Posted on May 22, 2009 by grfxho
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
Filed under: Graphics, Stuff | 2 Comments »
Posted on April 9, 2009 by grfxho
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
Filed under: Genius at Work, The Boy | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 18, 2009 by grfxho
Posted on December 6, 2008 by grfxho
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.
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One down… so many to go…
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The second one came out much better than the first.
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Two happy little pokeballs!
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All the tops are done… now for those blasted circles on the front…
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Finally! They’re all done…
Filed under: Genius at Work, Stuff, The Boy | 6 Comments »
Posted on December 4, 2008 by grfxho
In no particular order… (and I didn’t look to see if any of these existed first)
- Contraband Hammer
- Crash Dye It
- Lens
- Free with Purchase
- Halibut High
- Your Favorite Jeans
- Dangling Bits
- STFU
- Condom Fairies (courtesy of Andreas)
- Bumping Uglies
- Pretzel Stix (courtesy of The Boy)
- Between Toasts
- Strapping Young Men (an all-girls group, of course, like Barenaked Ladies)
- Over You (nothing but love balads, bay-bee)
- Self-Taught
- Mark/c
- Potential In-laws
- Courtside Lovers
- Harbinger
- A Likely Story
- The Stripsearch Marthas
- Oxidance (techno/dance group, of course)
- Jazz Hands
- Buyer Beware
- Dressed Down Daisies
- Just Like Mom’s
- Kissing Cousins (a country band?)
- Marked Unread
- Automatic Cynic
- Every Probable Outcome
- Sounds From the Peanut Gallery
- Danson Kweens (Gay punk band? courtesy of Jer)
Filed under: Entertainment Garbage, Genius at Work, Stuff | 6 Comments »