Things I'd like for next year:

• Posters (nicer than the run-off ones the office gave us) with our school rules on them
• Inspirational sayings for our classroom areas
• A birthday board (that I don't have to keep up with)
• Name signs to go above our doors and outside our classroom area
• A 4 drawer filing cabinet
• A curtain for storage area in workroom
• Casters for my shelving units
• Curtains for the junky shelving unit behind my desk (just to hide the inevitable mess)
• A better (team way) of handling discipline referrals
• A few more plastic storage tubs (big ones)

I am so tired today... I nearly passed out during my planning time.

Success - Punk Rock Tie Dye

It turned out fabulous! I had to spray paint the yellow twice, and the colors didn't really blend, but it looks just great. If I want the secondary colors, I'll have to spray them on too. But that's okay! Even the kids at school were impressed. (Heck, I'M impressed.) I gave the shirt a cold water wash to get the spray paint smell out, and the colors are still bright.

I wonder if my nephews would be interested in spray painting some shirts?

Recycled woven tray

I learned this from the book Weave, Coil, & Plait Crafty Containers from Recycled Materials. It had been in my amazon.com wish list for literally a few years, and it is really hard to find now. But I found it on half.com. :)

The bonus is that a certain weaving technique I'd been trying to figure out for some pouches was in there. Yay! I like this book because all of the projects are sooo colorful and ingenious, not to mention ecologically sound. (And cheap. Where in my town would I find traditional weaving materials? Oh that's right, nowhere.)

Now I can just weave cool stuff with the over-abundance of cardboard boxes in my house. I just have to remember to make them neat and classy. Here's the first completed project:

I made it from strips of boxes (fittingly enough, they were Amazon boxes), a bottle of glossy red outdoor paint that's been in my stash for years, and some gold metallic curling ribbon. I think it turned out pretty nicely.

I'd love to give one of those neon-bright laundry baskets a shot. We could use a laundry basket at the lake.

But I'll tell you, I got another new book today that I'm completely excited about: Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt. Admittedly, this is for people in their teens and maybe early 20s.

For someone my age, there's not a whole lot that I'd dare to wear outside the house, and I don't have the figure for it anymore. Not to mention that my breasts are WAY too big to be going bra-less, as many of the styles would require. But I can see having a whole lotta fun doing these projects with kids.

It makes me feel sad that I'm not young anymore. Officially a "spinster", according to my boss. I'm never going to forgive him for that. So this spinster has plans to create a shaggy rug from t-shirt strips. I think it would make a great bathmat for our lake house. Heaven knows we need a bath mat. I'm tired of wrapping a towel from the bar around me, only to discover that it is visibly filthy because someone else used it for a bathmat on the nasty floor.

And another thing: there's some funky black ickiness on the back of the toilet rim... right where the pee hits when men don't bother aiming. So my sister and I are on STRIKE. We're not cleaning that freaking toilet of THEIR urine they carelessly splatter all over the place, because there is NO way it could possibly be ours. If they don't like it, they can always go take a leak outside.

NEVER throw up antibiotics!

I think what happened was that I took my capsules without food, and they got kind of hung halfway down my esophagus. Then they dissolved.

It felt like the worst case of sickening heartburn I'd ever had. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I throw up, it'll stop bothering me.

WRONG. Throwing up THAT stuff was one of the worst barfing experiences of my entire life. It was like a batch of sulfuric acid coming out, and I couldn't get that horrible taste out of my mouth.

Horrible look on my face, and my hand clamped over my mouth not only going back into class, but for the entire rest of it. Yes, the kids noticed. So I told them I'd gotten sick and I needed to sit down.

After crunching up 3 peppermints in rapid succession, my tongue finally stopped tasting like battery acid.

I won't tell you what the stuff that came out looked like, but it bore NO resemblance to anything I'd eaten that day or the day before.

So lesson learned. If you're on antibiotics for an infection, fight the urge to throw up at all costs. You really don't want to go there. It won't make you feel any better, either.

Recycled Purple Bolster Pillow, pt. 2

The original purple skirt I can't bear to just toss...

The velvety parts feel sooo soooffft.. and I just love the jacquard panels and pretty ribbon. It always made me feel pretty wearing this skirt with the matching vest. It has huge holes in it too, but it didn't contain enough fabric to be salvageable.

There's a major hole between the tiers and it's pretty fragile there, so sewing it together for a repair wouldn't have been an option.

Actually, there's another picture that came before this, and I'm not sure how it got deleted, but it did. All it showed was a first shot at wrapping the outer pillow around the eggcrate pillow core, just to give an idea that there was a little bit of a struggle involved.

I had to pull it together in big sections with safety pins, then gradually close up the gaps with yet more safety pins, until I could manage to sew the open edges together without constantly breaking the thread.

Sewing was a job that made my fingers REALLY sore. I constantly had to fight to pull those brown piped edges together evenly. If I hadn't joined the seams right there, though, it would have been ridiculously lumpy.

But now you can see that I have a neckroll pillow form, made from a couple of unpresentable flat pillows I've had for far too many years.

I must have had a previous life in the depression, because I just can't STAND to throw out something that I could squeeze a little usefulness out of.

It's just the right firmness to put behind my back and help me with my posture. It also comes in handy to put behind my neck when I'm reading or computing in bed.

Of course, that's just the inner form. More later when I finish the cover for it. I'm not looking forward to the hand sewing, but then again, I don't want to dig out my sewing machine for this job either. I just want my finished pillow.

Kool Aid Pickles

I'm sure I haven't seen everything, but this sure fits in the category of "Now I've seen everything!" along with deep fried twinkies and snicker bars. LOL

Kool Aid Pickles. Big thing, especially with the kids, in Mississippi.
A Sweet So Sour: Kool-Aid Dills Some woman wants to get a trademark on them, as if she can really trademark something like that which is created by using an already trademarked product. http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/05/koolaid_pickles.html

I do have to say one thing for them - they're very pretty!

Foot is improving

It was infected, and gave my doctor "the willies" when he looked at it. By Monday it had swollen and turned red. Looked like a horrible sunburn. Swelled more and more as the day went on.

So I got another tetanus shot (last one 2 years ago when I bashed my face on the toilet seat, long story) and a 7 day course of antibiotics. Plus some diflucan for the inevitable girly problems that antibiotics always cause... Ick.

Today he said it looks a lot better, and the skin is wrinkling a little where the swelling has gone down. Good sign. :)

Now I've done it. :(

Friday night as I was sitting on the couch, my foot managed to find a needle protruding from the carpet. It stuck into that hard outside part of the foot by my little toe, and broke off. Not to worry about that - I pulled it out. But for it to have had enough force to break... I'm afraid it might have jabbed the bone. It didn't hurt too much Friday night, but by Saturday afternoon, it was getting pretty tender on the bottom of my foot.

Today, it's getting hard to walk on the thing. If I let it hang down, it throbs. If I prop it up, it feels like my foot is sweating. I'm afraid I have an infection down on the bottom of my foot, trapped inside all that hard skin.

Everything I've read on the net says not to worry about it being sore and swelling a little for a few days, because that's normal. I hope that's the case here. I know they'll have to do some serious cutting and irrigation into the sole of my foot if theres a trapped infection. :( That'll completely ruin my summer. At least it isn't my driving foot. Even if I have to use crutches, I'll still be able to drive myself where I need to go. And I've still got the crutches from the last time I tore up all those muscles in my foot falling down the stairs outside the duplex I used to live in.

I thought I'd go out and mow the yard today, because it's starting to look like a jungle, but the battery is still dead. I know Dad told me I didn't have to do anything to the riding mower but let it sit on the carport all winter, but I think he was wrong and the battery SHOULD have been disconnected and maybe stored inside. Now he's telling me (for the second incident) that he'll be glad to come over and "put it on a slow charge" when i get ready to mow. (Which he told me he'd do over a week ago and he never showed up.)

I'll be honest - this makes me extremely frustrated and angry!!!! How am I supposed to mow my own damn yard if I have to wait on someone else to show up and get my mower running? Is this why I bought the stupid thing from my brother in law? I'm getting tired of getting shit lawn equipment for my money. I think he cheated me, and I'm doubly pissed off that Dad broke most of the hood completely off. He said he'd fix it - hasn't tried. He said he'd replace it - then talked about how much the hoods cost. I said I'd buy it if he'd put it on.

Could something PLEASE go well for me for a while?

Punk Rock Tie Dye

I've come to the conclusion that Brach's makes the best gummy bears. :) However, I'm probably eating too many of them, which always causes me a lot of stomach pain. No pain yet, but I'm sure it's coming.

I saw a neat segment on Threadbanger.com about tie-dying using spray paint. Okay, there's no tying and there's no dying, but the look is completely awesome. I wonder if it's a project I can get T into - he can make a black, red, and white one if he likes. Is there a black red white phase that most kids go through in their freshman year? I'm pretty sure that's when I did.

Now here's something that surprised me... chatting with you-know-who the other night about this stuff, he told me that he's always wanted to learn to tie-dye. I never would have thought that - somehow a bright series of colors twisted tgether on fabric never collided in my mind with my concept of him. Oh well. It's too bad he doesn't want to spend any real time with me, or I could show him sometime.

Tie-Dye Links:
Dharma Trading
Punk Rock Tie-Dye (using spray paint)