A Birthday Cake/Present

Recently, one of my little siblings turned eleven! Yea, and as always, I had to out do myself in the wrapping, (for any of you who don't know, my wrapping is always really extreme. It happened kind of by accident, when one Christmas I wrapped about half the presents interestingly, even since then I have been legally required to wrap my presents cool.)

The base of the cake, the real present is the square on

the bottom, and I forgot to take a picture before I added

the frosting.

Gluing on the frosting.  At first that was going to be

it because, even though I wanted it to look more like 

a cake, I couldn't think of anything.

Then one of my other sisters came up with the brilliant idea of making candles.

Birthday cake/present all done!





Bookmarks!

Every reader probably employs the use of some kind of book mark. Whether it be a nice one from the store, a home made one, or a torn piece of news paper. (Unless, of course, you are one of those evil people who doggy ear;) I though, I have gone a little over board with book marks, but just a little. As of the moment, I have about eleven. (Twelve if you can the one I can change as two.)

                                      And that doesn't include the number that have been either lost or stolen. If it did, it would be well over a dozen. In fact, I think I have lost or broken more book marks that I have at the moment. Anyway, I absolutly love book marks. It's like a knick-knack that you can use. What's better than that? 



                                                                                                                                                               



Theses are the book-marks I have made myself. The bottom three are actually using friendship bracelet designs using embroidery floss.







These are just regular book-marks I guess. The top

one I won at a give away, and the bottom was a

graduation gift



These book-marks are from different parts of the world.

The yellow one is from Latvia, and the brown one is from...

I'm not entirely sure. Somewhere in the middle east. 

I pretty dragon fly book-mark. It isn't with the

regular book marks because it doesn't stick out of

just the top like those one do, but rather both ends.   

  

My charm ones, that you hook over the edge of

the book. The one with two is the

exchangeable one. The other has to stay the same.



Made to Match

Being an avid reader, I often employ the use of a book mark. Now, for some reason, the girly, girl deep inside of me combined with the uptight, schedule obsessive, drill sergeant I usually am cause me to have a deep seeded need to match my bookmark to my book. Sometimes it is better than others, especially if the book or bookmark are more neutral in colors, or if the book mark has a seasonal theme to it, or something.

Anyway, I couldn't find a bookmark I liked so I made a new one. Well, not a completely new one, only half a new one.

 This is a bookmark I got a while ago, a Christmas present I'm pretty sure. See how the charm can come off? It didn't used to be able to do that, but with some wire bending and the addition of a finding, I now can change the charms.

Until yesterday, the only charm for that bookmark is the one you see in the picture. Unable to find a bookmark to match my book though, I made a new charm for it. I mostly did this because, for some reason, this book needed to have a matching book mark, and making a charm seemed quicker and easier than a whole new bookmark.

Supplies for my new bookmark charm.

So here it is all put together.

My First Day of Not School

So yesterday, of course, was Labor Day, but for my house hold it was also the first day of school. I know, starting school on a holiday seems a little weird, but starting things off with a four day week is bothersome. I though, did not do a speck of school. My first year being a graduate, and it felt a little odd not sitting at my desk and working on the first lessons in my text books along with the rest of the kids. Yesterday was my first day of not school. (Hopefully though, come the winter term, I will be taking classes up at the community college.)

Getting all ready for school.

Colleen and Abi look happy and productive as they day school.

Colleen was so cute! She is kind of a Tom boy, but she "dressed up" with a really cute shirt for the first day of school. Abi had to help her pick the out fit.

My mum drinking her teaching fuel.

Just because I didn't do school doesn't mean I was lazy. I did my daily devotional, and I filled out a few job applications and wrote some cover letters.

Then to finish off the first day of school, our power went out. Sunny day, clear skies, calm weather, and the power goes out. *Sigh* It does that where we live, a lot, and it seems the worst on our block. (Then again I'm sure that is what everyone is thinking.)

Talking about education and school stuff, I am finally, finally going to take my GED. Yes, after several months of procrastination, I finally was a big girl and set it up. It involved calling many people only to be directed to someone else, to get an answering message, telling me to call someone else. I did finally call the right person, Micky. She seemed both relieved and happy to discover that I was not only over eighteen, and that I was home schooled and not a high school drop out. Apparently there is a lot less paper work that way.

So Micky signed my up to take the GED test as soon as possible. October 1st. Grrrrr. The thing is, is that our district is no longer offering GED test. Supposedly the college, (the aforementioned community one) was going to start offering them again. When I called them though, they weren't sure. If they did, it wasn't going to be until the winter terms. I figured October was better than winter, so come October 1st, I will pretty much be spending all day doing my GED.

78 Words

So Esquire, along with Aspen Writers' Foundation are hosting a short, short fiction contest. I first saw it on KatySue's blog.  I didn't have the sense to click on this picture,

so I was in the dark, and wondered what on earth the 78 word thing was about. I follow NaNoWriMo on facebook, and later that day I saw that they had posted about the Esquire contest, so I assumed that KatySue got it from that. Little did I know she got it from a blog she followed, and not from facebook at all.

While Esquire isn't exactly the type of reading material I would choose, the challenge intrigued me. So I did it, wrote a story in 78 words. I did enter it in the contest, even though I didn't like the looks of the magazine I figured it couldn't hurt to enter. In fact, I probably would have blogged about this before, but I am paranoid and didn't want to put my short, short on the web till I had entered it into the contest, because it is just so good I know someone would try to steal my idea.

78 Words

(or When Words Appear)

The story of humanity came to a man as he sat, idly holding his pen. The story spoke of all the pain in the world, and all the joy. The man realized what he had written only after the last word had been penned. In his excitement, he accidentally spilled his glass of water onto the paper, washing the story away. He tried to capture it again, but each time he tried, only an ugly perversion would appear.

So there it is. A story in 78 words, the best I could make them. For me, it was surprisingly hard to write. (KatySue wrote and finished hers in about five minutes.) Sure, initially when I wrote it, I told myself I would not look at the word count and just write till I had finished, then work on any extra words there may happen to be. I finished in about 5 minutes, with 110 words. It took quite a while to figure out what 30 or so words to scratch so the story would still say all I wanted it to say, but not be too long. There was quite a bit of condensing, turning two sentences into one, rephrasing things so they held the same meaning, but used fewer words. For someone who is naturally long winded, it was quite a challenge.

Writing the short, short was more like writing poetry as opposed to a story. It was all about making sure the words fit together nicely while working in a certain amount of space. It was annoying having such restrictions, and I certainly felt at times that the story would be better if I could have had at least 100 words. It's not only about saying what you want to say, but knowing which words to say it with, and how to say it to make it work. It was a good exercise though, especially for someone long winded like me. The process of using fewer words to say as much, (if not more) is a good talent to learn.

Even so, I didn't write in it all that I wanted to. It was, in fact, supposed to end with the man giving up and simply writing a few words that "explained" the metaphor of the story. When I was editing it though, either I could get rid of how it sounded at the beginning, or get rid of that ending. I chose the later. The story sounded clipped and sparse other wise, and I kind of like how now it is kind of left up to the reader to see what the story means to them. One of those instances, actually, where I have said more with fewer words. Before the reader would have had to seen it the way I wrote it, but now the story may move the reader in which ever way the reader needs to be moved.