Come on down!

I serve on my ward's RS meeting committee, and our most recent activity was all about becoming more self-reliant and spending our money wisely. We had people make presentations about couponing, smart shopping, and organization, and then I got to host the last segment. I say host because my part of the presentation consisted of playing games from The Price Is Right!

To make things fun I had the theme music play as I called contestants up, and I even made a skinny black microphone, just like Bob Barker always used:

The first game was Pick A Pair, which doesn't entail much. You have 6 items, made up of three pairs that cost the same amount. All the contestant has to do to win is correctly pick a pair, but I went a step further and had them try and pair up all three. Contestant # 1 knocked it out of the park.

For all the items I used little boxes as display stands, which looked something like this:

I taped up the box flaps with the prices behind them, so all I had to do was cut the tape for a dramatic reveal.

The second game was Punch-A-Bunch. I picked this one because I already have a small reusable punch board I made for a Primary lesson. All I had to do was switch out the tissue paper and add some dollar signs:

For this game Contestant #2 had to look at 4 items and tell me whether they were priced too high or too low. For every correct answer she got to punch a hole in the punch board, behind which cash prizes awaited. This was a very low-budget affair and the cash prizes were coming out of my spare change collection, so I priced them between 5 cents and 5 dollars. Luckily for me Contestant #2 got greedy, passed on getting $2, and ended up with 5 cents.

The best game I saved for last. Perhaps you remember a certain TPIR game called Cliffhangers, which debuted in 1976? Well, here's my miniature version, complete with a tiny yodeler who moves up and down the mountain:

Contestant #3 had to price three items, and for every ten cents she was off  the yodeler climbed higher and higher up the mountain to the yodeling song from the show. Luckily she didn't go over, because my yodeler is on a string loop, meaning I couldn't make him fall off the mountain if I tried. Even so, I'm very proud I was able to build a miniature version of the game.

Here's the yodeler up close:

And here you can see the backside of the game, and how I had to weigh the yodeler down with pennies to keep him from flipping over to the front:

He moves on a string that runs through three metal loops, so all I have to do is pull and up he goes. 

Perhaps the best part of the night was after the activity when I was putting everything away, and a few sisters came up and said how much fun they'd had. One of the sisters in particular is newer in the ward, so we don't know much about each other, and our conversation went like this:

her: That's so neat that you made the game from the show.

me: Well, I had a lot of fun building it. It isn't good for much outside of playing Cliffhangers, but I promised Optimistic. he could play with it when I got home, so he's excited about that.

her: And how old is he?

me: Ummm...thirty.

her: Oh, I thought he was your little boy!

me: No, he's just a fan of game shows. 

How I Spend My Wednesday Afternoons

As you may or may not know, Optimistic. and I are Cub Scout den leaders, which means we spend an hour every Wednesday trying to teach things to squirrely eight-year-olds. We've done a lot of fun things recently (learning how to hammer nails, building a birdhouse, making our own Chia heads), and the boys are most of the way done earning their Wolf, but they still have a handful of incredibly boring things to pass off. To help the medicine go down a little easier, we try to turn everything into a game.

Yesterday our meeting centered around how to interact with strangers and what to do in different emergency situations. What do you do when a stranger comes to the door, what do you do when a stranger calls on the phone, who do you call in case of an emergency? Stuff like that. To make a game out of it, we played "Stump the Boy Left Home Alone." Basically we had the boys take turns pretending the door to the primary room was their front door, and the rest of us would knock on the door and try to convince the boy to let us in for some reason or another. I was worried that the boys might not be able to come up with compelling reasons to be let in, so I gave them a few ideas of people to pretend to be, like a policeman, or a new neighbor, or a meter reader. I needn't have worried. On the first go-around Boy #1 answered the door, and Boy #2, without so much as a preliminary hello, hit him in the face and then said "Oh, let me come in and give you an ice pack." I have to admit, I thought that was pretty creative. Another boy simply refused to answer the door, which I thought was a wise tactic, until he made the mistake of coming up to the window in the door where we could see him and yelling "I'm not home!"

After that we practiced answering the phone, making sure to impress upon the boys the importance of  etiquette and personal safety. The phrases "They can't come to the phone right now, can I take a message?" and "May I ask who's calling?" were the two biggies, as we wanted to stress that a) it isn't safe to reveal that you're home alone, and b) you should always find out who's on the other end of the line. Optimistic. managed to trip up the first boy, who never asked who was calling and managed to reveal that his parents weren't home. The second boy failed on etiquette and paused when asked if his parents were home, but managed to demand "who's this?" and take down a pretend message.

Things only got better when we practiced emergency phone calls (the idea being that the boys should be able to calmly answer a 911 operator's questions during an emergency). As a fake 911 operator I received a call from one of the boys calling about a fire. He said he was a man inside a burning house. When I told him to get outside and wait for the fire department, he told me he had no legs. I asked if there was anyone else in the house with him, and was told that there was no one but his pet horse. When asked why he didn't ride his pet horse to safety, he responded that without his legs he wasn't tall enough to mount the horse. At that point I gave in and asked why he kept a pet horse if he couldn't ride it. In the end I needlessly advised him to stay low to the ground (no legs, remember?) and assured him that the fire department would be there soon.

It's a frustrating calling to have at times, but mostly it's just really really amusing.

"Must be the hormones."

Yesterday I went to open a banana and the top tore right off. Either this was a particularly brittle banana or I don't know my own strength. 

In the family way

For those who haven't heard, we're expecting a baby at the end of August. Today, Valentine's Day, is the end of my first trimester. Yes, we are excited. No, I will not be posting any baby bump pictures or ultrasounds. I will, however, suggest you watch these two gems to fully celebrate this momentous announcement:

and 

Lastly, all future baby-related posts will appear on our new blog, salmontamsen.blogspot.com. Check it out.

A spoonful of peanut butter helps the medicine go down

Most people don't believe me when I tell them my mom baked cookies every day, or every other day, depending on how long a batch lasted, but the fact remains that I had a home-baked peanut butter chocolate chip cookie available to me every day of my childhood. And even better, she let us eat the dough as she was making it. That's right, no bowl-licking for us, because we were allowed to pinch two spoonfuls of dough before the rest of it got rolled into balls and baked.

I make those cookies myself now, the exact same recipe my mother used, only I let them come out of the oven slightly underbaked, so they're gloriously soft, and I use bigger chocolate chips (milk chocolate, even though my mom insists on using semi-sweet), but at their core they're the same cookies I had as a kid. Optimistic., who loves all things peanut butter, didn't know I had this cookie recipe up my sleeve when he married me, and he claims it is the best surprise of his life.

Well, I certainly don't make these cookies every day, seeing as how there's just the two of us, but every few months or so I whip up a big double batch to put in the cookie jar. Months back I was making a batch, and, remembering how much I loved stealing spoonfuls of dough, I thought Optimistic. might like to lick the spoon I'd used to measure out the peanut butter. He was is the office watching sports, just a few feet from the kitchen, so I called out, "Want to lick the peanut butter spoon?" Spoon in hand I peeked into the office to see him with his mouth gaping wide, awaiting a spoonful of peanut-buttery goodness, so I walked up and stuck the spoon in his mouth. He immediately gagged and spluttered, and pulling the spoon from his mouth asked "Why did you do that?!" Turns out he hadn't heard me ask if he wanted to lick the spoon at all, and his mouth was coincidentally agape due to having just witnessed some sort of amazing sports play.

Pinkies out.

This Friday I went to a tea party-themed baby shower, where dainty and fragile were the watchwords of the day. Real china, gourmet cupcakes, and of course, that quintessential shower food, the crustless cucumber sandwich. (How crust went out of style I'll never know.)

The question I pose is this: Was there ever a stranger juxtaposition than eating a dainty crustless cucumber sandwich off of fine china while the women at your table describe what it sounds like to have your uterus vacuumed out after a C-section? I declare that there is not. If I ever eat another cucumber sandwich it will be too soon.

An early-morning encounter with a Ouija slug

Yesterday morning I made my way downstairs to go to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and immediately noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a dark blob in the shower. What was it, a giant beetle, and should I squish it? I didn't have my glasses on, so I edged closer to discover...a slug! Okay, squishing was out, because although slugs look squishy they are actually unpleasantly firm, sinewy, and sticky. (A fact which anyone who has ever stepped on a slug in their bare feet can attest to.) What to do? Salt it? Set it free? While I was making up my mind the slug started moving.

Slug: (squirm squirm squirm)

Me: Ah, you're making an "S." Well, all slugs can do that.

Slug: (wriggle wriggle wriggle)

Me: Oh, a "W." Now that's pretty impressive. I didn't think you were long enough for that. What's that you're doing now?

Slug: (writhe writhe writhe)

Me: Is it a "C"? No, a "J." Or is it an "A"? I feel like you need some vowels if you're going to spell something. Is that what you're doing?  

Slug: (flop flop flop)

Me: Of course, it seems to me you'd have a hard time doing really angular letters, like a "T" for instance. How could you possibly make a "T"? You couldn't, could you, and what if that were your next letter? 

Slug: (sludge sludge sludge)

Me: What is it boy, what are you trying to tell me? Wait a minute - S,W, A...T. SWAT! Sweet jeepers, is that it? Are they watching the house right now? You can just nod your head or something, you don't have to spell it all out.

Slug: (slalom, slalom, slalom)

Me: I think I'd better put you outside, otherwise they'll know we had time to talk.

And with that I tore a page out of a magazine, scooped him up, tossed him and the paper out the front door, and went back upstairs to bed, where my last thoughts before sleep consisted of wondering whether or not the slugs were trying to contact me, and if they were, would Hermione Granger be willing to relinquish her title of Queen of the Slugs to me?

I hope to make dozens of dollars

Friends, family, blog stalkers, my Etsy shop is now officially up and running. Tell your friends.

My Ting-A-Ling

We recently switched phone providers and had to buy new phones while we were at it. This was for the best, because Fact: my old phone actually had to be plugged in for me to use it, somewhat defeating the purpose of owning a mobile phone. Anyway, we're now with Ting (which you all should seriously consider looking into). There was some initial irritation on our part when they accidentally mailed one of our new phones to the wrong state, but all is forgiven. Do you want to know why? Because today when I called in to get my phone activated and was briefly put on hold while he looked something up, some familiar music started playing. Some very familiar music. Fact: it was the theme music from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I couldn't do anything for a full minute but laugh, I was so pleasantly surprised. Ting, you've won my allegiance.

In short, if you want my new number, or think I ought to have yours but don't, shoot me an email.

VHS tapes OR How I spent My Summer Vacation OR I Think It Might Be Love

For my sixteenth birthday my parents bought me a little TV with a built-in VCR, and man did I love it. Suddenly I could tape shows and watch them whenever I wanted. And if someone was watching TV upstairs, no biggie, I could go downstairs and watch something else. My TV even had a timer setting that would turn it on automatically, so I used it as an alarm clock, sleeping with the remote under my pillow. That's why I was so confused when I learned that John Ritter had died. I heard it on the early morning news when my TV turned on, but then I fell back asleep, and it worked its way into my dreams. So when I heard the news later that morning, I was sure I had made it happen. I dreamed he died, and then he was really dead. Heaven help us, no one was safe!

Mostly though, I watched a lot of TV and TV on DVD. That Christmas I got the second season of Gilmore Girls, and so during the post-present-opening-lull that comes Christmas afternoon when you've already given up on leaving the house because it would mean having to shower, my brother Rough Draft and I watched Gilmore Girls. After nine straight hours spent loafing in the dark watching the the antics of Rory and Lorelai, we agreed to take a break in order to get something to eat. Five minutes later, having consumed some crackers and water, we re-glued ourselves to my little TV screen and finished off the season.

Then there was the time that M-Lite started cleaning her room. With her bed a mess of clothes and items to be sorted, she came downstairs to sleep in my room where I had not one, but three beds set up. It was only supposed to be for a night, but it somehow stretched into a month. She kept all her things upstairs, but every night she'd come down to my room to watch TV (we tried to get into Cold Case) and end up staying there.

Nearly ten years later, I still have my little TV. I keep it in my craft room so I can have something on in the background while I work on things, which means I also have a small collection of VHS tapes. Too small, in fact. Because while I don't mind popping in and out of the room to rinse out paintbrushes during entertaining-but-mostly-just-stupid movies (Center Stage), there are others that I'd feel guilty for missing a single syllable of (Little Women). It's a problem of both quantity and quality, and the only solution I could see was getting my hands on more VHS tapes.

Today I was at Goodwill looking for a dresser, and while I struck out on that front (only ugly couches as far as the eye could see) I came across a bin of movies on VHS being sold for, get this, 10 for $0.99! At that price it was all I could do not to fill up my trunk!

Shall I tell you what I purchased? In no particular order, here are the gems I saw fit to buy:

1. Fiddler on the Roof (tradition!)

2. His Girl Friday

3. Great Sports Moments of the 80's (for Optimistic.)

4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings

5. Titanic (a total guilty pleasure movie)

6. The Great Escape (I've been wanting to watch this for weeks, and there it was!)

7. Mouse Hunt (Optimistic.'s family hates this movie (for obvious reasons), so the look on his face when he sees that this wretched movie has crossed the threshold of our house will make it ten cents well spent.)

8. Hook

9. How The Grinch Stole Christmas (I would touch this film with a 39 1/2 foot pole)

10. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (an absolute classic)

11. Hockey Fights & Big Hits (also for Optimistic.)

12. Grease (also one I've been meaning to watch, not because I like it, but because I got a line from it stuck in my head and I won't be able to get it out of my system until I watch it through.)

13. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (This is a collection of four episodes and it's a big deal that I found this, because on the back cover there's a picture from my all-time favorite episode of Dudley Do-Right, where Snidely Whiplash makes a suit out of Marigolds and gets away with committing his evil deeds because Dudley's allergic to him. I might die from happiness, people.)

Not purchased (through tremendous self-restraint) were Gargoyles ("What could make claw marks in solid stone?"), Blank Check ("It says all you can eat, not all you can eat here"), and Rookie of the Year ("Hot ice! That's right, I heat up the ice cubes. It's the best of both worlds!"). All in all, I'm very pleased with the mix I ended up with. And now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I've got some movie-watching to do.

The adequate, forgettable, and occasionally regrettable

An interesting thing about Eugene is that it has streets named after presidents. That's not so uncommon, except Eugene doesn't just have the popular or well known presidents. They've got the standard Lincoln, Jefferson, and Madison to be sure, but they also have people like Hayes, Garfield, and Fillmore represented. My only beef with their system is that the presidential streets aren't in any order. In my mind, it makes the most sense to place them in the order they served, so if you're driving around looking for Harding and you come across Coolidge, you know you've gone too far. I also secretly hoped they'd have more than one street named after Cleveland in honor of his two nonconsecutive terms, but alas, they do not. So, here is a sample of the new improved set-up I am proposing:

Pretty snazzy, right? Also, where a president intersects with the street corresponding to his presidential number, a statue will be erected. That way when you come across a statue of a man stuck in a bathtub you'll know you're at the corner of Taft and 27th. Suggestions on how to pose the other presidential statues to ensure instant recognition are welcome.

The state of things

A month ago we left Provo, dragging all our worldly possessions behind us in a trailer. It's a 14 hour drive to Portland, but we were buoyed up by the thought that we'd probably never have to make it again. So we drove and drove and drove some more, and eventually arrived at Optimistic.'s folks, where we were planning on staying a few days until we could secure an apartment in Eugene. However, instead of moving into anywhere, we got jerked around and promised apartments that would never actually become available. This is because all realtors are lying pieces of crud. So instead of four days, we spent four weeks in Portland, and are now down in Eugene staying with some nice members from the ward because Optimistic.'s classes started today and his job started a week before that.

We did find a place (without the help of the many realty agencies we paid fees to), and I'm pretty excited about it, the only snag being that it doesn't open up until Oct. 1st, hence all the commuting and living with people we don't know. It's a triplex, with the owners living on site. Our apartment is built just off the side of their house, and then there's a third apartment upstairs and around the back.

Here's our apartment off to the side.

And a shot of the kitchen, which is pretty small, but there's a nice big living room, and you can kind of see off to the side there's a bonus room with sliding glass doors leading to the back yard.

And our bedroom upstairs has hardwood floors.

The hardest part of this whole excursion has definitely been having all our stuff in storage. I packed a very limited set of stuff to take with us, which means I've been wearing the same outfit to church for the last three weeks and I'm running out of Q-tips. All my books, movies, craft supplies, and pots and pans are packed away and I'm going a bit stir-crazy not being able to do any of the things I normally do. Worst of all, this weekend should have been my fifth annual Hobo Fest, which rather ironically can't be held because I don't have a place to live.

It's a sickness, people.

We're getting ready to move, which means digging all of our stuff out of our apartment's many nooks, crannies, abysses, etc. To say our apartment was built with storage in mind is an understatement. We have closets within closets within closets of stuff, most of which hasn't been looked at since we crammed it away almost four years ago. Today I decided to start tackling the office closet. (I say start to ease the pressure of cleaning out this monstrosity in one day).

Well, I got all the boxes off the top shelf and happened upon a box of 100 cassette tapes (super useful), as well as a big white envelope marked MRI. So I opened it up, and what do I find? Scans of my sister's brain from 2007.

People, today I must admit that my pack-rattery has astounded even me. I don't know why I have these scans. Maybe she gave them to me. Maybe I stole them from her. I cannot say. Most likely she didn't want them and I thought they might come in handy, but what sort of person thinks that? Who looks at their sister's old MRI's and thinks hmmm...I could make a chandelier out of that? Me, apparently.

-Genuine Draft
Pack-Rat Extraordinaire

Ahhhlaska

I am now back from our Alaskan cruise adventure, which was indeed an adventure owing to the fact that I got sick the night before we left for Seattle. The one week I actually had plans I got bronchitis. As a result I spent a lot of time coughing (things up) and ended up losing my voice for a bit. It was fun times. But, on to the pictures!

Here's Optimistic. outside our boat (the Sapphire Princess) in Seattle. You can tell from the fierceness of his gaze that he is impatient to get to the cruising already. Why? Because there is food on the boat!

Lobstee, no! You are not really food! You have too much to live for! Eventually I talked him down, and before we knew it we were off the boat and in Ketchikan, the salmon capital of the world.

Here are all the siblings in Eagle park doing their best to look majestic/eagle-like. Most of them failed so we moved on to look at the gift shops where we had the pleasure of running into Sarah Palin.

This was a dream come true for Optimistic., but due to a restraining order filed by Ms. Palin earlier this year, he was forced to don a disguise so as to admire her up close.

Ah yes, she'll never recognize him now! After Ketchikan we went through Tracy Arm, which I'm told was beautiful but I chose to sleep through. Here's a picture Optimistic. took from the top deck.

After that it was on to Juneau where we ventured out into the rain to board a tour bus whose windows were so fogged up we couldn't really see anything.

But we trundled along and the driver gave us the scoop on the history of Juneau and after an enjoyable ride we arrived at the Mendenhall Glacier.

Yes, it's blue, and if you had sat through the movie at the Visitor's center twice like I did you'd know why. The big thrill of the visit was getting to touch a 250 year old piece of ice.

As a bonus I've included this guy who works at the visitor's center. Cool, right? Once Lobstee saw the ice there was no keeping him from it.

I had a lot of trouble keeping him from climbing into all the displays. He's full of mischief like that. Here he is crawling around in a bear's mouth. He has no fear that lobster.

Optimistic. was just as bad, as evidenced by the following picture in which he is shaking hands with a goat. They're ripe for blackmail, the both of them.

Our next stop was Skagway. Optimistic. was off zip-lining so I went to the Skagway Museum and poked around.

There were a lot of interesting artifacts on display from the time of the town's founding and I would have stayed longer if Lobstee hadn't managed to get us thrown out. Something about illegal gambling combined with the use of flash photography.

I say putting a roulette wheel out in the open like that is asking for trouble. Either way I was back on the boat before I knew it.

The next leg of our journey meant a few days on board as we headed for Canada, so we had a lot of time to hang out together. This entailed eating a lot of food and playing a lot of cards.

Check out this excellent hand. Several movies on TV later we arrived in Victoria, constituting my first trip out of the country.

We walked around, saw the sights, and spent a chunk of Canadian money on souvenirs.

And that was the end of the cruise. But unfortunately not the end of our trip. After we disembarked in Seattle we spent sixteen hours driving back to Provo in a gigantic SUV that ended up running out of gas 25 miles outside of La Grande. But that's a whole different story involving a tow truck driver, Weird Al, and talk of eel smuggling.

How I plan to hang pictures

Two things I want to have in my future house: permanent picture frames and photo corners.

The idea with a permanent frame is that it would be glassless, perhaps with a painted cork back or clips to hold things in place. But it would just stay where it is, fixed to the wall, and I could hang up the drawing of the week or something fun.

We've got a family picture wall in our apartment which consists of pictures with tape on the back stuck up on the wall. I like that it can be easily rearranged, but I don't like that the edges are always curling. So someday I'd like to install a whole mess of metal picture corners on the wall. That way I can switch pictures in and out while still having the whole thing be somewhat permanent.

That's all really.

The allergy sufferer's anxiety at the graduation ceremony

Lately my rhinitis has been bad enough that I've resorted to just sticking a tissue up my nose and walking around the house that way.* It keeps my hands free, which is nice, but it's starting to become a habit, and I sometimes have to remind myself not to do it in public.

I'm mostly at peace with the fact that I'm going to spend the next sixty years constantly blowing my nose, but that doesn't mean it isn't a bit depressing. I'm the person people say "bless you" to eight times before they realize the sneezing isn't going to stop so they drop the charade of caring already. I'm the person in the theatre or lecture hall that's blowing their nose so violently no one can hear what's being said. I'm the person everyone assumes is sick, and they judge me for coming out in public and making other people sick, even though what I've got isn't catching.

I know I'm that person, and I've come to terms with it, but I just this morning realized that next week I have to sit through my graduation ceremony, and depending on how much dust there is and whether or not the girl sitting next to me happens to be wearing perfume, I may go through upwards of 50 Kleenexes in the space of two hours.

Do I bring an entire box with me? Where am I going to put them all once I've used them? Should I arrange to have a small trash can placed under my seat? We don't have assigned seats. I'll have to carry it on stage myself. Am I bold enough to take the stage carrying a small lined trash can and an entire box of Kleenex? That's pretty bold. Why not just bring an ottoman and make myself at home?

And when we get up to receive our diplomas, we're not supposed to take anything with us. Surely I can conceal one or two tissues in my left hand? I don't need my left hand for anything, do I? Or is that the hand I take the diploma with while I shake the Dean's right hand? Maybe I can rubber band them to my wrist. How long are the sleeves on my robe?

And on and on it goes. Maybe instead of worrying about it I should just embrace it already and bring a gigantic red and white spotted clown hanky that I can blow my nose into as ostentatiously as possible.

In short, I have no idea how I'm going to get through two hours without making a spectacle of myself.

*I have a tissue crammed up my nose right now. It's bliss.

What they're teaching me in school

You should watch this. Right now.

And if you have time, this one.

And this one.

We're going to Eugene!

No, not that Eugene, this Eugene.

Come fall, I will be back in Oregon where I belong! Woot!

Who FRTD?

This Friday I get to go to an advance screening of the film I worked on last summer. You can see a trailer for "For Robbing the Dead" here.

Knowing that I'm finally going to see it now that it's completed and polished makes me a little bit giddy. It will take all my self control not to lean over to Optimistic. during the screening and poke him to point out the things I helped with (the shears on the table 10 seconds into the trailer? I picked those out.) It will be hard, but I will resist.

knit picking

Is anyone out there a fantastically gifted knitter/crocheter? I need to commission a scarf with a phrase knitted into it, which is very much above my skill level. Chances are, one of you must be a closet crocheter, so speak up now and I will be forever grateful.