Month: April 2017

Is she allowed to grow that much?

Posted on by Rainy Sunday

Well, it’s happened.  Munchkin officially has bigger feet than I do.  Or at least the same.  She is still shorter than I am, though, so I have that much to hold on to in the effort of deluding myself into thinking she won’t grow up. Truthfully, it’s my own fault that we found out she’s moved to adult shoes.  Since I started running, Munchkin has begged me to do races with me.  This is probably because I started with the really fun sounding races like The Bubble Run and The Blacklight Run.   We’ve decided to do the 5k at the Disneyland Lightside Half Marathon weekend next January (if they ever open up registration), so she’s been training with me.  She has also done one of this year’s Hogwarts Running Club races with me and some of the other local wizards.  Anyway, the shoes she’s been wearing were not bought with running in mind and didn’t breathe enough or have good support.  As we needed to get her a pocket knife for Campfire Girls, we decided to go to REI where we could look at running shoes, too. I suggested she might get better shoes in the adult section, and it proved that she’s out of the overlap zone and solidly in adult shoes.   Take a wild guess which shoe in the picture is hers and which is mine.


In other activities this weekend, Munchkin had a recital with her music school.   I thought she was going to play the piano and sing,  but she did vocals only.  There she was; big and brave enough to go on stage in front of a group of people she mostly didn’t know and sing all by herself.  I’m not going to say she’s ready for the pros, so to speak, but there are a lot of people who have never even managed that much.  Still, it’s another sign that she’s moving away from being a kid.  She’s not ten yet, though, so she’s not a tween yet, right?   Please?   She’s not allowed to grow up.

It only took me four months

Posted on by Rainy Sunday

I finally managed to “put up” some of our food overage, like I talked about back in January.  Last week, I managed to squeeze in making pickled asparagus between laundry and gaming.  This week, I made mango salsa and finished the laundry before going out with VetFriend and FlowerFriend.  I felt super accomplished.  Both recipes were from Preserving By the Pint, on opposing pages no less!  Both were labelled as “spicy” but, while I have no problem with spicy, I just don’t keep chili’s and such on hand.  Thus, I had to fudge on the recipes a bit.  Never fear, I didn’t mess with the essential make-this-food-safe ingredients, just the flavorings.  I have no idea how the pickled asparagus will taste, but I hope it’s good because Sister and I both love pickled asparagus.  At least I got to taste the finished product for the mango salsa before I canned it.  Also, there was a little left over that didn’t fit in the jars, so other people got to taste it, too!  So far, everyone has approved.

It’s really more fun canning in these tiny amounts, though I don’t have the usage of the fourth burner pot down quite smoothly yet.  I had to do both the asparagus and the salsa in two shifts.  It worked out fine, but I’d love to be able to do a batch all in one go.  Perhaps I’ve just chosen the wrong recipes to do the truly small batches?  Also, I was critically low on half pint (“jelly”) jars.  How the heck did I have only one?  That problem has been rectified, so maybe better luck next time.  Of course, I’m thinking of doing bread-and-butter squash pickles next, so maybe I’ll go larger batch on that one.  I’m fascinated by the idea of pickling zucchini and summer squash, and bread-and-butter are my favorite kind of pickle.  Of course, I also have some rainbow carrots that are going limp, so maybe I should pickle them first.  I also have a ton of beets, more than I need to make borscht.  Perhaps I should make up some pickled beets.  Tough decisions.  I might just have to make them all; as you might have figured out, I really like pickles.

Sakura-Con 2017

Posted on by Rainy Sunday

Once again, The Household had a good time at our local anime / Asian cultural festival. We watched a couple of new shows (A Little Snow Fairy Sugar and Valerian and Laureline), shopped in the exhibitors hall, and went to the Ouran High Host Club pajama party (hosted by the ADR director and voice actor Caitlin Glass – and yes, that was a lot of crazy fun).  Munchkin and I also got super close to finishing the scavenger hunt (seriously, we were only missing one spot!). We had fun in our casual cosplay, and Munchkin got some kudos and pictures for her cute Kirara costume.   It was a long day, but we had fun!

Casual Cosplay

Posted on by Rainy Sunday

IMG_3612Sister, Munchkin, and I spent this weekend gearing up for Sakura-Con next weekend.  Munchkin has known all year that she wanted to dress up again and may have known for just as long that she wanted to cosplay Kirara from InuYasha.  Sister ordered cream-colored pants and a shirt last month, which was harder than it sounds.  Apparently cream / ivory / ecru / whatever isn’t a popular color right now.  She ended getting a set of pants and shirt that are technically long underwear, but they’re a dri-weave tech fabric type, fit well, and feel pretty nice to the touch.  Yesterday, we bought some “fur” fabric to make the Kirara’s two tails and fur ruff.  We also got some fabric paint markers since Kirara has black stripes on her feet and tails.

IMG_3613Today, after a leisurely morning and brunch, the three of us started in on our craft projects.  Sister drew out a nice curved fluffy tail, which she sewed while I cut out a second.  I then designed the ruff while Sister sewed the second tail and painted the stripes on both tails as well as the cuffs of the pants and shirt.  Munchkin’s job was to use the hair blow dryer to try to speed up the drying rate of the fabric paint.  Sadly, the tails are still going to take the recommended day to dry before we can stuff them.  The ruff is mostly done, though; I just need to sew on some hooks so that Munchkin can easily don and remove it through the day.  We (or maybe just I) will stuff the tails tomorrow night and get them sewn onto the elastic belt that we’re constructing (with a buckle – again for easy removal).  I also need to sew some fur into the store-bought ears we got.  Even though the inside of Kirara’s ears are pink, I’m just going to use a couple of scraps from the tails and ruff.  We’re not trying to be that exact to detail; we’re not nearly that ambitious.

IMG_3616Speaking of low ambition, it’s only by accident that Sister and I are dressing up at all.  I’d been thinking of going in street clothes this year for the sake of comfort, but was leaving myself the option to wear my burlesque skirt and corset if I felt like it Saturday morning.  We were watching Zootopia last night, though, and suddenly I had that thought that Judy Hopps’ out of uniform outfits were cute and comfortable.  The next thing you know, I’d ordered a pink plaid shirt and a floppy straw hat and decided to do a casual cosplay of Judy.  Then, as I was snooping around on the internet and Pinterest for ideas, Sister got into the spirit and will be going as Marinette from Miraculous.  Both of us will be wearing was constitutes normal clothing for us and forgoing any wigs, prosthetics, etc.  Of course, Marinette is a human character, so Sister will be a little more “accurate” than me.  That’s okay, too.  I’ll wear a small amount of makeup to up my sweetness factor, and I’m going to put my hair into two pigtails to suggest rabbit ears.  That’s it, though.  Nice and simple for my first cosplay (I’ve only done steampunk before).  I love that people have come up with casual cosplay (or stealth cosplay, as I like to call it…oh, and DisneyBounding).

IMG_3614

Tune in next week for pictures of the three of us actually dressed up!  I have no idea if BIL will cosplay; he may just be our cameraman.  And, yes, the dining room was / is covered in little bits of fuzz…as were the three of us!

Nowhere Near Rainy

Posted on by Rainy Sunday

Sorry about not posting last week; I was out of town and forgot to set up a post ahead of time.  I flew down to Galveston to meet BestFriend and then take off on a (Western) Carribean cruise.  Our cabin was tiny, but who spends much time in their cabin on a cruise?  We sat on deck and in the lounge and in the cafe and even in the library.  There was plenty of stuff to do, including pedicures and massages.  We watched a movie on deck one night, which was really fun.  Of course, there was tons of good food (the Carnival chefs have a thing for fruit soups) and fancy cocktails and dressing up and pictures.  BestFriend and I read our books and worked on our knitting (I swatched for a new project rather than try and drag around any of my WIPs).

There were two at-sea days and two port stops, Cozumel and Progreso.  In Cozumel, we didn’t make any plans.  Instead, we just wandered around.  And by wandered, I mean walked…a lot.  Altogether that day, we walked slightly over four miles…in the sun and heat.  We did give in and take a cab between the cruise terminal area and downtown, after a while.  I didn’t altogether mind, though.  All that wandering let us find a really good place to have lunch, at what might be the tiniest resort ever.  It looked super cute, though, and I had absolutely perfect shrimp ceviche.  I even got a fresh churro from a guy selling them out of a bucket for a dollar each.  That’s a very important thing to remember – if you happen across a guy selling churros out of a bucket, buy one.  It will be the best churro you’ve ever had…just like tamales being sold out of someones car in Arizona are the best tamales you’re gonna get (other than home made).  Otherwise, we did some shopping (what is it about cruises and buying expensive jewelry?), dipped our toes in the ocean (okay, my heels), and found a Starbucks so that we could could connect to the world for a few minutes and I could get a couple of souvenir city mugs for BIL’s dad.  We even found the local synagogue.

For our stop in Progreso, we booked a shore excursion to the Mayan ruins at Uxmal.  It was brutally hot, very dry, and there was not nearly enough shade.  I overheated and was tomato red by the time we made it back to the visitor’s center.  Even though I was smart enough not to attempt climbing up the steps in the allowed places, towards the end I wasn’t entirely certain I was going to make it back.  And the site was entirely worth it.  Uxmal was amazing.  There’s an amazing degree of the original structures and architecture left, and they’ve done a remarkably good job restoring what they can.  There’s still a lot of damage and work to be done, but at least some of the original material was salvageable from the surrounding houses and villages where it had been taken.  Our guide, Antonio “Tony” was very knowledgeable and personable.  BestFriend and I loved him.  From what he said, I think he may have been an researching archaeologist at some point, though he has also been a tour guide for something like forty years. His love for the subject and the site was obvious, and it was very easy to see why Uxmal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It was great to see BestFriend again and to see a part of Mexico I’d never been to before.  I had a lot of fun, but it’s always nice to be home…even when it means diving right back into work.