wow and mmm!

The wow is in reference to my last post. Wow. I did not mean to confuse my dear readers. Apparently the elephant in the foreground of my picture totally blinded y’all to the stack of cardboard in the back. My apologies. Actually I’ll blame this one on the elephant and its obesity. Tsk, tsk, how dare he cover up my nicely-stacked stack of cardboard?!!

*pause as you all scroll down and look at my last post….see there IS cardboard in the back, behind the small carved wooden elephant. Amanda’s right again. Fancy that.*sarcasm dripping* *

I have a few progress pictures that I took while working on the elephant, which I shall post perhaps later. I have not yet painted him pink or purple……tho I do still plan to. I finished the elephant himdearself, but I left him in the classroom. Like who really wants an elephant in their house to begin with?! I regret to inform you that I did not photograph the finished product. That shall be done this coming Tuesday. No word yet on when I’ll post them though. Possibly before Hanukkah. Uh huh.

As far as mmm! I would like to introduce you all to a most luscious recipe for Coffee Jelly Frappuccinos. My first thought was one of strawberry jelly, grape jelly, and various and sundry other jellies and how horrible that would taste in coffee. However, a careful perusal of the recipe revealed a quite different story. (Yes, folks, if you click on “the recipe” in the previous sentence, you will see….the recipe.) The jelly part is actually coffee jello, which you make.

This is what mine looked like once I cubed it:

However, if I had carefully read the recipe, I would have known to cube them quite smaller. Like 1/4″ sized, instead of 1/2″ to 1″. They were big. If you decide to make this, cube them small. Trust me. (According to my brother, even the big ones can go up a standard size straw though. But I’m dubious of that.) Lesson learned: the best things come in small cubes.

Another piece of advice I have for you is to use a ginormous blender for the coffee (non-jello) part of the frappuccino. Or you could do what I wish I had done, and just blend half of the coffee and half of the milk and half of the ice (and half of the flavor syrup, if thou so desirest) together at one time. As stated, I did not blend mine this way, and the coffee foam leakage which ensued made me regret that choice. Here I was thinking that 3 1/2 cups of liquid plus about 10-12 ice cubes would fit nicely in a 5 (or was it 6?) cup blender. HA! <—–aka “obviously not.” Lesson learned: bigger really is better.

The recipe says at the end, and I quote, “…top with whipped cream.” Guys, that really isn’t necessary. Below you will find a picture I took of the blender after I poured out like half its contents into me and my brother’s respective glasses.

See that thick white layer on top? Well it’s whipped topping. Not whipped cream per se because I added milk, not cream, to the coffee. But it’s whipped and on the top, so there. In the pictures I took of the finished coffee jelly frappuccinos, you’ll see the ultra-thick layer of whipped topping. Seriously, like 2/3 of the cup. (Hint: the coffee jello floats to the top of the coffee liquid, but sits beneath the whipped topping. Ah, now the picture is becoming clearer.) Come to think of it, it’s really like coffee-flavored whipped topping. So why ruin the experience with store-bought, loaded-with-preservatives whipped cream? I don’t know why. Lesson learned: When in doubt, spray-paint the elephant purple. It will be able to hide better amongst the pansies.

And I just love this close up of the coffee jello at the bottom of the glass. Ahhhh, how the mouth salivates!

like…..finding an elephant in a cardboard stack

That was my assignment for 3D Design class. Except this finding was not happenstance. No, I had to create the elephant. Out of cardboard. With a utility knife. This is what I started with:

So much potential, I know. It’s an elephant in the rough…the very, very rough. So far, I have the head and body pretty much done, just need to work on the legs tonight and Sunday night. If all goes according to plan, you will be able to see the finished product sometime after Tuesday. If all does not go according to plan, I shall cry bitter tears and pierce the elephant’s cold, hard heart with the now-dull tip of my utility knife. Or maybe I’ll just spray-paint it pink. Or purple. Purple is a nice color.

News

In for the season, returning from last autumn, new for me to try, is pumpkin spice at Dunkin Donuts. I think I tried it last year and wasn’t so fond of it, but I tried it again this year. I used less pumpkin flavor than I was supposed to and added some mocha flavor (just cuz I can). It was tasty! And new for me.

The down-side to gorging myself on pumpkin spice mocha beverages is that I found myself unable to sleep when I finished my closing shift. And I had a 6am morning shift too. Which has nothing to do with anything being new, which is the general subject of this post, which is why I will no longer bemoan my self-induced lack of sleep last night.

After work this morning, I ate a hurried lunch and whisked my little sister off in the little tan car. We had some serious shopping to do. First stop was CVS to try to buy some new Sally Hansen HD nail polish. It was on sale last week, but not this week. I wanted to see if the price was really so bad that I should wait till the next sale. It was $7.19 for one lil bottle of nail polish. I’m waiting for the next sale.

If you live in or near Emmaus and you like getting awesome clothes for awesomer deals and you have never been to Once Is Not Enough, then shame on you. I go there……frequently. And if when I go, I find something with an impending markdown date, I make it a point to return soon. After shopping there this afternoon, I feel as though I just got a whole new wardrobe for the fall/winter season. A green sweater, a blue sweater, a comfy purple top, and I thought there was something else too. Honestly. Go there.

If you live in or near Emmaus and you have never heard of the new second hand shop, Shelby’s Closet, it’s okay. I just found out about it recently too. It’s near the Emmaus Triangle, and it opened about a month ago. Rarely do I enter a store and feel so delighted by the inspiring decorations that I wish I had brought my camera. I entered Shelby’s Closet and felt the aforementioned delight. Granted, it’s a new store, so it’s kinda small. But the prices were good (both tops I got were less than the nail polish. must. wait. for. sale….), and the dressing room was awe-inspiring. I want to decorate my walls like that – random squares of fabric stapled into the drywall. However, I have a feeling that that ain’t gonna happen. So I’ll just have to shop there more often. You should too!

I should come up with some other new thing to say to make it five perfectly uneven points of newness. But I can’t think of anything else. I guess that means my life is perfectly, evenly boring with only four items of news.

Do the Dew!

I had the greatest of intentions to post pictures of both my sketches for 3D and the first wire sculpture we’re working on. But I don’t. So instead I decided to post what I believe to be one of the funniest commercials I have heard. Admittedly it’s stupid, and quite possibly jr-high boy humor. But a solo closing shift lends itself to see humor in many things. Including stupid Mountain Dew commercials from last year. So a ten-second Google search (I waste so much time!) yielded a script of the very commercial I had in mind.

Maybe next week I’ll post the pictures of my projects. If I haven’t lost my entire readership by then.

MVO1: Hey, Dew drinkers; it’s time for another episode of ‘Mountain Dew User’s Guide to the Good Life’.
Today: How to impress a girl.
MVO2: It’s pretty easy to do if you follow these simple steps.

MVO1: Okay, Step 1: Be good-looking.
MVO2: That’s right. Look at me. I look hot.
MVO1: Uh, do you even own a mirror?
MVO2: Of course I do.
MVO1: Does it work?
MVO2: Yes.

MVO1: Okay, step 2 to impressing a girl? Compliment her.
MVO2: But be creative, okay? If she’s got an amazing ba-donka-donk, then everybody compliments her on that ba-donka-donk.
MVO1: Right, so compliment a different feature. Maybe her eyebrows. Like, ‘your eyebrows are so amazing. They remind me of your ba-donka-donk’.
MVO2: Nice. Definitely gonna work.

MVO1: Nailed it. Step 3, guys: Buy her a Mountain Dew.
MVO2: You want to say something like, ‘Eh, can I buy you a Mountain Dew, you beautiful creature, you?’
MVO1: Oh, that last part’s just creepy.
MVO2: Good point. Step 4: Don’t be creepy.

MVO1: So just to recap. To impress a girl: Be good-looking. Be complimentary. And be generous with the Dew.
MVO2: And…
MVO1 & MVO2: Don’t be creepy.

MVO1: Mountain Dew.
MVO2: Do the Dew.

“…has been cancelled.”

“Just this class? or for the whole semester?”

“The whole semester. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

My pattern-making 2 class, which I wasn’t totally pumped about taking in the first place, is now cancelled. Not the type of phonecall I wanted to receive. And thankfully I didn’t directly receive it. I’m just imagining the exchange my mom had with the receptionist at Baum.

At the time of the phonecall, I, on the other hand, was having a whole different set of bad circumstances. After a delightful lunch with a friend who is soon going back to AZ, I realized that we had to leave so I wouldn’t be late for work.

(theme music as Murphy enters with his inevitable law)

We returned to my car to discover that I had left my lights on. Therefore, there was no hasty departure from Mas Cafe. We sat and chatted in the car in the rain at the Emmaus Triangle, until my friend’s brother was able to come with his truck and long jumper cables. After some skillful maneuvering (which had nothing to do with my skills), I was back on the road.

Five minutes down the road, I realized that I was on some unknown street in Emmaus. Out came the GPS. “Acquiring Sattelites” was the only help I got from afore-mentioned GPS. Suddenly I found myself winding up a mountain I had never happened upon before. I came to the end of the road, didn’t know whether to make a right or a left, and decided to wave down the next car I saw. *Hallelujah* the kindly gent driving the next vehicle was able to tell me not only easy directions, but also the correct directions. Both are vitally important, as I’ve discovered. After one horrendously-loud squeal of the tires in wet leaves on a upward hill, two engine-stallings, and five minutes of moving infuriatingly slowly behind a school bus……I was back on a familiar road.

I ended up being 20 minutes late for work. But I must say to rescue my reputation, that this is the first time in over a year of working there that I have been late. *yay*

I’m still not exactly sure what to do instead of my pattern making 2 class. Each option so far has been eliminated. I don’t like when my plans change. (I mean honestly, who does?) I don’t like when *things* change, period. But one thing I’ve learned recently (which has little or nothing to do with this post) is that sometimes the most difficult thing about a change is not accepting that things are different; rather, it’s realizing that things will never again be what they used to be.

And with that in mind, I must go clip the fingernail I just broke. Ah, and that particular nail actually looked nice and symmetrical and rounded and pretty. It will never again be what it was five minutes ago.

*clip, clip*

*sigh*

Forsaken

Blankie…

Teddy bear…

Carefully-selected stack of bedtime stories…

Comfortable recliner…

……..forsaken.

Why?

Because Sarah called tonight and Brittany wanted to talk to her.  I rarely have seen Brittany leap so leapily. And then I watched her scamper back to Sarah’s room and sit on her bed and chatter on and on and on about the things that have happened here in the mere 9 hours since Sarah left.

Aw.

Drawing a blank

It’s been a while since I stared at an empty new post for my blog. In fact, WordPress didn’t even recognize me as Amanda, and they made me try to remember my password and sign in all over again. I typed enough words just trying to think of the right username/password combination that I’m almost out of words for this blog post. Seriously, I pity any person who ever tries to hack into my WordPress account. Not like anyone would. Or could. I almost couldn’t. And I’m me!

Anyways. Last I wrote, I had just finished my summer class. Now I just started my fall classes. Yay. (Yay? I didn’t think I was excited, but sometimes my subliminal thoughts do amaze me.) Well the only one that started already is Cultural Geography. I’m still not exactly sure what all it will entail, but so far it’s riveting. Since my work environment is so incredibly diverse in ethnicities (Indian, Pakistani, African American, Egyptian, Hispanic, to name a mere handful. Oh, and I’m the only white one, btw), I wanted to take this class so I can better understand them. Plus I think it will help me in understanding different mission fields and appreciating the struggles that the missionaries go through in those cultures.

I also have four classes that I will be taking at the art school in Allentown again. I hate the city bus. I just thought I’d say that. It is probably the worst part of college.

Dead.

Serious.

As I attend the classes and work on various projects, I’ll try to post about what I’m up to. But no promises. So I’ll tell you now – my four classes are 3D Design/Sculpture (Tues morning), Photography I (Tues afternoon), Fashion Draping (Wed afternoon), and Pattermaking II (Sat afternoon – I hate Saturday classes too). So if you don’t hear from me until I feel compelled to blog about my finals, at least you know what I’m being kept busy with.

Sarah leaves for college in Wisconsin tomorrow. There are the pros and cons. I’m focusing on the pros. Like I get her car (and have to start paying for gas and insurance). Like I get to wear whatever clothes she didn’t bring (provided they fit, look fine on me, and I don’t get them irreparably dirty). I get to use her desk and espresso machine (as long as I remember how to use it…hmmm). I’ll be able to email her once she gets her college email (but I won’t be able to text, call, google chat, sit cross-legged on her bed and talk to her, etc).

So I made her some pillows. Well, pillow covers for pre-made pillow forms. But pillows nonetheless. See?

You can’t exactly particularly see perfectly well, but on the underside of the square pillow on the left is some cute striped fabric. I forgot to take a picture of the other side of the pillow.

In other news, when I spell-checked this blog post, the only misspellings I had were WordPress, username, blog, hmmm, google, yay, Patternmaking, and btw. These are common words and should be added to the dictionary. WordPress needs to recognize when I spell its name correctly. Yay, I’m so glad I’m not the person running spell-check on the page where WordPress asks a person to put in their WordPress username in order to view their blog. I see conundrums and heads pounded on walls in their near future. Btw.

Amazingly boring

There are two prevailing opinions on the quality of my final exam essay for my history class. One, that it is boring, and two, that it is inspring. No one seems to be on my side of the debate, simply because only two people including myself have read it. So read on, and discover the depths of boredom!

If you find it long, it was supposed to be.

If you find it historically inaccurate, it wasn’t supposed to be.

If you find it boring, I told you so.

If you find it inspiring, please come back to reality. We miss you here.

Cutting-Edge Americans

LIFE (according to Brittany)

At the height of frustration, I told Brittany (who was at the height of boredom) to write a blog entry for me. And if she did a good job, I’d post it. She kept her end of the deal, and this is evidence that I am keeping mine. Read this post carefully; it is my life told in Brittany’s words through my supposed perspective with Brittany’s insightful twists. No punctuation, spelling, grammar or factual errors have been corrected.

———–*———–

LIFE
BLOT! So, here’s my life for ya, fun, frustrating, fantastic. Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha! It’s more like busy, hard, long and did I mention busy?!  My lil’ sister is driving me NUTS! She keeps asking me, “What can I do?” Does that ever happen to you? Tomorrow me and my family are going to Hershey Park! Last night, Brittany got out her suitcase and said, “Now, all I have to do is pack this full of stuff!” My mom said, “Actually, you’re going to use a tote bag.” Me, myself and I are going do an online class this summer, which I hope is not terribly hard! Me and Brittany share a room. Her bed has two rules. 1. no shoes 2. no boys ( I like number 2 the best). So, there;’s my life for ya, busy, hard, long and did I mention busy?!

———–*———–

I have learned two things through this blog entry.

1) I am apparently busy.

2) Brittany is taking a tote bag to Hershey Park tomorrow.

Threadware

I will not even feign sorrow over not blogging these past few (I think it’s been 5) weeks. I have been busy with my summer class and with work, and blogging about unnecessary tidbits of my life is, by self-description, unnecessary. However, it *is* a wonderful outlet for the words that float (and oh, how they float!) around in my head. So you had to know I would be blogging again sometime.

Speaking of bowls (it was encrypted into the above paragraph, trust me)….I came across this awesome tutorial on how to make a deadal fabric bowl. I doubt I will ever make one because (a) I have no time, (b) I have no use for one, and (c) all of the above. But I’m the type who loves looking through tutorials just so I can learn something new. Weird, I know. So if you are weird like me, help yourself. And I hereby theorize that you could make a set of matching bowls and even plates using the simple design on the tutorial. I’m not a fan of the orange, cream, and blackbird fabric that was chosen for the tutorial. If it was me, I’d use denim on one side and a funky pink and yellow floral print on the other. I obviously did not do the tutorial.

Oh and back to the beginning where I said I needed an outlet for all my words. I found one. Besides this blog. It’s a place where I can see my words in full color, in random order, in varying size, etc.

I found it in the link in a homeschool magazine, and I tore out the 3×5″ blurb that mentioned it because I knew I’d forget how to spell it. Wordle. See?! The blurb helped me remember! I am totally thinking about redoing the design on my blog header, using a something from Wordle. But, we’ll see. I still have to survive my history class.

If you are still trying to decrpyt my first paragraph for the missing clues that led me to “bowl,” don’t bother. I was just making a smooth transition between paragraphs. And now I’ve probably destroyed your trust in me. *sniff*