I have a niece.

Her name is Olivia, she was born today at 1:30 PM (Idaho time), and she is awesome.

A Possible Return

I'm thinking that I'm going to resurrect my synesthesia blog, Synesthetically Pleasing.

Watch out for upcoming posts!

It's aliiiiive!

I have a new hobby. You know, because obviously I don't have enough things to spend money on... And boy does this one cost money!

I don't know if many of you know this, but I love nail polish. Looking down to my nails painted fun colors makes me happy. It’s something small that brightens my life. So how excited was I when I found out about frankenpolish? SO excited.

Frankenpolish is mixing nail polishes and pigments and such to create your own colors. It's awesome. You can just mix already made colors, or you can mix clear polish with eyeshadow (or other types of powder pigments) to make colors. Yeah, eyeshadow. Awesome right?

There's a really cool blog about it here. Unfortunately she hasn't updated since October. Bummer.

As of right now, I've made 3 frankens. 2 by mixing just colored polish, and 1 with clear polish and eyeshadow (and a bit of colored polish added in). Another part of frankening is giving them clever names, but I'm not very good with that.

Here are my frankens. (I apologize for the crappy pictures. My camera sucks and messes up colors so I had to use my camera phone. It's very hard to take pictures with my phone using one hand.)

Franken #1
A dusty purple with sparkle

This started with a very pale shimmery pink (which I never wear, it was a hand me down). I added a bit of crimson and royal blue, then kaleidoscope sparkle for fun.

Franken #2
A basic sky blue

This started with mostly clear polish then I added some white and a bit of royal blue. I definitely started with too much clear because it takes about 4 coats and the consistency is...odd.
(I realize half the nails look a deifferent color. Cameras hate this nail polish. The middle fingernail is the closest to how it really looks.)

Franken #3
A VERY dark shimmery blackish blue


This is my first eyeshadow franken! It's awesome. I started with a clear base and added about 1/8 tsp of black shimmery eyeshadow. Then I added a little bit of royal blue.

So like I said, no names. I can't think of anything clever. Any suggestions?

Cupcakes and cakes

I haven't been doing much with my life besides baking. Here's some of what I've been baking.

Emily and I made cupcakes to celebrate San Jose's hockey team, The Sharks. My dad had bought a tube of different sea creature sprinkles and the shark sprinkles happened to be in The Sharks colors. This wasn't so much a coincidence as it was a sign. We made some with just sprinkles and then I decided to try making fins out melted chocolate. That turned out to be a fantastic decision.



They looked fantastic all set up on Emily's cupcake tree.


For Easter (or the day after Easter) I made this cake. When I saw it on a baking blog I thought "Oh my goodness! I'm going to try making a 4 layer cake!" When I finished it, I took a look at the giant tower of cake on my counter and thought "Holy crap... I just made a 4 layer cake..." I named it The Beast. Even after giving a quarter of it to the neighbors, it still left us with a LOT of cake.


It's alternating layers of white and red velvet, with strawberries, and more whipped cream than anyone should have to deal with. It turned out to be delicious.

Absent

My laptop blue screened earlier last month. I was and am still devastated. I hadn't backed up my files for about a month and a half. A MONTH AND A HALF. DO you know how many gigs of stuff I can obtain in a month and a half? A LOT. Like, serious damage. Sometimes I get ridiculously sad when I think of all the things I lost because I was too lazy to back it up. Movies, shows, albums, graphics, gifs- GIFS. I haven't looked at my external hard drive, but I might have lost all my gifs that I had spent all that time organizing.

Oh crap. I just remembered the pictures. That hadn't crossed my mind before. Oh my life...

So if you think I update pretty irregularly now, just wait. I have NO DESIRE TO UPDATE USING THE FAMILY COMPUTER. I had posts planned with the stuff on my laptop. I had files filled with pics and graphics just for the purpose of this blog. I WAS GOING TO GET BETTER AT BLOGGING. Thanks blue screen. You are a real winner.

So here are a couple pics that have made me happy. It's all you're getting for a while.

No Rhyme, No Reason, No Sweat.

I've been crafty this week.

First I made this lego necklace:


Then I made this cake:


It was delicious.

More on the amazing man later, but for now...

I've never loved my last name more than when I saw this picture.

Compromises are for lesser souls. Die Werewolf Zombie.

New Year's resolutions are a bit tricky, aren't they? For something that is supposed to help make myself better, they really bring me down. I create a list of things I want to change, which is basically just a list of things I don't like about myself. I have this list, which is probably longer than it should, and I go through it and decide which can actually be changed. Then once that is edited, I choose ones that I feel I can actually accomplish.
So I've gone from quite a long list of things I don't like about myself, to quite a short list of things I feel I am capable of accomplishing. Can you see why I am not a fan of this process?
I could just give up on the whole thing, no one is forcing me to do it. I could say say "Forget it!" but having resolutions are important, especially for that feeling of accomplishment when you cross one off the list.

I'm not going to tell you what my resolutions are. I've been told that if you tell someone your resolutions you are more likely to keep them, but I'm going to ignore that this year. I'm keeping them all to myself. I will instead tell you about my goal.
That's right! Not only do I have a list of resolutions, I have a goal. What's the difference? Probably nothing by definition, but in my head there definitely is. A resolution means a problem I want to resolve. A goal is just something a little more simple that I want to accomplish. I have my list of resolutions that sometimes makes me sad to look at, but then I have a goal to have fun with!

So my goal of 2011 is..

Learn to count to 10 in as many languages as possible!

Fun? Yes. Obtainable? Definitely.
Before starting this adventure, I started out knowing how to count to ten in 3 languages. Those are English, Spanish, and Irish Gaelic. In the six days since I decided to take on this task, I've learned American Sign Language and Welsh. Despite being one of the hardest languages to learn, learning to count to ten in Welsh was easy as it was pretty similar to Irish.
I have friends that have offered to teach me French, Italian, Albanian, Japanese, Russian, Portugese, Armenian, Tagolog, and Cebuano (which I had never even heard of before). So if I stick strictly to what my friends can teach me, I will have 14 languages in my brain bank. Then of course there is YouTube!
This is going to be a fun year.

Stupid Photobucket.

Egads! Foiled by bandwidth!