Monday, October 08, 2012

What I've been up to, I guess

This is a ceramic piece I found at an antique sale. It has some birds on it.

 This is a yard sale shelf that had Noah's Ark on it, but I primed it and repainted it so that it (mostly) matches my shower curtain. Yeah, this is what they mean by "having it all."



I had all my spices on this set of shelves, but they kept getting knocked over in the doing of the laundry, so we got some magnets and dollar store tupperware and repurposed a white board, and voila! 

But then we had these shelves left over. And also primer left over. And also an assortment of adorable toys that held significance/were adorable (as previously noted) and didn't want the children ruining. 
 The Fisher Price chicken on the top shelf was the start of this whole assortment. Also, a knockoff Luffy that I got for a dollar at a chinese restaurant (sorry, Oda sensei!), wind up teeth like you always see, but never in real life, some of our Mold A Ramas and Hedora.
 More Mold A Ramas, Big Mo the Biscuit, a ceramic viking Lily painted for father's day one year, and more wind ups and cars.
I paid $3 for the Fozzie mug at a yard sale. I balked at first, but she justified her price as it was "collectible." I suppose she was right. The onion dome plays music when you pick it up? The thing on top is a manta ray Mold A Rama, and it does not really work, as such.

Mold A Ramas are machines that, for $2, will extrude* you a plastic figurine. Florida is apparently ground zero for this type of thing, though you can find the machines in lots of places. The internet presence for collectors of this stuff is very limited and mostly not updated. But the zoo we got a membership to has several of the machines, and apparently they change out the molds for Halloween and Christmas, so we are super excited about that. And yes, I do nerd out similarly for the elongated penny machines. Maybe we can talk about that later.

*Extrude is probably the wrong word. There is a mold that plastic goes into, air is blown into the mold to get the plastic to form a hollow figure, and then the mold is cooled (somewhat), scraped off the platform and dropped into the basket. When you pick it up, you should hold it upside down for the first few minutes so no molten plastic bits drop onto your hand. Not sure why places children frequent wouldn't be super into these... (Note: the molten plastic bit dripping has never happened to me, but it does seem like a reasonable precaution.)

Sunday, May 06, 2012

What you missed

My lord, the time I wasted watching this. So much. Easily covers six of the fourteen months I wasn't blogging.

Other internet based repositories of that time
www.bookmooch.com
       My internet book swap site of choice. The selection is limited, but it has frequently come through for me.
       Sometimes for things quite obscure. (I'm looking at you, Chretien.) Also a good way to slough off the
       children's books we have outgrown. (Looking at you, Captain Underpants.) At media mail rates, it;s about
       2.50 for an average-sized book. Mooching more than one book from a person subsidizes that rate greatly.
esquire.com/politics
       Charlie Pierce is brilliant. Like, four times a day, every week day. I will totally have what he is having.
        He even has enough left over to sound highly amused on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
       If you like your current events with snark, this is high grade black tar stuff.

Non-internet time spendage
- did go back to school. Did ok. Managed to not withdraw from anything.
- Henry turned two.
- Lily is in the second grade.
- I got pleurisy.

More later.