Yeah, It's more Pinterest Crap

So all winter we were waiting for a snow day to bake cookies.  Specifically, cute as hell melting snow man cup cakes.

Well, no fucking snow day.
So we made them on the first day of spring instead.  I guess that was more appropo anyways.
So dumb ass me, of course I don't bother to actually read the recipe before I pin it or promise to make it with the kids...
The cookie dough requires a trip into the fridge FUCKING OVERNIGHT!  Talk about a joykill.  That was a lot of fun..  Yay kids, we can make the dough today and then make the actual cookies tomorrow.

 You would think I would change this habit of not reading a recipe until I actually make the recipe instead of planning ahead, but no.
SOOOOOO, we make the cookie dough and then today we bake the cookies and decorate them.
It was fun.
However, you should know that sometimes I suck so bad at making stuff that I can even screw up other people's stuff.
My poor kids.
The icing was too runny to decorate with and they really looked melting.

Well, this one was the two year old's fault.

Fucking Pinterest.

Pinterest.  What the hell, people?  Fucking pinterest - such a goddamn time suck and if I thought that Martha misled me and made my inner critic even worse.  GFY, Pinterest, GFY...
Honestly at least Pinterest has a pretty good sense of humor, but still.
I saw a recipe on there for a home made cleaning product.  I know that if you have EVER been on pinterest you will be deeply fucking shocked that there are cleaning recipes on there....

Anyhow.  We have kind of hard water here and I really clean the showers about once every two weeks. If you are here to judge, GFY. (The basement shower my husband uses - I've cleaned it two times...  He's been using that shower for at least a year.  He's a boy, he doesn't care and I don't ever use it, so I don't care.)

Anyways, the recipe is for a shower cleaner.  It calls for 1 cup vinegar heated until holy hell and 1 cup blue Dawn dish detergent.

Any veteran of these stupid ass home made cleaning products knows why Mr. Fucking Clean is still in business.  Half the time you use up all your damn vinegar and you either break your damn arm scrubbing or it just doesn't work or both.  If I wanted to use god damn elbow grease, I wouldn't be such a fan of chemistry.

That being said, I do freak out a little every time I clean the bathroom with Lime Away or similar and then everything has a weird chemical flavor for 36 hours.  Chemistry is good, chemistry burning my insides, well, I'm not such a big fan.

I thought I'd give this home made recipe a try.  And it worked!  It really fucking worked. 

Why the hell am I writing about this then?  This is a blog reserved strictly for failures....  Hmmm, can you spot the epic fail here?  Can you predict the two problems that this cheap and effective home made shower cleaner may have?

I am such a moron.  It wasn't until I had the entire shower sprayed down that it occurred to me that fucking Dawn suds and suds and suds and suds and suds and suds and when you think it will finally stop being bubbly, it fucking gives you the bird of suds and can take a fucking month to rinse off.  I thought, well shit, this is going to take a year to get off.  It did.

Next unexpected problem - vinegar inhalation.  Now, don't get me wrong, I would much rather inhale vinegar than phosphoric acid. (Well, wait a fucking minute.  Coke has phosphoric acid in it. Yes, the same shit that burns lime off my shower is also in my drink. Yes, yes, different concentrations, but still, that can't be good for you.  I wish there was a word that expressed someone just shaking their head no with their eyes closed with that feeling of being screwed seven ways til Sunday.  fuck.)

I wonder if there is a difference between inhaling acetic acid (vinegar) and phosphoric acid (lime away) or if my poor lungs look like the insides of rotten pumpkins either way.  Sigh.

Growing a Baby is Making Stuff - Right?

I say this with no sarcasm that I am so thankful to finally see a celebrity that looks pregnant - and I feel for her that she has to go out and show everyone her big-ness as she is approaching her delivery date.
For anyone who hates on her, first of all, she is 5'2", and second of all I wonder how much of her weight gain is in her boobs.  Seriously.  Her poor boobs...

I just had to discuss, because I was GINORMOUS when pregnant and am so happy to see a pregnant lady who is also ginormous.
I have to say, I did not suck at growing babies.  Giant, healthy, beautiful babies.  Thank god for cesareans.

More Paint Hate

Alright...
Here is the finished room.  It's been finished a while.  I haven't made shit.  I've been making hot dogs for dinner and not doing any kind of craftiness at all. 
Haters can suck it.  I had to clean my goddamn house.  REALLY clean my house.  It's a long story that is mortifying so I'll be posting about it soon.
Anyhoo - here is the lovely room all painted...

It turned out pretty well - and goes better with the rug than the mint green did. 
I just wanted to share more of the fallout from this project.

Are you asking yourself where the cream carpet is in that nice blue room?  There is no cream carpet in that fucking room.  Somehow I managed to track a huge splotch of paint all the way into the living room. This, I noticed.
This next one, I did not...  A friend spotted it today...

Yeah, I don't know how I did that either.  If you know how my house is laid out you would know how much raw talent it would take to track that much paint that far down the hall and around the corner - 
Maybe it's from the string on my hoodie that I managed to dip into the paint....
I don't know, but I know that you are jealous of my mad skills....
(Holes in the wall?  What?)
And to think that one of my friends couldn't understand why I would possibly need one of those tyveck haz mat suits in all my painting crap....

I fucking hate painting.

Sigh.  I forgot how much I hate to paint a room.  It fucking sucks.  From the tedious prep work through to the clean up.
If you know anything about me, you know that I am a weird combo of a perfectionist and a lazy ass.  So I am looking for reasons that I can't do a job and normally it's because of abnormally high standards.  I am also ALWAYS looking for a good short cut....
First of all, the room I was painting had issues.  It was previously a minty light green and was last painted before our daughter was born - so over 6 years ago.  The previous owners had EVERY surface in this house covered in wall paper.  To top it off, when we removed the wall paper, some of the walls were smooth and some were textured.  So skim coating was a must. 
So this was the second time around for skim coating - which if you don't know what skim coating  is, be thankful and just know it means DUST.  The kind of dust that is so tiny it will break your fucking vacuum, the kind of dust that gets into your ears and mouth and under your fingernails.

Here's a taste of that dust I was talkng about - and this is after I ruined a vacuum with it.  (Ok, in all honesty, I ruined this vacuum with that kind of dust a while ago... and the white streaks are not dust it's like chalk marks from the dust...)



 My husband was nice enough to keep the kids out of my hair.  I spent ALL damn day doing this. Normally the weekends for me mean actually sitting on my ass and enjoying it - so actually doing something for the house was a bit of a stretch.  The mess was kind of overwhelming - I stopped and decided to take a photo after all the painting was done, especially because the job wasn't done.

 It was at this point that I just wanted to fucking stop - but had to put the room back together...
Keep in mind that my laziness created more work for me, because I spent the entire day stepping over this pile of crap.

One would think that when I realized this at the start of the job, that I would have picked the shit up off the floor - but no. 

I'm actually surprised that it wasn't a bigger disaster because I didn't do any kind of taping.  What a waste of time.  I hate taping and then the paint seeps under it anyways because I always have a false sense of security with tape and go apeshit painting.

Sooo I had drips that needed to be washed up - and the number of times I did this meant that the rag became saturated and ended up leaving a white paint haze on the floor.  I don't fuck around with the wood floors, so I ended up washing and scrubbing them with a brush ala Cindrella to make sure all of the film was off.  (I even sang "Sing sweet nightingale!  Ahhhhhhl around you" while scrubbing.)

Phew.  All done.  Like I said.  I fucking hate painting.  I didn't even go into all the weird blobs, drips etc. that I was left with - not to mention what a crap job the trim ended up being.  Whatever.  It's done.  The room is fucking blue and not green.

It's Soup!

Well, I don't know about you, but every time I walk past the bags of dried beans in the veggie aisle, I get all kinds of homesteader fantasies about it.  I love especially the bags that have a huge assortment of beans and then a packet of seasonings for you to make soup out of.

In years past, I have bought these packets of soup mix and then had to throw them out because of how long they sat in the pantry.  Well, I bought a soup mix recently and it was beautiful.  All different colors and sizes of beans and lentils with a tiny packet of spice.  All I had to add was some Italian sausage...  It sounded easy enough.   I was having some friends over for a playdate and lunch - and I thought this hearty soup would be perfect! Working on my inspired momentum I decided to make this for our lunch.
I pictured that the soup would retain this look and have a clear broth  when made - that you could actually see the wholesomeness and my homesteader resourcefulness in the bowl.

Well, this is what it looks like when prepared according to package directions.

Seriously - I cleaned up some vomit in my car in December and it looked just like that.  The same color, the same ratio of liquid to solid.  I could make some and sell it to Hollywood as a vomit prop!
And guess what?  You get to soak those fucking beans overnight for this loveliness.  and rinse them.  and soak them, and rinse and soak and rinse and soak.  Alright, I am exaggerating, but still this was a jobby soup.
So it turned out looking exactly like vomit.  EXACTLY.  And one of those friends who was coming over for lunch - well, her family has had the stomach flu no less than 3 times in the past 3 weeks...  She was really ready to chow down on my bowl of vomit soup.
Ok.  So it looks terrible and is a lot of work - but what about the taste?  It tastes like eating a can of refried beans that have been sitting in the sun all day - and it actually is a lot of work to chew and more work to swallow.

Soooo.  Bean soup.  At least I'm fucking over it.

I'm back!

Like a bad dream about missing all of your classes and it's the final, I am back.  I've been busy motherfuckers!  I've been on Pinterest -enough said.

Anyways, I wanted to go ahead and share my latest project.  This is a VERY VERY special project.  I started it before my first child was born, before I was even pregnant, which means this thing has been in the works for over 7 years!!! I think we even moved this project from the city house in all of its pieces and parts.  I hope that you are ready to be impressed with beauty, perfection, intricacy....

 What?  You are underwhelmed?   We had a huge amount of corks for over 7 years with the excuse that it was for the tray.  Let this be a lesson to all of you Pinterest fantasizers, sometimes the cork art is best left at a glass urn that you throw a used cork into.

Yes, when I saw the kit in the catalog, there were no stupid gaps between corks, let alone half inch ones, but as we all know, the promise of crafts is in the seeming perfection, and the disappointment is in the reality that to get it to look perfect you would have to spend a long ass time sanding fucking corks.  I chose gaps. 
I am so glad that we paid to move this and that I had this project hanging over my head for over 7 years.  It's so totally worth it!