Since I haven't written in a while and I don't know when I'll write again...I just figured I'd post a comic I made ages ago for HitRecord.org ...I've been meaning to finish another one that I started along the same lines (the love of kitcheny things), but I just haven't had time....I think I would like to develop my own comic style though and do a story or something...or maybe random ones...or maybe both....who knows. Anyway...Here's the comic. I apologize for my writing. It's three in the morning...so yeah. Not much more to explain. Btw, you should check out the site. I made the comic a link to it as a record on the site....so you can go see some of my other records, or even better, join the site and make some of your own.

Cheers!

What would you do?

Okay, yes, I realize I didn't do any of what I promised to do last week. To be honest, I had a feeling that would happen when I said I'd do it. I actually started the one for HIMYM, but it just got too rambly and I got too busy...so it never got finished.

Anyway, after saying goodbye to Thomas today so he could go to work, I stopped off at Big Lots in order to find the paper shredder I felt I should have bought when I was at a different location earlier this week. They didn't have it, but I did end up buying this retro flip clock that I loved the moment I saw it. I was super excited, because I love anything retro and it was only $13, but I was hesitant because money has been a little tight lately. Unfortunately the excitement has started to wear off because it's a pain to set and keep on the right time since, like a vending machine, it doesn't always release the number as it should. Rewind back to when I first bought it now. I stepped out of the store and there on the ground was a $10 bill. There was no one around and it was in the middle of the street, so I just picked it up.

Immediately I didn't really know what to do. I'd always been taught to ask around and try to find out whose it was or turn it into the authorities, which in this case would be the manager of the store I found it in. Since neither of these really applied, I was kind of at a loss. After a while, I migrated to trying to decide what finding such a thing meant. Of course, leave it to me to analyze something so simple.

What I came up with...
1) It could be a sign from God saying I needed to lighten up on myself and just buy stuff I like every once in a while.
2) It could be a test from God, to see what I would do. However, since, from what I remember, I've been taught to believe that God no longer tests us in that way, I feel I can discredit this idea.
3)It was just meant as a gesture to kind of help me with money and I should keep it for when I need it.
4)It was some sort of pay it forward thing....and I should give it away to charity, or some random person off the side of the street.
5)It was just luck.

Yes, I know I was over-thinking it a little too much....but I don't know...it just really struck something inside me. With all of the stress of wedding planning, work, housework, etc. It's been really nice to realize when things kind of fall in place like that. I've had a lot of help from a lot of people lately, especially with the wedding, and I'm so grateful and appreciative of it all. It really makes me feel loved and makes me really feel like this is all meant to be. I hope thats not too sappy for any of you.

As far as the $10 bill, it's still in my wallet...awaiting my decision. We'll just have to wait and see how it get's spent. So, as the title of this post asks, what would you do?

Deconstructing Jane Austen (Literally)

So,  few weeks ago, I was scouring through etsy to try to find things for the wedding, when I came across a listing by anovelamore of confetti made from Jane Austen's Emma. I thought to myself, "What a great idea!" I had it all planned out that I was going to buy hard cover copies of The Time Traveler's Wife, a compilation of Jane Austen's novels, and a compilation of the Bronte sisters' novels. The pages would become confetti, and the covers would become flower girl baskets, in the spirit of some book purses I've seen around the internet. Well, some people weren't so sure about the baskets, and I started to wonder if it was worth the money to buy all three books, so I started to rethink things.

A few days later I went to work at the bookstore and saw that we had received this lovely edition while I was out. The actual cover is white, so I might can use it for something else, and it's thick enough to theoretically make enough confetti. Even if it doesn't, by the time I've punched every page out, I'll be tired of it. The best thing about it of course, was that it was only $7.99. Of course, I felt bad buying the book under false pretenses, if you will, but since I already own almost all of the novels in there, two of which I still need to read, I decided it was better to use this cheap book than the others.


So, for several weeks,  the book just sat on my coffee table collecting dust and what not. The closest Michaels is about 20 minutes away, so I just never really made the time to get over there. I figured I had plenty of time before the wedding, and even partially assumed we'd just do this as a group the week before once everyone was in town and in wedding finishing mode.


Anyway, yesterday we ended up near the store anyway, so I stopped off and got two heart hole punchers, one jumbo sized and one regular. I have to say I was semi confused because jumbo was the second smallest size out of like five different sizes. I guess they slowly expanded the line and didn't feel the need to rename it. Once we got home, I sat the stuff to the side, figuring I'd get to it over the weekend. After a while however, I got kind of bored and thought, "I might as well." So, I grabbed the necessary items, two punchers, the book, and a shoe box to keep the confetti in.



Thomas decided to help me so he took the smaller one and I took the larger one and we went to work. By the way, if you plan on doing this yourself, I'd say the best way seemed to be to fold one page in half, until it was small enough to get two rows of hearts punched out. If you go thicker, than it's too hard to punch, let alone fit in the little slit the puncher allows for paper. Also, you get more hearts for your punch. Oh, and you might also want to make sure they aren't sloppy folds, or you'll end up cutting on the fold and making weird shaped flower-like double heart things.

The first rip. Gasp!             Accordion hearts        I loved this bigger one.

Probably about thirty minutes later, though I really have no clue how long it was, we figured it was time to stop. It was after about one in the morning, so we were pretty tired and ready for bed. To the left is how far we got, 71 pages into Sense and Sensibility...so I guess we got roughly 35 pages punched thoroughly. However many it was, I know it was about a grocery bag worth of trash.

To the right you can see just how little confetti was made from all of that work. It's probably more than I figure since the pieces are so small. All I know is we have quite a bit left to do. I'll try to do as much as I can during the day when I take breaks from work to watch a TV show or a movie. Speaking of, I better get going so I can work.

Cheers!

P.S. These pictures all came from my phone because my camera wasn't charged enough. I think it worked out pretty well. I do have a droid so it is relatively good quality. Thomas did "judge" me a bit for documenting the whole thing.

Boy, I've been slack

Okay, first of all, to add to the last list, I'm also probably going to also write a blog about Kevin Kline's film In & Out. Though it was a silly comedy on the surface, there was a lot in there that was really interesting about in terms of views on homosexuality in the late 1990s. Oh well, we'll see.

Anyway, as you can I changed up the layout a little bit. I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I might prefer to have a picture background. That's neither here nor there though. I got on here to say that next week, in honor of premiere week, or at least that's what I'm calling it, next week on TV I'm going to make a list each day of ten reasons why I love the show that premieres that night. The only exception is Thursday night because there are so many premiering that night.

Here's the schedule:

Monday: How I Met Your Mother

Tuesday: Glee

Wednesday: nothing...I get my wedding dress that day and hopefully will be going to Mr. Jason Mraz in concert that night.

Thursday: Bones

Friday: nada

Saturday: nope

Sunday: Bored to Death

So yep, that's all I have write now. I've got to get back to work.

What to hopefully expect if I ever get the time....

So, I just read my good friend Katie's blog, featured over in the right column over there, 2010 a Marriage Odyssey, where she used a list to go ahead and go through and talk about all of the things she's been wanting to say.  I don't really plan on doing that exactly, I thought that I might as well post a list of topics I'm dying to write about on here, and then whenever I do find the time to write, I won't have to sit around secretly chastising myself for forgetting.

1. An Education - a few things about the film, as well as the stupidity that allowed me to find the time to finally watch it.

2. Celebrity - My growth from a fanatical teen to an appreciative audience and why the former probably happened in the first place.

3. Briar Rose - Whenever I get around to it, if I still remember enough about the book to write about it thoughtfully and objectively, I will. If not, I'll just write about the other latest book I've read.

4..pending...I know there's other stuff I want to write about, I just can't think of it right now.

If this helps I may periodically edit this post, or just make new ones adding on to the list....I guess it depends on if I've written anything since or not. Oh well, back to work.

Cheers

What makes me smile

I wanted to share this, but it's just slightly too long for a tweet, so here I am blogging. First of all, I won't disclose precisely what I do, because I don't know how much I'm supposed to talk about it, but I work with surveys more or less, for a website. The site itself doesn't have anything to do with film directly, but the survey does ask, "what is you favorite film?", in an attempt to define the character of the person in question. While, in the spirit of DeLillo, I don't know how effective it is to use these sorts of personality markers, or how healthy it is to perpetuate this sort of definition of character, as a film minor, I am usually very interested in what people write as their answer. The question also asks what your favorite film is, which is usually the part people tend to answer.  I've been noticing a great trend here in people putting really only recent films in their favorites. There will be the default classic like Casablanca every once in a while, but usually it's something from the last year or two. I can't quite place why that bothers me...It probably has to do with the fact that I don't really see it as a praise for more contemporary filmmaking, but as an honest and active inability to recognize and remember  the past. I am all for (like seriously adore) new forms of media and everything, so don't think I'm some kind of biased the-internet-is-making-society-dumb imbecile. I really just have a problem with us forgetting the past like it seriously never happened. You can't truly know the world, let alone the human race, if you ignore that kind of thing. I recently heard someone say that the Holocaust bothered them too much, so after high school they completely cut it out of their life. There is just so many things wrong with that kind of mentality that I'm not going to go into it right now. Anyway, the point of this post was not to complain, but actually say how thrilled I am that almost everyone who I've gotten in the last week or so who has answered the question of the last movie they enjoyed, answered Inception. When I watch a really good film, I always want to share it with people and talk about it, and I guess it just makes me happy that so many other people are enjoying it as I did. I usually have to defend the movies I love from people to a certain extent, so not really having to I guess just really makes me smile. Okay, I apologize, that was supposed to only be a few sentences long, but I got into that random tangent. I've got to get back to work, so cheers!

p.s. I do think that the types of movies someone likes does reflect their character, I just don't think it defines it.

Stamps, Stamps, and More Stamps!

So, I really have a tendency to learn how to do something, whether artistically, culinarily, or just whatever, and then go crazy with ideas of how to put this new talent/knowledge to use. More often than not, the interest fades out, or money subsides, halting production on whatever I was working on. For this reason, I own stools that I was refurbishing in my own quirky way that are half sanded and in dire need of another run over with the wood burner, and have recipes that I never wrote down, swearing that I'd remember them, and no, of course, I don't. Most recently, as a by product of trying to find some way  to put our own logo on the back of homemade Harry Potter Apples To Apples cards, I stumbled across stamps at Michaels. Suddenly, while searching for stamps that didn't exist, I saw a few wedding ones and got the idea of making my own wedding invitations. I have currently done two trial invites and think I finally have a good idea as to the design for  the outside, it just requires patience and a few more materials.

Of course, this is sideways, but you get the picture.

Anywho, that led me to my next step, searching Etsy to find someone who will make a single stamp containing all of the information that needs to go on the inside. While I'm still toying with this idea, it turns out to be more expensive than I'd like, so I might have to go back to stamping it letter by letter with a smaller packet of letter stamps. Back to the story however,  this prompted me to search and see just how hard it might be to make your own stamp. After just a few minutes on google and youtube, I was equipped with the knowledge to at least go make my own HP AtoA stamps. In case you're wondering, here's a video on how it's done.                                                                                                                    

So I went to Michaels to purchase either a stamp pad or an extra large eraser.  I found the pads in no time, but they were more expensive than I wanted to spend. When I was about to check out however, I looked over at the $1 bins and saw this huge pink eraser that was perfect for the job, as well as the idea I had brewing in my head about making a stamp for the bookmark wedding favor I'd been trying to design.

I was pretty excited, and thought the quote on the front was kind of funny. If only I knew how true it would turn out to be. Sorry by the way, all of the pictures from my web cam are mirrored, which may or may not be ironic, I can't tell.

 So I went over to Thomas' grandparents' house, cut one of the erasers in half and went to work with my pen and carving tools. Everyone else thought it was pretty neat, with several of the cousins who helped telling me it was sort of therapeutic work. In no time we had two lovely apple-with-a-lightning-bolt stamps reading for the cards we still had to rewrite.

As you can see I even became victim of being stamped myself, as Kallan decided to go around stamping us all while we waited on dinner to be made and could not work on the cards because it would take up too much room. I'm actually pretty proud of how these turned out, except the fact that I should have gotten a better ink pad, and of course, I forgot that it would stamp a mirrored image rather than the one I cut out. Oh well, the lightning bolt works okay on either side.


So today, is when I thoroughly failed. I started to work on the bookmark stamp, and instead of planning it out, which is always my downfall, I got too excited and went ahead and started drawing and carving.

The result is what you see on your left. What is funny is that, using my computer's camera, the image actually looks like it should. However, when you actually see it, I didn't take the time to mirror the writing. I spent something like an hour and a half on this, and had half of it carved out, as you can see. I went to test it since I had a portion big enough to ink and not smear over the parts I hadn't worked on yet, and saw, whoopsy, it was backwards. I wanted to scream and laugh at the same time. Of course, I can go back to the store and get another eraser, and perhaps thinner carving tools to make the letter's a little bit tighter and less matisse font-like. For now, I'm frustrated and am thinking about just using whatever smaller letters I buy for the inside of the invitations, but maybe I'll stop back by and grab another eraser or two and try again soon. If I am I need to do it before they move them and I can't ever find  them again. Even if I give up on this idea, I may make some smaller, simpler ones for the kids at the wedding to play with while the adults are doing their socializing. The lesson after all of this though, is to plan ahead as much as possible. Don't let your excitement get the best of you, or you'll be out of several bucks and a few hours of time you could have been using to not fail at other things.
Oh well, you live and you learn. I'll probably definitely update again soon with how everything's going. Wish me luck!

Cheers!

For you're own tools to for stamp making: