When not packing for the trip, cleaning before the trip, mowing the lawn so it doesn't consume a small village before the trip and being on the trip I and my husband were creating.
For me it was nothing too exciting, I had a pretty blue sponging background 11X14 painting staring back at me for a while.
While I was creating a special black tag for someone's towel soap order I decided what the hell and tried to use up the rest of the black paint to make a new tree. It was as unplanned as all the rest but I like the way it took shape over a few days:
It's for sale here under the exceedingly uncreative title of Abstract Tree.
While I was painting my husband was hard at work crafting a series of special molds that could be combined to create the nerdiest soap ever.
I give you the Discworld is soap form:
It's created using three different molds, the turtle, the elephant and the disc itself. I then come back and hand paint to give it more depth and bring out some of the details from the model.
The whole thing is only about 2 ounces so it'd fit well in a soap dish. The elephants are by far the hardest as I have to pipe burning hot glycerin into a mold no bigger than my pinkie. But as my previous elephant army shows they are damn adorable.
The Discworld soap is up for sale for $10 and it can be whatever scent you'd like. I imagine if Great A'Tuin had a choice he'd go with something brisk but oceany or possibly the Banana Bread cause that stuff smells awesome.
That's the latest to roll out of our ol' factory. There are a few soap molds still cooling and a painting needing a few more coats of glow in the dark paint but they shall have to wait for another day.
There was a trend a while back where mother's (it's always mothers, because father's are given a plaque and retirement watch for spending more than 10 minutes with their spawn) were told to mask and bury vegetables inside foods.
As a person who can pick out that one stray piece of coconut, find pineapple juice in a sea of other juices and don't even bother trying to sneak a stray baked bean past me I was appalled. No one would believe me that no I have not simply never had a good piece of coconut or pot of beans I hate everything about it and if you try to sneak a bit past me and watch to see if I'll like it you're going to get a wad of half eaten goo handed back to you.
I also wonder about these children that have no idea they're eating "magical, make you perfect" vegetables. If you really grow up being lied to by your parents for years about what is and isn't food what happens when you move away and have to cook for yourself. Those "mashed potatoes" made from real potatoes are going to taste a lot better than pureed cauliflower (which is an abomination, make up your mind are you broccoli or some sort of non flavored spirit of a vegetable here to inflict pain upon the world).
Instead of opening them to the world of vegetables at a younger age so they could develop a taste and love of them you hid them away like a dirty secret treating them as something to be feared and ashamed of. As any God fearing housewife knows, you only save that tactic for sex and eating chocolate, duh.
This little diatribe is getting to a point, a point about chips. But not chips made from what pseudo-nutrition has declared nothing better than chewing on Styrofoam the potato, but that sweeter tastier cousin the yam (or sweet potato if you want to get technicalish).
A local BBQ joint that's really only good for one thing makes these delectable homemade sweet potato chips you can't help but gobble up by the boatload (I bet you guessed what their one good thing is, yes their Caesar salad made with a bulb of garlic so you can shoot flaming anti-vampire spray from your mouth after).
For a long time my husband and I kept talking about how we should try to make them at home. Wouldn't it be a great idea, blah blah blah. Then I'd usually forget at the grocery store as I hunted for whatever was on sale to create meals for the week.
But that all changed (obvioulsy or this would be a short and pointless post -- well more pointless) last week when I snagged up two yams/sweet potatoes/alien pods.
We don't have a mandolin so I did the second best (maybe third if you have a home guillotine) and used my vegetable peeler to slice of thin pieces of the two yams, collected those and tossed them into hot oil for about 5 minutes or so.
You don't want to let them turn brown just a more translucent less orangey hue. They'll continue to cook and crisp up a bit on the drying rack. But be careful you'll be so tempted to taste a few as they're cooling there is a high chance to tongue burnage plan accordingly.
Are these better for you than regular old potato chips? I have no idea, I rather doubt it but as we declared war on the potato and the corn cob and labeled them anti-vegetable I guess one must make due with what one is allowed to have by Food Big Brother.
But these are some of the most addictive tasty chips I've ever had. The slight sweetness really rings through so I personally don't feel like they need a bit of salt added. Just a crunch and a lingering hint of sugar on the tongue.
I made up both of the yams thinking we'd have some leftover I could bag up but before we knew it the entire bowl was empty (well not entirely before we knew, the slowly lowering level was a bit of a hint).
What is the moral of this post? That hiding veggies from your kids is lying and could mess them up really bad down the road? That randomly declaring a food worse than Hitler is overkill? Or that making sweet potato chips at home with just a vegetable peeler and a drying rack is incredibly tasty and I heartily recommend it?
Yeah let's go with the last one, I've got yams to peel. *crunch crunch crunch*
Commercials, anti-aging products and fantasy camps all rely upon convincing the world that it was a much simpler and better time when we were children.
You could spend every night outside chasing fireflies with nary a care in the world, conveniently forgetting that there was a stack of homework half your height waiting for you back inside as well as a 9 hour bedtime and a parent who doesn't understand why in the world you'd possibly be needing that ticket to go see those robots that talk over movies live. Now eat your broccoli and shut up.
I'd much rather be an adult. Sure saddled with more responsibilities and the like, but now I can decide if I want to try something a little different for dinner, if I'll go ahead and join that Halloween prop making group and if I'll drive 6 hours to a show to celebrate nerdom known as #w00tstock.
The last one was in there because that's exactly what my husband and I did the past weekish. On Friday we put in the requisite extra 10 hours of work just to leave our house and go on vacation cleaning everything up, mowing the lawn, organizing it all, doing laundry so that once we come back we have to do it all again because apparently little mess making organisims move in to house sit.
We dropped Essie off at my parents so she could spend five days tormenting her brothers.
Apparently she missed us for about an hour and then there were brother ears to chew on.
We packed up and were off to the land of lakes, forests, uffda and lutefisk. We were heading to Minneapolis.
Okay so my husband and I had already been to the Twin Cities about two years prior for our honeymoon but this time was a bit different, for the Saturday-Monday we'd get to hang out with some friends that I'd only met on the scary internet.
I've been doing the web thing for quite a while now, since the wild west days of the late 90's when everyone had a website I made a friend that we would email back and forth (it sounds so quaint now like having a pen pal).
The early 00's brought my foray into a message board world where I once again connected and made new friends but still due to my location and the fact that I was a poor college student I knew I would never get to meet any of those electronic chums.
Then came the announcement of #w00tstock (got to include the hashtag because this is so twitter twined you'd think the little bird was sponsoring it) and a chance to not only see a gathering of nerds so epic outside a comicon the world may implode but also some of those good old twitter friends were gonna be there too.
I saw this sign on the trip and it seemed almost prophetic (well prophetic with a little help from a paint job).
Eight hours, a small stop over in Ames Iowa to kill some time as the puppy got us up at an ungodly hour to start out and we were there. The Twin Cities:
What was to follow was hours of jam packed fun followed by a quick nap at night only to have a continental breakfast catered by Jesse Venture and emceed by Garrison Keillor lead into more jam packed fun.
Saturday night was a comedy show to get us ready for the bigger things to come on Monday. There were 5 various bachelorette parties there. Watching the feathered boas, penis shaped necklaces and constant marriage ribbing made me very glad I was deemed far too old for one of those things of my own.
After some of the life lost while making the trip was gained back sleeping we were off again on Sunday, this time to The Mall. There need be no explanation in the Cities, everyone knows what The Mall means. But if you're say just tuning in The Mall would be the one of America, you know the one they crashed an amusement park into.
We showed up at about 10:30 where as we were heading to the doors I suddenly had an epiphany "Crap, it's Sunday so that can only mean one thing. Nothing will be open!"
And sure enough I was right. It was so dead certain corners had a zombie movie feel. I kept expecting a monster to stumble out of a Sears mumbling about brains.
So my husband and I circled the third floor once and before we knew it an hour was up and everything was opening (seriously, the mall is that big you can spend an hour just walking a floor and not going inside anything).
We met up with our fellow twitter nerdlings and made trips inside weird shops, scored some awesome ice cube trays and geeked out in a FYE where I realized that if you point a camera at someone you can get them to do just about anything:
I swear I will only use my powers for good-ish. I'll only level a couple villages, you won't even notice they're gone.
One of the twitter friends traveling with us, I'll call her Sunrise, kept wanting to visit the thing in the basement. That was about all we knew, there was a thing in the basement and we had to see it. Oh and it involved a guy in a blue shark suit following us around the entire day.
Down into the depths we traveled where we discovered to our horror the thing in the basement.
I should warn you now, if you have any small children in the room send them out now before you gaze upon the Thing in the basement of the Mall of America.
Because they might want one of their own.
Though it wasn't all adorable sea turtles, you can't tell me this Jellyfish exhibit isn't something out of any horror sci fi movie.
I took some video of our trip through the rather large basement aquarium that had probably the most sharks I've ever seen:
By the time we left the Mall it was 8 hours after we'd arrived and I'm pretty sure my legs were about to pick up a sign and go on strike.
So we headed back to our hotel for rest, recuperation and so I could share the picture with the rest of the internets.
Monday brought another awesome day making a trip to the Science Museum where my history nerdness went into hyper overload. We'd already planned to go to the Science museum way back in whenever this trip was planned.
When we got there we discovered the special exhibit wasn't some CSI experience or a traveling section of plasticized bodies. No, it was none other than sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls!
I'll give you a minute to let that sink in.
Go ahead and take your time, I know it's pretty damn monumental.
Okay so I'm probably the only one of the group that was freaking out. But I'm the kind of person that if I find any show about the scrolls or the gnostic bibles on the History channel I have to watch it. I knew so much about those things it's crazy.
We wound up spending 2 hours in the no pictures allowed scroll section viewing various pots the scrolls were found in, hearing theories from scholars about who wrote the scrolls and why they were placed in the caves and finally seeing pieces of them with our own two eyes.
It's one of those things that if you come in and just look at you wouldn't think much of. The pieces were no bigger than your hand, jagged and ripped. The writing was so small it gave your hand a cramp just thinking about it.
But then you stop and realize these are over 2,000 years old. They were written when Rome controlled the world, when Europe was just a vast bastion of "barbarians." And they've survived for that long. What do we have now recording our history would survived 2,000 years of sitting in a cave sealed away inside clay pots?
Sorry forgive the geeking out there, I'm so bad I actually got a replica pot to keep on my mantle. I think I'll make my own scroll to keep inside it.
There was lots to see at the science museum too, like a replica of the Mayan calendar that says we're all gonna die in 2012 (or not really, I bet they just ran out of stone and stopped carving):
And dinosaurs, lots and lots of fun dinosaurs!
And now we get to the real meat, the show, the entire reason we made that trek up north.
#w00tstock
It's just indescribable, the meeting of nerds of all types come together to revel and laugh at our shared journey on this big blue ball.
I don't know if I could put it all to words watching the likes of Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage, the MST3K guys - Bill, Kevin and Trace, as well as tons of other internet famous comedians share the stage for what in the end amounted to 5 straight hours of laughing so hard we couldn't talk the next day.
How about I just show you instead.
For any MSTies here's Trace Beaulieu performing his book of poems for belligerent children:
Here Bill Corbett & Kevin Murphy write and perform some silly songs for silly songing:
And now for you Mythbusters nuts here Adam Savage tells some great tales about Jamie and gives heartfelt geek memories as well as a kleenex douche and singing like gollum:
We didn't get to bed til 2 in the morning where we then got up at 9 the next day to travel 3 hours north to do really boring things I'm sure none of you need to know about.
It was awesome, fun, gut bustingly hilarious and wonderful to get to spend the time traveling around doing touristy things with fellow nerds. I hope I get the chance to meet other internet people I've met at least everyone I've made a soap or painting for that's gotten something a little extra for keeps.
So if we've ever interacted in anyway stay sharp, you never know when I could be lurking in the bushes waiting for the opportunity to attack!
Memorial weekend wasn't just devoted to puppy play and making sure our garden and lawn didn't become so overgrown we'd be visited by the evil foliage imps (they write some nasty letters if you don't take good care of your plants).
My husband and I pulled out the clay and got to work creating some new soaps.
He worked hard on a sea turtle and four tiny elephants for a soap that's slowly taking shape and I'll explain much later. (I do have a tiny elephant army right now though)
Meanwhile I pulled and flattened the clay so I could fold it up, added some texture, a number and then baked it for the mold. (Now you know our secret soap making recipe. I'll have to kill you. Hold still please).
Allow me to present the perfect soap for any galaxy hitchhikers so they can always have access to their towel, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything and wash their hands when needed.
I love all the little side details. It really feels like a tiny towel folded up. And pairs pretty nicely with our dirt clod:
But all the soap and painting stuff will have to go on a little hiatus because we're going on vacation soon! I have numerous thoughts, feelings and hot dogs about it so I shall save it for another post.
For now simply bask in the nerdiness of the glycerin.
Three day weekends are a bit like house guests. You anticipate their arrival with big plans, specialty foods and actually bothering to try cleaning behind the toilet.
And like houseguests, once it leaves you're left with pots and pans scouring in the sink, half an eaten cake, some strange goo all over the living room floor and nowhere near enough energy to bother with any of it.
We stayed close to home getting things done, excitingly amazing things like mowing the lawn and cleaning out the gutters. It was so much fun I can barely contain my excitement recapping it.
However, we did do one traditional Memorial day event. Loading up the puppy and making sure to completely forget the towels we took Essie for a big romp around in the lake.
This was actually Essies second time at the lake but I of course forgot my camera the first time. So she was a bit more used to the idea of there's water go run around in it.
After we throw the ball of course.
She doesn't really swim yet. She mostly just skips across the water as fast as she can.
The few times she does get into deep water she puppy paddles, keeping her feet above the water and splashing like crazy. It's kinda like watching a paddle boat in reverse.
I took some video of her in action.
Generally Essie keeps near us, avoiding people and other dogs she doesn't know. But at one point the great small bird hunter noticed these guys hanging around by the waters edge.
Which then lead to chasing, swimming, running and I'm pretty sure small attempts to fly by our puppy.
All in all a good day at the lake.
And that's my exciting Memorial Day.
Oh but if that's not enough cute doggie doing silly doggie things, here's Essie playing with a giant branch:
