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Toddler Birthday Party: The Aftermath

toddler birthday parties result in hangovers too, but they're not necessarily alcohol-induced. unless you have actually imbibed a fair amount after such a celebration. then in that case, you are blessed with twice the headache and exhaustion.

we had The Governor's birthday party yesterday, replete with clever decorations and a moonbounce. kids of all ages (from 5 months up to 65, i believe) were there and it was a family-style cookout in our backyard. a lot of planning went into it, and i was fortunate only to have fought with my mom once, and that was on the eve of the celebration.

anyway, it came and went, His Honor had a wonderful time and that's really what mattered. but clean up is a pain, and we have yet to complete the job. if i were to analogize this to some sort of organized crime anything, it would be the "long, slow, drawn-out death" variety of punishment.

the hangover symptoms are there, though: stomach ache from eating chips before 11 a.m., exhaustion, heavy-headedness, pounding headache from dehydration (forgot to drink water in the course of running around).

ah, parenthood. we love this stuff.

99 Problems

courtesy of teahouse blossom, remixing Weezer and Jay-Z. "99 luft problems" is my favorite so far.

New Friends

i've been participating in online communities in one form or another for at least four years, but it's so odd that my experience has been limited primarily to women-oriented forums.

so imagine my surprise when i was asked to moderate a car-related forum.

what's the big deal, you might ask? well, initially it may not be such a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things, it might be small potatoes. yet most car-related communities are dominated by men who happen to be in their 20's and 30s.

and in truth, they treat each other a little differently than i'm used to. and they tend to treat the community a little differently--for example, repetitive threads are generally taken in stride, not really closed until they are overly repetitive. now at first, i was annoyed, but then i thought that maybe it was me who was thinking narrow-mindedly, and since then, i'm trying to learn to roll with the punches.

but they are a fun bunch over there. some very clever, funny folks, and well-read too. it should be fun.

Heed My Warning--Please!

Fire Mountain Gems needs to stop it. Just stop putting luscious, fabulous gemstone strands on sale. And being so kind in sendng me an email advertising these sales. It's bad enough already that they have this wonderful selection, and that customer service is terrific. And now a daily email reminding me of all of these great prices on aventurine and citrine top-drilled faceted teardrops? Just too much.

Recent Creations

All this talk of creative endeavors, and I have yet to actually post pics of recent creations. So I thought I’d do a little creation show-and-tell. If I was in elementary school, I’d be putting on my brave face to stand in front of class right now.

Jewelry
Here is a cherry quartz flower and teardrop I completed on the trip up to my brother and sister-and-law’s place:

Here’s a red Czech-glass bead and hematite bolo-style necklace that I’m awfully proud of because the style is so versatile:

This is what it looks like knotted:

The great thing about this necklace is that not only can you tie it in front, or in the back, depending on what you are wearing--but you can also wrap it around your wrist, tie it once, and the weight will keep it knotted. It makes for a simple and modern but striking bracelet.

Here’s a cherry quartz, carnelian, and clear glass accent bead necklace that you can either wear as a choker or at the collarbone:

A simple bracelet of serpentine cubes and cherry quartz (which I’m addicted to). The shapes and colors balance each other out:

A two-tier lapis lazuli nugget, India glass, and serpentine bracelet:

And my last piece of jewelry is a charm bracelet made of red Czech glass beads. I strung the “pattern” at random, and added the resin charm at the end. I love how unusual it looks:

All of these are made using hand wrapped sterling silver wire and extender chains, with silver plated lobster clasps and sterling silver toggle clasps. I’ve gotten incredibly spoiled with this medium, and when you start to work with silver, it’s almost impossible to work with base metal again.

Purses

A couple of purses I’ve made—the first is from a Marimekko fabric that I found, made with cotton webbing straps and pink broadcloth lining, with a pretty pink satin ribbon closure:

And an eyelet-print purse with pink grosgrain ribbon closure and trim, with blue polyester lining:

Both of these bags are structured, thanks to sew-in Timtex lining and plastic needlework canvas to reinforce the bottom.

I’ve been enjoying making all of these over the past couple of months, whenever I get the time, but when I finish, I always have doubts in my mind as to whether they are of a good enough quality to sell, and if anyone would buy them. I wonder if that’s part of the creative process, learning to accept or be proud or your creations and then having faith in them as items that people would buy.

More Updates

I've been so quiet lately, but then again, I've gone into a mini-"hibernation" mode. Things have been busy and are gearing up for a rash of events, but I'm proactively taking something of an emotional/mental break.

A couple of weeks ago, we spent 3 days at my brother's farm, which is just south of Lake Ontario and just north of the Finger Lakes region. While the days were slightly cool, it made the feeling of the sun touching your cheeks feel heavenly. Geese flew in formations above our heads, and we had a campfire and made s'mores--which led to a late bedtime for the Governor. Of course, Conan had to shrink his 6-foot-plus frame to fit on a futon to sleep, but I think overall we enjoyed ourselves.

The Governor loved to go "fishing" at the pond on their property. He would take reeds and dip them in the water, pretending to catch very large fish.

Conan stayed out and drank with the other men by the fire, and talked about politics.

I completed two necklaces and got my teeny-tiny-baby fix for the time being, as I got to hold my five-month old niece.

Personality: Introvert

There's a great conversation about Introvert v. Extrovert characteristics on an online community that i frequent. Reading the posts has made me realize that i am a classic introvert. I'd suspected that this was the case, but actually admitting that this was part of my personality helped me make be a little more at ease with myself.

I do a lot of things that introverts do. I prefer to be in my office, expressing myself through writing, than in a teleconference. I hate speaking up, and I always have to work up courage to do so, and I often resort to an e-mail as a follow up. Sitting alone and reading by myself is akin to emotional and mental resuscitation, and I absolutely have to be alone after being in a large group of people.

Being an introvert is not a bad thing at all, and in fact, it does not stop you from socializing or being capable of interaction. In fact, I used to participate in activities that involved me being in front of large crowds of people on a regular basis. Mostly, being an introvert means –at least for me—that you need to withdraw in order to recharge emotionally and mentally. Now, there are various degrees of introvertedness, and I am still reading up and doing my research, but the basic characterization of introvertedness is that you need to be alone and that you need to do so to digest and "make sense of" things. And this is the way that you achieve balance.

I always knew that I was naturally shy. I like being shy. I think it is sort of a complement to be called "shy," to be honest. Shy people, I believe, are evaluators of situations, people who take everything in.

Classic Books I've Read

Courtesy of Ajax: Copy this list and bold the books you've read.

Beowulf

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart

Agee, James - A Death in the Family

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice

Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain

Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot

Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March

Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre

Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert - The Stranger

Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop

Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard

Chopin, Kate - The Awakening

Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness

Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage

Dante - Inferno

de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote

Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy

Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers

Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss

Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying

Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury

Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust

Golding, William - Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter

Heller, Joseph - Catch 22

Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms

Homer - The Iliad

Homer - The Odyssey

Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World

Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House

James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady

James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw

Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird

Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt

London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville, Herman - Moby Dick

Miller, Arthur - The Crucible

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find

O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night

Orwell, George - Animal Farm

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago

Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar

Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales

Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way

Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front

Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac

Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep

Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye

Shakespeare, William - Hamlet

Shakespeare, William - Macbeth

Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet

Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion

Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein

Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Sophocles - Antigone

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath

Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island

Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair

Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace

Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons

Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire - Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple

Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth

Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories

Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie

Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse

Wright, Richard - Native Son