It's Not Too Early For Halloween!!!

I LOVE Halloween.  As soon as I see products out on the shelves at the grocery store or craft stores, my fingers start curling with need. I need to buy them all! (Which is a slight problem with not having an income to support that...)  My home decor has taken a more fall theme the past few years.  Rich cranberry red, pumpkin or burnt orange, brown.  It just makes me feel cozy.

I have a friend who goes ALL OUT for their parties.  Every one of them has a theme and then it's too the extreme.  It's a cosplayers fantasy.

This year's Halloween them is Disney's Haunted Mansion, but also including the equivalent themes from the Disney parks across the globe.

Let me just say that https://family.disney.com/crafts/ has been an AWESOME place for ideas and legit, free pdfs.  I've been working on the sliding chamber bookmarks and Tomb Sweet Tomb gift boxes.  I won't be able to attend the party itself, or I'll at least be more than fashionably late to it. My husband and I have a wedding to attend to in Nashville, IN that evening.  The party is in the historic district of Irvington, IN.  (We live in Greenwood, IN.)  With all of my health issues, I might be done for before we make it back to our side of town, let alone getting me up to Irvington.  My husband wouldn't go with me--he has some social anxiety and doesn't know most of the "normal" crowd at the house and this will also have a lot of extended friends from other groups that I haven't even met, so I can't ask him to go with me and be uncomfortable.

We also have my kids that weekend, so there's that.  Luckily my mom will be keeping them for the wedding, but I'm supposed to pick them up before they go to church, so I am even more unsure about making it to the party due to that.  I'll need at least four hours of sleep before driving up to Southport.

Back to Disney.  I've saved a ton of those pdfs from the website to use for later parties. Y'know, when my kids actually have friends contact information for parties.  Currently our school district doesn't allow for invites to be given at school, even if you're inviting the whole class, which became a thing a while ago. You couldn't just give invites to your friends because bullies or leaving people out and making them outcasts. All about the inclusion, y'know. 

I wasn't ever really included in things even when I was part of groups back in school. Sure, it hurt, but I'd made my peace with not being popular.  I've now embraced my weirdness, and there are times that I wish I had more adult contact outside of the internet and my immediate neighbors, but my eclectic strangeness can be overwhelming for some people. I also tend to have "diarrhea of the mouth", where I just spill everything and anything about my life to people.  Once I mention something, then it all just starts spilling out.  People don't tend to know how to react with my life story, even if I only give a little bit.  I've been through some stuff.  I'm in counseling though. So it's not ALL bad. And it's all made me into who I am.  A better person, maybe? I don't know. Whatever.

But seriously. Go check out that website (here it is again).  There's a lot of amazing things there.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

I love that song. After the year I've had, it fits though.

I saw a vlog by another blogger recently on Facebook (I'll have to go back and find the link later; she's on YouTube as well) about ideas to use extra notebooks for.  Let me just say that I have a major love for office supplies. If the journal has a pretty design on it, it's even worse for me. I hoard yarn, beads, and office supplies.

She suggested using a notebook for just brain dumping the day. Another for writing down your dreams or how you're feeling at the beginning of the day. Another is used for "a month at a glance", where you just summarize the events of the month, or week.  Then even another for things that have happened that you were thankful for. There's sketch books, but you can also doodle in notebooks as well. Songs or poetry.  Story brainstorms, timelines, planning.  I'm going to use one for taking notes on gaming as well, since I've gotten back into that. (I'm playing World of Warcraft; Lothar server. Mostly alliance, but I've got a blood elf I'm working on leveling too.)

You could also use another one for prayers or your daily devotions, if you do that of course. Not trying to push any religion on anyone.

I've also purchased and been using a health journal. You can get yours here. The woman originally started the journal for her husband during his cancer battle which started before their wedding but the diagnosis came immediately after their wedding.  There is actually more than enough spots for doctor contact information. With all of my health issues, that's a HUGE deal for me.  I never have enough spots for my doctors or my diagnoses.   There's also daily spots for how your symptoms were each day, things to talk to your doctor, pages for your current medication lists.  It's just incredible.  I wish I'd bought this YEARS ago (although she just started them, but I could have designed one too). 

If I'd picked something like this up earlier, I possibly wouldn't still be fighting for disability.  I should tell y'all about that sometime.

But that's enough of that for now!  I'm going to make another post for the awesome things I've been working on for a friend's Halloween party!

I hope the year has treated you better than me.  I'll post about that another time as well.

Happy 2018!

Another year has flown by with me not posting ANYTHING on here. 

I'm an absolutely horrid author.

At least I don't have any true followers, right?  Just family and friends that occasionally poke at me about my stories. 

Although, in making friends at my local coffee/tea shop, I met an artist who has some freaking amazing work.  As soon as I remember, I'm going to be taking her some of my concepts.  She'd been very adamant about working on art for some of my books.

I just have to get them written, right?  I just have this horrible connection between my brain and either my mouth or my fingers and I can't get these amazing worlds to come out!

There's Tichion that I still need to rehash out, or just start completely over with a new name for that world.  The one on the other side of the mirrors?  With the demons and the tech between the worlds...

Then there's Bloo. Oh, my beloved Bloo--the world that friends created in high school that we all role played and my crafting hobby-business came from.

I've also been toying with some "urban romance" ideas--those psuedo-paranormal romances.  I've been doing some research to make some sense of what I'm trying to work out, but it's going to be a doozy.  (Did I just say "doozy?")

And then, of course, there's the ever popular "mom" book.  The "my kids are insane" book.  The "I don't have enough coffee for this crap".  (I can't drink coffee, by the way. Health issues. So, can someone chug a pot and send their energy to me?)


This year has to be different. In so many ways, I need it to be different.  It's starting with me flying to Japan all by myself and leaving my children behind for a month.  Once I get to Japan, I will be with friends, but the trip will be my first alone, let alone out of the midwest and country.  (Have I ever mentioned that I've never left the United States? I finally have a passport, so hopefully that will be happening frequently now.)  I don't speak Japanese, althought I'm trying to learn the bare necessities and quickly. (Thank  you, Google and Duolingo!)  I'll have a layover in LA and China on the way to Nagoya and then again in Nagoya on the way back.  I'll be gone for almost the entire month of February, flying out of Chicago on January 29th, landing in Nagoya on the 31st. 
I'm a bit panicky about that.  Again, I have a LOT of health issues and I only speak English, very minimal Spanish, and even less Japanese. 

Where's the bathroom? バスルームはどこですか？Basurūmu wa dokodesu ka?

Water: 水 mizu

Oh, and I can count to ten, in theory to 99, in Japanese.  But that's about it so far.  (I'm slowly catching on about "desu"...)

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What I'm reading:

Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series (book 26 is due out August 2018)
Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter, The League, and Chronicles of Nick series
Lori Foster's Jude's Law, Murphy's Law, and her Fighter series
L.A. Banks' Crimson Moon series. (I cried when she passed away and I re-read her series as often as possible.)
J. K. Rowling "The Cursed Child"
Tiana Hanson's "Battle Lines Drawn"
Karen Marie Moning's Highlander and Fever series

Happy 2017 and Screen Time

FIRST I want to say HAPPY 2017!!! I know, it's March.  I also know that I failed to write last year.  I also know that it has been a year since saying that I would.  Life just threw one wrench after another at me.  However, maybe things are looking up.

SECOND I want to talk about screen time for kids.  I know we aren't supposed to give kids a lot of screen time.  I'm guilty of letting the kids have a movie on in each room--I got tired of fighting with them about only having one on at a time. Plus, two kids? There's always a fight over who wants to watch what.  Of course, we haven't set the best examples as adults, either, being constantly glued to our phones or computers.
However, I think some of the apps for kids don't count as "screen time" due to the learning aspect of them.  My kids are currently 8 and 4 (almost 9 and 5).  They don't have their own tablets or anything, but there's apps on my phone to keep them occupied while we are out and stuck at, say, doctors' offices or getting our hair cut for the first time in months.  My daughter loves the bilingual apps--we have one for Mandarin and Spanish.  Well, let me correct myself there.  There's one for Mandarin and English, one for Spanish and English, one for Mandarin only, and one for Spanish only.  There's a child for each language and they say the word and you are supposed to move the block that corresponds with that word up to a little box.  It's cute.
My son, the four year old, loves the Endless Reader app, which was mainly what this post was for.  No, this is not an ad.  Well, not in the "I'm getting paid" sense, because I'm not. But I love this app.

ClassDojo is for my daughter's school.  Reader is the Endless Reader app. And at the bottom you can see the bilingual apps.

 Endless Reader has helped my son so much with learning.  He'll come up to me while I'm lost in facebook or pinterest or instagram, pull at my arm, and ask, "Mommy, can I learn about monsters?"  The app uses "monsters" to spell words and act out sentences with those words.

The screen after the "opening scene", which you can skip by just tapping on the screen.

 After you select a word (sorry, I didn't take a screen shot of the word selection screen), it shows on the screen in colors and the narrator says the word.  Then the letters get jumbled up and your job is to move them back into the correct position.  The letters also make their own sounds, after faces appear once you touch them to move, until they are placed.  As they are placed, the letter name is said.

You can move multiple letters at the same time I recently discovered.  My son likes to use all of his fingers to place them at the same time and THAT can be a bit of a ruckus...

 Once the word is spelled out, there's a recording of a group of kids repeating the word.  Then the little green bird picks up the word and carries it to the next screen which has the sentence.  However, before s/he can place the word, all of the monsters stampede across the screen and knock out a few words from the sentence.  The child then has to move the words to their correct places in the sentence.  Once a word is selected, it changes into whatever word it is ("house" is a house) while being moved.  It also says what word it is.  Quiet is whispered.

 Once your sentence is finished, a scene pops up and the monsters act out what is on the screen.  The narrator then speaks the sentence.  My son likes to repeat the scene a LOT; the repeat/refresh symbol (what is that called?) shows up in the middle of the screen after the scene is acted out.

The concert is muffled and Dapper Dandy does smile after this.  My issue is, if he didn't like the loud noise, why did he go to the concert? 

The app only starts with so many words. You have to buy additional upgrades.  However, each stage, if you buy all available in that stage, is only $11.99 or $10.99.  I think it's well worth the money, and a better use of funds than spending $9.99 on coins to buy Pokeballs because I'm too lazy to walk down to the Pokestop at the end of the street.

What a few years it has been...

The past few years have been quite the adventure.  I got married, birthed a son, got divorced, almost moved to Oklahoma, and am now marrying my high school sweet heart.  My health has been crap--I even had another surgery for Crohn's Disease after this last flare and it didn't help like it should have.  I still haven't progressed on my manuscripts.  I haven't been writing poetry either.  I do have a few book ideas that I want to work on, though.

I apologize for disappearing from the blog world though.  You can still find my crafting work at Kypress Designs and I'm on Etsy, Twitter, and Instagram.  I will try to post here at least once a month if not once a week.  Perhaps posting will help spur me to start writing again.  "Bloo" is still sitting next to my desk, collecting dust, as is my notes on Tichion's sequel.  I have been toying with a book on my adventures of being a mom and fighting chronic illnesses.  What are your thoughts?

I also changed the blog back to my maiden name. My published works are under my maiden name anyways and I may just keep it that way.