Life Outside the Fishbowl

Work In Progress

It's not quite Monday anymore, but we had a busy weekend with camping for both cub scouts and girl scouts. So, after recovering from the weekend, I'm finally getting around to posting for Scrapscene's WIP Monday.

So, this past weekend Tom took the boys, who ended up staying up in a tent close to midnight (apparently one wouldn't turn out a flashlight) while I had about half of our Brownie troop at encampment all day long (emphasis on the long...)

And here's Rachel in her "yellow" outfit. She's now into dressing in all one color family - not that she matches any better....

The arts and crafts was a bit hit with Rachel. And they thought the "99 Things to do with Bandanas" was fun - so much so that quite a few of them went around with "slings" on their arms the rest of the day.

Sunday Thomas had his first fencing competition. It was a practice one run by VAF to give kids who are interested in competing a taste of what competion is like. He came in fourth in his age group, wasn't happy about not winning more bouts, but hopefully had a good learning experience. And I learned that I should've brought the camera with us.... the iPhone just doens't cut it sometimes.

And after a much needed rest.... I turned my attention to this canvas I'd had laying around. The background was made by layering strips of book paper - all pretty much horizontally. I decided to use this as a my guina pig for testing the image transfer so I added some color to the background, mostly with various Golden fluid acrylics.

Monday I went to Staples to see if they could print out a photo in 12x12 size for me to use on one of the larger canvases. After causing the printing desk staff much consternation, I finally got two copies of my photo.

So here's where I'm at. I just added a bit more paint to my canvas. When it's dry I'm going to do an image transfer with Golden Matte Medium. The paper's quite thin, so we'll see what happens.

Learning My Lesson....

... to listen to my inner voice telling me *not* to put a full glass of water in front of my computer. Because, sure enough, I spilled the entire glass all over the table soaking the keyboard and mouse. Totally fried the mouse - I ran to Best Buy to replace it last night. And this morning discoverd that a few important keys didn't work - like the space bar, enter, etc....

Now I'm struggling to type on a smaller, more flat keyboard and getting used the the new Apple trackpad.

And trying to keep my kids from demanding one, too....

Murphy's Law

So last night Thomas asked me about Murphy's Law. I can't remember how it came up, but after I told him what it was he asked, "Is that for real?"

Well, yes, I told him. Look at what just happened. Today we had to pick up 93 cases of Girl Scout cookies. And Thursday my car's engine came on again, after two months necessitating towing again to the dealership. The day before we needed the SUV to pick up cookies.

The towing guy recognized me.

Anyhow, apparently the car will be ready on Monday. At least this time they found something and not another "well, we couldn't get an error code and can't duplicate the problem." They're replacing a cylider head on the engine. That's just not good for a car less than three years old.

So, yes, Murphy's Law is alive and well. And we were able to cram close to 50 cases in the rental car. Thanks to another mom with a minivan we got all the cookies.

Today is the Cub Scout Blue & Gold. Food is ordered, entertainment confirmed yesterday, parents are ready to decorate. We've got four huge piles of paper products in our living room. Hopefully, Murphy will stay home....

 

Sparkle Girls

Don't you wish that you could have an invisible camera to capture all the funny things your kids do?

On the walk home from the bus stop on Friday, Rachel announced that she was in a band. The Sparkle Girls. Audrey started it and was the leader, Michelle was going to play drums and Rachel was going to play the recorder.

When she got home she started working on their theme song. Then she sang it for me....

I think she's been watching too much"My Little Pony" but man, I would've killed to have that on tape!

Glasses....

So back-to-school also means eye appointments for both my kids. They were quite hesitant until they realized that this kind of doctor doesn't do shots.

Last year Thomas started wearing glasses and Rachel was jealous, having a slight stigmatism, but not enough to need correcting at this point.

Tuesday morning I was sitting on Rachel's bed giving her the schedule for the day and letting her know we had appointments at the optomotrist.

That was greeted by a groan and dramatic eye rolling.

"But you had fun last year!" I retorted.

"Mom," she said, looking up at me dramatically. "Did you hear me laugh?"

 

UK Vacation and a Bit of Echo Park

We were fortunate to spend ten days in the England countryside in August. It's wonderful to have friends with country houses that get themselves reassigned, leaving their home open for visitors :)

So, we started with an "overnight" flight to Heathrow, arriving at 7 a.m. London time. I really wish I had figured out that each channel on the flight was a different movie, otherwise I wouldn't have watched and rewatched parts of Thor for the entire seven hour flight....

And our first train ride to Paddinton Station. Ahh, wifi!

I was suprised (slightly) to see Burger King and a Starbucks there, well, not the Starbucks. We took an immediate liking to England's version - Costa. Much, much better.

And soon were were off on another train to the Cotswalds, and in particular, Cheltenham.

Now for the most nerve-racking part - driving on the wrong side of the road. This was the most stressful part of the whole vacation, especially on those narrow country roads.

And, the most frustrating part of the trip - there's no street signs in the country. There are markers pointing towards the next village, but without a GPS and/or an extremely detailed map in the car it's really impossible to tell if you're on the right path.

Eventually, we made it to Forthamton and our home for the next week.

Our neighbors - seriously:

 And, with some of the Echo Park in the August DT kit from ScrapbooksPlus, I put together a layout using Hipstamatic photos I took on the way over. I used Tim Holtz stamps from Stamper's Anonymous - the Air Travel set - over part of the Echo Park paper.

 

Camp Songs

This past week I volunteered at a Girl Scout camp as an afternoon bus rider. Lucky me, it was the hottest week around - up to 120 degrees with the heat index on Friday. And, of course, we were on unairconditioned school buses.

I didn't get much done with the heat and still haven't downloaded pics from the camera from Rachel's birthday and party last week. By the time we get back home I'm tired, hot and just sweaty. Rachel even fell asleep coming back on the first day.

But Friday the girls were full of energy and sang all the way back. Camp songs have changed a lot since I was a girl scout -- I think I only knew two of the songs. But all of them were catchy. We've been going around all weekend singing them, especially Wiggalo.

We sang Hermie the Worm, Tarzan, It's Cheese that Makes the World Go Around, a bananas song, and Super California Sufer Expert on the Ocean, to name a few.

Need camp songs? Scoutorama has some good ones. I've got to keep practicing these. Our first Brownie meeeting is just around the corner.

Stop-Motion Animation

Thomas went to an awesome camp the other week, Funbotlab. If it wasn't for the 50 minutes driving in rush hour traffic to get there, we'd sign him up for more. He got to work with Lego Mindstorm robots and complete challenges, as well as learn how to make stop-motion animation with Star Wars Legos.

They used webcams taped onto tripods and a Claymation software program. Here's their work of art. Not bad for their very first try. It's a bit shaky in one part because the boys thought it'd be fun to have an earthquake....

We've already bought green posterboard for a backdrop and have been researching iStopmotion so he can continue this at home.

Holtzing It Up for Valentines

It's been a busy couple of weeks over here. First, CHA, then right back home to two sick kids who generously passed their bug to me. I posted a few pics from CHA over at Method Playground.

First, last Friday we had the Cub Scout pack Blue and Gold dinner - complete with a cake contest this year with a theme of what scouting means to me {the scout, of course}. I'm not a cake decorator and have had many a frustrating experience with icing. But this one turned out better than expected. A pretzel and fondant tent, edible glitter fire (who knew?) and sprayed coconut grass.

Rachel and her friend wanted to "help" so I sent them to find Legos for the cake. They bring up two - girl Legos complete with long hair. After convincing them that (1) the icing would get all in the hair and (2) this was for cub scouts i.e. boys they went back down and brought up two white ponies. So I sent my son to find appropriate boy Legos. He had a good time building the tent and fire with me. I decided to do the spraying of the coconut myself - I didn't need a green kitchen.

And, Thomas's cake won the best overall design, so he was quite happy.

Saturday Karen and I taught our second tag class at ScrapbooksPlus - six tags with lots of Tim Holtz, ink and a side of girl scout cookies. Here are the three I designed:

 

Christmas Wishes

I think imagination is a wonderful thing, really I do. And it's important for children to have imagination.

However.

My kids are killing me. Yet again. Every year they seem to ask for toys that apparently don't exist.

First it was Thomas who asked Santa for one thing only: a singing Christmas tree. That sent us all over stores, the internet and Ebay. Last year Rachel asked for a pink kitty that moved. Doesn't exist. She got a black and white fur real kitty.

This year, Rachel's wish list. I'll translate the line near the bottom:  remote control dog, remote control cat, remote control pony and remote control giraffe ....

So I asked her if she'd ever seen any of these toys. "No, but the elves can make them," she responds right away. "Any toys that Santa can't find in the store the elves make." And she was very certain of it. Then she decides to ask Santa only for a Nintendo dsi - the toy I've been trying to dissuade her from for two weeks.

Thomas had a different strategy. He tells Rachel that he's going to ask Santa for the rare, hard-to-find Bionicle. And he does. The only toy he asks for ....sigh.....

Off to Ebay ....