Monopoly Murder!

Long time no see!
More than two years now, I think.
Bad me, for not writing. x3
I'm going to try to do it more often, even if its just short little posts instead of massive long ones.

What am I up to right now?
Well, we moved, from Maryland to Idaho.
I got my Associate's Degree, so that's something more interesting I can put on my applications I'm filling out as I look for a job, ugh.
I'm volunteering at the library store right now.
And I'm trying to do more crafty artsy things.
Mostly because I made a pinterest account. xD

My current interest is in upcycling. It's where you take old things and repurpose them.
My favorite is when people take old books, that would just get tossed or recycled, and turn them into things. Notebooks, sketchbooks, secret compartment containers, shelves, decoupage old pages onto things, make origami from the pages, etc. The sky's the limit, really.
But my current interest is in upcycling old board games.
I'm sure most people have seen the pendants made from scrabble tiles, but there's so much more you can do.
We've picked up a couple of old Monopoly games for pretty cheap at the DI. (Once was missing a couple things - including EVERY 5 dollar bill. o.O - the other was pretty beat up, so it's not like someone would have bought it to play...)

Between the two of them, I've got a good stock of bits and piece to play with:

• Houses and hotels and moving pieces for making charms from.
• Two playing boards to cut up to turn into...coasters or notebooks or something.
• Chance and Chest cards to cut up for the pictures to turn into magnets or for lining inside covers of sketchbooks (they fit REALLY well on the back of the deed cards). Some cards, such as the Get Out Of Jail Free cards may be usable just by themselves.
• LOTS of money. For decoupaging or...well, you'll see in a bit. :3
• Some pictures cut off a cardboard inset from one of the games.
  

One of the boxes Mom took for shipping Ebay stuff, and I kept the other to keep all this in. :3
It fits well, no? x3

When I got the first game the other day, I didn't know, yet, that I was keeping ALL the pieces. I knew I was keeping the movers and the houses and hotels, but I wasn't sure if I was keeping or recycling the rest.
Then I started looking online for ideas and came across a BUNCH of ideas. :3
So I kept it all. AND the board. xD
I was trying to figure out what to use the money for...when I remembered the old 'making bracelets out of candy wrappers' craft my friends used to make in high school. A bit of trial and error, and I made a bracelet for my sister. (On the left in the photo below)
I also came across an interesting origami thing called a 'mette ring', which is on the right side of the photo. (I think I'll try making the 10 piece ring instead of the 18 piece one next time.)

In the end, I scavenged every part of the games to use.
Every piece...except one, that is. x3

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yesterday was my birthday. (Yay!) It was pretty much with the awesome and massive with the cool.
We ended up going to DC for the day...although that wasn't my original plan. X3
My first thought was that we could go see the new Tron movie. Except...we did that last week. One idea down. (It was a really cool movie, though. XD)
Then I thought...well, maybe we could go to Ice at the Gaylord Resort. We ended up doing that last week too. (Also really cool. And COLD. 2 million pounds of ice carved into sculptures of the Grinch and such made for a very cold place. :D)
So...yesterday rolls around and I'm trying to figure out what to do. "Um...let's go to...the...Bureau of Engraving and Printing?" I say uncertainly...and so that's where we go!
It was a good day for it too...there was hardly anyone there. We hit the building just in time to catch a tour and went through with plenty of elbow room to spare. (I did have a group of cranky people behind me who made nasty comments every time I paused to look at something. 'Ohmigosh, how horrible to get stuck behind someone who just stops in these skinny hallways and escalators and gets in our way.' I felt like smacking them before I was through. XD) I really never pictured the people who work at the Bureau as big burly guys with hugely muscled tattooed arms and beards and ladies with long (I think they were painted purple) fingernails and such. Then at the gift shop I got a keychain...full of shredded money. (How could you go to the giftshop and not get something full of shredded money I ask?)
Then we went to-...wait, hold on and back up a minute. I skipped a part of the trip!
We stopped at Union Station on the way to the Bureau to snag a treat - pound cake for mom, muffins for my sibs, and a giant almost palm-sized coconut macaroon for me. (Which, though good, I do not think I will get again because it was so big that the center, instead of being chewy, was almost gooey. A bit much. I was chewing for like a half hour afterwards. X3)
Then we went to the Holocaust museum, since it is right next to the Bureau. It was a very interesting, if deep, museum. Lots to read and look at and watch.
By the time we got through it, it was WAY past lunchtime, but we decided to have a granola bar (and the other halves of our treats from earlier) and keep going.
Where? I really didn't have a clue at that point. We'd exhausted all of my ideas. XD
But, one of the presents I was getting was a Buddha Board (pictures to come later in this post), and we needed to track it down first. So we went to the Hirshorn museum and then to the American Art/Portraiture museum to find the one I wanted. Since we still had some time to kill we wandered around the AA/P museum (saw a couple of...very...very...strange exhibits and I sat and marveled at the MVSEVM (a miniature museum, it's VERY cool. Look it up on google or something. :3)
Then our stomachs said we needed to go find food, so we went back to Union Station for chicken salad sandwiches of awesomeness. (We've become sort of regulars there, the workers know us on sight. X3 ) The lady was so sweet - when she heard it was my birthday she tried first to give me a free drink, but I had already gotten our drinks from someplace else. So she gave me my sandwich for free. :D
Then we wandered around Union Station for a while, looking in the shops. (My sister got a nifty scarf, my brother magazine about the new Tron movie, and he almost got a cool-looking Hot Wheels car...except that it rang up at FOUR DOLLARS. They only sell for a dollar at Toys'R'Us, so we were all like 'I dunn think so.')
When we got home, my 'cake' awaited! My dad asks me the other day what I want for a cake, if he should make one or go buy one at Sam's or what. My answer? 'Let's have Cinnabon cinnamon rolls!' So that's what we had. Was kinda funny watching him put the candles in. XD
Then I got my presents, most of which I had chosen myself. X3
And while my sibs worked on catching up on journals (because they hadn't written in them for a couple days and were behiiiiiiiind), I ran upstairs with my awesome stuff:


A cuuuuute pair of new boots (that will take...a little bit of getting used to because I hardly ever wear anything with ANY sort of heel. XD)


My Buddha Board. (Which, as you see below, works perfectly well. Cool effect as the picture fades, like in the second photo.)



A treasure chest box to keep my geocaching swag in - I've been looking for something suitable for months now and found this the other week in an art museum. Now my swag doesn't have to be kept in a plastic sandwich baggie on my shelf. Yay!

I have another pop-up book by this guy (Narnia), and love it. I came across this one in the same museum I found the treasure chest in and REALLY loved it.

Recently I've been on this HUGE Wonderland kick, where I've bought a whole bunch of Alice-related stuff...this was perfect to add to my little collection. X3

I took pictures of two of the pages. Aren't they incredible?

There's lift the flap pages on the sides (you can see one in the left side of the tea-table page photograph) that ALSO have popups. It's impressive.

Finally, I got this great how-to-draw book - the only gift I didn't know about before my birthday. XD

I love Chris Hart's stuff, he does such beautiful pictures. The girls in this book are super cute.

But wait, there's more!

While my sibs were journaling, I came up to my room and got on my computer to visit with some of my friends before going to bed. I have a group of really good friends on a website called gaiaonline, and not only did they all wish me happy birthday, they all sent me virtual gifts! X3

So I got a whole bunch of awesome items for my avatar on Gaia, including a few I'd been wanting for a while.

All in all I think it was a pretty great birthday.

Even if we did end up walking, according to 'Chuck', my Pokewalker (named for Chuck Norris, 'Walker', Texas Ranger? XDDDD I know, it's a HORRIBLE joke, but I love it), fourteen THOUSAND steps yesterday. WOW!

So that's my 'birthday report' :3

And the second blogpost in like a week! Isn't it amazing?

We'll have to see if I can keep this up. Maybe I'll do a picture post next time, since I've actually been using my drawing tablet for more than just a glorified mousepad and have stuff I can show you. :D

Christmas 2010!

Long time no talk, ne?
'Pologies for that, I've been busy. XD
I'll try to be better about posting, particularly since I've been making cute stuff in various places. (For one thing, I've been playing with my tablet and have started having some digital art actually worth saving and showing.)

Buuuuuut.
Christmas was pretty much with the awesome this year.
I decided to make all of the gifts to give to my family this time. Made four amigurumis (which I'll put up pictures of in another post), one for each of my parents and each of my siblings. What I worked hardest at making, though, was the scarves I gave my sister and brother.

This one is modeled by my sister but actually made for my brother. (When I took the picture I couldn't very well have him wear it, could I? XD)
It's HUGE: about five and a half feet tall and probably at least 10 inches wide. Striped yellow and black (Pittsburgh Steelers colours, his favorite football team), the scarf totally made his geeky mathematical self squee in delight - the 'striped pattern' is actually a visual representation of the first 100 digits of the mathematical expression pi. You know, 3.1415......etc. So the first 'stripe' is 3 rows wide, the next one 1 row, then 4 rows. '0' is made by switching colours every stitch to make a dashed line.
His face, when he realized what it was, was the BEST thing I saw all night. I was afraid his eyes were going to pop out of his head, they went so wide. XD
It's also an INCREDIBLY WARM scarf - my sister, when she posed for the picture, could only keep it on for about half a minute because it was 'really, REALLY hot'. Good for cold, windy DC trips, no?



I made this scarf for my sister, and it didn't take NEAR as long as my brother's. His was over 550 rows of 80 stitches each of straight knitting. Took more than a month and a half to make it.
My sister's took about a half a week. XD
I saw the idea for this one in a crochet magazine...didn't buy the magazine, but I looked over the pattern and remembered enough of the details to recreate it.
It's meant to mimic the look of the paper chain garlands. (I used to love making those.) And the colours, for my Beehive president sister, are the value colours - although finding the right shades was a bit of a pain, particularly the gold! (For anyone needing 'gold' yarn, Simply Soft's bone colour is just right. :3)




Alright, enough of the stuff I gave to people, onto the stuff I got! XD

Christmas Eve we always open family gifts. And for sibling gifts, we started the tradition a couple years back of going to the dollar store to pick out a couple of fun things for each other (the siblings). Part of the fun is in trying to figure out what people would like without bumping into them and keeping the items secret so they don't see! (Although since I made/had already bought three gifts for my brother and sister - the scarves, an amigurumi for each, and a necklace for each I bought at the Renaissance Festival almost two months ago - I didn't get to play. *sigh*)
So, from my sister I got an awesomely cute colouring book, a pack of Blue's Clues stickers, and a package of Goetze's caramel creams (already eaten!), and from my brother I got a pack of silly stickers, a cool book to read, a fun puzzle (which I forgot to have in the photograph! ^^"), and a package of 8 fun-size 100 Grand bars (partly eaten. XD)




From Grandma Weatherston I got this pretty purple blanket in the right. Then parent gifts - purple Eeyore pajamas at the bottom of the picture, the Hunger Games trilogy (an AWESOME set), and the giant WALL-E plush in the left (affectionately named WALL-A since he's ginormous compared to my other WALL-E plush, just like the WALL-As in the movie tower over WALL-E. XD)





Christmas morning!
Stockings are always my favorite to open. X3
There's always yummy candy (not pictured because I've already eaten most of it!) and little presents - mini stuff is always my favorite!
We take turns opening presents, my sibs and I. When they both opened their squishy packages and got socks, I thought for sure I was getting some too. Maybe fuzzy socks to keep my feet warm on those early seminary mornings?
Nuh-uh! I got an awesome Cheshire Cat hat - perfect, since I didn't really have one...and the one I kept borrowing from my mom didn't like to stay down over my ears and keep them warm. This one most definitely will keep my ears warm. XD
Then, holy cow cool, I opened the other package and found a game I've been dying to have since it came out - Pokemon Soul Silver is the DS remake of my second favorite Pokemon EVAR. (Pokemon Yellow being my first favorite. :3) One of the niftiest/funniest things about it is it comes with a Pokewalker - a pedometer. XD
I know JUST how to get a ton of steps on it - slip it in my pocket whenever we go to DC. That'll do it. *laughs*



Then we had breakfast before moving onto the 'big' gifts - the nonstocking stuff.
The drawing book is one I knew I wanted - I have a whole bunch of other books from that company and LOVE them. I'd never seen the finger puppet one before ever. The patterns are SUPER cute. Guess I'll have new stuff I can make while I wait for my brother to finish in Seminary or my sister to finish in Piano. XD
I LOVE the Alice bag. I recently got addicted to all things Wonderland, I'm not sure why. But this bag is absolutely GINORMOUS and wonderfully cute. I'm thinking it may work really well for a crochet bag...or a drawing one, since it's large enough to hold sketchbooks with ease!
Maybe it will be my supply bag for the Drawing class I'm going to be taking Spring semester (yes, you heard me right - I am FINALLY going to take an art class. I'll talk all about it in a different post, though. :3)
My final gift, and a very cool one, is the mystical looking ball in the bottom of the picture...it's a Fushigi ball, made for the art of contact juggling, a form of juggling where the ball never leaves your hands. It was made pretty famous in the movie Labyrinth - remember the crystal bubbles Jareth juggles? Well, that wasn't done by David Bowie but by Michael Moschen, one of the world's foremost contact jugglers.



That's not all, though! (Well, that is it for the photographs. XD)
We also got a bunch of cool stuff that's not for any one person but for the whole family.
We got a number of Wii games (including Epic Mickey, which was COOL, and a Disney karaoke game), a bunch of board games (I love The Game of Things and Quelf looks totally awesome), and a really nice easel for painting and drawing! AWESOME!

So I'd say it was a pretty great Christmas. :3
I'd write more, but I'm busy hunting down Pokemon, keeping mah ears warm, and trying not to drop this heavy ball on my foot while trying to balance it on my fingers. Ciao!

Zoos Aplenty!

This has been a busy week for the Weatherston Zoo Crew...in less than a week, we've gone to zoos 3 times!

The first came earlier this week, when we went to the Baltimore Zoo with our friends the Cornwall family.

As you might tell from the pictures, much craziness ensued, from butt-watching rhinos, flying down slides, turtle-riding, and cowgirling.















Snoozing like a polar bear sounded like a good idea by the end of the day.







Today, we had decided to go to the National Zoo in Washington DC. At least until Mom noticed an article in the newspaper than mentioned that at the celebration of the second birthday of Samson the elephant at the Baltimore Zoo there would be served cakes made by Charm City Cakes. As in the Charm City Cakes of Ace of Cakes fame. [Google if you've no idea what I'm talking about. It's only one of the most loved shows in our house. They make AWESOME cakes. Go look. Now. Shoo. Then come back.]

The problem then is...do we go? We had just been to the Baltimore Zoo, and still wanted to go to the National Zoo...but cake! By Duff! Cake!

So we did both.

Mom didn't tell Stevie what we were doing until we were almost there.

He then proceeded to drool. Vastly. We nigh well needed a mop to deal with it.

When we got there we quite a bit of time to kill until the gate opened. Then we rode the tram back to the part of the zoo wherein the celebration would occur. We walked (swiftly) past the animals, for of course the elephants are found in the very backmost portion of the zoo. We missed Duff himself by only a few moments - Stevie glimpsed a man on a motorcyle roar off, who we realized later must have been him. Several of the CCC girls were there, however. They were kind enough to pose in a picture with Stevie, as well as sign his zoomap.
There were a number of activities planned. The serving of the cake, of course (we were first in line). Signing a card for the guest of honor, as well as writing birthday greetings on the sidewalk with chalk (which then got drawn on by little kids coming later). We saw the cake that the zookeepers made for Samson...not something I'd want to eat, but it looked yummy for elephants.
We chose to have the chocolate cake filled with delicious peanut butter filling over the one with raspberry. Good choice, I think.



We may have gotten filmed in line...and my Dad may have gotten filmed licking his plate clean - watch for us in 3-4 months on an Ace of Cakes episode in season 9! *laughs*
We skipped the rest of the birthday bash, as we had another zoo to get to!

The National Zoo had crazy amounts of people. Almost no parking whatsoever, and a crowd of probably thousands of people.

The trees were blooming. They were extremely pretty. Looked like a huge group of white butterflies settled on a bare tree. Or popcorn. Depending on your point of view.



The prairie dogs were posing.



As were the meerkats.



The pandas were...eating. And eating. And...well, you get the idea.



And Missy was...getting pennies. Her penny collection must be worth lots by now! A couple of dollars, for sure. *grins*



All in all, a sucessful (but tiring) day.

Tomorrow we go to an art festival!

First Trip to the Science Center

Recently I blogged about the trip we made to the Science Center for Pi Day. That was not our first trip there.

The first trip we made was the week prior. It was to be a 'short' trip...we did not explore EVERY part of the building.

The very first thing I saw and was excited about as we walked up to the strange-shaped building that is the Sceince Center was the sign for the geocaching exhibit. [Aside: I LOVE geocaching...even though I do not yet have access to a GPS. ^^" I do my best by studying other people's pictures, reading their comments, and googlemaps. It doesn't work vastly well, but it's still fun. For those who do not know, geocaching is the hobby of finding hidden caches of items and such by using their GPS, then logging their visit to the cache on geocaching.com.]

I thought it was super cool that they had an exhibit, including caches hidden around the harbor that you can borrow museum GPS to find. (We haven't done that yet.) When we later went to the exhibit, I was the only kid to go through the entire maze they had, reading all the signs. (Dad came with me. ^^)

That was not, however, the first thing we did. First we watched the new Alice in Wonderland movie from Tim Burton on the IMAX. In 3d. It was pretty awesome. (My favorite character was probably the Cat. Or the Dormouse. Except for that icky eye-poking thing she does.)

After that we did some exploration of the museum.

Dad got tired and decided to rest for a bit.

On a bed of nails! Ouch!

Not really.

We went up to the roof of the Science Center, where they have a really cool telescope. They also have screens you can hold in front of your eyes so as to safely look at the sun. It filtered out light...and made the sun appear green.

We even got to look at the sun through the telescope. Needless to say, you got a lot better picture. Dad spent a long time looking through it.

I couldn't see through very well...sometimes having glasses means suffering the curse of being unable to through telescopes...microscopes...binoculars...

I like my glasses, however. I enjoy clarity in my life. *laughs*

I did manage to take a picture through the telescope.

I was feeling pretty good about my picture...until one of the guys running the telescope goes "No, no, no...that's not a good picture...this is a good picture!" He spends several minutes getting me a closeup picture of the sun...it even has some action going on toward the left side - a sun flare. Looks like a little curved thread.

As long as we were on the roof, I wanted to get a good shot of the view. Only way the view could be better is if they had built it so you could face the water.

Finally, just some other pictures I took of the interior of the building from varying heights.

I imagine that these probably will not be the last time you see blogposts about the Science Center around here...it's become a very popular place for our family!

Happy Birthday!

Today's my Grandma Elna's birthday!

I wanted to wish her a very happy birthday!

We love ya here at the zoo crew.

^_____________________^

Happy Pi Day!

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510...

Enough of that.

Today is March 14th! 3.14.2010!

I discovered 'Pi Day' a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I've actually celebrated it.
Now, I don't like math, but I do like the concept of a math symbol-related holiday. And a reason to eat pi. I mean pie. I also enjoy making pi jokes. (Mathematician: Pi r squared. Baker: NO! Pies are round!)

Well, when we went to the Baltimore Science Center last week (which I will get around to blogging about), we noticed that today would be Pi Day, and they would be doing special events to celebrate.
Both my brother and I decided that we...had...to...go.

So we did. ^^
And it was awesome.

Now, the weather was a bit icky...but we didn't care.
The birds might have, though. They looked kind of miserable.

My brother signed up for the drawing to get into the pie-eating contest. He didn't get in. Too bad, he would have whomped on those kids! Most of them barely touched their pie, because they didn't want to get their faces dirty.

The science center was doing a lot of cool activities: there were hula hoops (Pi is important in calculating the circumference of circles, of course), pi colouring pages, making pi necklaces (three beads of a colour, then one bead of a different colour, then four beads of a different colour, etc.), reciting as much of pi as you can (Let's see...chocolate, pumpkin, apple...oh, you mean the digits?), stringing pi along the stairwell of the building, one digit at a time, like a number garland:

There was eating pi...at least, Moon Pies.

My favorite, however, was piku and piems.

-

Celebrate

Pi

Day with haiku.

-

Traditional form:

Five seven five; or Pi form:

Three then one then four.

-

Call me the

Pi

Poem Master.

-

Feel free to make up

Your own 'piems' for Pi Day.

Does it look like fun?

-

The one I made up at the building actually went like this:

The symbol is cool!

As for the food, I think that

Cheesecake is better.

-

We did spend some exploring the rest of the science center too. We went to a couple of planetarium shows and played in most of the exhibits. (They wouldn't let us go play in the Kids' Room. My plan of hijacking someone's kid to get an in was nixed by the family. *sigh* Guess I'll have to plot something else.

One thing I found that was really cool was a small area devoted to the IMAX theater. It has lookthrough spots where you can watch the IMAX projector working, which was neat, but I found the display that compared different kinds of film fascinating. The two short, skinny films are VHS and such, while the bottom filmstrip is the IMAX film.

After we got done at the science center, we drove past a really funky looking art museum-thing. (I'll put pictures up in a slideshow soon as I figure out how).

When we got home we had dinner (mm...burgers). Since Stevie was bummed about missing the pie-eating contest...which he won, despite his 20-second handicap! But only by a few seconds...seconds I had lost because I had to stop to breath through my mouth because I'd gotten whipped cream up my nose! My sinuses are still burning. Kids, do not snort whipped cream. It ain't pretty.

Then we had pie. Chocolate cream. Mm.

But we ate it with chopsticks. *shrugs* That's life at our house for ya.

This morning, I actually sent out a message to my crochet group about Pi Day...with some links that I had found. I found an awesome hat to make my brother, as well as an amigurumi pi symbol. I'm thinking birthday presents, maybe?

So, overall Pi Day was much with the fun.

I hope everyone else had a great Pi Day...and if not, there's always next year!

-

It's farewell

to

Pi Day this year.

-

May next year

be

just as much fun!

-

[Slideshow of art museum to be added as soon as possible.]

[Am also working on drafting blog posts for everything from the trips we did in Texas to the move to this point in time.]

[Apologies for the screwed up formatting - I CANNOT get it to stay right.]