Disney Shirts

2017-10-06 20.34.56We’re headed back to WDW pretty soon, this time with Matt’s whole side of the family. I am not a big fan of the matchy-matchy family shirts, but I do like to do a little something special for a Mickey trip. So I came up with the idea of making a “custom” Mickey head for each person. I drew a ton of designs in Illustrator, drawing inspiration from all over the web – except Darth Mickey – he was cribbed directly from the web. Then circulated then let everyone have their choice.

They got printed on some t’shirt transfer paper, ironed on and voila. I’m excited to see everyone in their shirts!

A Maker Kind of Weekend

2016-06-11 13.48.24-2It was a good weekend. Mostly they are.

The highlight of the weekend was Denver’s Mini Maker Faire. It’s quite a bit different (smaller) than the main Maker Faire in Bay Area, but it was fun! And cheap ($20 for us all!). And we got to do some cool stuff. Like make little cars (above).

2016-06-11 13.54.43And try out weaving …

2016-06-11 10.44.19And make light up pins …

2016-06-11 09.04.50And show off my McGyver for president shirt (it was a hit).

We were there for over 4 hours and luckily it was a mostly indoor event, because it was HOT! HOT HOT! Summer is here.

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Afterward, we had naps (Matt and I) and then sent the kids off to the community center so we could have a date night. Ahhhhhhh Grown Up Time. I’m a fan.

In other weekend news:

  1. We had people over on Friday (jerk chicken cook off, natch)2016-06-10 18.11.28
  2.  Tabby got to kitty-sit (OH JOY!) and had a playdate.
  3. We finished off two more benches (except a little sanding and some sealing)2016-06-11 16.48.52
  4. Ben got his own playdate and some quality time on his skate board.
  5. We had (different) people over on Sunday for burgers.

Yes, no complaints. I do love me some summer.

 

 

Raingutter Regatta

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Being as that I am a girl with no brothers, I have little experience with the boy side of scouting. Which is actually part of what makes Ben’s Boy Scout events so much fun. It’s lots of new stuff.

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For the uninitiated, like myself, the Raingutter Regatta is the maritime equivalent of the Pinewood Derby. You build a boat, paint it, make it a sail and race it in rain gutters against your fellow scouts.

We (of course) discovered that this event was sooner than we’d thought on Monday right after Matt left for a business trip (that wouldn’t have him home until today), so I got tasked with turning the rectangular wooden piece and dowel we were given into y’know … boats.

Fortunately, I have been paying attention during shop time. And I was able to complete the task with little fanfare.

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The kids painted them and off we went.

DSC_6322Ben competed against fellow Wolf Scouts and Tabby was in the “family” (mostly sisters) bracket.

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It was a double elimination tournament (I learned how those work yesterday), and both kids won their first 2 races and lost their third.

DSC_6360Which netted them 3rd place in each of their brackets!

DSC_6365Not too shabby for our first go. More importantly, they had a great time!

 

A Weekend in the Shop

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This guy had a birthday last week.

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It was a pretty fun affair if fairly low key. He got new sheets and a new backpacking chair (which hasn’t actually arrived yet) and he got to hang out with these weirdos and drink homemade lemon cream soda (delish).

But my other gift to him was taking a whole Friday off to hang together. And it was pretty awesome.

See we needed a new patio table. We had one from our old house, but it was just a little too wide to really fit our somewhat narrow porch. And as “luck” would have it, a crazy windstorm picked up the tiles that made the top of the old one and smashed them into the railings and floors, breaking all but 2 of them. So while the table frame was fine, it needed a new top and we were ready to say bubye to that table.

I designed this new one sometime last summer before the other one was destroyed. It’s almost 12′ long and as we plan to have 4 benches (2 per side) and 2 chairs on each end, we can comfortably seat 14 people. Not too shabby.

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Matt and one of his friends have been working in his wood shop by night, toiling on our new patio set and on our friend’s new coffee table. We had friends coming over that evening and had created an artificial deadline of having the table done when they arrived, even though the forecast said it was supposed to be cold.

But artificial deadlines are great and we got down to business making the table. The guys already had the frame built, so we just had to add the top. It seems easy, but it was quite a bit of work, let me tell you.

I got a real appreciation for the work Matt puts in in his wood shop, that’s for sure. Each board has to be properly dimensionalized (made perfectly square and into the correct thickness) which is quite a lot of work, running it multiple times through two different machines since each pass can only take off a fraction of an inch at a time.

Then you have to cut it to size (on one of 2 or 3 different saws) and attach. The attaching part on this is actually “simple” compared with his normal work. He regularly uses complex joinery (not screws) to attach pieces. This one has carefully hidden screws instead since it’s less “fine” woodwork.

Finally, you must finish – that’s at least 3 rounds of sanding (everywhere!) and then using some variety of finishing solution on it – stain, sealer, oil, etc. then sanding again, staining again and sanding again. You can do this a couple more coats if you want to depending on the finish. This is the part I regularly help with, so I’m very versed in it.

We didn’t get past the first three rounds of sanding (still not done) but it was fine to eat off!

You might notice the middle looks kind of strange – that’s a trough that runs up the center. You can put ice in it for drinks (like so), or add river rocks and sterno cans (like so) for table top s’mores. Also, if we end up hating the idea, we can pretty easily run narrow boards down the center and just finish it off.

Anyhow, that was day 1. I fully expected to be done, but inclement weather caused our friends to cancel the hike we had planned and so we decided to get going on 1 of the 4 benches.

2016-05-14 18.26.47-1So we did. More dimensionalizing, cutting to size.

And then gluing! It seems so strange that something that we sit on (several of us, actually) could be held together with glue, but that’s the deal. I suppose there’s also some dowels and strategic structure choices, but mostly, it’s glue. Crazy.

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But it turned out great! Check it out!
2016-05-14 21.03.27This guy actually required even more sanding than normal because we were sanding several disparate pieces of wood to perfectly flat and it’s not much difference (less than 1/32 in most cases), but it’s a lot of sanding.

Love how it looks though!

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And here’s the other little thing I worked on … a little sign for Matt’s shop. My woodgeek. 😀

 

2015 in Review

20162015 was in many ways an excellent year for me and mine. The second full year following Mom’s death had it’s own pitfalls and moments of sorrow, but it went on and was definitely more happy than sad.

Family

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We soaked up lots of family time, skiing, hiking, camping, backpacking, cooking, walking, reading, playing and just hanging together. It’s odd – I thought things might get quieter as the kids got older – I think because I thought they’d take less of my time to manage, and they do! – but we do so much more together.

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Tabby is turning into a young lady right before our very eyes. She’s worked hard at school and at home and generally has a great attitude and work ethic. She reads like it’s breathing and impresses me constantly with her artistic abilities and insights. She got her ears pierced over Christmas break after working hard for this all semester, and it makes her look even more grown up. She’s enjoying learning piano and getting pretty good and has fun with karate and swimming.

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Benji is still our darling little guy. I’m so glad he’s not too big or cool to give me lots of hugs and kisses and snuggles. School can be a struggle for him with all the requirements to sit down and concentrate, but he does well academically and we’re grateful for that. At home he’s a huge ball of energy. He spends his freetime building either with legos or in Minecraft. We’ve also gotten him interested in running on the treadmill and we’re hoping to help him beat some winter blahs that way (fully supervised of course). He’s a force to be reckoned with on the slopes and so so much fun. He also had a major puncture this year, but it was of the unscheduled variety – he had his finger slammed and badly injured in a door at school and a few hours at the emergency room later and minus a fingernail, he is much improved.

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Matt and I are doing our usual balancing act, making sure everyone’s fed, bills are paid and the house doesn’t look like too much of a disaster zone. We bought a second treadmill on a crazy sale in early December so we can workout together in the evenings … important because we’re training for another half marathon in April! We sneak away just the two of us whenever we can manage it – date nights when dad takes the kids or sometimes a day off when the kids are at school and occasionally, we hire a sitter to watch the kids so we can go for a run or a bike ride. It’s a nice little luxury.

Work

Matt took on a new and extended role about halfway through 2015 and it’s making him happy and keeping him busy! He goes to the office about once a week and traveling more (none of us loves this, but it’s good for him and his career).

Work has been going great for me as well. I work long hours sometimes, but usually it’s very manageable. We’ve picked up a ton of work this year and really gotten our “hit rates” up – that’s marketing speak for how often we win work. Some of it is the improving economy, I’m sure, but I fancy that some of it has to do with some cool new things we’ve been doing. Cheeeeeers!

Travel

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It was a fun travel year. The coolest trip we took, was probably the surprise trip we took in May! It deserves its own post (which it never got), but I won (!!) a trip to San Francisco to go to MakerFaire! So Matt and I took off while my dad watched the kids and we flew to CA and did it up right! It was a blast!

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We also had a few ski trips throughout the winter and filled up the summer with camping trips and our first ever family backpacking trip.

Our longest trip was from Denver to Nashville, with some stops along the way. We pulled the pop-up to Missouri and dropped it off at my mom’s cousin’s house. Then we went onto Nashville, spent a few days there, including a great trip to Mammoth Cave in KY, and then picked it up, took it to family reunion and came home. Exhausting, but wonderful!

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We finished off the year with an amazing trip to Big Sky, Montana over Christmas to ski!

Home Improvement

We did lots of little projects around the house throughout the year. We organized our laundry room and some kitchen drawers. We did a bunch of yard work. We planted a garden.

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But probably the biggest project of the year finished up right before Christmas when Matt installed our new barn door!!! He and a family friend worked for HOURS on it and it turned out so amazing. And trust me, it’s even better in person.

 

There are probably another load of things I could and maybe should talk about, but those are some of the highlights. It was a good year.

Pallet Flag

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I know I’ve been a bad blogger. Like terrible. But man, it’s been NUTS. Work got nuts. Then I got sick (strep-AGAIN) making work even more nuts. And of course it’s not like all the regular stuff stops when I’m sick or busy at work, so on and on it goes.

We’ve been kicking butt around the house. You should see the cool stuff we did last weekend. It’s not super photogenic (like this project), but we started the weekend with one vehicle (our pop-up) in the garage and ended the weekend with all three in there. We are ready (though not anxious for!) snow. We got tons of cardboard and boxes and random stuff gone and hung everything up. Then to top it all off, we installed landscaping lighting in the yard because the landscaping is going in SOON.

Anyhoo, the project.

Labor Day weekend when we were in Vail, we had the pleasure of dining at Mountain Standard, the sister restaurant to one of our perennial faves there, Sweet Basil. It is the same awesome food, but more of a low-key casual atmosphere. And directly above our table was a very cool industrial-chic version of the CO flag made from reclaimed wood. I loved it immediately and knew we had to DIY one for our house. We started asking around about pallets and in a ‘hood still well under construction they’re pretty plentiful. So last week in the middle of crazy, Matt suddenly jumps up and goes “roofers!” and runs out of the house. Apparently that was code for the fact that our super had told him that roofers always had pallets and he was tracking them down. Just an hour or two later, we had 6 pallets all to ourselves! For free! Score!

The first thing we had to do was disassemble them. Pallets are a hot mess of semi-crappy wood and nails, so we went to the interwebs to figure out the best way to do it. We read all up on pallets as well and ascertained that ours were in fact free from dangerous chemicals (these were actually phased out around 2007 so if the ones you get are new, you’re probably safe). So after reading up, we decided the best option for us was the sawsall! Matt of course owns one and he and his handy demolition blade made relatively quick work of two of them so we’d have our pick of wood.

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Then we laid it out. The wood was 40″ wide and in a wide variety of condition. Some had gotten wet, making it wavy, some had gotten knicked by the sawsall, some had mold (ick). And it was different widths. Looking at flags on the ‘net to determine ratio, we decided between 25 and 27″ tall was best for us, and we ended up with a couple of wider pieces and 4 narrow ones. We then used some of the other bits of reclaimed wood to nail them together along the back (two pieces total).

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Next I had to make a stencil for it. Using my mad chops from the days of art class, I used the little projector we have to project an image of the correct size on the wall and then taped a piece of cardboard (we have TONS) that I tacked to the wall. Then I traced the outline of the flag with a pencil and then cut it out with an exacto knife, maintaining the pieces to use as mask as we worked.

2014-09-28 17.00.26Then came the fun part – painting. Well almost, Matt insisted on running over it with some coarse grit sand paper first.  He’s exacting like that.

So finally painting!!! As with all painting, you work from light to dark, so I did the white stripe first. I actually only eye-balled this, knowing I could easily paint over the overspray.

2014-09-28 17.09.25Next the yellow.

2014-09-28 17.10.45Then the red.

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And finally the blue! We were a little over excited so we didn’t take as much time as we should’ve between colors, but fortunately that only meant a leeetle bit of touch up.

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And just for funsies, we figured out what it would cost us to buy one of these on the interwebs. Bargain price as $100 and we saw them for as much as $200. I am also very grateful to my state for having a pretty simple flag design. NY or CA’s flags are simply out of my artistic skillz.

 

Pre-Moving Weekend


2014-07-20 20.06.01-1Not sure if one could really call this a weekend. Other than the fact that I didn’t have to work at the office. We worked like crazy around the house, getting everything ready to … MOVE!

2014-07-20 19.24.47Though two pieces of our mudroom cabinets finished up last weekend, Matt and I still had to finish all the pieces for the broom closet and all of the pieces for the bookshelf/counter 2014-07-19 16.23.12as well as the bench-top for the boot bench. This is the only piece that is not painted white, but is instead gorgeous cherry. I loved the way it looks as you work with it. I’m really excited to see it installed with the white cabinets. I think the contrast will be striking.

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So while Matt was still cutting and assembling, I was finishing. I am once again covered in paint, and he in sawdust. The kids got in on the action too. They can now sand things and help steady boards as they are cut.

2014-07-20 20.23.14During drying times, I worked on packing. Kelly came to help on Saturday and we got the kitchen almost entirely packed as well as a good portion of our bedroom. I packed up the bathroom last night and the kids’ room today. It’s getting tricky to walk around here.

2014-07-20 21.11.02Of course there’s lots more to do. We have just a few finishing touches to put on the cabinets tomorrow. It’s mostly touch-up painting, but there was an unfortunate incident where the main structure of the broom closet got knocked over by a gust of wind and the top was damaged. Then we have to finalize packing (those last few things you can’t put away until the night before or morning of). And we’ve got to make phone calls and pick up things like the air mattresses we’re borrowing from our friends and the barstools from storage so we have a place to sit the first couple of days.

It will be kind of a pain in the butt to be living in our house without many creature comforts, but not having the drive to deal with in the evenings will be worth it!

2014-07-19 19.04.55Of course it wasn’t allll work and no play. We took time off yesterday evening to go to dinner with my dad. He’s headed off on an extended fishing excursion so we had to get some last minute hugs in. He’ll be back in time to celebrate his birthday in mid August just before the kids are due to start school.

We also took some time to do some extra reading. The kids and I finished Little House in the Big Woods and I finished Eleanor & Park on audio as I worked. I also played a few rounds of Civilization Revolution …. Civ on the iPad!!

Friday Faves May 24, 2013

 

Another busy busy week! Looking forward to the long weekend. We need it!

riomaggiore

Favorite Daydream: Check out this beautiful lagoon in Riomaggiore, Italy. The Mediterranean coast is gorgeous! I could go there!

coolranchchickenFavorite Savory Treat: cool ranch, crockpot chicken. I am game to try this!

fred&georgeFavorite Funny: my HP nerd may be showing here, but I just adore this photo.

angelfoodFavorite Breakfast Nom: angel food french toast! Maybe this should be under sweet treat, but angel food is pretty healthy, right? riiiight?

chalkfairyFavorite Craftiness: I think doing these chalk drawings with the kids would be so much fun. I think Tabby would really get into it and maybe Ben if I can get him to hold still for a bit! He did pretty good on his b’day.

uphillFavorite Workout: Some great tips from Fit Sugar on running up hill. I’ve gotten lots better at this, but can definitely use some work!

blueberryyogurtFavorite Sweet Treat: check out these frozen yogurt blueberry bars – they look a little complicated but worth the effort!

penultimateFavorite App: This is an app I use practically every day for note taking at work and goofing around outside of work: Penultimate! It’s from the people who make Evernote and it’s basically a Moleskin on your iPad. It has loads of features too that I haven’t even scratched the surface on, including handwriting recognition.

MAKEFavorite Wise Words: Well Joss would know.

Have a wonderful weekend!!!!

Friday Faves May 17, 2013

Another busy Friday! Tabby has Field Day today, so I am spending half my day at her school, playing tag and giving out popcicles and the like. Should be fun! On to another round of Friday Faves.

attictheatreFavorite Daydream: check out this awesome attic movie theatre. I think what really appeals to me is the soft surfaces and cave-like look of it. I think I could watch movies or just sleep or read in here for hours.

caramelcrunchFavorite Purchase: I tried some of this ice cream at the Mother’s Day Race I ran on the recommendation of my girlfriend. Man, she was right. I am not sure I’ve ever had better ice cream. Sweet, salty, creamy, crunchy. AWESOME.  Not sure how widely available it is, since they’re a CO company, but if you can find it, BUY IT!! Coconut crunch is great too.

orangechickenFavorite Savory Delight: This orange chicken with asparagus looks awesome. I think we’re heading out of asparagus season, but I want to make some next week.

samethingFavorite App: This game’s a little hard to explain, but easy once you “get” it. You and a friend both say a random word, then you both try to find something in between your two words. Then again with the next two words you come up with until you both say the same thing. It’s also great because you can get it on Android and iOS. Interesting side note, it was developed by the band OK Go! (a personal fave).

tapeFavorite Craftiness: Just saw this great article on how to make your own paper tape!!  You just get some double-sided adhesive and put it on wrapping paper or whatever you like. Such a fun idea.

faroeFavorite Destination: This is Faroe Islands in Denmark and it is definitely going on my must-visit list. So beautiful.

bobFavorite Workout: Bob Harper’s 20  minute crossfit workout is all things I love: Bob Harper and Crossfit. All you need are some dumbells and this little vid.

avalancheFavorite Sweet Thang: Check out these avalanche bars. One of my favorite candy stores, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, sells something pretty similar. It won’t happen soon because I’m trying to behave myself vis-a-vis sugar, but I will have to try these out!

sofaFavorite Funny: bwwaaaahahhahahah! His expression says it all!!!

inferiorsFavorite Wise Words: yep … well said, Sirius.

bfastpizzaFavorite Breakfast Nom: I am constantly on the lookout for new breakfast ideas because while I could (and do) happily eat the same breakfast repeatedly for months, the kids like variety. This breakfast pizza looks great and has the protein that is hard to fit into a quickie breakfast on the way out the door. Going to try it soon – maybe for camping!

And that is it! Hope you have a great weekend!

Friday Favorites May 10, 2013

I am taking a half day today in order to play assistant to my awesome hubby’s mad scientist. Should be a good time! Fridays are fun.treehousesFavorite Daydream: Loooove me some treehouses. This is a very cool collection with a few I’ve never seen before.

lightupconstellationFavorite Craftiness: Look at this great light up constellation! A fun piece for your wall and so adaptable to other ideas.

turkeyburgerFavorite Savory Delight: Grilling season is upon us and I cannot wait to try out these mushroom crusted turkey burgers with Havarti. Bring it on!

skortFavorite Purchase: I bought a new skirt at Athleta this week … this one in black. It’s super cute and great for everything from work to play!

paradisecoveFavorite Adventure: And speaking of play, I saw this amazing swimming hole not to far from us, Guffey’s Paradise Cove. Can’t wait to explore it. It never ceases to amaze me how many amazing places are right in our backyard.

friedicecreamFavorite Sweet Treat: SkinnyTaste’s Unfried Ice Cream. Tasty and lighter. Yum.

7minworkoutFavorite Workout: 7-minute, research-based workout that exercises your whole body. We do a lot of these in bootcamp.

pocketboothFavorite App: This is fun … Pocketbooth does photobooth style photos on your phone.