The Unveiling of the LEGO Man

If you'll remember, last year I offered up many prayers for my Halloween Miracle and this year, we were poised to have a repeat of the same costume.  Josh, when asked a month or two ago, wanted to be an elephant, again. 

Which suit me fine.  Me, not being much of a holidays kinda gal.

But then he got interested in--no, obsessed with--legos.  And he wanted to be a LEGO-man.  I tried to convince him to be a LEGO.  You know, a block colored red with the nubby things. 

Simple.  So much so that even a monkey--or me--could put it together.

Alas, that was not his vision at all.  A LEGO man would be the only thing that would do.  So I scoured the internet for some ideas.  I found some awesome LEGO man outfits and set out to make one myself for Josh (really, how hard could it be?).  Of course, I waited until the week of Halloween to start said costume, but at least I was making an effort.

As a refresher course, this is a LEGO mini-fig:

And this is what I was sort of going for:

But I had a limited amount of supplies, given my proximity to anything other than a Walmart, as well as a four year old who had his own vision. 

Josh's vision was a LEGO mini-fig that he had brought from home to the store with us.  It was gray with blue pants and one blue arm and one red arm.  He also had gray hands.  True to Josh's form, we had to duplicate THIS LEGO mini fig and not, say, an easier one.  Though, in hindsight the gray hands did turn out to be a blessing.

So Tuesday, the day before Josh's Halloween party at Preschool, we set off on our adventure.  We spent 2 hours at the store looking for something--anything--that we could use as a head.  I finally came upon a 5 gallon water jug:

I sawed off the nozzle bit and stuffed the handle part with batting (for some reason, I had that, and it seemed like a good idea at the time).  I used yellow duct tape to tape everything down and give it that somewhat uniformal shape.

The original idea was to spray paint it yellow, but lo and behold spray paint doesn't stick very well to plastic.  Who knew?  So we went for option number two which was to wrap it all in yellow duct tape.  It was about at this point that I gave up on my vision of the guy in the above photo.  But I was not to be deterred.  If my boy wants a LEGO mini fig, then a LEGO mini fig he gets.

I cut out (large) eyeholes and a mouth and Voila!

A slightly demented LEGO Man.

I took a container of butter, emptied it into a different container, washed it out and secured it to the top of the head for the little nub with--yellow duct tape.

For the boxy shoes, I used a shoe box (I have plenty of those) and cut it in half.  Then I taped them onto Josh's shoes and cut out openings for his legs so he wouldn't trip on them.

The idea was to pull his sweat pants over them, but Josh naturally refused to wear them, so that got scrapped.

Our next order of business were the hands.  Luckily for me, Josh wanted gray hands, so regular duct tape worked wonders.  I cut the hands out of styrofoam and then wrapped them in duct tape

I took a pair of sweats and taped in the perfect size of styrofoam blocks to make his legs look blocky.  And I cut a trapezoidal shape out of cardboard to wear under his shirt for the front.  I attached the hands to gray cotton gloves so Josh could hold his own pumpkin around the neighborhood.  These three items didn't get pictures.  Sorry.

Before the final unveiling, I want everyone to know that Josh loved his costume.  And really that's all that matters.

And he was too sick to go to his Halloween party anyways.  Figures.

So here's the final production:

I think this final picture exemplifies my blog title the best:

"Undomestically Geeky". 

Book Review Friday 10/30/09

Book: Queen of Babble in the Big City
Author: Meg Cabot
Pages: 307

This is the follow-up to Queen of Babble, which I read earlier this year.  I am a HUGE fan of Meg Cabot.  She's the author behind The Princess Diaries series (which I haven't read) and a slew of other books, some of which I have read.  It's her style I love.  If my brain were an open book (heaven help us all), it would read like a Meg Cabot book.

Well, maybe like a Meg Cabot book on steriods because of all the math thingies going on in there.

But still...it's me, in book form.

Queen of Babble in the Big City picks up from when Lizzie returns to the states after a summer stay in France, where she meets Luke, her now-boyfriend (subject matter of Queen of Babble).  She decides to move to New York from her homestate of Michigan to fulfill her dreams of opening a wedding dress refurnishing shop in lower Manhattan while Luke is attending medical school at NYU.  However, Lizzie doesn't realize how hard it is to make it in New York and she tends to open her mouth at all the wrong times and places, making it doubly hard. 

I'll be honest--there's not much depth here.  But it was the perfect book for a week of de-stressing.  Or what was suppose to be de-stressing, but actually quite stressing with two Halloween costumes to make, a pot of chili to make and a host of other, less fun activities.

I would kill at this point to have a weekend to myself where I could hole up somewhere and just read.  Or watch tv or take a nap. 

A nap would be nice.

But I digress.

Meg Cabot has quickly become one of my most favorite authors and I can't wait to pick up the next book in the Queen of Babble series.

Whoa!

So it's been a week. 

One crazy, weird week.

But I have pictures.  And that's cool.  But I don't have all the pictures I need, so I need to gather my energy and restuff Josh into his demented Lego-Man outfit so I can get a total picture of my efforts. 

And kids have been sick.



And stalkers have been lurking.

And I've spent a lot of time catching up on sleep from trying to get our basement (nearly) finished.  (Pictures of that too--not of me sleeping but of our newly finished basement).

And I spent a lot of time making a Halloween costume for a kid that--thus far--has been too sick to wear it anywhere.

And then there's our new obsession on TV, Stormchasers on Discovery, where people chase tornadoes.  So stupid, yet so fascinating all at the same time.

But don't despair.  I haven't forgotten about you.  This weekend should be a picture-filled blogtastic weekend.  

Unless, it's so busy, I don't find time to come back until next week.  But rest assured, I'm thinking of you.  And there is always my Friday Book Review to look forward to.

Yawn.

But one day you will want to read a book and you'll remember that I have a bunch on my blog.  So you'll come back and find one that I reviewed and I will have done my part to make this world a better place.

Happy Halloween.  Stay warm and get lots of candy. 

Or steal it from your kids. 

Whatever.  The end justifies the means.

Smokin'

A few weeks ago I coerced my twin brother, Scott, into running a 5k with me.  Well, coerce might be a little understated.  It was more like I signed us both up for the race and then told him he was going to run it.

Why?  Because a few months ago he started running and I was so excited to finally have someone from my family start running and I started thinking about all these cool races we could do, and then he quit.  But I still made him run a 5k with me.

I'm nice like that.

The race was yesterday.  Last week, as I might have mentioned, I PRed with an awesome time (for me) of 27:07 at another local 5k.  This week, I wasn't so worried about time.  I was just going out to have fun.

The whole fam damily drove down to watch us run our 5k.  Here's us walking to the start line of the 5k:

And here's us at the starting line:

I was confident going into the race because I knew the course.  That was, until the race director told us the course, which was the opposite way then what I thought we'd be running, so it was considerably harder since it was UPHILL. 

But I was undeterred.

We started off, laughing and chatting.  At about 1 mile, I voiced my regret about eating a Tostino's pizza for lunch.  Scott echoed with his regret of two double cheeseburgers from McDonald's.

At two miles, I was regretting not having peed before the start of the race. Scott had given up on conversation by slipping his headphones in, but he laughed and said "eh, just let it go".  He was about 30 seconds too late with his advice.  We continued forth.  I pointed out the spots where I almost stepped on a skunk and the time I came across a guy with a shotgun.  Just me, him and the shotgun.

In my defense, I kept asking Scott how he was feeling and he replied good.

We ran to the high school and then we had to do a lap around the track. 

I was slightly ahead at this point, but at the top of the last straight away, Scott took off and I was left in the dust.

My cute nieces made signs for us:

It was a great run though.  Scott finished in 27:22ish and I finished in 27:32.  Not too bad for how hard the course was. AND I totally smoked my age category.  I came in first, besting #2 by over 5 MINUTES.  I've never won an age category award before.  I'm so cool.

My mom snapped pictures of us like we'd just finished 26 miles and not just 3.

 

(secret: we felt like we had just finished 26 miles and not just 3.)

I'm not really use to running in the afternoons.  Or the sunlight.  It took some adjusting.  But, all in all, we had a good time.  And I have BOTH brothers tentatively planned for the New Year's Eve run in Sugarhouse Park.

Yeah, we'll see if that happens. :)

Book Review Friday 10/23/09

I know.  Finished a basement AND a book this week.  Will I ever cease amazing you?

Book: Alicia
Author: Alicia Appleman-Jurman
Pages: 448 pages

A friend let me borrow this a while ago and it's been sitting on my nightstand for a long time.  I just wasn't in the place mentally to where I could read about the Holocaust, although it is one of my most favorite topics to read about.  Last week, I was finally there, and so I picked it back up and finished it. 

The story is the memoir of a 12 year old Polish Jewess who was living through the German occupation.  While she never is sent to a concentration camp, she does live in the ghettos in Poland and witnesses a lot of horrible things.  The things she endured over the course of the war are incredible and her fortitude is amazing.  I kept imagining some of the girls that come over and babysit for me who are about the same age and wondered if they would be as resilient.  It's always amazing what you can make yourself do if you are put in certain situations.  Your instinct to survive is a lot stronger than I think we give it credit.

By the time she is 15, the war is over and she becomes one of the displaced.  She has no family or home to return to.  But she makes her way back to Poland and starts up an orphanage for children who lost their entire families in concentration camps. 

From there she goes on to work in the underground movement to move the Jewish out of Poland and into Palenstine. 

Alicia endures heartbreak and illness, but manages to make it through in one piece without losing her faith in God or for the human race.

The story was incredible.  I really can't say enough about it.  We should be required to read stories like this to remind us that our troubles are merely bumps in the road. 

How All Our Hard Work Almost Went Up in Smoke (Literally)

Last night, we were doing some final things in the basement before the carpet layers came to lay carpet (imagine that...carpet layers laying carpet.  Amazing!) this morning.  It was late (like 2 am late) and we had unhooked one of the lights in the bedroom to paint around it.  So we were using our trusty spotlight of which we had been using to work on the basement up until Monday night.

Because we had run out of "proper" lightbulbs for said spotlight, we were using one with a much larger watt size than was recommended.  But, that wasn't going to deter us.  So Wade laid the spotlight down on top of the plastic covering the desk of which the entire basement is built around--that sucker isn't going anywhere--and proceeded to paint.  Then he came upstairs for a minute while I was taking a break.


As we made our way back downstairs we could smell something burning from one of the back bedrooms.  Lo and behold, as the plastic heated up under the spotlight because the wattage in the lightbulb was so high, it burned a hole right down to the desk and was well on it's way to starting a castastrophic fire that would have, at the very least, gutted our entire basement--the very one that was within HOURS of being completed--if not the entire house. 

Can you imagine being that close and having it all burn down to the ground at 3 in the morning?   

Good Weekend Moments

It's been a good weekend.  To make up for a very crappy and stressful week:

Last weekend we painted our walls.  A nice shade of PINK.  I was not so happy when I woke up the next morning, excited we were so close to being done, and finding my ENTIRE basement covered in strawberry ice cream. 

How does one paint their entire basement pink? 

See, we have a guy in the neighborhood who is a painter for a living.  When he handed us the color templates, both Wade and I were overwhelmed.  We had a vague idea of what color we wanted, (hint: it wasn't pink) but there were SO many to choose from.  Bob suggested a particular color combination that he really likes and we went with it.  It looked so nice on a 2 inch by 2 inch square.  We bought 10 gallons of it and promptly forgot what color it was until Wade sprayed it on the walls.

Wade and I both stared at the walls and tried to will ourselves to like the color, but I just couldn't.  And with the furniture we bought for the basement a year ago, it would've looked horrendous, so we had no choice.  We had to repaint it.

And the quest was on.  Though, we didn't have a lot of time because in our exuberance, we scheduled the electrician for tomorrow morning and the carpet people for Thursday and a family party for my side on Saturday to watch the BYU-TCU game on the projector screen.  Throw in three assignments Wade has due, a scout campout, painting the ceilings, and work and we've kind of put a big time crunch on ourselves. 

So a process that would've taken the old Wade and Sandra a month to agree upon, was now condensed to two days.  Find a new paint color pronto.

I spent Monday at Home Depot looking for the "right" shade I was envisioning.  Didn't find it.  So I spent Tuesday at the paint store where we got the original color talking to the paint technician. (Bad sentence structure.  Sorry.  Don't care.  You get the idea.) We talked for 15 minutes and he was just this side of helpful.  But I did manage to find a color I really liked and went with just a quart of it to try on the walls.  I slapped it up, loved it and then handed the decision to Wade. 

I have no problem making decisions...

Wade took Wednesday off from work and went in to talk to the paint people himself, arriving home with 8 gallons of paint.  I wasn't sure what color he was going to choose because it was still up in the air when he left, but he did go with the color I chose.

Smart man.

He slapped that paint up on the walls and now we have finally achieved nirvana.  Or something akin.

Saturday morning, I headed off to a local 5k.  Which was the beginning of my FANTASTIC weekend.  The course was the same as the running course of the triathlon I've done twice now.  The first year, I ran the 5k portion in 33:17.  This year, I ran it in 33:28.  It's a challenging course.  The first mile is a gradual uphill and then it flattens out and then it's downhill for a smidge and then you turn around and head back, though you turn before you get the full benefit of running back down the gradual uphill.  My only goal was to beat 30 minutes.  But, in the back of my mind, I thought it'd be cool to PR on this course.  But it was a lofty goal since my current PR stands at 27:33. 

I started off, keeping it cool and not sprinting up the first mile.   My neighbor across the street and I were neck and neck.  He's a faithful 5 am runner as well.  I felt really good--and even better when I could spot my training buddy, H.  It's always a good feeling when H is still in my line of sight during a race.  We ran on, each of us alone with our ipods and thoughts. 

As the neighbor and I made the final turn for the last half mile, I pulled slightly ahead for a bit, but I looked across the road to see him right beside me with about a quarter mile left.  I had to cross the street and as we pulled into the parking lot for the last bit, he was slightly ahead of me.  I motioned for all the onlookers to be quiet and at the last possible second, I veered right past him to the finish line.  I was probably two steps ahead, but I still won the duel.

Not only did I win the duel, but I set a PR of 27:07 AND came in fourth (I had originally thought 5th, but at church, I was corrected) OVERALL for the women. 

Not that there were a lot of women.

But still...

I can't begin to tell you have happy this made me.  I'm starting to feel like maybe a Boston Qualifier in a year isn't so out of the picture.  Baby steps, though.  I still haven't run a 5k at a pace that I need to keep to run a marathon.  But I've taken 4 minutes off alone this year and 6 minutes off of this course alone.

When I returned home, Wade's dad was out here, helping Wade paint the ceilings.  He was such a godsend.  I don't think we would've been ready to have the electrician in by tomorrow if he hadn't come out to help.

When I say that we have finished our basement, I mean to say that WE (or rather, more so Wade) has finished the basement.  By himself.  Except for a day of framing help from my brother, a day of laying tile from his brother, and help building the fireplace mantel from a neighbor, Wade has done this entire project on his own.  We hired out the plumbing, the drywall and the electrical.  Everything else has been him.  And he's done an AMAZING job.

So much so that I haven't thought about the "Dream House" in well over a month now. 

I guess it's for the best.

T-5 days and we will be DONE!