Moved out

This blog has moved out, and is currently rooming with wordpress.com. :) So head over to:

edalley.wordpress.com

Now! Also I changed the name to one that was a little more fitting for what this blog has turned into, so please don't be alarmed. Change is good! 

Sharing the love

Hi there blog peeps! Don't have much of a post today. There isn't much else going on until the summer hits and even then it will all be arts and crafts and baking with the kiddies. However I have a couple peeps I wanted to share with everyone, although I don't know how many people are actually reading this blog. But you know, every little bit helps! So here is the link to Knotty Knit Wittz and here.

I also realize as I am sharing this information that I haven't yet shared my own business here on my blog. Myself and my friend run a photography business, BulletProof Photography and recently I did a bunch of photos for a brand new online store called Knotty Knit Wittz. The owner lives here in my own building and  makes some amazing products for all ages. So head over and check out her merch, maybe hit up that like button! And if you are in the southern Ontario area you should maybe check out my page too, and keep us in mind for your next photography need!

Next on the block is a guy I worked with years ago, Michael Rennick. He's an amazing traditional artist, based out of Toronto, Ontario and educated at OCAD. He had just recently made a Facebook page to promote his work and I want to help him out by sharing the love!

Also, check me out with the linkage, every time I post a new blog I discover new stuff I can do with Blogger. Seriously some awesome blogging script going on right here! I love it! Next post, potentially some short bread cookies made with four year old assistance, or possible chocolate lasagna! I know that'll get you comin' back! :D Ciao for now!

Crafty Fun Times

Lifetime update! Did I mention in my last post that I had chosen my courses for this September? Well I'm far too lazy to look back and check so in case I didn't here they are (potentially again) Biological Anthropology, French and Latin. Bio Anthro because it is the coolest branch of anthropology, french because that's going to be my minor and Latin to spite my dad, lol also because its cool as hell. Just wait, Next January, all new Latin blog posts! Ooh, that's gonna be so awesome. So aside from I'm super excited to be going to school! I do have a few things to say about the process of applying and all that fun stuff, especially relevant to those people interested in applying years after they have graduated high school. However, I shall save that for tomorrows post. For now, ON TO THE CRAFTY TIMES.

Homemade crayons (or How to make and even bigger mess with all the broken crayons in your house):

First and foremost, this is not at all my idea. I absolutely saw this on the internet somewhere and now I can't remember where. Hold on maybe I can Google and find it again. Alright, that's not happening. It turns out that a million people have done this and then blogged about it and I can't for the life of me find the original blog post that gave me the idea. But anyways, so I got this idea online, the post I saw was for making star shaped homemade crayons. Well that's boring, so I made fruit shaped ones! Its easy, little bit time consuming, but the kids thought I was like a wizard.

You will need: 

1 silicone ice cube tray

a whole pile of broken crayons

a knife

an oven

some newspaper (Spread underneath your work surface for easy clean up)

Step One:

Peel all the paper off the crayons, this one is a job for the kids since in my house at least this is their favorite thing to do with crayons. 

Step Two:

Chop up the relevant colors into itty bitty pieces with a knife. Now if you are doing stars or generic shapes like that you can mix up the colors and really do whatever you want. In fact you could also do that with any shape I guess no one is going to bust down the door and say Hey! How dare you make a purple apple! However for this particular project we tried to use true to life colors to make the fruits look proper.  

Step Three: 

Fill in the mold. I used a combination of getting my fingers all waxy, trying to bend the paper and pour the bits in and also using a funnel. However you want to accomplish this step I promise you it will be ultra mega messy and result in little tiny crayon bitties all over what ever surface you are working on. Wishing I'd thought of the newspaper idea yesterday, and not today as I'm writing this blog.

Please ignore the lousy focus on this photo, the lighting in my living room is terrible. 

Step Four:
Put in the oven. I put mine in at 250°F for maybe 10 mins and just checked on them frequently so as not to fill my house with the smell of boiling wax. It should also be noted that I took my crayon mold out of the over after the wax had melted and added more wax bits because the molds were only half full. Once the wax melts and fills in all the air pockets this will happen, so if you want to get bigger, fuller crayons be prepared to do this all twice. I also noticed that once melted the wax moved around a lot in the mold when I tried to move it, which was a pain for the pineapples since I wanted those colors to stay separate so I recommend putting your mold in a bigger glass/Pyrex/metal baking dish.

Step Five:
Remove from oven. Now this worst part, the waiting. All there is to do at this point is to wait until the crayons are nice and cooled. I put mine in the fridge for a good 30 mins especially because some of these ones, like the pears were pretty deep I didn't want to run the risk of the bottom still being soft.

Tada! 

Step Six: 

Behold! 

Pop out crayons and watch children be amazed. My four year old got the hugest kick out of this project. Also I probably should have mentioned this before but you will never again be able to use the silicone tray you used for this project for anything but making crayons. 

Also one last little aside, I really love the fruit crayons. They are neat and the kids loved them. Far more interesting than boring old star crayons lol. However, it should be said that only one of the pineapples survived intact, the other two lost their tops in the crayon removal process. Other than that little speed bump this was a great project, it kept me and two four year olds occupied for a good while yesterday afternoon. I hope I have inspired the rest of you to go forth and be crafty! Until next time...

Real life times

I promise! Also I'm just terrible at posting titles that are even remotely entertaining. Gonna have to work on that one. Anyways, this blog post is the boring kind so if you're not into that sort of thing feel free to move on to the next blog. I won't be offended (much) ha ha.

When I started this blog I listed off all these things I was going to post about. Kids, weight loss, university, and the trials of trying to juggle all of these things in one life. Which is lots of fun (not) let me tell you. Well I was thinking last night that I have done a lot of not blogging about that stuff and maybe I would toss out an update for anyone who is the teeniest bit interested. I suppose I'll start at the top and work my way down.

In my first post (I think) I mentioned wanting to blog about my children mostly because sometimes children can be funny but also trying. The other reason I wanted to write about them was because my eldest has Aspergers Syndrome, and I have found whilst trolling the blogosphere that while there is a great community of moms/parents out there who are all experiencing much the same thing I am, there is also a lot of perfect parents. Or so it seems. This is a hard topic to broach because its going to make me sound like a terrible person, I think, but I find that so many of these other parents of ASD kids are so very understanding and wonderful with everything related to their child's specific needs that I just feel inadequate. Where are the insecure moms? Where are the moms who get frustrated with behaviors that we know are out of our child's control but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with? *waves hand in the air* Here's one! Right here! I'm far from perfect, and while I like to think I'm doing a good job, the best I can anyways, its hard to stack up against these "perfect" personas all over the internet. So I stopped reading blogs of parents with kids on the spectrum, because it just made me feel like crap. I thought however that I can't be the only one in this position so if there are any other parents out there feeling lost, totally insecure about their decisions, and generally just a little bit crazy with the pressure to be the wonderful, understanding, endlessly patient human being, please comment, because you are not alone and it would be nice to know that I am not either. And next.

I have absolutely fallen off the weight loss wagon. I actually ended up going to get my thyroid checked because I was having so much trouble with it. However it appears my thyroid is ok, I also don't have diabetes or high cholesterol so I'll just have to try and get back on the wagon. But its hard ok? That makes me sound like a whiner I know, however once again I know I'm not the only one struggling with this and dammit its discouraging when your weight yo-yos like crazy even though you are exercising and all that. It makes it real easy to just give up and pig out on potato chips. And next.

Possibly the only thing that is actually happy and awesome right now (please don't take that sentence to mean that my children are not happy and awesome, because they most certainly are.) is that I'm one step closer to actually going to school in September and I'm so freaking excited! I chose my classes on Monday night so I now have an official schedule and all that. Of course this means I also now have an official tuition payment to make but I'll cross that bridge with the bill actually comes in. So for anyone interested I'm taking Biological Anthropology, Latin and French. The Anthro and French because those will be my major and minor respectively, when I transfer into the degree program next year. And the Latin because I think its cool, and also to spite my dad who told me Latin is a dead language and why would I take it. Well dad, its gonna be a lot less dead when I start spouting it at you all the time and refusing to translate. Muah ha ha ha.

So that's all my life time updates for the time being, I promise the next post will be more rant-y less serious life stuff.  On that note though, part of the reason I started this blog was to connect with other people in similar life situations, so please anyone reading this who feels any resonance with these topics, comment and I'll answer. Until next time.

Yet another Disney movie post

Bear with me internet, there's been a lot of Disney movie watching going on in my house. Maybe burning 16-20 new Disney movies was a bad bad idea? Who knows, what I do know is that I spent two hours at work last night thinking about Disney movies, because I'm just that much awesome. Also work was very boring due to the thunderstorm and I had nothing to do but clean and think, about cartoons apparently.  Anyways, on to the rant!

When Disney prequels retcon the existing story line so bad it no longer makes sense:

My favorite Disney movie of all time is the Little Mermaid. Find me a little girl born in the 80's who doesn't know all the lyrics to "Part of your world" and I will show you a seriously deprived person, or someone who's parents maybe didn't believe in TV or happiness. Needless to say I have seen The Little Mermaid more times than any person should reasonably watch a movie, and at 27 I still know all the words and sing along very loudly when Ariel laments about the horrors of living under the sea. Recently, actually not so recently more like 2008. I had to Wikipedia that. Anyways, Disney came out with a prequel to The Little Mermaid called Ariel's Beginning. Now I've only seen the prequel a few times despite it existing in my house, it just doesn't have the same magic the original had. Either way I know the story line and its basically about how Ariel's beautiful voice brings the magic of singing back to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis.

Side note: I'm not actually totally certain that Triton's kingdom is called Atlantis, but in my head it always has been so I'm gonna keep calling it that.

However, somewhere around the beginning of the movie we the audience learn that the reason there is no singing or music allowed in Atlantis is because Ariel's mother had a beautiful voice and King Triton can't bear to be reminded of his late wife. Why you ask? Well in the movie the mermaid sisters and their royal parents are all hanging out in a lagoon on the surface (fans of the original will gasp now, as Triton is vehemently opposed to all things "surface" in the original movie) when suddenly a pirate ship comes upon them and starts flinging harpoons. All the children and the king escape but their mother doesn't make it. Its not shown on screen but I'm going to go ahead and assume she was harpooned.

Taking this new information into account the entire premise of the original makes no sense. Why on earth would Ariel ever risk going to the surface? This is obviously something she does often since she is best buddies with a seagull, did she forget her mothers horrific death? With no (sane) reason to ever go to the surface Ariel would never have become to enamored of humans and the whole idea of her falling in love with one is laughable since, wait for it, they harpooned her mom!

So now not only does the entire movies premise no longer make sense but we have this totally confusing exchange between Ariel and her father when he discovers that she's been splashing around above water.

Triton: "Contact between the human world and the mer world is strictly forbidden, Ariel you know that! Everyone knows that!"
Ariel: "You don't even know him!"
Triton: "Know him? I don't have to know him! They're all the same, spineless, savage, harpooning fish eaters, incapable of any feeling-"

Given what we now know thanks to the magic of retconning that first line should read something more along that lines of "Contact between the human world and the mer world is strictly forbidden,because they harpooned your mother! Ariel you know that! Everyone knows that!" And boom! Argument over. Sure it may seem a little heartless for him to bring something like that up, but given that he then goes on to destroy all her stuff and is pretty clear about the fact that he is desperate to convince her to stay away from the surface, it would've been much easier to just remind her of that part of her history that Disney has seen fit to give us.

In conclusion, Disney is shooting itself in the foot with all the prequels, children may not care being so excited to see their favourite characters in new movies and such. But us life long fans? We're dying over here Disney, there is only so much nonsense a person can handle. So from the bottom of my heart Disney, please no more prequels! 

PS. Did you notice that I discovered the font controls in this post? Behold the magic of italics and bold type :) 

The most misunderstood Disney villain

I've been so incredibly absent from this blog since I started it (ultra mega absent!), I discovered its a lot harder to think of something remotely interesting to say on a daily basis. I'll try and update more often, I promise. With that in mind, on to the post!

I recently got a bunch of the old school Disney movies for my kids, and also for me because I loved those movies. And so did you, don't pretend you don't still love them. Today I put on Peter Pan for my son thinking it would be the most likely to grab his attention since he would recognize some of the characters from watching Jake and the Neverland pirates. It didn't, and I ended up watching most of the movie by myself. However I noticed while watching it that poor Captain Hook is actually tragically misunderstood and not really a villain at all. Sure he does some mental stuff, like kidnapping Tiger Lily and bribing Tinkerbell into giving up the location of Peter Pan, but he's totally driven out of his mind by Peter Pan. Lets break it down shall we?

1. At the beginning of the movie, our first introduction to Captain Hook is on his ship full of disgruntled pirates, they are even throwing knives at his likeness carved into the door. The other pirates are pissed off because clearly this thing with Peter Pan has been going on for a long time. However there is no mention of why Captain Hook is after Peter. Except his missing hand.

2. HE`S MISSING HIS HAND! Everyone just kind of laughs at poor Captain Hook with his hook for a hand. BUT there is no back story about the missing hand except that Peter cut it off in a fight and fed it to a crocodile who is now stalking Hook trying to eat the rest of him. Has anyone considered the idea that Hook may have some pretty severe PTSD going on? Possibly some kind of anxiety problem from being stalked by a carnivorous animal bent on ingesting him? Take for example Captain Hook`s reaction when the crocodile shows up in that intro scene. He is visibly shaking and distraught, going so far as to climb into Smee`s arms. Mr. Smee is not nearly so troubled by the crocodile as he can obviously see that the crocodile can`t get them while they are on the ship, but Captain Hook is incapable of thinking rationally when it comes to the crocodile. An indication of some deeper problem? I think yes.

3. Why is he missing his hand? Sure Peter cut it off, but why? Who started the fight? For all we know Peter Pan is a spoiled brat who thinks he can get away with mutilating poor pirate Captains. There is obviously no law enforcement on Never Land.

So my theory here is that perhaps Captain Hook is after Peter because he is seeking some sort of retribution for his missing hand. Maybe he wants to turn Peter over to a some sort of law enforcement that we are never introduced to in the movie? Under this theory that things that Captain Hook does start to make more sense. Even when he kidnaps Tiger Lily, she is harboring a fugitive by refusing to turn over Peter Pan. There is also further evidence that Peter is nothing but a jerk. He exiles his best friend (Tinkerbell) ordering her banned for life, only to rescind that when Wendy insists on it. Keep in mind that later in the movie he says that Tinkerbell is `the most important thing in the world to him. But he had no problem kicking her to the curb when the new girl comes along. Then he laughs hysterically while the mermaids try to drown Wendy, they even admit to trying to drown her. Which Peter thinks is just awesome. He also totally forgets about Tiger Lily when he is supposed to be rescuing her, instead tormenting Captain Hook some more, further contributing to his mental illness. He only remembers to save Tiger Lily who is tied up and drowning, after Wendy reminds him.

Based on all this I think its pretty obvious that poor Captain Hook is just looking for some justice against this maniac youth who thrives on chaos.

Good Mood!

Just a small update as I am actually in a good mood today. I biked my 10 km yesterday, and it occurs to me just now that not all the people reading this are located in Canada. Therefore...10 km = 6.21 miles. But that sounds way lamer than 10 so I'm gonna keep going by our measurement system thank you! Also lost another 2 lbs.. go me! Its finally starting to show a little bit, after just over a month of work. I still have a LONG way to go yet, but its nice to see some results.

I totally forget to share this yesterday too but after my rant about Pinterest I sat here on Feb 13th and made 26 little heart shaped valentines out of red and pink construction paper for my daughter to take to school for her class. We laid them all out on the kitchen table when they were done so the glue could dry before she wrote on them. (For the record she is 10 and easily could have made these herself, in fact she's always making shit out of everything in my house. God forbid I throw away a shoe box or egg carton. But, she has Aspergers and ADHD and get distracted easily, and she had homework to do. So I made them, because I'm nice like that.) Anyway while they were all laid out on the table there with my Pinterest rant fresh in my mind I thought to myself FUCK I should totally take a picture and post that shit on-line  I didn't though, because my phone was dying so the camera wouldn't work and I was far too lazy to go get my real camera, take a picture, put the memory card in my computer, upload the picture, then upload it to Facebook  See, and this is another part of my issue with these Pinterest mom's and their (so called) perfect fucking life. Parents don't actually have time for all that crap, or they are too lazy/tired. So when you are staging photos to show off how organic/home-made/crafty etc. your house and lifestyle are...are you not then taking away time you could be spending with your children? Which is not to say I don't take pictures of my kids, I do. When they are playing nicely and stuff I love to get the camera out and take pictures. I'm referring to this phenomenon of setting up an elaborate set and changing your child's outfit and everything just to get the perfect "candid" photo of how awesome your life is.

Wow that turned out to by longer than I thought it would, apparently even when I'm in a great mood I can still find time to rant. Doesn't that make you smile? It makes me smile, or possibly the prospect of shots later is what's making me smile. Who knows? See ya :)