Merry Christmas!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season filled with food, family, and of course SNOW! 

(how else are you going to build an igloo?)

Christmas Time Is Here!

I ♥ my new Christmas tree!

It looks super cool in the dark

I went with a silver and white theme for the ornaments

I wanted to hang the amazing ornaments my Aunt Leslie
gave me for christmas last year, but they were too large
for my tree... so I hung them on the wall instead!

Really Amazon? Really?

This is why I don't like Amazon...

Tomorrow, Amazon is going to give people a 5% discount if they use the Amazon Price Check phone app to compare prices for things like toys, electronics, sporting goods, music, and DVDs in stores vs. on Amazon.

The deal doesn't work for books, but is just another way to encourage people to do what they are already doing in bookstores (browsing and finding books to buy in a bricks-and-mortar store, but actually buying them from Amazon, or other online competitor, rather than the physical bookstore).

Amazon is seriously trying to take over the world.

Needing Some Encouragement...

I'm seriously lacking the knowledge to finish my final exam and research paper... 

Here's hoping those voices start whispering in my ear before 10 p.m. tomorrow night!

I'm Weirdly Excited For This Movie

So the other day I read this statement in one of my shelf awareness issues...

"Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. I still vividly remember reading this book when I was 11; it cast a spell on me like nothing ever had before. For days afterward, I felt feverish, disoriented, changed. A sense of simply not knowing what to do with myself. Even today, those symptoms follow after I've finished a great book."

That was author Paul Russell's response when asked to name a book that had changed his life.

I mildly embarrassed to say that I've also felt (although way less intensely) the same way after reading a book before. Now, that statement in itself isn't the embarrassing part, rather, it's the fact that The Hunger Games books are the ones that gave me those feverish disoriented feelings.

But it happened.

Last summer, I finally gave in to the Hunger Games craze and read those books. And when I say I read them, I really mean that I devoured them.... like non-stop, can't put it down, dreamed about them kind of devoured. I got so into them (especially the last book) that I got all cold and clammy (I know embarrassing, right?) and had to go outside to read because I was literally shivering in my only moderately air conditioned house.

Geez. 

Now, there's a trailer for the movie and I'm kind of excited by it. 

Are you?

Birthday Cake Art

My cousin Megan and I made this amazing cake for my brother's birthday last Saturday.

We tossed around the idea of making him a gun (he has a lot of those), but didn't like it. In the past we've made him a racoon (when he shot one in my aunt's backyard) and a deer (he's shot one of those too).

And then, my aunt suggested we make him a kayak cake... and a genius idea was born.

We decided to create a kayaking scene!

Megan molded the kayak using orange starbursts
(I thought Mitchell's was orange, but apparently it's actually red... whoops)

We thought it would be funny if we depicted Mitchell crashing...
He loved it.

We used balloon candles as the paddle... it broke in the crash
and the arm (which belonged to a Bratz doll my aunt had lying around)
represents Mitchell struggling to grab one half of his paddle.

The rocks are made out of chocolate raisonetts and donut holes.
The trees are icing-, sprinkle-, and dyed-green noodle- covered ice cream cones.
We also used Swedish fish 'cause we thought they were cool.
The cake itself is funfetti cake (best. ever.) with rainbow chip icing.
We used a spray to "paint" the icing blue and green

A side note: The Bratz doll that I cut the arm off of is now a resident of my apartment because my aunt refused to let me leave it at her house... she thinks it's going to haunt me and has advised me to dispose of it some where far far away from anywhere that I am.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree

On Saturday, my family (mom, dad, brother, grandparents, cousins, cousin-in-law, aunt, and uncle) and I drove down to this cool cut-your-own-Christmas tree farm and picked out our Christmas tree! Well actually Christmas trees plural... we left with three.

We picked out my grandparents' tree first... it was pretty tall 

So after they cut it down, they cut off the bottom.
Apparently they didn't cut off enough though,
because it was still too tall to stand up in the garage... 

Then we picked out the McDonald tree

My cousin Megan was concerned that it was too skinny...

We had to cut that one down to size too...
Pretty (and unintentional) sunburst in the picture!

Then my super clever family decided that the best way to get the trees out of the woods was to put them on a tarp and drag them with down with the car... so Peter devised a "trapezoid" with bungee cords to do the job

And of course, they took about 100 years to attach the trees to our cars.
Megan and Nate's tree (never pictured here) was the best, because it fit in the back of the car! 

Only In Vermont...

Will you ever get to watch a Tractor Parade.

Yes, folks. That's right. A parade comprised completely of farm tractors covered in Christmas lights.

It was awesome. Check it out.

Yes.
There are absolutely two kids sitting in the bucket of this guy.

And how adorable is this general store?!
It makes me wish I was living in a small town instead of a huge metropolis.

I'm Dreaming of a White... Thanksgiving?

Thanksgivings (or at least the-day-before-thanksgivings) with snow are weird.

What a Lot of Red

Traffic is no fun... Especially in the rain. At night. When you're hungry.

It's never good when you watch your GPS go from saying you'll reach your destination at 10:35 p.m. to saying you'll reach it at 4:45 a.m.

Walls O' Happy

If there is one thing I really don't like in a room it's a large expanse of white walls and a white ceiling. 

Well, welcome to my new bedroom.

Normally, this is a problem I would fix by throwing a bunch of pictures on the wall, but I'm trying really hard to limit the number of screws I put in my walls (yes not nails, but screws, thanks to my cinderblock? walls), mostly so that it's easier for my mom to spackle when I move out eventually.

In my room at home I created a border made out of the large amount of postcards I've amassed during my travels across the country. It actually looks really cool and I have a postcard for almost every state (and several foreign territories and countries, too). But I don't have a postcard stash large enough to recreate that here. So that was out of the question.

My next thought was to do something like what my friends and I did in our dorms in college, which was to border our walls with quotes. But I couldn't think of a quote I liked enough, and it felt too collegey, so I got over that too.

And then, during my travels through pinterest and evening of crazy DIY fervor, I got hit with an inspiration. What if I lined my ceiling with words? Not quotes, but words.

So I hopped onto Thesaurus.com and started trying to think of a good word to cover my room with. I finally settled on Happy. It seemed like a good thing to expand on. With the help of my favorite word website, I found about 50 synonyms for happy. Who knew that was even possible?

The next task was trying to figure out how to do it. At school, we settled on our font, printed out one of each letter, cut those out, traced them onto pretty scrapbook paper, and then cut those out and taped them to the walls. It was quite the process. But I had found this pretty script font that I really wanted to use and I knew that tracing the letters wouldn't be able to do it justice this time. So, I decided to print the words straight onto the paper (something we would have scorned in school, since we tried to squeeze as many letters as humanly possible onto that 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper). 

After I'd gotten my words sized and figured out, and the paper cut to size (I had to cut the 12x12 scrapbook paper to about 8.5x12 so it would fit in my printer) it was time to print them. That was probably the scariest moment.

Then, I had to cut them out, a process that took about a day. I did the rough cutting with a large pair of scissors, then switched to small sissors to get the larger small details, and finally switched to an exacto knife to do the insides of the letters with holes and other fine details. It's a good thing I enjoy doing tedious tasks!

This is what they looked like all spread out on my bed waiting to get put up on the walls.

I didn't just want to put up a bunch of words, so I had the idea to use something to space them out. Luckily, I've been collecting paint chips for some reason, and Home Depot happened to make some of theirs in a decorative leaf shape, so I decided to use my stock of leaf shaped paint chips (and a bunch of rectangular ones cut to leaf shape) as spacers.

I put each word up on the wall with a ton of double stick tape and used a loop of normal tape for each leaf. I made sure that I never had the same color word (I had five colors with varying patterns) too close to each other and never repeated the same first letter (ie blissful next to blithe was not allowed). I also wanted to avoid getting alphabetical (ie blissful followed by carefree) but didn't always succeed in that goal.

I also decided to alternate the orientation of the leaf shapes, with the two pointed either up or down, because I thought it looked cooler.

In all, the "hanging" process took about five hours, what with tape sticking and color figuring. When I started this process, I was assuming that I would be able to fill the wall I see from my bed, and maybe one other, but certainly not the whole room. So, I was amazed to find that I did the whole room, and had a bunch of words left over... I'm not sure what I'll do with those yet.

I put this up last Friday and a week later I still love it. It makes me smile every time I walk into the room and I sort of can't wait for a "bad day" because I think it will absolutely make things better!

One side note, at least on my walls, double stick tape didn't cut it and after about three days, words definitely started falling off. Fortunately, Scotch's removable poster tape seems to stick much better, so I reinforced each word with that, and so far, so good!

I Finally Understand

My whole life (or at least a large part of what I remember) I've eaten dinner at what most people might call a very late hour. You see, growing up, 8:30 or 9 p.m. was normal dinner time for my family. There were extenuating factors most of the time — my ballet classes that didn't end until 8 or 9 at night or soccer practice or dad teaching a night class — and since a whole family dinner was important to us, that usually meant it was late.

But then, I went to college and after weeks and months and years of a 5:15 p.m. dinner, I came home expecting (or at least hoping for) something similar. But lo and behold, despite a lack of ballet and biology classes and other evening commitments, dinner time was still at 9. I mean seriously. Come on people! I'm hungry.

I finally came to the conclusion that my parents just liked to come home from work and relax, foregoing a meal before the sun set for an evening of crossword puzzle solving, beer drinking, and cat watching next to the fire (in the winter) or bird watching on the deck (in the summer). Not something I (or my growling tummy) especially loved, but something I had been trained for years to endure. Love you m&d.

But now here I am. I've turned into them.

I got home from class tonight at about 10:05 and, despite the fact that I was utterly starving, the first thing I did was sit down on the couch and relax with my new issue of Entertainment Weekly for a good half hour. Now, it's 10:39 and I've only just put the water on the stove to cook my tortellini.

I guess I understand you now mom and dad... it only took 24 years.

Happy Veterans Day!

(and also happy 11/11/11)

This Makes Me Want to Shop Exclusively at Nordstrom for the Month of November.

Someone I'm friends with on Facebook "shared" this picture and I happened to see it pop up on my feed thinger.

I liked this so much that when I went to the mall today to get an Apple Genius to take a look at my computer (it's been a little slow lately) I made a special side trip to Nordstrom. I didn't buy anything (my wallet is a little empty these days) but when I walked in and didn't see CHRISTMAS TREES (they're out in abundance in the mall hallways and food courts) or hear CHRISTMAS MUSIC (I heard it playing at Walmart the other day and wanted to barf) it certainly made me want to break out my wallet and go on a spending spree. Granted, I did notice a small christmas ornament/decoration display on the fourth floor, but the untimely display was relegated to that specific area and there was no early holiday cheer to be seen anywhere else in the store.

I love this. Good job Nordstrom.

Side note: More observant people will notice that the date for Friday is wrong, that's because this picture was taken several years ago, BUT Nordstrom is still sticking to the no Christmas before Thanksgiving policy.

Can't You Hear That Boom, Badoom, Boom, Boom, Badoom, Boom Bass?

Now, I'm not a Nicki Minaj fan at all. But I'm absolutely loving Sophia Grace and Rosie. They are quite possibly the cutest things in the entire world. Check out their amazing appearance on Ellen a few weeks ago...

And then they actually met Nicki...

Well, they were back on Ellen today...

I could watch those two forever!

20 Kids and Counting...

In other child-related pop culture news, the Duggar family (of TLC reality TV show fame) is having another baby. While those who are not aware of the Duggars may not think that is a note-worthy statement, let me enlighten you: This will be baby number 20. Yes. That's right the 20th child.

Their oldest(?), well one of the older daughters, already has two kids of her own. That means that those two kids will have an aunt younger then them... weird. I'm having a You've Got Mail flashback right now...

I guess they're going to have to change the name of their show to 20 Kids & Counting.

14 Years and Counting...

(I had to keep with the theme)

As of this week, the Lion King has been on Broadway for 14 years.

It is the most amazing show I have ever seen.

Period.

Homemade Caramel Apples

This weekend my mom and I made super yummy caramel apples.

FROM SCRATCH!

I've recently re-discovered the amazingness that is a caramel apple and have fallen to temptation and picked one up every time I've gone to Safeway in the past month (it's only been 3 times... so I'm not too fat yet). So when mom decided to make some while I was home over the weekend, I was pumped.

I found this super cool way to make caramel by cooking a can of sweetened condensed milk on low for 8-10 hours in a slow cooker on Pinterest (my new favorite site). We decided to try this approach because it was less work than the sugar, lemon, cream, and butter recipe that she had found on Fine Cooking.

And frankly, we sort of didn't believe that it would actually work, so we had to try it out!

Before doing anything else (aside from cooking the caramel) we washed and dried the apples. Then we jammed popsicle sticks into the tops of the apples.

We actually ended up cooking our can for about 10 hours (dinner and Beauty and the Beast on ABC Family got in the way of our apple plans) and personally I think that was a little too long... whoops.

I think it would have been a bit more liquidy and a little less brown if we had taken it out sooner...

The caramel was a little stiff, so we decided to heat it in a sauce pan to liquify it a bit... I'm not sure that that worked, but the pan was more convenient for apple rolling.

 

What I didn't photograph was the rolling process, we just dipped the apple into the caramel in the pan and rolled it around until the apple was covered. Then because the caramel was super thick, we took a butter knife and used it to spread out and remove the excess caramel.

Then, I covered a few of them with SPRINKLES! I used the yummy waxy kind because they are the softest.

Don't they look delicious!