My First Woot Entry

I patronize this site called www.woot.com and its subsite shirt.woot.com.  For those of you that don’t know the site, it is dedicated to selling one thing per day and selling it very cheaply.  They also sell one t-shirt per day, and hold a weekly t-shirt contest (the derby) to determine the 3 shirts that will be sold Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

After lurking and wooting other’s shirts and whatnot, I decided to submit an entry for this week’s Derby.  The theme is “dance” and I decided to go for a bit of an international flavor since I have been playing with henna/batik style pieces in my spare time.

Here is the thumbnail of my entry–click to see the full entry as listed on the woot site.  :)

Lasya Entry at Shirt.woot.com

Karate Lessons

The Boy has been taking martial arts lessons since he was four.  It’s been a great thing for him, helping him learn respect, discipline, coordination and building strength, endurance, and stamina.  The cost has always been something I’ve budgeted for, seeing is as an important hobby/extracurricular endeavor for him to continue.

Because of my Pursuit of the Perfect Job, we have moved a few times.  This has been a negative for him in some ways, shaking up his routines, including the karate lessons, but has also been a positive, as it exposed him to different techniques (blends of defensive/aggressive/disarming/weapon skills), styles (olympic vs traditional), and also different art forms (karate/jujitsu vs tae kwon do).  This summer he’ll probably make the switch back to Karate, with a some tae kwon do infusion.  It should be fun.

I think my years as a [insert-color-here]-belt mom made me susceptible to this particular ad though:

 

I'd have given him $5

Book Post (stolen from facebook & Lynn because I found it interesting and haven’t been able to finish any of my other posts in the drafts list)

According to Lynn…

“Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.”

Key (I am using color instead of x’s and such to denote which ones I’ve read or not):

• Those I have Read 
• Those I have NOT Read
• Those I PLAN to Read
• <3 is a heart — as in, I have read and loved it

A tally is at the bottom…

1.  Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2.  The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien  <3
3.  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4.  Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5.  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee  <3
6.  The Bible (haven’t read all of it!)
7.  Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 
8.  Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell  <3
9.  His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10.  Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11.  Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 
12.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy  <3
13.  Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 
14.  Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15.  Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier  <3
16.  The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 
17.  Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18.  Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19.  The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 
20.  Middlemarch – George Eliot 
21.  Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell  <3
22.  The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald  <3
23.  Bleak House – Charles Dickens 
24.  War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 
25.  The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams  <3
26.  Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27.  Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28.  Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29.  Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 
30.  The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31.  Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (started it, but never finished it…)
32.  David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33.  Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34.  Emma – Jane Austen 
    
35.  Persuasion – Jane Austen 
36.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37.  The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 
38.  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39.  Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40.  Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 
41.  Animal Farm – George Orwell  <3
42.  The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43.  One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez  <3
44.  A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45.  The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46.  Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 
47.  Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy  <3
48.  The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 
49.  Lord of the Flies – William Golding 
50.  Atonement – Ian McEwan 
51.  Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52.  Dune – Frank Herbert  <3
53.  Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54.  Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55.  A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56.  The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57.  A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58.  Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 
60.  Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez  <3
61.  Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62.  Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63.  The Secret History – Donna Tartt 
64.  The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold 
65.  Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 
66.  On The Road – Jack Kerouac 
67.  Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 
69.  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70.  Moby Dick – Herman Melville 
71.  Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72.  Dracula – Bram Stoker 
73.  The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74.  Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 
75.  Ulysses – James Joyce
76.  The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77.  Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78.  Germinal – Emile Zola
79.  Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80.  Possession – AS Byatt 
81.  A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens  <3
82.  Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83.  The Color Purple – Alice Walker  <3
84.  The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 
85.  Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
86.  A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87.  Charlotte’s Web – EB White  <3
88.  The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89.  Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90.  The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91.  Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92.  The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery  <3
93.  The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94.  Watership Down – Richard Adams <3
95.  A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 
96.  A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97.  The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 
98.  Hamlet – William Shakespeare <3
99.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl <3
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 

I think I totaled 55… 

Some pieces I think could have been included, possibly instead of Bridget Jones’ Diary, Dan Brown’s hack of Templar tales, or the duplicates of Hamlet (complete works of Shakespeare are already included) and The Lion the Witch & The Wardrobe (which is singled out when it belongs with the Chronicles of Narnia which are also listed):

1. The Giver – Lois Lowry
2. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
3. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
4. ANYTHING by Mark Twain (wtf?)
5. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
6. Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein (or JOB or Friday, which are more personal favorites)
7. The Dark Tower Series or The Stand – Stephen King (if Dan Brown can be included, so can King!)
8. Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
9. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
10. What about the works of  Tennessee Williams??
11. The Little House on the Prairie series – Laura Ingalls Wilder
12. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Any others you can think of?

Also, could short stories count?  If so…

1. A Telltale Heart – Edgar Allen Poe
2. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3. The Lottery – Shirley Jackson
4. The Long Walk or The Body – Stephen King
5. The Awakening – Kate Chopin

Balls

So The Boy is turning 9 in a couple of weeks, and to give (myself) some breathing room between the birthday bash and the Christmas bonanza, I decided to have his birthday party next week.  When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he begged me for a cake in the shape of a pokeball.

Now, for those of you who don’t have soon-to-be-9-year-old boys living with you, don’t watch kids TV, and/or don’t have a love of Japanese invasion characters (basically if you’ve been living under a rock), this is a pokeball:

 

I thought about this for a while, wondering how much it would set me back to have one made, and eventually deciding that I would make my own miniature (cupcake-sized) pokeballs for each kid to eat.

Having never worked with rounded cupcake pans and frosting that dries shiny before, I wanted to run through a test batch this weekend to iron out any kinks in the process and practice decorating them (read: screwing them up).  I first thought I would be a genius and carve out the centers of each half and hide a little plastic pokemon toy inside.  Then I realized that the toys I had as party favors would be too big for that.  The boy had the idea of filling the bottom half with vanilla pudding like his favorite donuts.  So we decided to try that for the test batch and see how that went.

I spent a long time (and almost a whole bottle of red food coloring) trying to get the red frosting to be red and not peptobismol pink.  In the process I ended up with one purple index finger (from the black frosting) and 9 bright pink ones.   Why couldn’t I be cool and end up with a red right hand? (I love you, Nick Cave and all your Bad Seeds.)

Below are photos of my actual cakes as I decorated them.  Yep, my cell phone is slightly pink in spots now too.

One down… so many to go…

The second one came out much better than the first.

Two happy little pokeballs!

All the tops are done… now for those blasted circles on the front…

Finally! They’re all done…

32 Potential Band Names (DO NOT STEAL THEM!)

In no particular order… (and I didn’t look to see if any of these existed first)

1. Contraband Hammer
2. Crash Dye It
3. Lens
4. Free with Purchase
5. Halibut High
6. Your Favorite Jeans
7. Dangling Bits
8. STFU
9. Condom Fairies (courtesy of Andreas)
10. Bumping Uglies
11. Pretzel Stix (courtesy of The Boy)
12. Between Toasts
13. Strapping Young Men (an all-girls group, of course, like Barenaked Ladies)
14. Over You (nothing but love balads, bay-bee)
15. Self-Taught
16. Mark/c
17. Potential In-laws
18. Courtside Lovers
19. Harbinger
20. A Likely Story
21. The Stripsearch Marthas
22. Oxidance (techno/dance group, of course)
23. Jazz Hands
24. Buyer Beware
25. Dressed Down Daisies
26. Just Like Mom’s
27. Kissing Cousins (a country band?)
28. Marked Unread
29. Automatic Cynic
30. Every Probable Outcome
31. Sounds From the Peanut Gallery
32. Danson Kweens (Gay punk band? courtesy of Jer)