodbye 2008, hello 2009! (Uggg, I turn 30 this year!!!)

Friday, December 26, 2008

Rockin' The Glitter




Jason got me a nice little gift card to The ScrapYard. I have been eyeing up some Tim Holtz items and I decided to go for the 'grungeboard'. I LOVE,LOVE,LOVE this stuff! You can do anything to it, the more techniques you use on it, the better it gets. I also got the Martha Stewart glitter pack. So as I am typing this, I am also sparkling! I glittered the angel wings, a crown, and a prima flower. Nothing is safe when there is glitter involved, anything is fair game. I know the scrapbook world is full of pricey glues that all promise different things, but nothing works as well as good old Elmer's glue for this project. I just thinned it out a little bit with some water and it was great for the glitter. Now I must get back to all that glitter....hummm, didn't I just see a cat walk by that could use some sparkle...

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Diggin' My New Purse!

I was in search of Christmas gifts at TJ Maxx yesterday and I couldn't be in the store without browsing the purse section. Well, just as I was about done and ready to head over to the home section, this purse was screaming my name!! I had to have it, I had been carrying around a ragged old purse for awhile now and I just loved this one!! Merry Christmas to me. So here it is:


Here we are having a debate on whether the animal on the purse is a hedgehog or a sheep, let me know what you think!

On another note, apparently buying a Christmas tree the Saturday before Christmas is NOT such a good idea. We went in search of a real tree last night, only to discover that tree farms shut their doors at dusk, WHAT??? I would think that they would be open later than that, however, after 3 hours of driving through back roads, windy hills, and small towns that don't know what street signs are, we still didn't get our tree! I am assuming that they will be open today, so we will try that (in the afternoon), but it's so bitter cold and snowy today that the last thing I want to do is pick out a tree!! That 75% off fake tree at Rite Aid is looking pretty good right about now!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

*Dear Roodof*

Here is Mason's letter to Santa that he will leave next to a nice batch of Chocolate Chip Cookies, an ice cold glass of milk and some carrots for the reindeer:
*click picture to see a better view*

Very funny!

Ohhhhh, raspberry deliciousness:


Here is the batch of oatmeal-raspberry bars that I mentioned in my last post. They smell fantastic, and with 3 sticks of butter, 3 cups of brown sugar, 3 eggs and tons of flour HOW could they not taste as good as they smell!!! I put them in the little take out boxes and now they are ready to go.



At the moment, Jason is down in the basement 'discreetly' wrapping my presents. I don't make this an easy thing for him to do, oh no! I will pull out any and all bribery tactics on Mason to try to get him to cave in and tell me what my presents are. It almost happened tonight, but I stopped him, I don't REALLY want to know what I got until Christmas, I just like the torture that I put Jason and Mason through!!! For the record, Jason has REALLY bad 'hiding Christmas presents' abilities, I have been known to snoop around, however, I didn't even need to snoop last week when I saw a big 'Bath and Body Works' bag just sitting in plain view in the basement. Do you think that I peeked?? Nooooo, not me!!

Things are moving along....

I have the Christmas cards mailed {by 'mailed' I mean ready for the post office tomorrow morning}, so be expecting yours shortly! Here are the ornaments that I made, very simple and very cute. All I did was buy the clear ball ornaments at Michael's and put rolled Christmas patterned paper inside with a little bit of buffalo snow to give it some sparkle.



As I was doing this I got an idea, since there are 12 ornaments in a pack {2 missing from the photo} I think I am going to buy some more on clearance and make them for gifts next year. The paper that I will put in each will be significant to each of the 12 months. For example, January's ornament will have snow flake paper, June's will have sunny or beach paper. I think that would be a nice gift for teacher's or anyone!

Right now I am baking raspberry oatmeal bars for gifts for the volunteers for Dogs Deserve Better. Tomorrow is our annual lunch at the Olive Garden! I bought little 'Chinese take out' looking boxes to stuff the raspberry bars in--they are going to be sooooo good!!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Remember ALF!!


I used to LOVE this show!! I remember the cat named Lucky that ALF always tried to eat! Funny stuff. While looking through my myspace yesterday I found a link to all these great '80's shows that you can actually watch episodes of. There was an ALF Christmas movie on there!! I couldn't get over it, Mason even enjoyed the first 20 minutes (that's all I got through). I used to have an ALF doll that when you pushed his stomach, he recited the phrases, "I'm a people alien" and "let's go check out the fridge!". I can't wait to have some free time to catch up some of the episodes! I couldn't, even at a young age, stand the dad, Willy! He was so obnoxious and I assume that he is the reason the show was not on air for very long.

I made some ornaments and I keep forgetting to get pictures of them, so if I remember later this evening, I will get them up, they are super simple to make. that's all for now.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

(Funny)

Only a person with multiple cats can appreciate this one!!


funny pictures of cats with captions
more animals

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

{A Few Christmas Cards}

Here are some of the Christmas cards that I have gotten done so far. I made them in a fairly short amount of time thanks to the {insert voice of Carson Kressley from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy here} *Fabulous* sparkly snowflakes with the *Gorgeous* brads, I just can't get enough of them!! The first card is actually a card that I am going to send to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation along with a donation in memory of Mason's friend's mother that passed away. It, at times, makes me so sad to think about a 2nd grader (or anyone for the matter) losing his mom to a horrible disease and his mom is no longer there to simply hug him. I just can't fathom it.



So, on a lighter note, here are the Christmas cards:






Now, when I was at Michael's I wanted to buy the plain cards, apparently rocket science is involved in order figure out what kind of card you need to go with what envelope. You would think that they would sell them together, but hey, that would make sense! So, I ended up (accidentally) getting the flat cards, they don't have a fold, so the cards that I made are just the fronts, they will be adhered to cards in the near future. Not real sure how these cards are going to be mailed, but hey, if it isn't a challenge, it isn't fun! The red cards don't have 'Merry Christmas' on them yet, I didn't have any coordinating colored letters. Hope you enjoyed!

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Here Are The Sweater Wreaths




I thought that they turned out cute! It goes with the theme of my Christmas tree, organic and recycled. These couldn't get any cheaper. I made about 8 of them, the total for the entire project was $4.88!! I used floral wire to give them some support. Now I want to try to make a purse out of a sweater, next time I visit the Goodwill (I really prefer the Salvation Army) I will look for a fun, colorful sweater to experiment with.

Now that I am up from a little snooze, I think I am going to try to get some Christmas cards made.

Friday, December 05, 2008

*Christmas Is Right Around The Corner*

And could there be a better gift out there for Jason? This shirt is PERFECT.


Click here to see.

I may go with the yellow, though, since that seems to be his color.
;^)

[Poor O.J]



I find his tearful apology in court today sickening and unbelievably fake. I am glad that the Goldman family was there in the courtroom, they will never let him forget what he did to their son. I highly doubt that he will serve anywhere close to the 33 years he could face in prison, but at least he is serving time. What a waste of a human being.

Giving Makes My Heart Happy.

This is what my dining room table looked like about 15 minutes ago:


I organized a donation drive for our troops for the Christmas care packages. Most of the 2nd grade classes participated. I am so grateful for all the stuff that was donated. Some of the items included, candy, toilet paper, magazines, gum, 25 tooth brushes, 15 boxes of tooth paste, countless ramen noodles, and a local Mary Kay rep donated 5 boxes of lotion that smell really good!! This is my {little} way of giving back to the Americans who sacrifice a lot to keep our country safe. So to all of them: Thank you.

Yes, I am still working on the sweater project, it is coming along nicely, however I worked a VERY long work week this week so it left very little time for anything else, I was falling asleep at like 8 o'clock every night!! So, I should get them done this weekend and will post some pics!

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

'Nuff Said

I need to get myself one of these t-shirts!

Monday, December 01, 2008

/Recycled Projects On The Brain/

So, my favorite consignment store's owner, Patty, called me to tell me that everything in the store on black Friday will be 50% off. Since Mason is growing out of every pair of pants he has and her prices are practically steals anyway, I thought I would go chat with her and see what she has in. I found this sweater:



Now, 'I' thought it was nice, apparently none of the males in the house had the same feeling. So, I didn't want my now 8 year old to be embarrassed by the nice $3 Gap sweater, so I have come up with a project that I think is going to be pretty cool. With all the colors in the sweater, I am sure to get a variety. A variety of what, you ask?? I am going to work on this tonight and hopefully will have some to show you tomorrow (let's hope they turn out!!). Also, I am finding projects online and in magazines using felt and old wool sweaters that are 'felted' (is that how you say it??), I would like to try my hand at some of those, I am sure that I have boxes of old wool sweaters somewhere. So, stay tuned, I should have some projects completed for tomorrow!

Sunday, November 30, 2008

.BaG fuLL oF gOoDiEs.


My Aunt Gwen works at a newspaper and is constantly getting press kits from companies wanting her to write about them. She saves them for me because I love to use scraps and odds and ends for my scrapbooking and crafting. It gives everything that I do a bit of uniqueness, simply because you can't buy these in the store (or if you did, I imagine that even 1 roll of this wallpaper would set you back quite a bit!). I can't wait to take all of this apart and see what I can do with it. I already have some ideas for that bag of peanuts! Just look at that wallpaper!! Could you imagine that being on the walls of your house, the purple one is fuzzy and the white one has tiny glass beads on it, amazing!




On another note, my fellow blogger, http://madcapfrenzy.blogspot.com/, posted a link that has an amazing project:

http://talkottown. blogspot.com/2008/11/black-friday-giveaway_28.html

I'm not even sure what I would do with it, but it would be really cool to try and find out!! I am looking forward to getting some crafting done soon!

On an extremely sad note, yesterday a classmate of Mason's, a really good friend of his, did not show up at the party and I was informed by another mom that the boy's mom is not doing so well. She had breast cancer that spread through her entire body. As I read the paper this morning, I saw that she had died yesterday. She left behind 3 kids, my thoughts are with her and her family.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Hint, Hint

Hint, *clearing my throat*, Jason, I WANT this for Christmas. I'm off to watch my Saturday night COPS now!

)Partied Out(

I can't believe that Mason is going to be 8 years old tomorrow! After months and months of planning, the party is over! We had a blast, the Summit was amazing (with the exception of the 'party coordinator'), the pool rocked, good food and good company made the afternoon a blast. We arrived about an hour and a half early (I can never have enough time to set up) and got the party room rockin'. After all the kids got there they swam in the pool for almost two hours and then went back to the room for some pizza, cake and all kinds of sweets.



Mason got a ton of great presents and he was just happy to spend the afternoon with some of his friends. I thought that his cake turned out well and I am so glad that it survived the transport. Well, I will give myself a few months to recover and then we will start planning next years! Thank you, Aunt Gwen for providing many of the 'direct from the beach' supplies. Thank you to everyone who helped out and a special thanks to Amber, Tara and Alex for helping clean up every last piece of confetti (among other items) so that I can use it again!! It was great to see everyone.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

{{Happy Thanksgiving}}

What goes better with a day of thanks than The Rocky Horror Picture Show!!


I had no idea what I was missing all these years, although it was around 4 years before I was even born. As I am writing this I have the Timewarp song playing--what an awesome song! I thought it was a bit odd to play this marathon today, however I enjoyed it. So much strangeness, craziness, and humor all wrapped up into one movie! I imagine that this movie was pretty controversial in the 70's! It was playing on my new favorite channel, the 'Chiller' channel. This channel rocks! They play old, cheesy horror movies (you know the ones where the blood squirts out of someone about 2 minutes before they are even stabbed!). I watched one called 'Return to Horror High' (I'm sure the original 'Horror High' was so great that they couldn't wait to make a sequel!!), it was bad, horrible acting and a lot of screaming, however, George Clooney was in it!! It must have been one of his first movies (this was a 1983 movie) because he was not even listed in the opening credits. He's come along way since then! Home Alone is a movie that I love to watch during the holidays. That movie never gets old! Watching Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in that movie is a riot! We rented a movie for tonight, LineWatch, with Cuba Gooding Jr. It is about a border patrol agent that is forced to smuggle drugs across the border, hopefully it is good. We have rented quite a few bad ones lately, so it's about time we get a good one.

Have a great rest of your Turkey day!!

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

A Little Bit Of This And A Little Bit Of That

Uggg, all this snow is making me think it is going to be a L.O.N.G winter! I guess living in this part of Pennsylvania we have to expect it, but I'm never ready for it. I am sure in a few weeks I will embrace it (well, I might not go that far) but I will accept it and maybe have a little fun in it. I have been throwing around different ideas in my head about a Christmas tree. We always get a real tree (I cringe at the thought of a fake one), I love the smell of a real one. It is difficult to make it through a season without losing a few ornaments (refer to the last post regarding 8 cats), I have very nice ornaments and then some that are just 'filler' types (they never seem to break!). I have decided this year to get a real tree, but keep all my ornaments tucked away in the attic for another year. I want to have an 'organic' theme. As I am typing this I am drying some 'less than fresh' key limes from my fridge (that Mason promptly took a whole one and ate it, the kid will eat anything!) along with some lemons. I want to get some sticks, whole walnuts, cinnamon sticks, etc. and see what I can come up with. We will put them together with some hot glue and maybe a few googly eyes! We'll see how it goes, at least if anything falls off the tree the cats (and dogs) won't even bother with it.

On another note, I'm not sure if I posted this picture back in October or not, but it's worth seeing again! I wanted the big zombie that I bought on clearance last year to go in the front tree for Halloween. Since we do not own a latter, Jason climbed up the tree to secure the zombie (and in the process I got some really funny pictures) so that strong winds would still ensure that he could make trip up the tree next year. Well, then it snowed. Since Jason needs both of his legs to work, we decided that the zombie will stay in place for a little longer. Then Jason got to thinking....he is no longer the 'Zombie of Halloween', he is the 'Ghost of Christmas Future'! See, now we get two holidays out of him instead of one! Yeah, as soon as the snow clears, he's coming down, though!


I can now officially say that I have 'burned' dinner. I certainly would not call myself a novice at cooking but I am no Rachel Ray (maybe that's not a compliment) or Emeril (*BAM*), for that matter. As I was cooking taco meat (soy meat, of course) I started to smell something burning. I went over to the toaster oven that was warming the taco shells and sure enough they were on fire. I was in a slight panic as I did not want to spray water onto an electrical appliance, but I also didn't want the house to burn down. Jason calmly unplugged and pulled out the flaming taco shells and put them in the sink, where I poured water on them!! So, we ended up having taco salad for dinner, but I actually thought it was better than the original plan!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I will be in search of a Tofurkey, I highly doubt I will find one around here!!

Monday, November 24, 2008

Sneeky Peeky...


Here is a picture of some signs that I made for Mason's party. Ironically, the beach signs were right next to the snow shovel in our mud room! Having the mud room is a blessing, I certainly would not expect these beach signs to last very long over night with 8 sneaky cats wondering around!! So the mud room, currently, is full of all beach related items ready for Saturday, including a blow-up palm tree! I am sure the people at the party venue are going to think I am a little nuts, but hey, they wouldn't be the first!! I have a few more items of interest that I am working on, I will post them later.

P.S Pay no attention to the creepy straw head in the bottom left corner! I still have a few Halloween decorations that have not made their way up to the attic yet!!

Friday, November 21, 2008

Positive Thoughts



I just checked the 10 day forecast and it seems that it is going to be cold for Mason's birthday party, however, there are no more snow storms in the near future. I am not one to hold the weather man to his word, but lets hope that he is right this time! I'll update closer to next weekend.

This morning I was going to take Mason to school and then do my weekly shopping at Walmart right after. It was close to the time that Mason gets picked up by the bus and Jason called me to tell me that the roads were horrible. I hate to drive in snow, so I got Mason packed up really fast to see if we could still catch the bus. Since there are hills on all sides of our house, I had a feeling that the bus was going to have trouble getting up the street. As the kids got on the bus at our bus stop, Terry, the bus driver, started to pull away. No sooner did he step on the gas did he hit the stop sign that was about 2 feet away from me! Then he attempted to get up the hill, he did successfully, sideways and with the assistance of the borough salt truck! I really think that we should have had a 2 hour delay, or the hard-at-work borough workers could have come to work before 8 am!! A friend of Mason's didn't arrive at school until really late, turns out his bus got stuck in a ditch and they had to send another bus for all the kids. I have to admit, my stomach had butterflies when I saw Mason's bus slide sideways and down the hill. I remember when I was a kid and had to ride the bus we always got stuck!! The bus driver used to have all of us jump up and down in the back of the bus to get some movement! I remember it being fun, but this morning I had a different perspective of it--it wasn't that much fun knowing Mason was on that bus.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

--->Finally<---


Finally, I can buy a pack of smokes for $4.21 a pack!! Not really, haha, I don't get how people can actually smoke cigarettes. It's a disgusting habit and one that costs A LOT of money. If a person were to smoke 1 pack a day (which is probably average) that would add up to $1,535 dollars a year!! How crazy is that?? I could think of a lot of other things that money could go towards. On the same note, I am SO happy that Pa has gone smoke-free in restaurants. The non-smoking section of a restaurant is like the non-peeing section of a pool!! Doesn't make much sense!! That's gross.

Anyway back to my original thoughts. I am so glad that gas prices have gone down so much. I highly doubt that it will go much below $2/gal, but that's ok. As long as we are not paying over $4/gal, I'll take it! The most I ever paid was $4.11/gal. When I started driving at the ripe old age of 16, gas was .99 cents/gal!! Those days are long gone, I'm sure, but as long as the gas prices stay around where they are, I'll be happy.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

And Another...

Here is a simple project using an Altoids tin. I let Mason eat the mints because they contain gelatin (I have no idea why, they aren't even gummy!). So from the time it took to purchase the tin at Sheetz to the time it took to get home (less than 5 minutes), Mason had eaten the entire tin full of the peppermint mints!! Well, I guess I should have specified to only eat a few! That got my project rolling a little faster, I guess. This one is a mini scrapbook, also. I used double-sided paper to make it easier. I made an accordion style fold so that it could easily pull out.




I have also made these tins for gift card holders. A gift card fits perfect inside the tin. It's a great gift idea. The tin can be used all year long! I recommend a glue that is suitable for metal, because others would just not hold. I also tried spray painting the tin to make it uniform, I would not suggest it. The paint did not allow the tin to close properly. Trial and error is what crafting is all about! I let the color of the tin (different flavors have different color tins) decide what paper I wanted to use. Then a simple piece of ribbon covers the writing on the sides of the tin.

Yes, Mason did eat all of the mints out of all 5 tins that I've made!! Yuck!

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

{Just A Few Projects}

Last week I got some of the projects back from the Scrapyard that I had created. I really liked the way these turned out. I was sort of on a 'Go Green' kick, so I decided to use items that already had a previous life. The first one is an old CD case (I officially have about 600 of them) that I turned into a mini scrapbook. I thought it was cute and I used up a lot of scraps, I would definitely make this again.


Next up is a clipboard. We have a ton of these laying around due to our jobs requiring them, so why not put a new spin on it? This one in particular, was really beat up and chipped. So I got some old tissue paper left over from a gift and ModPodged it on there!! This technique is one of my favorites and probably the easiest of all. I had to add a pic of my favorite cat to go with the adorable post-it note pad, of course!

Well, I just wanted to share and spark your creativity. Tomorrow I will post another project...stay tuned!

Saturday, November 15, 2008

*Sometimes I Wonder*

At first glance this looks like nothing more than a wholesome, delicious,complete (except for a toy in the box) breakfast. Well, it is, but how Mason ate it was a different story!

While I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes this morning I picked up Mason's cereal bowl to put it in the dishwasher (that is a foreign concept to him, but anyway...) as I picked up the spoon, I saw that he had used the gigantic, over-sized spoon that is reserved for serving food. I thought about it for a minute and then I questioned him as to why he used the biggest spoon in the drawer, he didn't have an answer. Then I asked if he could even fit the spoon in his mouth and he promptly answered "NO". Then why? I guess as an adult you just assume that a kid that can get his own breakfast could easily choose the right size spoon! This was just one of those many moments that you just shake your head and remember that we probably did goofy stuff like this, too!!


What a goofball!!

*It's The Final Countdown*

On a totally unrelated note about this post, Central Cambria won against Tyrone last night 27-20!! Yeah, another week. However, we did not go to the game as planned we went to Toys R Us in search of Christmas ideas. This is how we can tell if Mason likes something: "Oh, yeah, that's nice" means he doesn't like it. "Ohhhh, this is cool" means he likes it, but it would probably sit in his toy bin after one time of use. However, "MOM, Hey MOM, come look at this" means he wants that toy and we should make a mental note! Jason, however, could get GI Joe 'dolls' and be happy for the rest of his life!! He was very disappointed when he showed Mason the GI Joe pack and Mason put his thumb down (indicating that he would never even open the toy) and I saw a little piece of Jason get crushed last night because of it! Oh well.

Now back to my original thoughts. It's the final countdown to Mason's birthday party!! I have so much to do, so little time! I handmade an invitation to my liking (after about 4 attempts, I got it to where I wanted it), so I wasn't going to make 30 of them by hand (I'm not crazy!!) so I went to Copy Rite in Hollidaysburg and they made really nice copies. So I cut out 30 invites and glued them on cardstock, bagged them in ziplock bags and put a little sand on the bottom with a few seashells. Then to finish it off, I put a mini beach ball inside that the kids can bring with them to the party! I think they turned out pretty nice and the beach balls were a hit in Mason's class! I still have a lot to do, but at least the invitations are out. Now I still have to: Make cupcakes, bake cookies and decorate, make Mason's cake (it's going to be awesome!), place the order for pizza, decorate, and then relax? I don't know if I will get to that last one, though! Party planning is so fun for me. Here is a peek at the invitations: