What-What?! Week of October 29th

Today is Saffron's birthday!  She turns 10 today; a very exciting milestone.


To celebrate, we hit the movie theater on Thursday to see the new My Little Pony Movie.  Overall, it was a like watching a very long MLP episode.  I appreciate that they kept the original voice cast, though I do object to the new animation style somewhat.  There were points in the story that retread on the same themes and events as the show, which was a bit obnoxious, but I did expect that from the film since they cannot depend on the people watching having the backstory of the world.

The bigger issue to me is the shoe-horning in of a popstar character who was totally unnecessary.  It would've been one thing if they had gotten any of the existing popstars of the MLP world to come in, but the film had this completely unknown character, then made this her out to be a much larger part of the story than she actually was.

Saffron totally loved it, and Corwin as well.  Osric was not very impressed; he gave one thumbs up and one thumbs down.

This next week, we have Halloween to look forward to!  We've already taken the kids to one Halloween party yesterday, and they had a good time playing carnival games and wearing their costumes.

What-What?! Week of October 22nd

This week was horrible.  I caught a stomach flu on Monday, then was miserable the rest of the week.  I didn't take any time off of work, because we'd had a problem with one of the servers that needed to get sorted out ASAP.  So I worked from home... and spent a lot of hours fixing things.  Then I had to be in the office to help manage a set of complicated releases.

Then I went into the office yesterday, which was Saturday; one of the other departments needed help with one of their messes, and the issue is/was important enough to my department that several of us were there to help out.

Then I sewed some stuff.  And that's been the entire week.

With the kids costumes this year, I have hit the bifecta for types of fabrics that are obnoxious to sew; Osric's costume has this super fluffy fabric, which when doubled up barely fits under the presser foot of the sewing machine.  Saffron's costume involved sewing together two thin, very slippery fabrics -- I should have ironed on stabilizer onto one of them at least, but I didn't realize how big a problem it was going to be until it was too late.  Also, sequin hearts that melt when you get them too hot is not good.  Not good for iron, not good for fabric, not good for my fingers.

Blah.

What-What?! Week of October 15th

Yesterday, the husband and I got to have a date night with just the two of us.  Since we didn't have any kids with us, we decided to go to the Funko headquarters, located in downtown Everett.  Funko makes collectable licensed vinyl figures, t-shirts, and other accessories.  The most common style they make generally looks like this, with the big square head:

(source: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0552/1401/products/4780_Avengers_2_Thor_hires_large.jpg?v=1417639793)

Funko recently moved to downtown Everett, and afterwards opened their headquarters up with a new store and what can only be described as attractions.  The outside of the building has giant-sized figures:

(source: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/funko4-630x354.jpg)

Inside, there are various themed areas; superheroes, Disney, Harry Potter, Star Wars...  There were tons and tons of people there, so we didn't take any pictures, but here's some from the local newspaper:







One of the coolest things they have is a full-sized Adam West-era Batmobile model that you can actually sit in:

(source: https://13thdimension.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Screen-Shot-2017-08-20-at-1.48.05-PM-copy.png)

Overall, it was much cooler than I had expected.  We will be taking the kids back at some point, though preferably sometime when there are fewer people.

Oh, and I bought myself an MLP -- Daring Do (essentially, Indiana Jones):

What-What?! Week of October 8th

We haven't done anything too exciting in the last week; I'm starting to gather supplies to make kids costumes, and this week I'll start doing any sewing needed.  So far, it looks like I'm making Saffron a vest, Osric needs his red coat sized down (it's perfect, except for the fact that it's a women's size small), and Corwin needs pretty much everything.  Corwin changed his mind, and now wants to be a snowy owl -- this would be fine except for the part where finding warm white clothing is a turning into a giant pain; we went to three different stores yesterday looking for some.  I had picked up some white fleece from the fabric store two weeks ago, so I'm starting to look at making him a white fleece hoodie and pants.

Last weekend, we went to Ikea for the first time -- the Redmond store was just recently expanded, with both a larger building and a larger parking lot.  The store/parking lot are both absolutely cavernous.  While there, we picked up Saffron a new computer chair as an early birthday gift, some small bits and bobs (a $2 wall clock!), and I bought myself this rolling cart:

 

It now sits next to my desk and holds my current craft projects and supplies.  For $25, I think it's a very good value.  We might just wind up with another one, too; I came home, assembled it, and the husband was drooling over how nice it is.  I could see putting another one out in the garage to hold tools, actually -- just roll them where you need them, then out of the way when done.

What-What?! Week of October 1st

It's October!  That means it's time to get ready for Halloween!

To celebrate this, we made sweet tortilla pumpkin thingers.  Basically, you take corn tortillas, paint them with oil, sprinkle with sugar, then bake.  In order to make the pumpkins more orange, we mixed food coloring into the oil.

The kids had a lot of fun making and eating them.  The pumpkin part turned out to be a bit chewy, rather than crunchy like we were expecting, though.  I think this is the pumpkins were actually kind of large, so we could only bake them so long before the edges were going to start burning.  Smaller cookie cutters would be better.

They came out SO orange!