Wednesday Thoughts

Happy Thanksgiving week! I love Thanksgiving - I love the food, the days off of work, my family's traditional candy house competition, seeing family, sleeping in, the Thanksgiving parade, the smell of turkey cooking, mashed potatoes, Oreo Delight, watching movies, Christmas shopping, Christmas music, snowflakes, sweaters, and so on. It's a magical time of year!

I haven't really updated much lately so I thought I'd give you a brief update on some stuff I've been doing lately!

Craft show!
Last weekend my sisters and I participated in a craft show. We made a little money, had a little fun, and ate peanut butter fudge. My nieces came and "helped." My older niece sold some loom bracelets she made too.

Crafting
(Duh.) I craft as much as I eat. And both are necessary to nourish me.

pinwheels and a chicken

paper marbling with Brady!

Baking
I've been making lots of marshmallows lately, and this dessert which calls for homemade marshmallows is perfect. Butterscotch, butter, and peanut butter (am I missing any kind of butter?) mixed with marshmallows. My dad took one bite and said they'd put him in an early grave.

Watching Agatha Christie's Poirot on Netflix
I love Agatha Christie, and though I'm partial to Miss Marple over Poirot, the Poirot episodes are very good. I'm constantly obsessed with Poirot's assistant's hair. Check this out:

Always with those circles at the top of her forehead! Is it me or is it awesome? Also, HOW does she do it?

I was also awed by these mens bathing suits in one episode:

Well, those are some things I've been up to lately. I guess we're mostly up to speed now. Or at least, according to the pictures on my cell phone that I used to remind me what I've been up to lately. I hope you all have an amazing Thanksgiving!

Happy Wednesday!

Weird Christmas

This weekend I went to Bronners, the largest Christmas store in the world. If you've never been there, you should know that it is quite an experience. It's hard to explain what this place is like. I'm trying to think of some adjectives and here's what comes to mind:

weird, magical, tacky, beautiful, expensive, extensive, breakable, fun, so weird, cool

Sexy Santa sums it all up:

Basically any ornament you could ask for, you'll find there. They have all the states, most countries, almost all the food groups, all the US sports teams, all the hobbies you could dream of, and so on.

And they engrave ornaments too, which is nice. In my family growing up, we all had our own engraved ornaments from Bronners. It's a nice tradition. There are a lot of classy, pretty ornaments at Bronners. However, there are also a LOT of weird ones too. Here are some of the weirder things I saw at Bronners:

No.

No.

Uncomfortable.

TMI.

 No.

Why.

Blech.

Am I being too old fashioned? Or are these awful?  Which is your least favorite?

Wednesday Thoughts

I woke up in an oddly good mood today. I felt free and happy. Maybe it had something to do with election day - who knows. I'm going to make today's Wednesday Thoughts about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ready?

The Good:

• Daylight savings started - my friends with kids are suffering because of this, so I feel bad for them. But I love the brighter, lighter mornings. Plus that extra hour of sleep on Sunday was sa-weet.
• Like many of you, I voted yesterday. I love voting - it makes me feel all excited and alive. Do you know what I mean? Here's a picture of me with my sticker from snapchat. I look like a friggin idiot because it's a selfie and selfie's are so embarrassing. I'll make it real small so you can scroll by it fast.

• Two of the proposals we Michiganders voted on were about wolves. Pretty cool. I would love to know some unique things other states voted on!
• I carved a pumpkin on Halloween using a star cookie cutter (an idea I no doubt got from Pinterest) and it worked! The cookie cutter did not survive though. All the hammering rendered it bent beyond recognition.

The Bad:

• It snowed on Halloween. Such a bummer for the kids! And for me. I had to open the door to hand out candy. The struggle was real.
• It's cold and flu season. I heard a coworker sneeze this morning and I almost lost it.

• I took a picture of the building where I work and sent it to a friend. His response was, "it looks like an insane asylum." What do you think?

The Ugly:

• Winter is coming. A house down the block always puts up an ice skating rink every winter and when I walked by this morning, they'd cleared the space for it. For ice. FOR WINTER! But here's the thing: I am determined to enjoy winter this year. We'll see if I can do it. I have a plan. More to come.

Happy Wednesday! 

Election Day

Election day is finally here which makes me sad. As much as I do love voting, I am truly going to miss the attack ads. They are so, so funny. They always freeze frame on the worst facial expression possible, then make it dark and moody and scary. The message being that while you thought the candidate was a nice person who cared about your state, they were actually a demon from Hell.

They quickly go from this:

To this:

And from this:

To this:

I believe none of them. Not the ones that support the person I want to vote for, or the ones that support the other guy. They all take things out of context to make the person sound as awful as possible. It's bad but it's also so funny. I will miss it.

VOTE!

PS, I'm almost positive that Governor Snyder got a voice coach. I heard him speak in a commercial recently and he sounded decidedly less like Kermit the Frog than usual.