Lastly we made a pretty sweet card for Bug's Granddad. After tracing his hand to cut out the foam pieces and cardstock I helped Bug cut the long strips for the inside. We glued three sheets of paper together because Bug kept saying it was too short . . . I had to cut him off after we hit three. I added the yellow strip around the whole thing to keep the hands together. *Inside reads: "THIS MUCH!" |
Bug and I spent the week before Father's Day crafting. We've got it down to a science... Bug plays while I get things set up and I call him over when I got to a part that he could help with. He loves his safety scissors, helping with the gluing, & "coloring." I loved this card design so much I used it for my own father! This was another post I started abut a week ago...technical difficulties and life got in the way!
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On Monday we celebrated Memorial Day. I want to take this opportunity to send my heartfelt thanks and well wishes to all in our Armed Services and the families that support them. I am the proud great-granddaughter & granddaughter of members of the Navy & Marine Corps. I love holidays. I love everything that goes along with celebrating holidays. I love the decorations, long held traditions and new ones, & I adore making holiday themed food. For our Memorial Day celebration at my brothers house I was put in charge of dessert. After simple Google search for "chocolate dessert" a few clicks took me to Chocolate Moosey and a recipe for Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Treat Truffles (<--you can click there for her recipe). Peanut butter & chocolate together? Sold. My awesome sis-in-law is allergic to peanuts so I made one batch with peanut butter and one without. They are super easy to make. Here's my version! Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Treat TrufflesServes: Varies based on the size balls you roll Ingredients
Rice Crispy TreatsChocolate & DecoratingPrinter-friendly Version:
*Sorry for the delay, had a issue where I was 75% done and it all vanished. Oy.K, so I meant to get back to regular posting. I swear I did. Yeah that didn't happen. I'm gonna get better at this, I promise. BIG NEWS- On Friday, May 10th Bug's little sister was born. She showed up about 2 weeks early and super fast once they got to the hospital (under an hour) and I'm already in love. I've held her a handful of times and she's already awesome. Thinking I might call her Lady Bug on here...seems right. Last Sunday we celebrated Momma's Day (left), Monday was my awesome sister Erin's birthday (middle), Tuesday my girls and I hit up the University Mall Theater for their $2 Tuesdays to see Jack the Giant Slayer (EPIC!), Wednesday my Dad turned 61 (right), Thursday I went with Tam to her Write By The Rails meeting to listen to her speak about NaNo and her novel From These Ashes, & Friday I ended the week at Sweetwater then a West Wing marathon with my friend Erin. Pretty sweet days. Now for the changes... I've decided to give myself a break on some of the goals I had originally outlined for this month. I took out the crochet, & family interviews and substituted "write Erin (sis) everyday." I've been doing really well with that goal so far. There has been a day or two that the letter didn't make it into the mailbox the next day but I have written her every single night. I had a thought before the year began that I would write her once a week and that didn't go further than addressing and stamping the envelopes. At least that saved me a step this time around! Writing to my sis every day is almost like writing in a journal and it's been really fun. It has been years since I've written someone a note or a letter, totally taking me back to my school days. More soon! I totally started writing this on Monday...it really shouldn't have taken this long to post
or...Well, hello there. So here we are at the beginning of another month and it's been that long since you've heard from me. My simple reason for that is that I did not factor blog posts into my planning for Camp NaNo. I hit my 100 pages a little over halfway through the month and thought about making a post celebrating that but then life got in the way. I gave myself a day off and then went back to writing and plotting. The process of turning last year's NaNo novel into a television series was a little more challenging after I got past the first three episodes which used up most of the material from the novel. So before I could start on the fourth episode I had to go back and do some major plotting. In the midst of doing that I realized a way to expand the beginning which meant I started over. Like, completely over. I was able to save fairly large chunks of what I had done and I kept my page count so it wasn't really a big deal. It actually allowed me to see that this particular story works so much better as a television series than it did as a one shot novel. In other April news . . . Tam and I went to the Hylton Performing Arts center for the Arts Alive! festival. We got to walk around and enjoy seeing some beautiful ballet, emotional poetry and non-fiction readings (made jokes about being the only people in the audience for those and faking emotion...didn't have to do that, at all. So many feels.), along with other arts and crafts. Tam belongs to an awesome writers group called Write By The Rails which had a table at the festival with rotating writers. Tam's turn came during the second half of the day. She did pretty awesome! Don't forget to grab your own copy of her book! One of the coolest kids I've ever known turned 3 towards the end of April. His mom is flat out awesome and one of my best friends. She made the pull-apart cupcake cake to the left. Pictures don't do it justice...seriously thought it was a store bought deal. She's just that good! My folks took a trip to California, my dad was judging/mc'ing a DECA event and my momma went to hang out with Erin (my super cool older sister). During the weekend that they were gone I hosted a writing retreat at my house. Both Tam & Jules hung out for the first two days but Sunday was just me & Tam. I ended up buying a new game called Dicecapades that comes with over 100 dice & has three sections: Actionland, Thinkingtown, & Triviaville. Tam & I played and loved it so much that the last night I had the house to myself I invited Tam, Jules, & Liz over to play again. Yup, that's Jules & Liz arm-wrestling...ended in a tie and was hysterical. Since we had started playing only after watching Pitch Perfect (Jules hadn't seen it yet) so our midnight cut-off came before we made it to the end of the game. We took a picture of the board so we can keep going the next time we all hang out. Hope it's soon cause I was kicking butt! :-) Now for May...Next Camp NaNo is in June and I would normally go back to writing a novel but this whole tv series has really worked for me and I want to stick with the story for now. I'll go back to a novel for regular NaNo in November!
Also Bug's parents want me to work on more preschool things with him and get him used to a more structured environment so when he goes to actual preschool he won't be "that kid," you know what I mean...the kid bouncing off the walls or flipping his lid all the time. We wanna avoid that. He's super smart and a really great kid so this week I've been adding little things to our daily routine and this weekend I"m going to come up with an outline that we'll follow. Totally loving this. I really am my mother's daughter. :-) First off, check out that photo cause I cut almost eight inches of hair off the weekend! I've loved having long hair but summer is coming up (fingers crossed) and I felt like it was time for a change. My awesome friend Abby is a professional hairstylist and she did an amazing job. So freaking happy with the cut and I can still pull it back into a super cute ponytail on hot days. Plus my hair likes to tangle itself and the long hair was just making it more prone to do that, pain in the butt. I'll let it grow out again closer to winter time. Now on to the Business of April...Today marks the start of Camp NaNo #1 for 2013. In years past April was actually set aside for Script Frenzy but apparently that didn't bring in enough money so Camp Nano took over. Personally I was a huge fan of Script Frenzy so I'm sticking to a script this month. They did make the goals adjustable on the website but I wish they gave you the option to have a page count goal instead of word count since that's how scripts work. Oh we'll, I'll make it work for me.
For this script I'm actually using last year's NaNo novel and turning it into a television series. I've never written a tv script before so this will be interesting. Format-wise I feel pretty good that I know what goes where but breaking the story up and expanding it to work as a tv series is what I'm really excited about. That's all you get for now, I've gotta get back to writing so I can keep my page/word count where it needs to be!! Wish me luck! "The battle's done and we kinda won so we sound our victory cheer, tell me... photo by Jamie Kay Photography Saturday was awesome. Seriously awesome. But before I tell you all about that let's backtrack to Friday. My mom and Colin (my crazy awesome nephew, can't remember if I've mentioned him before) picked me up from work and Bug was insanely happy to see them. On the way home we stopped by Harris Teeter to check out what plants/flowers they had. I had decided earlier that live plants/flowers would look better than making arrangements and would work better with our semi-Native American theme. Plus they are a helluva lot less work. We found a couple good ones at Harris Teeter and after stopping at Meadows Farms on the way home we had all we needed. I had planned on going out to Wegmans to order the photo cake once I dropped Mom & Colin off. In my researching I didn't see a way to order online and when I had called earlier in the week to check prices the guy I talked to said I just had to come in and place the order. My momma suggested I call and make sure someone would be in the bakery when I got there. The girl who answered seemed confused by my question and said "I can take your order over then phone and you can email us the picture." That would have been awesome to know when I called earlier but my momma's suggestion and the Wegmans lady's answer saved me time and driving. Saturday morning I tried to start the day by sleeping in a little but my body didn't cooperate. So instead I ran through my packing list a few dozen times and finished up some last minute touches before I loaded the car and headed out around noon. First stop was Target where I picked up the helium tank, pen for Tam, poster putty, and attempted to find some suction cup hooks. When I couldn't find them on my own I asked one of the Target guys if they sold suction cup hooks and where I could find them. He looked down the same aisles I did then took off. I thought he was going to check at customer service but when I finally found him (at least when I saw him from a distance) he had moved on to something else. Kinda annoying, right? Figuring he wasn't going to actually help me anymore I abandoned the suction cup hooks and went to the pen aisle. While I was debating pen styles a guy came up to the employee in the same aisle and asked where the helium tanks were sold and I had to tell him that I had the last one on the shelf. Felt a little bad about that, hopefully he was able get one maybe from the stock. After I checked out I drove out to the Lowes in Gainesville. At Lowes I finally found the suction cup hooks and took a few moments in the plant aisle to see if they had anything better than the plants/flowers I bought on Friday. Once I decided the ones I already had were perfect I checked the time and saw I still had almost two hours before the cake would be ready. So I hit up Panera to grab a sandwich. I have to say that I was really disappointed with the Wegmans cake. I don't know if it was lost in translation but I had asked for the photo to be as large as possible. They suggested a 1/2 sheet for the number of people we expected and I assumed they would lay the photo on the cake portrait style...instead they plopped it down in the middle of the cake horizontally with huge empty spaces on either side. It seriously looked like a piece of paper too, the edges weren't blended at all. Instead of possibly wasting time at Wegmans I took the cake as it was then stopped by Giant near Tam's house and picked up a can of frosting, the kind in the large cans that look like whipped cream, and some red sprinkles. When I got to Tam's house I went to work adding icing in spikes on either side. Of course nothing can be simple so I ran out of icing when I was about 2/3 done. Another trip to Giant to pick up more icing and some gold sprinkles then I was back to finish it up. It's not the way I wanted the cake to be but I'm fairly happy with it. Unfortunately we were allowed in the room at Lion & Bull until 30 minutes before the party started so I got super flustered almost immediately. Didn't help that the tables were set up differently than I'd asked for. After we settled that and I gave everyone a job to do we were almost ready when people started showing up for the party. I had brought my dvd player along with the cords so I was able to connect that to the large flat screen above the fireplace to get the slideshow started. I had trouble when I was making the DVD with file sizes being too large to have the music and photos run on the DVD so I split them up. I used my movie editing software to save the music (fades and all) as one 3+ hour long mp3 and loaded it up on an iPod Touch. I wasn't sure about the music system at the Lion & Bull so I brought my mom's Bose...of course I forgot the remote for it so it was completely useless. Not sure if the music would have made much of an impact anyway because the crowd was fairly loud all night. People started buying books almost immediately. At the beginning of the month I order a Square so we could take credit card payments and a little over 1/3 of the sales ended up being credit cards. Tam ended up selling 50 books! Check out the little slideshow below (all photos by Jamie Kay Photography) and you'll see what a great time it was. Thank you so much to everyone who came out!! On Sunday both Tam and I were in a "what now?" stage. After all the time and energy spent leading up to that one night it left us a little restless the next day. She ended up coming over and we dished about the night, ate pizza, & watched Dowton Abbey.
Good times. you're only a day away... One day. Well, technically less than one day. Wow. We've been prepping for this for awhile now and I'm feeling super confident about how it's all going to go. My "To-Do" list has been rapidly shrinking. As of right now I've got the faux book (almost 95% finished now) and the DVD Slideshow to finish up tonight. Our wonderful friend Kate has taken over the cupcake baking which is awesome considering she has her own bakery business so you know they're gonna be awesome. Before party time tomorrow I've gotta get the balloons, pick up the cake (ordered from Wegmans), and haul everything from my home in Manassas to Haymarket. Then it's just set up and party! For everyone coming to the party here's the timeline we'll be working off of so you know how to plan your night. Come for the whole thing or just pop in to say 'hi!'
6:30 start party, eat food, photobooth, book signing (if requested) 7:30 Intro by editor, then Tam will talk about the book 8ish book signing (seated), more food, photobooth 9ish cake cutting & raffles 9:30 end THE TOTES CAME IN!!How cool are they?! I'm pretty crazy excited about them. So we're in the last week before the big day. SATURDAY is coming so freaking fast! I've got a couple things left to do before I'm ready but I'm not worried, which is a new feeling for me when it comes to deadlines. And it's totally a welcome feeling :-) TO DO:
1) Slideshow *finish adding photos *pick and add music *extend time to 3+ hours 2) Seeds *print labels *sew bags (if time permits) 3) Photo booth Prop *create large faux book 4) Goodie Bags *print labels *fill bags 5) Tote Bags *fill bags 6) Raffle Prizes *paint baskets? 7) Cake/Cupcakes *order photo sheet cake *make/decorate cupcakes Writing it all out makes it seem like more than I thought but for the most part everything is fairly quickly done. I hope. Fingers crossed! So InsideNoVa partnered with Ashley Furniture to put on a Build-a-Snowman contest. The grand prize being a new recliner from Ashley Furniture. We submitted my mom's Lorax, that I suggested because Bug's favorite movie right now is The Lorax & because when I was super little my momma instilled in me the importance of knocking heavy snow off of trees to prevent them from breaking...she really does "speak for the trees!" About a week after we submitted our Lorax the site was open for voting. It was kind of a pain in the butt to vote because they required a registration that asked for your email and phone number along with creating your own profile on the site. I know that some people didn't vote simply because it took more time than the facebook contests that only you require you to "like" something. But even with that annoyance we got 40+ votes fairly quickly. I created a facebook event and invited everyone so they could easily get to the link. My dad did the same and soon we were doing pretty well. We started off in 3rd place but overtook to claim second in the first day. The contest allowed registered users to vote once a day for a week, the contest set to expire at 11:59:59 on St. Patrick's Day. As they days went on our vote total steadily increased...but so did another the votes for another entry. Now I have to admit that I would probably vote for that snowman if my own weren't part of the competition. I wasn't surprised when I saw it take an early lead and stay there. From time to time we looked like we were closing the gap and during the last day of voting we were as close as 15 votes behind. All of our friends and family rallied behind us and kept banging out votes. Then this snow zombie launched up almost 40 votes. It was pretty disappointing. Several of my father's friends started speculating that it was getting fake votes and even that it wasn't from Virginia. At first I dismissed these claims and starting to resign myself to the fact that we were gonna lose. Even if we ended up losing I was super happy and grateful for all the support we got. Then one of those friends said they found the same picture at a website called Alaska Commons. I wasn't sure if that meant but thought I'd check into it a little, if just to put the whole thing to rest. I started off using Google Image Search where you can upload a photo and search for it online. The zombie snowman showed up 300+ times online. Now, that could mean nothing at all. Zombies are pretty popular right now and it's easy with all the social media sites out there for photos to be shared thousands of times in less than a day. Then I heard from my dad that he followed the Alaska Commons appearance to George Takei's Facebook page and when he looked into that he found this comment: "Colleen Kittrell - this was taken near Neosho, Missouri, and posted Feb 27. I didn't take it but Neosho is about an hr from here so I reposted it. I didn't send it to George, but I'm glad he saw the humor in it. March 3 at 4:06pm" I did some more checking on facebook and found the same photo on another page, Alien Invasion Zombie Apocalypse Fitness, which again credits it to Neosho, Mo. Clicking on the photo from there I got back to the original post, Joplin Zombie Defense Network, which is dated Feb 26th and once again says it was "Seen today in nearby Neosho MO." With all of that it seemed obvious that the person who submitted the photo had stolen it and claimed it as their own. Even if the snow zombie belonged to the submitter part of the contest rules stated that the winner had to live within 60 miles of Leesburg, which just makes sense considering that the prize is a recliner that they'll have to ship. I wrote up what I found and submitted it via a feedback form. I wasn't sure what was going to happen but I hoped that they would at least consider the evidence. Well, I didn't have to wait long. Within minutes both my father and I received emails from editor of InsideNoVa and the Marketing & Events Coordinator letting us know that the zombie snowman was pulled from the competition. It turns out that beyond the evidence we had found they also said there were more than 200 suspicious votes from different email addresses, but from the same IP address. Now doesn't that seem like a lot of work to cheat at a snowman building contest? With that out of the way we were clearly in the lead. With only 30 minutes left till the end the snowman in second place only had 112 votes. When the clock struck midnight... WE WON!The day is finally HERE!! Tam's book, From These Ashes, is officially for sale! You can get it in Paperback or on Kindle. Go grab your copy today and you can tell me later about how awesome it is. Can't wait to read it again with the actual book in my hands! Of course I will have to wait until after the Book Release Party when I'm not quite so busy. :-) I swear I wasn't putting off this blog post for any reason. In all honesty the days just got away from me. I figure that happens to everyone so you'll all just have to forgive me. On Saturday Tam came and picked me up so we could hang out. The plan was to have lunch then go back to her place to work on picking out pictures for the DVD slideshow and have a movie night. Before we got to that we made two stops. First up was Southern States where we found the seeds on the left. The idea is that each flower or plant ties in with the book. I've got muslin from forever ago that I'll cut into rectangles that I can sew into small bags. I've already designed the labels for them and just have to put in the seed information. When I looked on the back to get that info I saw what's pictured below: Made me think of my sister and smile! I looked at the other veggie seeds and they all have a similar label, she'd be so proud!! After we checked out there we made our way to the Party Store (I can never remember if it's Party Co or Party City) to pick up the red metallic foil curtains which is the last of the photo booth decorations. At least the last of the bought decorations. I still need to make up the extra large fake book copy but I'll get to that soon! For lunch we headed to the Lion & Bull (remember that's the venue for the Book Release Party) and I had one of the best burgers I've had in a long time. Back at Tam's (well honestly we got to Tam's then realized we didn't get any movies so we went back out to Redbox) we went through several bags of photos and ended up picking out 103 photos for the slideshow. Today I finished cropping all of them and have started working on the actual slideshow. I'm sure there's a program or a way in the program I have to make this part easier on myself but I haven't figured that out and it's going alright so far. Slow and steady wins the race, right? The slideshow will be on a DVD and shown on the huge TV above the fireplace during the party. Flashback to Saturday, we ended up getting two movies: Playing for Keeps "A former sports star who's fallen on hard times starts coaching his son's soccer team as a way to get his life together. His attempts to become an adult are met with challenges from the attractive soccer moms who pursue him at every turn." For A Good Time, Call "Former college frenemies Lauren and Katie move into a fabulous Gramercy Park apartment, and in order to make ends meet, the unlikely pair start a phone sex line together." Surprisingly the second was the better movie. Both in storytelling and in heart. Just goes to show the whole "don't judge...by it's cover" is oh so true. After the last movie we set up the Wii to watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube. I've seen all of them but Tam is still pretty far behind. We started at 38 and got all the way through 65 before the wiimote batteries died and we realized it was almost 3am! I know I've said it before but if you haven't seen The Lizzie Bennet Diaries you should, asap!! 11 DAYS TO GO!! |