Runaway October

Thanks to every­one for par­tic­i­pat­ing! We had 80+ com­ments.

Random.org tells me that #70 is our win­ner! Yay! *

And who is #70? Why, that would be Shawna.

So Ms Shawna, I will be email­ing you soon. I hope you devour the book as quickly as I will!

Thank you to every­one for par­tic­i­pat­ing! Best of luck in the other give­aways. And a HUGE THANK YOU to Ms. Carey for being gra­cious enough to not only give away a signed edi­tion, but to let me host the give­away on my hum­ble lit­tle blog.

*The num­bers selected for Random.org started at com­ment #3 , because #1 and #2 were com­ments from my hus­band and I, so we don’t count.

Hey hey guys.

Long time no blog. Things are always hec­tic in Octo­ber here. I’ll have to get you all caught up in another post, because today I have some­thing VERY excit­ing for you guys.

Jacque­line Carey, Author of the Kushiel’s Legacy series and com­pan­ion Naamah Tril­ogy, has very gra­ciously given me a signed copy of her lat­est book to give to one of my lovely read­ers! How excit­ing! Guys, this is the first give­away I’ve had that I didn’t have to buy myself.

I think Carey is an amaz­ing author. I’m not even sure where I picked up her first book. It could have pos­si­bly been Good­will for all I know, but from there it was a mad dash to have ALL THE BOOKS! Saints Astray, and its pre­de­ces­sor Santa Olivia, are very dif­fer­ent from the books that first made me love Carey… dif­fer­ent like Nutella Vs Mac&Cheese dif­fer­ent and you don’t see me turn­ing either one down.

Here’s the book excerpt from Amazon:

Fel­low orphans, ama­teur vig­i­lantes, and mem­bers of the San­ti­tos, Loup Garron-the fugi­tive daugh­ter of a genet­i­cally engi­neered “wolf man”-and Pilar Ecchevar­ria grew up in the mil­i­tary zone of Out­post 12, for­merly known as Santa Olivia. But now they’re free, and they want to help the rest of the San­ti­tos escape. Dur­ing a series of escapades, they dis­cover that Miguel, Loup’s for­mer spar­ring part­ner and repro­bate sur­ro­gate brother, has escaped from Out­post 12 and is tes­ti­fy­ing on behalf of its for­got­ten citizens-at least until he dis­ap­pears from pro­tec­tive cus­tody. Honor dri­ves Loup to res­cue Miguel, even though enter­ing the U.S could mean los­ing her lib­erty. Pilar vows to help her.

It will take a dar­ing and absurd caper to extri­cate Miguel from the mess he’s cre­ated but Loup is pre­pared to risk every­thing… and this time she has help.

You can click here to read the first chap­ter or click here to order it on Amazon.

So, just leave me a com­ment, any com­ment — though prefer­ably some­thing about how pretty I am or that you’ll bring me gourmet cof­fee in bed every morn­ing — and we’ll ran­domly select a winner.

Rules:

• One entry per per­son. Dou­ble entries will be dis­qual­i­fied. Even par­tic­u­larly flat­ter­ing com­ments only count as one.
• Entries must be in by Mid­night Novem­ber 15^th. Win­ner will be announced the fol­low­ing morning.
• Win­ner has 48 hours to respond. If no response in said time frame, another ran­dom com­menter will be drawn.

Good Luck guys!

I’ve been pretty busy lately. There’s only 61 days ’til Haloween, which means about 54 until our party.

So far I’ve:

• Stained our garage util­ity sink tea-staining cheesecloth.
• Made about half a skele­ton worth of paper mache bones.
• Redid a giant plas­tic pump­kin I picked up at a yard­sale. It needed paint and sand­ing and such.
• Made PVC flicker candles
• And destroyed a lamp and chan­de­lier and put it all back together as a, what I like to call, Lampalier!

Ta da!

Not bad, eh? I had an old shiny brass light fix­ture we took down out of the house and an aged brass lamp base I picked up at Good­Will for like $3. I took them apart, stuck them back together, had my dad cut some metal disks for the can­dle­holder parts and painted. Of course, I don’t have any big can­dles handy at the moment, but you get the idea. And it’s very big and heavy. Very dra­matic. Also, no “before” pic­tures. I’m lazy like that.

And this is where I admit where I was wrong. Was that a col­lec­tive gasp I just heard?! I know, I know. I was bab­bling about what color to paint it one evening and my hus­band sug­gests Matte Black. I prob­a­bly gave him the stu­pid­est look ever. Matte Black? Seri­ously? Men have no sense. Seri­ously. So I pick out this ham­mered black color and grab some dark grey auto­mo­tive primer and start prim­ing away. Prob­lem is I really like the primer color, so Matte Black it shall stay. I love you honey!

It’s gonna show fin­ger­prints like crazy, but what doesn’t in my house?

Don’t ask about the chair on the table. I was gonna drape a back­ground cloth but my fam­ily was giv­ing me too many crazy looks.

See those can­dles? Made ‘em. Yep. I’m not entirely sure open flames will be a good idea, so these “can­dles” will be used with flick­er­ing LED tealights in strate­gic loca­tions where I really appre­ci­ate things NOT catch­ing on fire. Here’s a tuto­r­ial, if you are so inclined. I would like to add though, to skip the expend­ing foam step. The stuff is expen­sive and a pain. Just turn your tea light on, put it in, and stuff some news­pa­per or gro­cery bags under­neath it. You don’t need to worry about heat or melt­ing or any­thing like that.

So have you started on your Hal­loween stuff yet? Is it too early to start decorating?

So it’s been roughly 6 months since I’ve posted here. That’s prob­a­bly the longest break I’ve taken. I’ve just been busy, I guess.

Here’s a cou­ple excuses rea­sons why:

• Went back to school at the last minute. (Not rec­om­mended. Sum­mer semes­ter with sci­ence and math is not rec­om­mended either.)
• Declan started Kindergarten.
• Hal­loween party planning.
• … Uhm, Pin­ter­est?

Wow, that’s not nearly the list of impres­sive rea­sons I kept pic­tur­ing in my mind. The good news is that I’m sure most of my fol­low­ers know me some­what in per­son and have been in touch on FaceBook.If you don’t know me per­son­ally… well, come say ‘Hi’. The worst thing that will hap­pen is I end up with some crazy stalker and they leave dead ani­mals on my porch. I already have a cat that does that, so you’ll have to try harder than that crazy, future, poten­tial stalker.

Declan did sur­pris­ingly well with his first day. He seems gen­uinely excited to go.

 Just a few days after start­ing school, he lost his first tooth!

I’ve been work­ing on a whole lot of Hal­loween stuff. Here’s a quick Save The Date I made for the party so far.

I only edited this to fit dif­fer­ent word­ing. When I find the orig­i­nal source again, I will give credit where credit is due.

And if I was any kind of GOOD blog­ger I’d promise pic­tures of my Hal­loween stuff and what­not. But we all know I’m not a very GOOD blog­ger so maybe, just maybe, I might post again soon.

So, my pho­tographs are typ­i­cally pretty… blah. I took pho­tog­ra­phy in High School, but for some rea­son my brain is just not trans­fer­ring those skills to digital.

One of my goals this year is too get bet­ter with my cam­era and coin­ci­den­tally The MCP Project 52 signups hap­pened to cross my path.

Here’s the gist:

MCP Project 52 – It’s a way to encour­age cre­ativ­ity, make pho­tog­ra­phy fun, and pro­vide a chal­lenge with­out actual pres­sure. Par­tic­i­pants will [sic] shar­ing their art work and images weekly while inspir­ing each other.

The theme of the first week, which I am slightly behind on, was “Around The House” so here’s my go.

Click to embiggen

I fixed some of the overblown and added a vin­tage photo fil­ter to it.

I hop­ing that if I keep fid­dling with my cam­era every week that I’ll get bet­ter. Hope­fully.

If you’d like to join–and we’d love to have you–the infor­ma­tion is here. And be sure to stop by the Flickr pool of all the par­tic­i­pat­ing pho­tos here. There are some out­stand­ing pho­tos in there!