Welcome

Category: randomness

  • Happy Chaos by Soleil Moon Frye (aka-Punky Brewster)

    If you have not figured out by now, I am a total 80’s girl.  Through and through.  I am the typical email that goes around…”you know you are a child of the 80’s if you had a cabbage patch kid collection, puffy stickers and know what getting slimed is on Nickelodeon.”  And of course, my sister and I were avid fans of Punky Brewster.  Yes, that show with the orphan who lives with Henry Warnimont, has the crazy shoes and funny personality.  I can’t tell you the number of times I DREAMED of being that little girl!

    A few years ago, my mom picked up the first season of Punky Brewster for me on DVD.  Just for ol’ times sake…  Well…MY two little girls were obviously attracted to the cover and wanted to watch it.  Pretty soon that was the only thing they watched.  My mom bought the other 3 seasons to finish our collection.  The girls can tell you what happens in every.single.episode.  (Obsession comes to mind…like mother like daughters…)  I must admit, they don’t make wholesome family TV shows like they used to…

    That little girl grew up.  (Both of us!)  Soleil now owns a shop in LA called The Little Seed that sells organic clothing for children.  She has over a million twitter followers and is constantly posting videos and pictures on her website about her life with her 2 little girls.  I am pretty sure she is a great friend…if you are lucky enough to have her as a friend!

    In August, she did a promo with Target to release her new book Happy Chaos.  For 30 minutes, she answered questions about parenting on twitter.  After watching the feed for a while I submitted a question…and she actually answered!!!  Punky Brewster saw something I wrote…and responded!!!  I felt like I was 10 again!

    Then…the first 10 people to retweet the TargetBaby tweet about Happy Chaos would receive the book in the mail.  You can bet my fingers were moving!  And I won!!! AND she signed the book!!!

    I read the whole thing on one of my trips. Maybe because I wondered what it would be like to be someone famous in Hollywood, maybe I am just a big nerd (well…I know that is true!), but the book was really good! Soleil talks about her life growing up mixed in with what she thinks about being a parent now and how it all relates. Aside from the fact that her children’s God parents are the Kutchers (yes that would be Ashton and Demi Moore), everything about her is “normal.”

  • Cleaning out the Russians

    What a mess!  My blog got hacked AGAIN.  Luckily since it happened a little over a year ago, I regularly backup my blog.  This morning I have spent time cleaning off the *shared* server I am on (probably the cause the of the hack…the price I pay for super cheap hosting), deleting EVERYTHING including the database, and reinstalling wordpress.  I have restored my posts, but the pictures will come later.  I do have those backed up as well…but I am changing how I insert pictures and am going to link from my archived files from SmugMug.  (And I am working on a new look for my site…so it is pretty plain for now.)  😉

  • It’s been 5 years

    Since we moved into our house.  (Give or take a day or two.)  My how we have grown!

  • May 1968

    This is my dad.  Taken in May of 1968, according to the slide I found.  Yes, a slide, like the kind you fill into the round circle thing then push the button to get to the next picture.

    I only have this one picture of him when he was so young…a whopping 21 years old!  Taken during Vietnam.  Pretty good looking huh?

    Dad, do you have any more slides???

  • Blurb Books

    A while back I was introduced to Blurb.  I found it looking for a way to print my blog to a book.  Well…they offer so much more than blog printing!  Every year I print (yes print) our family picture from the year and put them in an album.  I usually print 500-700.  Yikes! And this is what that looks like (there is another row behind these on each shelf)…

    This year I decided to put them in a “book” format.  As I went looking for companies, I could not find any for a decent price that could handle the number of pictures I wanted in the book.  In comes Blurb.

    The binding was a little looser than I would like, but that could be because I upgraded to the better paper.

    It is press printed, so it looks like it came from the press.

    But I still love them…I only have about 13 more to order!  The other neat thing is that you can share your book online, and other people can buy it.

  • Brass Doorknobs

    I am not a fan of them.  Nor is Wade.  When we moved into our house, we did not want to spend the hundreds to upgrade the doorknobs and said we would do it eventually.  Several times we priced it out and figured it would cost about $300 to replace the whole house.

    Instead, I read a blog about a lady that just spray painted the.  I decided to try it.

    They turned out AWESOME!  Surprisingly, they have not chipped either.  I did go over them with some steel wool before applying the paint.

  • Bell Tradition

    When Wade and I got married, a good friend of ours gave us a silver bell and told us that we had to get one each year.  So far so good.  The most difficult years have been 1999 and 2000.  But we managed to find them online.  Do you have any ornament traditions?

  • Elf on a Shelf

    The girls got very excited this year when an Elf showed up at their school to watch the children.

    When school got out for break, an Elf showed up at our house.  Meet Joy.

    Every night he leaves to give Santa an update on the girls and then finds a new spot to hide each morning.  It is like Christmas each morning as the girls run in to see where Joy is hiding.

  • Fun with a Tilt-Shift Lens

    Last week I helped my mom out at her work with a United Way fundraiser.  Knowing that I would be in the Williams Tower (the tallest building in Houston) I took a tilt-shift lens to play with.  Even though we were only on the 6th floor, this is what I captured.  Not the most interesting scene, but still fun to play with!  The lens makes it look like miniatures.

  • Monday’s and the Storm

    My Monday’s got very interesting this weekend.  I found out that I would be an adjunct professor for a social studies methods class at my alma mater– HBU.  A few weeks ago, one of my former professors contacted me and asked if I would be interested in the position.  I am just giddy with excitement.  I loved that class when I took and hope to do the same for this group of students.

    As we were wrapping up the class for the evening, it started thundering and the wind really picked up.  Pretty soon, the sky opened up and the rain started falling.  After about 45 minutes it was just sprinkling so I was able to drive through the flooded streets and horrible traffic to get home.  The storm had just passed through and knocked out the electricity.  And when I say it knocked out the electricity, I mean everything, including the traffic lights.  It just amazes me that people do not understand (especially the UPS driver) that when the lights are out it is a 4-way stop and fly through intersections that are not operational.

    My camera happen to be in the front seat and I took this waiting in the long line of cars to get through the intersection.

    Wade fixed gourmet mac and cheese with hot dogs (real cooks have gas, so not having electricity did not hinder him from cooking dinner).  We ate by candle light.  Something we have not done since the hurricane 2 years ago.  The bad part was that we did not get electricity until 3am.  Being so hot and humid and not having AC makes for a bad combo.  I got very little sleep.

    In the morning, we checked out the damage.  The winds were so strong, they moved the bball goal across the patio.  Some of the pots were flipped upside down and thrown across the yard.  Our bug zapper was ripped off of the eve and thrown on the ground.  AND my luffa fell down!!!  Wade and I are not sure what to do with it now.  The fruit is still not ready to be picked.

    But…the playhouse was unaffected!  We built it to withstand a hurricane and it looks like it just might work.  We even have small pieces of wood to cover the windows if we need.