Summertime family cookout memories.

     Well another 4th of July has come and went.  We spent it in the company of friends!  Was just nice to have time together.  On a side note I did learn tonight that candle sticks from Walmart's Minstay line are horrible as I burned a few in my chandelier and they dripped everywhere!  The Jubla candlesticks from IKEA will have to be my staple use since they burn clean and are dripless.
     Now I sit here watching a Golden Girls Marathon on Hallmark and reminiscing on old family gatherings this time of year.  My great Aunt Mary and Uncle Mike would host a great cookout at their house very close to July 4th.  A great deal of my moms side of the family would get together for this day.  They stopped doing the cookouts roughly around the time I turned 21 and my Uncle Mike left us us roughly three years ago but the memories are still strong to this day and always will.

One of the last family cookouts I remember! This was 2000!

     Uncle mike would make waterice (a frozen desert of sorts similar to italian ice).  We would play volleyball together.  To this day I can still hear Uncle Mike calling out "To ya to ya to ya" as he would set to pass the ball to someone.  I remember one year my cousins wife dropped a baking dish filled with baked beans in the yard and for whatever reason I decided to take a picture of it.  I remember one year my departed Aunt Sadie brought a gift for me that she had wanted to give me the previous year.  It was a nutcracker but the memory that sticks out most was that the tape she used to wrap the present was really a roll of to and from labels.  One year it rained and the family squeezed into the garage instead.  When it would get dark enough all the kids would play Ghost In The Graveyard (kinda like a combination of hide and seek, tag, and flashlight tag together).  Then when all was said and done and the families said their goodbyes I remember the drive home where I would look out the window of my Moms van and see tree after tree filled with lightning bugs!
  

A Fresh Inspired Thought

     So tonight I found myself looking at my previous entries and finding myself inspired to restart my blog.  I deleted my weight loss journey blog since it had very little success.  I want to use my main blog to share my experiences through life, decorating techniques, and tips and thoughts for a better well being.
     I think too often we focus on what we dont have and what we cant do instead of the blessings we have in front of us.  Going forward I plan on focusing more on these.  How long this will take place I do not know!  I just know at this exact moment I am inspired to write!

New crafting project: Recreating a memory while learning to crochet

     I like to be a crafty person but just like writers get writers block and loose their inspiration the same will happen with me and crafting projects.  Then out of nowhere a random thought or idea will pop in my head and BAM im inspired to start a new project and Im all about getting started in it.  This time it was learning to crochet for the purpose of recreating a blanket I remembered from my parents when I was a kid.

The blanket that inspired me to learn to crochet

First skein of yarn and assorted
crochet hooks 

     With inspiration in mind I started searching youtube for videos showing how to crochet.  I found a video series that was making the kind of blanket I wanted to make, which is a "granny square".  After watching the videos a few times I decided that surely this would be a easy task to take on and immediately headed to my local Walmart to grab supplies at two in the morning.  I found the hooks and kept in mind what colors I needed.  I wanted to recreate the same blanket so that meant I would need white, yellow, orange, and brown.  I didnt want to overdo it on the supplies so I just picked up the white for now and headed back to my hotel.

Frustrated with not being able
to figure it out.

     Yarn and hooks in hand I brought back up the youtube video and started attempting to follow the instructions.  Well this is where the fun ends and the frustration begins.  The easy task became this crazy thing I couldn't follow.  I literally restarted numerous times and couldn't figure it out resulting in restart after restart.  I decided to give it a break, posted my frustration with my new project on Facebook and found other things to do till it was time to go to bed.

     The next night I gave it another go and once again I just couldn't figure it out.  I posted yet another Facebook post asking my crafting friend if they could suggest any sites that could help me figure this frustrating, supposedly easy, task out.  A friend suggested www.craftown.com so I decided to check it out.  I found a link on the site showing how to crochet and suddenly they way they were showing things made sense.  I queued up the youtube video once again with a sense of purpose and successfully managed to create my first square.  

Finally I think I figured it out!

     Now granted its not the best but its a start and the important thing is I did it.  So now Im going to keep going with this project.  Lord help me when I have to figure out how to switch colors but I should be good for a while.  Ill continue to post updates on this project as I go along.  With all the alone time I have being on solo projects for work at the moment I should be able to get some decent progress into this!

Winter Poem

I get this poem every winter & every winter I love re-reading it.  It's a beautiful poem and very well written. Thought it might be a comfort to you, it was to me. Shit! It's cold! The End.

Hotel phobia or hotel OCD, you decide!

     So I've become a creature of habit when I stay at a hotel and have decided that I have a certain fear in regards to staying at them.
     I seam to be deathly afraid that once I leave my room my room key is going to magically stop working.  I've gotten to the point where whenever I leave my room I instinctually have to check my room key to make sure I see the little green light before I can comfortably close the door.
     But seriously what am I going to do if I see the red instead of the green?  Quickly run back and the room and hide because I'm afraid I'll never get back in LOL.

Alone

     Sometimes i think its funny how after all the facebook connections, youtube comments, and blog reads I still feel truly alone from time to time.

     I miss having a best friend.  You know someone you talk to almost every single day.  Someone who knows you better then your wife, husband, partner etc.

     I talk to people semi regularly, make comments back, but sometimes i just feel ignored and i miss the feeling of having a very close friend.

Dreams

Had one of those odd sleeping nights where the dreams seem very lucid when I first wake up so I decided to take a moment and post them for my own laughs.

Dream 1:
     Im a cop in a back alley somewhere.  I go to arrest someone and they resist and break away from me as I try to cuff them.  They're trying to run away and out of no where a random lady starts chasing him down the alley hitting him repeatedly with her purse and I decide to leave well enough alone.

Dream 2:
     Im back at a hotel that in my dream I know I stayed in before for a work assignment.  I get on the elevator to go to the second floor and in my mind I know there should only be two floors to this hotel.  Somehow I end up on the 68th floor.  Now this is odd in itself because supposedly in your dreams your not supposed to be able to read but I remember this number clearly.
     This floor contains the worlds largest food court I've ever seen.  It had every type of eating establishment you could dream of.  Buffet style, cafeteria style, fast food, fancy meals, sub shops and so on and so on.  I make my way back to the elevator and get to the proper floor I find my co-workers in they're room (now in my dream the faces I saw as my co-workers were all new to me but in the dream they were surely my co-workers) and explain excitedly about my discovery and they all look at me with a "WELL DUH!" look and the dream fades out

Dream 3:
     Im the director/owner/manager/whatever of a very large, popular, and successful Gogo Boy/whore house LOL!  I remember there being numerous pools, slides, rooms, etc etc etc and hotties to look at everywhere of all different shapes, sizes, and colors.  Right as one of the, for lack of better words, employees is about to show me what skills they have that would encourage me to keep him in my employ I wake up.........

DAMNIT!  Can I go back to sleep please and continue dream 3?!?!?!?!

LOL even in y dreams Im random!

Happy Holidays! Krampus is coming!

     I hope you have been good this year because its that magical time of the year where we are rewarded accordingly for our actions.  No I'm not talking about Santa, Im talking about the Krampus!

     What is the Krampus you might ask?  Well the Krampus is a demon-like creature with origin ties in Germany and Austria as well as other nearby regions.  Krampus was the traveling companion of Santa Claus / St. Nicholas.  As Santa and Krampus would travel along from home to home Santa, or St. Nicholas depending on the region,  would leave presents for the good kids.  If Santa came across naughty kids Krampus would be set loose to punish the kids.   Most pictures would depict Krampus hitting the kids with switches and in some extreme cases the kids would actually be tossed into his basket and drowned in the local lakes.

To check out Wikipidia's complete description of the Krampus click on the following link here!  You can also check out the official Krampus site here!

I learned about the Krampus quite a few years ago and totally fell in love with this bit of lore.  Sadly this tradition is one of the few that did not make its way to the US.  I can think of quite a few kids that could stand to learn of the Krampus and what can result from their naughty actions.  Now of course you'll hear parents say how its such a horrible thing to consider teaching kids about such a scary creature but I honestly think its a great idea, especially in this time and age where many parents have have suck a lax approach (or total lack there of) to correcting their kids for fear of being reported for child abuse should they spank them.  Krampus has made a few modern leaps into the US through random TV cartoons like the Venture Bros and T-shirt sites on the internet.

Many towns are preparing to celebrate the Krampus festival on the eve of december 5th where the men of the towns will dress up as the Krampus and parade through the streets scaring the kids of the town.  These Krampus impersonators will travel from home to home scaring the kids to their rooms as they in turn enjoy a drink with the adults.  As the night would progress the growl would turn into slurs.





I've come across some great Krampus videos on Youtube and thought Id share them with you.  The first is a Krampus carol of sorts.



The second I found recently and is called "The Story of the Christmas Krampus".  This cute video takes a little time to explain one of the many stories of the Christmas Krampus.



The final is a video showcasing a collection of vintage postcards with the Krampus.



I wish I could find Krampus Christmas cards as I would surely send them out to my friends and family alike!

So in closing I hope you enjoyed this little bit of information about a very interesting holiday figure that again I really wish had made its way into our own holiday origins here in the US.

4 Subconscious Self Inflicted Halloween Tricks

So today for Halloween I got to travel to North East, MD for work.  The city is called North East because its the furthest north eastern point of MD, supposedly.

As The day progressed I slowly realized the four subconscious self inflicted Halloween tricks were inflicted upon myself!

Trick 01:
About two hours into my drive I was glancing at the back of my car through my rear view mirror at two zip ties that I had used on a latch in the ceiling of my car to hang my shirts as I traveled.  I thought to myself that I need to cut them out since now I had purchased a expandable clothes hanging bar to hang my clothes on.  Then my eyes went to the hang bar and that's when i realized that the dress shirts that should have been hanging on the bar were still hanging on a bar outside of my closet back home.  So instead of adding 4 extra hours to my travel day (2 back home and then turn around time) I stopped at a local Walmart and purchased a few to get me through.  That in itself was fun because the shelf was clearly over shopped and I had to hunt to find shirts in both the proper size and sleeve length.

Trick 02:
When I got to the hotel I unpacked the few bags I brought with me.  I love how it has taken me all year to learn to micro pack LOL.  I was in the mood for a cup of coffee and started searching my bags and realized that I had left my travel mug and my freshly purchased supply of Starbucks VIA on the kitchen counter.  The mugs have a bottom that unscrews so you can store VIA packets in the wall of the mug.  I remembered a extra mug in my car so ran to get it but alas it was empty.    

Trick 03:
My big plan for today was to relax in bed and watch Van Helsing on my iPad and that would be my Halloween excitement for the day.  I went and grabbed my iPad and switched to the videos app and for hat ever reason the movie did not sync to my device even though I remember selecting it.  There's a little bit of back irony to it as I had to tear through the boxes of DVDs I had already encoded to my digital media library to find it as I had stowed it away by accident without encoding it.  So I found the DVD and spent last night encoding it to the library, adding it to my iTunes library, and adding the artwork and description to it.

Trick 04:
I decided to quickly write a blog on this and thought id use the bloggpress app on my ipad to do it.  I grabbed my iPad and that's when I realized that the keyboard dock that I had purchased, for times just like this, was siting at home just feet away from the VIA and mug I left in the kitchen!

So all in all Id say my subconscious had a good day tricking me!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!

Random Travel Day Thought!

Just a quick random thought:

You know what my favorite part of travel day is? (The day I travel to a work assignment)
The total lack of motivation to get on the road!
Sure my bags are 99.9% packed and the apple devices are syncing and yes I should be in the shower.

But instead Im glued to my computer playing with the apple devices and facebook!

OK Random moment over!

BTW HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!