In Which I Think a Time-Machine Would Be a Good Thing

I don't know what it's been about this last week, but I'd sure like to have a time machine so I could go backwards a few years.

Maybe it's because we just had (some of) the Kid's Senior Pictures taken.

Maybe it's because she just started her 2nd semester of her senior year.

Maybe it's because a family friend (whom the Kid has really liked for years) just left for Army Basic training.

Maybe it's because they all grew up way too fast and are starting to leave home.

I don't know exactly what it is. I know that's part of a parent's job, to get them ready to fly on their own, and I think we've done a pretty good job.

But I'd sure like to be able to go back and tell my past self to capture and enjoy more of the everyday moments from when they were younger, instead of trying to just get going to the next thing.

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The Kid and I went to see 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' tonight. We ended up sitting 4 rows from the screen. It was a pretty good movie, but some of the spinning scenes as seen from 4 rows from the screen were kind of dizzying.

But, I'm glad we got to go anyway. Even if she was cranky that we didn't go to Punch Pizza for dinner.

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Not sure how the genetics worked on this one...pretty sure it's taught that dark hair/eyes override every other color. Obviously the Kid didn't get the memo. She's no Mini-Me, that's for sure.

However, she IS getting better at giving The Look, so that's good. When she can make people quail at even the THOUGHT of getting The Look thrown in their direction, well, I'll know my job here is done.

NaBloWriMo Day 16

Wednesday, 16 November 2011
What is the moment that you leave childhood and enter adulthood?

Is there just one moment? I don't know.

So, is it an age thing? Even though I'm 842 (says so on my birth certificate), I don't think of myself as an adult much. Legally we're considered adults at 18 years old. Thing is, there's no way I was an adult at 18; even at the time I didn't consider myself an adult. Could it be at 21 when we can legally drink alcohol? Nah, because I wasn't adult then, either. I got married when I was 24, and I suppose that was closer to being an adult, and even more so because I had the Kid 2 weeks before I turned 25.

Is it a mentality thing? Like, I think and act like an adult, therefore I am? That might be it. The Kid is only 17, but she's an old soul, always has been. She is probably more adult than I am, even now. Being responsible is considered an adult trait, but does that make a person an adult, just because s/he is responsible and trustworthy?

I don't know that there's ONE moment where ta-da! we become adults. I think it's more of an ongoing process in which we keep evolving, hopefully for the better.

In the end, I just don't know.

365 Photos Day 312

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Yay! I voted! Now I can complain all I want about the results of the election!

That was always my Mom's thing about voting, or the lack thereof. "If you don't vote, you can't bitch." Makes perfect sense to me.

I remember on my 18th birthday, Mom asked, "Did you register to vote?" When I replied, "Not yet..." She said, "GO REGISTER." "Um, it's SUNDAY, so I CAN'T." First thing Monday morning, though, I registered to vote.

And I have voted ever since.

Why?

Because if there's one thing that I feel I excel at, it's complaining.

(Amanda is wearing both our 'I Voted!' stickers because we've always given them to her since she was little. And because I really hate wearing stickers that say 'I Voted!')

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Guess who's beyond excited to have (FINALLY!!!!!) received her acceptance letter from the University of Minnesota?

She's wanted to go there since she was about 6 years old. Her reasons over the years have changed (ranging from: "That way I can get my aunt tickets for the football and basketball games" to "It's down in the Cities" to "It has a really good engineering school"), her desire to be a Gopher has not.

Yay on the Kid. :)

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The Kid and I spent awhile today carving mini-pumpkins (and a gourd!) and making them into Vampire Pumpkins for one of my 31 Days of Pinterest projects. I think we did OK.

31 Days of Pinterest: Day 26 Vampire Pumpkins

Vampire Pumpkins (and a Gourd)!

The first time I saw these on Pinterest, I KNEW I was going to make them. The picture cracks me up every time I look at it. Even though Steve thought they looked dumb, Amanda & I made some.


Original inspiration:

(Originally from Martha Stewart)


We went to a local farm to pick up the pumpkins (and gourd). They were $1 each. I got the smaller fangs at WalMart and the colored fangs at Target for less than $2. The pins I found in the fabric section of WalMart for around $3.

We started by roughing out an opening for the fangs to set in. Then we scraped all the guts and seeds out.

Then it was just a matter of sliding in the fangs and putting the quilting pins in for the eyes.

I changed out the black fangs in the pumpkin for green ones because the black ones weren't easily seen from a distance.

And here they are again:

I have them on the kitchen windowsill until tomorrow when they'll go outside to join the other pumpkins.

To see my other 31 Days of Pinterest projects, click on the image below, and it will take you to my original post.

31 Days of Pinterest: Day 23 Flaming Softball Senior Pictures (Take 1)

I'm not taking the Kid's senior pictures. We have a family friend who's wanted to for years, and it's what she does (and does quite well), so I'm glad to let her do them.

However, one request Amanda had was that we figure out how to do some softball pictures where the softball was on fire. We have other family friends who had their pictures taken with flaming footballs, so we asked how it was done. They thought with rubber cement.

Yep. Rubber cement.

We gobbed it onto the ball, she got ready, I lit the match and held it to the goop, and HOLY CRAP THAT FLAME IS SOOOOO COOL!!!!

We may or may not have kept putting some on "just to make sure it works".

The rubber cement burns, but not the object it's put onto. However, said object is still kind of sticky, so beware. The flame burns pretty well, but then tapers off after 10 seconds or so. Plenty of time to get in a good shot or two. Or three and a video if you're like me and hit the wrong buttons on the camera...

This was really really fun.

The inspiration shot was:

(Originally from Northrup Photo's Flickr page)


To see my other 31 Days of Pinterest projects, click on the image below, and it will take you to my original post.

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It's about time to start thinking about getting the Kid's senior pictures taken. Since she spends so much time on a softball field, it seems appropriate that some of her pictures be taken on one.

Today we decided to see if we could make the pictures even cooler by figuring out how to light a softball on fire. A liberal amount of rubber cement will do the trick.

This was taken juuuust before the wind shifted back toward her glove, causing us both to jump away from the flame (it would be Very Bad if that glove caught on fire...it took too long to break in. Well, and her hand would still be in it too). Her smile is so big because we'd just been saying, "Holy crap, look at the size of that flame!!!!"

I think it'll be fun seeing what the photographer can do with her. And the flaming softball.

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This is the first year in a loooooooong time that we've gone out as a family to get pumpkins for Halloween. It'll probably be the last time because the Kid will be going off to college next year. Unless, of course, she decides to stay in-state. Then maybe there will be more moments like this.

We're going to take these mini-pumpkins and use them to make Vampire Pumpkins (a project I've had pinned on my Pinterest board for awhile because the faces crack me up every time I look at them).

31 Days of Pinterest: Day 7 Brownie Batter Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Outrageously Rich Chocolate Indulgence Frosting

These cupcakes...oh my.

I think any cupcakes with this much chocolate in them should come with a warning label. Yuu-uum.

I found this recipe originally on Pinterest, but it was originally pinned from this blog (Kevin and Amanda).

This is a two-day kind of project. First the brownie batter has to be made using these ingredients.

Then, once the brownie batter is made, it needs to be scooped out onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. We were out of parchment paper, so we just used waxed paper, which was fine.

I'm pretty sure we could have gotten more than 24 brownie batter balls out of the mix had some assorted family members not insisted on doing "quality control" (read: stealing brownie batter from the bowl).

Once the brownie balls are made, they need to be frozen overnight. If your family is like mine, you may have to threaten bodily harm if they take any of said brownie balls from the freezer "just to see how they are" (read: eat them).

Today we made the rest of the cupcakes.

One good way to keep the mini-chocolate chips from sinking to the bottom is to coat them with the dry cake batter. Alas, we forgot that step.

Then it was time to put it all together.

Amanda filled the cupcake liners about half- to three-quarters full, then took one of the brownie balls and put it in the middle.

When they came out of the oven, the middles had sunk some, but that just means more room for the frosting.

I don't have any pictures of the making of the frosting, sadly. It was kind of a throw everything into the mixer bowl and go with it moment. I will say, however, that I don't recall ever having used 5 (FIVE!!!) sticks of butter in ANY frosting recipe I've ever done.

This recipe made 3 dozen cupcakes. 2 dozen with brownie balls, and 1 dozen without. It also earned a spot in the permanent recipe file.

To see my other 31 Days of Pinterest projects, click on the image below, and it will take you to my original post.

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This is what our hands looked like during the making of some Brownie Batter Chocolate Chip Cupcakes this evening.

It was messy. But, oh my were they worth it.

I knew it was going to be a dang good recipe when I read through it. The frosting alone had 5 sticks of butter in it.

I'll probably be on sugar overload for awhile. WHEEEEEEE!!!!

31 days of Pinterest: Day 5 Scarecrow Crunch

I made this for the Church Bazaar this weekend, with some help from Dart and Amanda.

This is really really easy to do. I'm talking REALLY easy.

I picked up everything I needed from the store.

Then, I did what I normally don't do, which is to actually take out all the ingredients at the same time. I probably should do this more since there have been times where I've either run out of or just don't have a key ingredient, but well, yeah.

Then my lovely assistant and I realized that our biggest mixing bowl was full of tomatoes from the garden, so we just used 2 smaller bowls, which worked out fine.

And just as the instructions say to do, we mixed everything together.

I think we ended up with about 1 to 1.5 Cups of Scarecrow Crunch in each bag, and we filled 10 bags.

To see my other 31 Days of Pinterest projects, click on the image below, and it will take you to my original post.

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This is probably one of the best things the Kid has ever found in the Target Dollar Spot aisle thing. This is not her...this is a family friend who found it as amusing as Amanda did.
I was looking at Halloween stuff when Amanda put this on her head in the store. It gave me a much needed laugh, and for $2.50, well, it just needed to come home with us. She was pretty sure she should wear it for her senior pictures. Or something.

The cats aren't sure what to think about it, especially since Amanda makes the turkey bob and peck them.

Amanda refuses to have me take a picture of it because she says I'll put it on the Internet. Well, YEAH. Duuu-uuuh. Julie, on the other hand, put it on and said, "You're going to upload these to Facebook, right?"

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The Kid and I went to go see this Friday night. We'd listened to the book this past summer, and wanted to kind of see where the movie took it.

I'll give it a solid "eh". It seemed as if the book almost needed to be read before the movie was watched because there were sure lots of parts that were glossed over fairly quickly, but would make sense if a person really had read the book.

Sometimes a book < the movie, but not for me, not this one.

Maybe it's because the readers on the audio were so good. Or maybe I was already in a semi-cranky mood.

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Tomorrow (later today, I guess) is the "official" start date of the Kid's senior year of high school--it's the day that the rest of her classmates start back, anyway.

She's already been back to school for 2 weeks now, and has had to do homework even as they've all been whooping it up for the last couple weeks of summer. And her courseload is definitely more engaging than her schedule would have been at the high school.

She's happier at the college than she was at the high school, and we're happy too, considering that her first 2 years of college have been free. Free is always a good thing, I think.

So this is it. Her last first day of school...as a high schooler.

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This was taken on Saturday, 3 September in honor of the first Gopher football game of the season.

It's also the university that the Kid is seriously looking at for their Mechanical Engineering program. They have a solar car program which fascinates her to no end, and have "really cool stuff" too.

She's kind of wanted to go here since she was little, because one of her aunts always took her to basketball games. I asked her once why she wanted to go to the U of M, and she told me so that she could get her aunt basketball and football tickets. She didn't seem to get it when I told her that it was possible to not go there and still get the tickets anyway.

I have to admit, I'd love to have her stay that close to home when she goes off to college, but at the same time, I want her to experience what else is out there. It's kind of odd knowing that this is her senior year of high school, and even though she'll be at the community college all day, she's still JUST in high school.

Sigh.

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This is the Kid's senior year of high school. Simutaneously, it's her second year at the local community college because she took advantage of the post-secondary option offered through her school. She won't be at the high school at all this year because she wanted to go full-time at the college.

She loaded up her backpack on Monday, and had to set it on the table to get it on because it was so heavy. Her books are HUGE, but that's what happens with lots of math & science classes. That's why I liked majoring in History--the books were much smaller. But, she wants to be a mechanical engineer when she grows up, not a historian.

Iz wasn't sure this new turn of events was a good thing. She misses Amanda when Amanda is gone. So much that she spends part of the day crying until I tell her that her girl WILL BE BACK. Iz's way around it this time was to jump on the backpack and not let go. I'm pretty sure she'd do OK in class with Amanda. She'd be happy she was with her girl.

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I love late summer days like today. It was the first Fall Ball games (a shortened softball season that lasts until the end of September), and a gorgeous day.

I like that Fall Ball is more relaxed, somehow, even as it's usually only the die-hard players that play, so it's a bit more competitive too.

Or maybe because most years*, it's so so so lovely outside that it's not a hardship to sit and watch the games without overheating from all the humidity.

*The first year she played, it rained EVERY. FREAKING. WEEKEND. I told her & Steve that I needed a better umbrella if she was going to continue to play. That Christmas I got a really nice golf umbrella.