Mr. Moneybags

Sometimes, almost by accident, I make something super awesome.  This happened at least once this summer.  I made this really professional, upscale money bag for my brother-in-law Jason.

My sister Dorothy and I were always saying how hilarious it would be if Jason brought the money back and forth to Baskin Robbins in a money bag that looked like your classic cartoons, instead of just the envelope-shaped one from the bank.  Boring!  Usually masked bandits are running out of banks carrying these in the classic cartoons.  We were always saying we should make it!  Let's just make him one!

This year I decided to DO IT! because I didn't have a better birthday gift in mind.  I gathered supplies I already had:  suede leather scraps, canvas scraps (hey, Kandra!), and some green fuzzy fabric scraps.  I printed the dollar sign off the computer and traced it to get the dollar sign just perfect.

I made it the dimensions that would make the best use of the suede.  I wasn't sure how to do the drawstring, so I decided to use the leftover scraps of suede for little tabs, which turned out to be inspired.  Had I created a whole sleeve for the drawstring, it would have been stiff like crazy and a little bit super-lame.

I stuffed it with Walmart bags (irony, anyone?) to show off the great money-lugging capacity.

You have to put a six-year-old kid in there for perspective.  You can see that the man who could fill THIS bag with money, really would be Mr. Moneybags. 

May you be blessed with enough to fill this sack and more, Jason!

Conditioner Update

I'm in charge of the activities for the women's group at church. (Relief Society!!)   All year we've been doing service and collecting things for charity.  During one collection period, for a women's shelter, we asked for shampoo and toiletries.  Someone donated a huge sack of hotel shampoos and conditioners.  One bottle had come open and they were all slimy.  I had to rinse them all and sort them out, which ones were suitable for donation and which ones had to go to a better place.

One conditioner was not acceptable for donation but was not bad enough to have to go to a better place.  I needed conditioner, so I started using it.

I finally found the conditioner I was looking for!  It was from a Sheraton hotel.  It looked and worked just like conditioner should.  And it smelled like Clinique "Happy" so my guess is that it was from the early 2000's when Happy was IT.  I'm just sad that I used it all up.

I bought a conditioner recently that I think will be ok.  It doesn't say "moisture" on the bottle.  It looks and smells like the ineffective conditioners, but works better.  We'll see.

Second Favorite Holiday

After Easter, Independence Day may be my favorite holiday.  It may be time to make it official.  Maybe not.  I know a lot of people really dig Christmas, but the gifts and decorating kind of lower it in the ratings for me.

I like Independence Day for a lot of reasons.  I'm into history.  I LOVE America's history and especially, America's Heritage.  It's almost more than I can take, how much I love this country.  But I also like Independence Day for the sense of community.  I love going out and seeing everybody in their red, white, and blue t-shirts.  I love being part of a crowd that gathers for fireworks -- and I HATE crowds.  I love Fourth of July parades and wish there was one I could attend close by here.  I'm always trying to teach the children on Independence Day, making them read the Declaration of Independence, reading them the preamble to the Constitution and so forth.  Also speaking disparagingly about other, lamer countries, like 1776 Great Britain, no offense to current Brits. 

So, in addition to the gifts Dorothy brought, several other things made it an awesome Independence Day.  Here are some highlights:

Jules and I both sported the "Old Glory" toenail job I perfected years ago.  What a privilege to have a daughter big enough to sit still and let the paint dry...and get patriotic with me!

I'm not very good at photographically documenting events.  I took a picture of Seth and Scott trying out the cot we put up.  If you don't have a hammock, a jumbo-size cot is the next best thing for chillin' in the shade.

There was a complete fireworks ban in Aurora this year, thanks to dry conditions and wildfires.  Even the city of Aurora had to cancel its fireworks display.  To compensate, we had pretty good substitutes.  I spent more than 50 bucks on glow-stuff, which we cracked open and distributed after dark.  Then to simulate the firework sounds, we blew up several dozen balloons, which we then popped like crazy during glowstick time.

When I was growing up, my dad called these "Grasshoppers," as in, "Look kids!  There's a grasshopper!!" [bang!]  I guess some people call them bang-snaps.  Whatever you call them, they were freely available for purchase at the Dollar Tree and are therefore not fireworks.  I got 15 double-packages of these and we went crazy on it!  It's really fun to chuck a big handful of these up in the air with wild abandon and then enjoy the rapid-fire, nearly firecracker-like sound and small flash.

This year's Independence Day party may have been more fun than a real-fireworks time.  We only go to the big shows periodically, and then have a terrible time fighting traffic all the way home.  There was no traffic this year, tons of sody pop, no worry about whether the ground flowers were going to go off, or whether the tank fireworks were going to drive forward, dribble out a tiny spark and then die.  I dare say, all 17 children had a great time, and our nation's Independence and resultant Freedoms were appropriately celebrated.

A True Home Improvement

So, our house is much too small for our family.  Let's put it that way.  However, the price for our house is just right for our family.  This creates a situation of home improvement, wherein we need to be able to fit a ton of regular family stuff into a small space.  Usually, this means we obtain much taller storage solutions that use the same amount of floor space and provide lots more stuff-room.  Here's our latest stroke of genius.

We were ex-psyched for IKEA to open in Denver last summer.  We immediately put into motion our plan for a better living room, using IKEA's Billy Bookshelf system.  The living room is WAY better, with more storage space, more floor space, and a lot more contemporary style.  Then we did the same in our dining area, also using Billys.  THEN we got the super-brilliant idea to use Billys in our bedroom.

Before this, we had a hand-me-down dresser with three drawers per person.  It was about 3 feet tall, which is good if you want to stash a lot of papers and useless crap on your dresser everyday -- right in arm's reach.  This dresser setup was not ideal for us for several reasons:  we have more clothes than we can fit in 3 middle-size drawers, our room was ugly because of all the stacked up, dusty, useless crap we had piled up, and we had painted, vinyled the walls, and hung pretty curtains, and the dresser wasn't fitting in with our plan for a cute, modern-looking room.

 So, Billy comes in the usual 11 inch bookshelf depth, but then also now it comes in a 15 inch depth.  That's what gave us the brilliant idea for our bedroom.  An 11 inch bookshelf would be lame for clothes, but a 15 inch deep bookshelf is perfect.  We decided to DO IT! and gave the dresser to the Young Women's Yard Sale.  A Bold Move, since we didn't have a replacement yet, eh?

We went a few days later and just DID IT.  We bought two brown-black 15-inch deep Billys.  One for each of us.  It's super fun to put up something pretty and practical.

Our clothes fit -- ALL our clothes.  I have thermal underwear in there!  Fleeces!  Sweaters!  Shorts!  Everything I wear all year, plus a lovely Heirloom Jewelry Box my dad made AND my "dresser-top" toiletries.  Seth even had room for a couple shelves-worth of shoes.  Now the ugly laundry basket lives in the closet instead of right out in the open as you walk into our room.  It's better all around.

The other awesome thing about Billy is that it's A System.  You can add any number of doors in all different styles or you can add a height extension.  It all works together to make the storage solution that works the most awesomely in your space.  It seems like a commercial up in here!!

It was a few weeks before we were able to go and get the doors.  They're not expensive, but especially when you need four of them at one time, they're not giving them away either.  These were the best doors for the job.  They're a little too sleek for me, but whatever.  They're the best ones.

Billy is a blessing from Heaven.  We can walk through our room before we make the bed -- there's room for pillows and blankets on the floor and we can still walk around!  A dream come true!  

Of course, the better dream come true would be to build that Master-Bedroom-Over-the-Garage I've been envisioning since before we moved in.  But THAT's a dream for another day.

Right now, I'm just grateful to have a room that looks better, works better, and IS better.

Family Parties Present a Problem

It's my problem.  It's been getting worse in the last few years.  A stress response, probably.  The problem is this:  I can't tolerate noises

To be fair, when we get the Four Families together for big parties, there are eight adults and 17 children.  This would create a noise problem for anyone, I think.  The other adults just seem to be able to tolerate it better, I guess.

This party was for the Fourth of July.  We were all here at my place.  There was a little bit of a scheduling blunder.  Probably my bad.  Stress!  Anyway, even outside, the 17 children were creating too much noise for me.  I look really dumb putting my hands over my ears and trying to carry on conversations and answer trivia questions.  Dorothy brought me this gift:  

Isn't she great?  They're noise-cancelling earmuffs.  It's Just What the Doctor Ordered. I can still hear all the people around me, mostly, but the kid-noise is just about squelched.  It's like going into the light, through a tunnel, into blissful peace.

Jodi tried them on.  You can also see the other gift I got from Dorothy.  Jason's holding it there on his head:  it's an electric bug zapper raquet.  Flies get in the house, Wib goes insane.  The old familiar story.  But not anymore.  Flies get in the house, Wib zaps them with the raquet, bugs get dead.  Awesome!

Andrew asked if we thought he should touch the raquet.  He's 14 so, yeah, we think you should.  He got a big old cracking shock.  Sucka!

Anyway, I've brought my earmuffs (earphones, I call them) to several more family parties, with great results each time.  Seth has asked me, though, not to wear them too much because it makes me look...special.

Thanks Dorothy, for helping solve my problem!

The Day Time Stood Still

So we went to Utah in June.  It was our first family trip back there since we moved away in 2002.  We went around visiting places and showing the children sites from their family history.  This is one of them:

M.L. Bigelow and Company Organ Builders in American Fork Utah.  Here's their website.

I worked here from when I graduated from BYU in 1997 until Eric was born in November 1999.

Scott was not sure about the Organ Factory

It's such a cool place.  They build pipe organs, and the shop occupies one of the four original LDS church buildings in American Fork.  Mike Bigelow and his family live upstairs.  The organs are assembled in the chapel and the woodshop is in the gym (First one in Utah Valley!). 

Mark wanted to look at stuff pretty badly

The day we went there were three organs in the shop.  That's a ton!  Every surface was covered with pipes and shutters and pipe organ pieces.  I'm glad to see that business is booming.  The two "office" guys were sitting right in their desks just like when I worked there.  The two "shop" guys I used to work with were both out for the day.  The woodshop was dark and quiet and smelled just like I remembered it, with just a little summer heat trying to sneak in the french doors all the way around.

As we drove around Utah Valley, it was shocking how much things had changed in the 10 years since we left.  Shocking. You expect things to change, but this place is insane.  It's like there was some community-wide goal to leave no house, business, or street unchanged.  That's why it was so awesome to come to the Organ Factory and find things exactly as I left them.  I showed my children around; I knew where everything was because it was all just where it was last time I worked there.  See those pipe trays behind Scotty?  I built some of those!  On the wall in the shop is the stupid, gimpy shelf I hung on the wall so I'd have a place for my tools.  Here's the planer I had a good working relationship with, children!  Here's the creepy coal cart I used to tote the steel action rods around on!

Scott finally agreed to be photographed

It was refreshing to come and find things the same, not because I'm resistant to change, but because I like to see a reason for change.  Or that the changes are for the better.  Most of the stuff that we saw was different for no apparent reason.  The Organ Factory was awesome when I worked there, and it's just that awesome now, because why fix what's not broken?  Refreshing!  I can't stress enough how much it was like a tall, cool glass of Italian Soda in a desert of frivolous progress.

...aaaand there's a smile

I love that I worked here.  I loved being able to show my family around.  I love that this place exists.  And I love that they're all still there, doing what they were doing before I got there and still doing the same things today.  They're doing a good work.  More pipe organs in the world is a change I can get behind!

PS Eric said he was brave enough to go in the creepy original basement area when I was describing it to him; then when we were actually standing in front of the door in the poorly lit basement, he chickened out.  That was good, because I wasn't sure I was ready for that creepiness again...  I wish I had pictures of THAT to share!