I Am Crafty!

Well, no, in fact I am really very NOT crafty.  I don’t even really like to read all of those craft blogs out there.  I also have friends (mainly Wendy and Stephanie) who like to go to second hand stores in search of junk that they end up making into absolutely gorgeous things.  I have tried doing the same thing, but usually leave the store empty handed…it all just looks like junk to me, and I just don’t have the creative vision necessary to make it nice.

However.  I have noticed a lot of really cool crafts out there made with chalkboard spray paint, and I saw one project in particular, in multiple places, that I finally thought I could do (I wish I could tell you where, I don’t remember, although Wendy may have been my inspiration because she has done a lot with chalkboard paint). 

Last week I hit the secondhand store again, with very low expectations, but I found this!

And I decided to try to be crafty.

I bought these:

I removed the painting from the frame and spray painted the frame (both sides).

Then I spray painted the painting with the chalkboard paint, following the directions on the can (at least 3 coats with 10 minutes of drying time between coats, painted with vertical then horizontal sweeps).  I let it completely dry for 24 hours.

Then Maddie and I seasoned the chalkboard (also per the directions on the can).  Look at the wall behind Maddie…that’s where this puppy is going!

After that it was ready to hang.  Dave did this for me, and he attached it securely to the wall in multiple places, since we knew it wasn’t going to be just hanging there.  And I love it!

I really am so happy with it, and am trying to figure out what I’ll use the remainder of that chalkboard spray paint on.  Possibly my car hood (I could write “Hip Mama” on it!),  my wine glasses (“I’m with ‘Stupid’”), empty Kleenex boxes (“Get Your Snot Out Here!”)

It’s possible I still need to work on my artistic vision.  But it’s a start.

Technology

I thought this was pretty funny…two of our neighborhood girls biking and texting…you get the feeling their moms said, “Put down the electronics and go outside and get some fresh air!”  So they did.  Kinda sorta maybe.

Wouldn’t it be even funnier if they were actually texting each other?

Things really haven’t changed that much since I was their age.  When I was about 13, I was so excited because for Christmas I asked for—and got—a handheld gaming system:

It played games like BlackJack, Tic TacToe, and Echo, and I spent hours on my bed with my feet up on the wall and my Holly Hobbie dolls gathered around me playing that thing. So I can relate to the electronics-addicted biking/texting girls.  Kinda sorta maybe.

My family was always on the cutting edge of technology.  I was also the first one in my neighborhood to have one of these:

We also had a cordless phone!  And I got an electric typewriter as a graduation gift!  My college boasted telephones in each of our dorm rooms…no community phone in the hall!   And when I wanted to talk to my parents on the phone every couple of weeks, I’d call home collect, they wouldn’t accept the charges and then they’d call me back.

I wrote papers on my typewriter and when I made a mistake, I put a little piece of white ink paper into the typewriter, hit the letter again and typed over it in white, then went back and typed the correct letter in black. When I needed to do research I went to the library, looked in the card catalog, worked my way through the stacks, and read books.  I took a roll of film with my camera, mailed it off to the photo place, and received my 24 photos back in about two weeks.  If I wanted extra prints, I had to take the negative to a photo duplicating place and wait another week.  Which I never did because the photo quality on my Disc camera was so bad.

For entertainment, we played Trivial  Pursuit, eating popcorn we popped with oil in a popcorn popper, surrounded by walls covered with Oneida/Snoopy/Michael J.Fox posters, our books stacked on genu-wine milk crates we “borrowed” from all of the local stores (one time a wild rumor circulated campus that the police were coming to check dorm rooms for “borrowed” milk crates and anyone that had them would be fined $50 a milk crate…crates were immediately ejected from all of the dorm rooms and littered stairways, lobbies, hallways, and front lawns of dorms!)

That’s me on the left in pink!

We cooked Ramen noodles in hotpots, and later a few fortunate girls got giant microwave ovens in their dorm rooms.  We received real letters from people and we sent real letters back.  We wrote notes in notebooks using pens and highlighters. When we wanted to see a movie, we went to a theatre (seriously…no one even had VCR’s then). When we wanted to see what our “friends” were up to, we headed down the hall and asked instead of checking out their Facebook status. We walked to class using our own feet, none of this fancy flying skateboard crap kids have nowadays.

Sorry.   I think I got carried away and suddenly started channeling Back to the Future.

Anywho, I do like technology, and I really wish I would have had it to help me out with research and papers and socializing.  I’m glad my kids will have access to so many more resources for entertainment and information.  The eighties were a good decade, and I wouldn’t have had them be much different if I had a chance.  Except for maybe cell phones.  And Red Box.  Ooh! And blogging!  And Angry Birds, Instagram, Google, and iTunes.  Also digital cameras.  And no perms.  Geez, I hated getting perms. 

Dude, the eighties stank!  We wore jelly shoes and our mixed cassette tapes were always getting ruined and our “digital” clocks clicked at us every time a minute changed and our eyeglasses were huge and there was only one flavor of Oreos! 

How did we survive without mint Oreos?

The end.

September Book Review

Welcome to the September edition of Beth’s Super Fab Book Review!  I hope you find something you’d like to read.

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova-Lisa Genova also wrote Still Alice, which I read in August and really liked (remember-- the links to my previous book reviews are over on the right). I was excited to read this novel, but was pretty disappointed.  Left Neglected tells the story of a woman who is in a car accident and as a result, loses the ability to not only use the left side of her body, but to recognize anything on the left.  So if there are two people standing in front of her, she only sees the person on the right.  Supposedly this is an actual medical condition, but the whole story seemed far-fetched, and quite frankly, I was bored after awhile with all the ways the main character had no left…can only read the right half of a page, can only see half a picture, can’t read her watch if it’s on the left arm.  It just got old fast.  Additionally, the other storyline, that of her being a busy working mother before the accident and now coming to terms with her having to be content staying home with her family as she can no longer work seemed thrown in there and could have been developed better.  It was an okay book, and you might definitely like it, it just wasn’t for me.

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay- This book has had a lot of buzz lately, and is even being made into a movie so I was excited to read it.  The setting of the book is Paris during World War II.  Sarah and her family are Jews who are forced to leave their home during a huge round up of Jews (the Vel’ d’Hiv’), however, Sarah, not realizing the seriousness of the round-up, and that she and her family would likely never return, locks her little brother into a hidden cabinet for safety, with the intentions of returning and letting him out.  A really great yet awful premise, and the book generally was a page turner.  Sarah and her parents are taken to a concentration camp and the conditions and storyline are truly heartbreaking.  I won’t tell you anymore, you have to read it to see what becomes of the family and the brother.   I only gave the book 3/5 stars however, because although that part of the novel is interesting, I didn’t enjoy the second storyline which is woven through Sarah’s story…Julia Jarmond, a reporter in modern days who is researching the Vel’ d’Hiv’, is a whiny American living with her French husband and daughter in Paris.  She’s pregnant, her husband cheats on her, there’s a dying grandma…really?  The author needed to add all that to this terrific story?  Also, I hate to say this, but the author is not the best writer in the world.  I think the Sarah/Vel’ d’Hiv’ story idea was great, but another author could have written this better.  (I feel so mean saying that, and I hope the author never googles herself and finds her way here, because I’d feel bad.  But I think you will probably agree with me.)

Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich-If you haven’t read any of Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books, go get one at your library! (Although, maybe not the first one, Evanovich hadn’t hit her groove yet with the characters.)  The book titles are numbered (One For the Money, Two For the Dough) so as you can see, Evanovich has written 17 novels now about Stephanie and her sidekick Lula, Grandma Mazur, her two hot guys, and her hamster, Rex.  Basically, Stephanie is a bounty hunter…she goes after the people who don’t show up in court after her cousin’s bonds business bails them out of jail.  She is bad at this.  Her car gets blown up or somehow destroyed, sometimes multiple times, in every book (and in very crazy, creative ways).  Her sidekick Lula has the best lines of a sidekick, ever.  She is constantly going back and forth between her two hunky guys…Ranger and Morelli (I’m pulling for Morelli, but I also enjoy when she’s with Ranger).  The situations she gets herself into are usually hilarious (in this book for example, one of her captures is a self-proclaimed vampire, and three people are trying to kill her, which made for one of the best endings ever in the the Stephanie books this time!)  Is this great literature?  No!  Definitely not!  It’s very fun, light reading, and I can’t wait for number 18 to come out in November.  As soon as I see it, I will get on the waiting list, and will probably be something insane like #39, because the books are popular:  once you read a Stephanie book, you will be hooked! (Again, maybe not the first one.)

Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson-Talk about your page turners!  I read this one in a day and a half, I really couldn’t put it down.  Christine, the main character, suffers from a tragedy induced disorder that makes her forget everything from day to day.  So when she wakes up every morning, she doesn’t know where she is, who that dude is in the bed next to her, or why she is almost 50 years old (she thinks she’s in her twenties, her age before her accident).  Her husband fills her in every morning on who she is, how she has this crazy amnesia, and assures her she is safe, and then he leaves her alone and heads to work.  The only thing is, every day she gets a phone call from a doctor who tells her that he has been secretly working with her, and to look in the closet, where she will find a journal she is keeping there.  When she looks for the journal and finds it (every single day) she reads what she’s been writing (which of course she forgets once she falls asleep at night) and discovers that maybe the story of her amnesia that her husband tell her isn’t quite right.  In fact, on the cover of her journal she has written, “Don’t Trust Ben” (Ben is her husband).   But can she trust the doctor?  He also seems in on things, and why are they meeting in secret?  I’m not telling you anything that’s not on the dust jacket, so don’t worry that you know what’s going to happen, because you don’t.  This is a page turning thriller and I bet it’s made into a movie in the next year or so!

Election by Tom Perrotta-I ran across Election because I was trying to reserve Perrotta’s newest novel at the library.  I’m very excited about his new one (The Leftovers), and am first on the list when the library gets it in.  Election and one of Perrotta’s other novels, Little Children (also an excellent novel),  were both made into movies.  Election was made back in the 90’s starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, I remember seeing it years ago and it was an enjoyable movie.  The book was good too.  A very easy, quick read, the story revolves around a high school student presidential election and is told in turns by the three candidates and the social studies teacher who is the election advisor.  It was a terrific story, very well told, the characters were spot on (high school angst and all), and the ending was a good satisfying wrap-up. 

Sneak Peek:  Now I’ve moved on to Confessions of a Prairie B*tch, Alison Arngrim’s autobiography.  And shame on you if you don’t know that Alison Arngrim played Nellie in “Little House and the Prairie”.  I am loving it, and will tell you about it next time!                                                                                                                                                                                      

Yes.  I wear reading glasses.  You got a problem with that?

Rain Rain Go Away

We’ve been having a little rain around here.  It started in mid-August with a soaker of a rainfall that reportedly gave us 2-5 inches of rain in just an hour.   The rest of August gave us a slightly above normal amount of rain until Hurricane Irene, who soaked us again and gave all of us the chance to play Musical Lawn Chairs/Trampolines/Garbage Cans with our neighbors and knocked out power for many people I know for almost a week.  But this week?

Has. Been. A. Doozy.

Picture a nice map of the northeastern United States.  Now picture Tropical Depression Lee to the west of Pennsylvania and Hurricane Katia to the east, in the ocean.  Those two weather systems funneled a crazy amount of hard, heavy rain right through central Pennsylvania for three days.  Three days of crazy hard rain.  I’ve made a technologically advanced illustration for you to help you visualize it!

Yes! Those are Twistables!  The latest in crayon technology!

I’m thinking of buying one of these:

                                                                   Or maybe just scuba gear.

School students were dismissed early on Wednesday (after the school decided that it wasn’t safe to transport them home in buses—huh??), and roads became covered in water so quickly, that some kids didn’t even make it home and spent the night at school.  Since the start of this thing, some of us have had ruined basements galore, a boil water advisory, and no electricity, we’ve seen a submerged Pizza Hut, two dead bison at the local zoo, and plenty of newly opened sinkholes (we live in an area abundant in porous limestone) and Facebook has been alive with stunned gawkers, whiny reporters, and nosy lurkers as folks post devastating  photos from around the area.  Like these:

Thank you, Facebook Friends.  You are totally better than any news report.

It’s not funny, and it’s not a joke, and I really feel for those (like my parents and in-laws, and many, many friends) who’ve had to bail the water out of their basements one bucket at a time (my father-in-law estimated it took him 150 trips up and down his stairs).

We’ve had it rough around here too.

I’m so glad that I’m kidding.  We’ve watched the basement carefully but so far so good. We need to conserve our water, but not boil it, and our electricity outages have been fairly short.  And since school was cancelled yet again today, the kids have decided to practice their sloth impressions.  They’re getting mighty good at them too.

Oh!  They did move at one point…

Boys.  Maddie and I think they’re totally dumb.

There are also a bunch of really cool looking mushrooms around now.




And if we didn’t already have a pool, we could go swimming in our backyard…



I wish I could send some of this rain to Texas or Oklahoma since I know things are dry, dusty, and dire there.  All I know is we are ready to say goodbye to Lee and Katia and send them on their happy, floody ways.   Sunshine?  What the heck is that?   Even Herbie is getting depressed.  I think.

To my local friends…stay safe and dry.

Applesauce for Dummies

I am not implying anything with that title, I swear.

But applesauce is easy.   If you’ve never made it, you are really missing out, if only for the amazing aroma of spicy sweet cinnamon apples that will lovingly settle into every room of your house on the day you make it.  It really is worth it, if only for that.

But it’s not just that.  Homemade applesauce made from just picked apples (either off the tree or from the grocery store apple display) tastes really good too, and you can make it with as much or as little sugar as you want, and you can make it as smooth or as chunky as you want.  It also freezes well (which is good for me, because I don’t know how to can things).

Which apples are good for applesauce?  Sweet apples are the best, like Red Delicious, Gala, Honeycrisp, Yellow Delicious, etc.  (I didn’t know that…I googled it for you.  You’re welcome).  Today I am using Galas.

So here are the basics.

First you need to peel and cut up some apples, although I do it the other way (cut then peel)*.  I use my apple slicer, slice (and core) the apple into its individual slices, and then I use a paring knife to remove the peel from each slice.  That to me is easier than peeling a whole apple.  But as my mother says to me (frequently) “You do what you want, you will anyway.” 

*If you have a fancy sieve meant for grinding up apples, you do not need to peel the apples,the sieve will strain them out of the finished product and your applesauce may turn a lovely pink color if you use red apples.

After I remove the peel from the slice, I cut the slice into halves or thirds and then put it right in my crockpot.  Today I had a helper who cut all of those apple slices for me.  We have a safety knife that I think I got from Pampered Chef that he uses when he decides to play chef.

Cut up as many apples as it takes to fill up your crockpot, I think mine took about 20.  Then add the following to your crockpot:

1/2 cup water

1 cup sugar (white or brown, I usually use 1/4 cup brown, and 3/4 c. white sugar), you can also use less sugar than this.  The kids love it, but I’m starting to think it’s a bit too sweet in my old age.  I might lower it to 3/4 c. next time.

1 T. cinnamon

Stir it up a bit and turn your crockpot on low.  You can let it cook overnight if you want.  My recipe tells me it needs to cook for 3-4 hours, but the apples don’t seem soft enough after that amount of time.  6-8 hours is how long I usually cook them.  You can stir this occasionally if you want, but you don’t need to. 

After you’ve cooked it long enough, stir it and smoosh it up with a spoon or some kind of smoosher (I believe that is the technical term.  You can look it up.  But I wouldn’t.)  If you want a really smooth applesauce, you can put this in your food processor and quickly smooth it up that way!

We like ours pretty chunky.  We ate some of it with dinner, but some of it I put in containers to freeze individually for school lunches.

See?  Easy peasy. 

By the way, if you leave it a little chunky, you can make these using crescent rolls and a teaspoon of applesauce…just pinch up the ends when you roll them up so the applesauce doesn’t leak out, and bake for the time the package says.  Yum!


I thought I’d end this post with a nice apple quote, and  I found some good ones like "Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits." -- Henry David Thoreau, but then I found this one:

"Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes." Robert Greene (1590)

…and I don’t know if Mr. Greene meant it to be a dig to his chubby wife or romantic, but it made me think I might just have to say this to Dave the next time he comes in for a kiss.  Which led me to think of other cool things to tell him his breath is like:

Thy breath is like a stale mug o’ coffee.
Thy breath is like the starchy Pringle chip thou ate two minutes yon.
Thy breath is like a deadeth possum, go brush.
Thy breath is like the cool Arctic mint of the paste of the tooth… thou mayest proceed.

Anyway, may all your kisses be like the steame of apple-pyes and may thou be no dummy when making thine applesauce.

I am linking this recipe with Foodie Friday!

Creeped Out and a Little Bit Paranoid

Can someone please tell me why there are so many spiders, building so many webs  that stretch out in extremely annoying places in early September?  Even bug boy doesn’t like spider time.

The other day I was doing this…

…and I had to keep dodging these…

Creepy.

At one point I mowed through a web that was stretched between two evergreens but I never saw the spider who made the web.  As a result, I kept feeling a phantom spider crawling on me for the next half an hour or so.  In my hair.  On my leg.  On my elbow.  In my ear.  Ugh.  I’m feeling all itchy just thinking about it.

I don’t like rodents much either, but at least they know their proper place in our society and stay hidden away, unlike spiders who flaunt their creepy, sinister, hairy-legged beastliness to us.  It’s just not right.

This is also giant grasshopper time.  Our backyard borders a cornfield, and the area within about 6 feet from the fence is infested with thousands of giant grasshoppers.  Bug Boy loves this, and I don’t usually mind so much, but the other day while I was mowing, the grasshoppers were hopping and flying away from me, while their less agile friends were cruelly mutilated by my lawn mower, which left me feeling really very guilty thinking about all the baby grasshoppers I had just orphaned.  There was one giant grasshopper in particular who finally did me in.  On my first sweep along the fence, I must have injured him, because as I was heading back again, I saw him hobbling frantically away from me.  I passed him and he made it!  Of course I came back again, and over and over he just narrowly missed my mower.  I actually began to pull for him until I realized that the poor guy was heading triumphantly yet tragically straight to the pool and certain death, while surely (what was left of) his distraught family helplessly watched.  This made me pretty sad.

But then I started to think, what if Mr. Giant Grasshopper was like the mafia boss of the grasshoppers, or maybe even  the gentle, beloved grandpa of the grasshoppers, and all of his goombahs/grandchildren decided to seek revenge on the Grasshopper Hacker (their name for me).

And then I got this clear picture of me waking up one morning to the buzzing sound of thousands of jaws, opening my eyes to see grasshoppers galore sitting and waiting for me, on my dresser, on the ceiling fan blades, on my comforter, their vengeful eyes boring into me with the intense hatred only angry grasshoppers can feel when they witness their sweet grandpa mercilessly chased by a bloody lawn mower into a pool.  Gah!

I think maybe I do a little too much thinking while I am mowing the lawn.  Maybe I need to use my iPod more, or practice my states and capitals to perfection, or think of witty retorts for all the conversations I’ve stumbled through  for the last twenty years or so.

So to recap:

Spiders = creepy

Grasshoppers = vengeful

Beth = paranoid, slow-witted, states/capitals expert

Instagram August

We started off the month at the beach and the boardwalk (Ha!  And you thought the beach posts were finished!)



It’s kind of cool when the colors in the pool match the colors in the sky…and not just boring, old blue.  Now that the sun has been going down a little earlier, we did quite a bit more night swimming in August than we did earlier in the summer.


We visited a family with the best dog in the world.

        Seriously?  I may dognap him.  They might want to lock him up at night.

We had the sinkhole in our front yard fixed and we weathered Hurricane Irene.


We discovered our new favorite place for ice cream!  (Those are called Stuffed Snowballs…very creamy soft-serve atop a snowcone!)

We did our first round of apple picking.  These are galas, which we used to make applesauce (you’ll see that one next week) and good old apple crisp, but the apple I really can’t wait for is the Crispin, due out on September 23.  I just read in the paper yesterday, though, that a lot of the Crispin crop was lost due to Hurricane Irene.  They are such a big heavy apple, I guess they’re easy to blow off a tree.
 
Apples + Irene= Bad Joke:  Why didn't the two worms go into Noah's ark in an apple? Because everyone had to go in pairs !  Sorry.

Then everyone headed back to school.  Here is my happy first grader eating lunch in the cafeteria for the first time!

Now August is over and September has begun.  The weather has been crisp and perfect, with temperatures in the eighties and very low humidity.  This week I actually wore my hair down (not in a ponytail) for the first time in months.  I am sorry to see summer end, but at least I’ve got those Crispins to look forward to! Maybe.

I am linking this post with InstaFriday at Life Rearranged!