five questions

I saw this over at pocketful of pretty and I'm bored on this blazing 105 and up summer day so I'm rolling with it.

 5 places you need to visit: 

Ireland

 New York

 Canada

London

Australia 

5 places you would love to call home: 

Hhmm this one had me thinking because I've only moved outside my hometown once. 

Charleston

San Diego

Portland

St. Augustine 

Chicago 

Top 5 favorite things in your life: 

This very moment:

Writing

Being a crafting ninja 

My record player

The smell of summer

Growing closer and closer in my faith 

 5 things you want to cross off your bucket list or goal list this year:

Start an Etsy shop

Finish a novel

Get a new tattoo

Loose 30 pounds (13 down - holla!)

Take a mini road trip

 5 random facts about yourself: 

 My entire name is in the dictionary. 

By the time I die I will have spent 8 to 10 years of my life riding in a car listening to music for fun. 

I freaking hate snakes. Like screaming - cursing type of reaction when I see one. 

I randomly break out into song and dance. You've been warned if we ever meet. 

I have a smell phobia which means I carry deodorant in my purse at all times and have a much too large collection of perfumes and body sprays. 

DIY: Fabric Covered Bookcase

After doing the kitchen I was on a kick to do more. I have a lot of dark wood furniture in my living room. I'm still in the process of fixing things up in there as well. Like the trim you'll see in the pictures, it has got to go! The green is now clashing with a lot of things, and I don't like it at all.

I had seen on Pinterest  about how you can stencil your bookcase, paint a bookcase, but I liked the idea of putting fabric on the removable boards a lot better. My bookcases are the cheap ones from Wal-Mart, and to be honest it's a miracle this thing hasn't collapsed yet so taking off the backing was a no-no. Plus it didn't hurt that the fabric I liked was on a super cheap clearance.

. : Before : . 

When I said I had been ignoring my house, I wasn't exactly lying. Just look how bare that is!

. : Middle : . 

. : After : .

I didn't bother doing the bottom shelf due to my records being there, but I'm kinda giddy that it's building up nicely :)

Things I learned during this project:

a. I still cannot cut a straight line

b. I need to hit up some flea markets to find neat stuff to add onto my bookcase

c. Always put newspaper down when working on the coffee table. 

DIY: Sprucing up the kitchen

I've been on this crazy crafting spree for a while now. I think it's the lack of not constantly having to be somewhere and do something. Lemme just say, it's freaking awesome having to spare time to do whatever I please. I've ignored my kitchen like crazy and have been taking it one section at a time.

The place is small, I don't call it Little House for nothing, and the kitchen? Very tiny. Thankfully my landlord had a baker's rack for me to use so I could add stuff on it. Only problem was the wire type racks. Nothing would fit on there right so after getting so annoyed one day, I just cut up some foam boards and threw them on there. I couldn't leave it like that for long because it was just dull. That's where a little bit of fabric and my trusty friend Mod Podge came in hand.

Before 

After

Looks so much better!

There this thing in my genes (comes from my Padre's side of the family) where we hate seeing any wall bare so I wanted to add a little something-something above it. 

And now my little corner of the kitchen is complete! 

Things I learned by doing this:

a. I suck at cutting a straight line. 

b. An exacto type knife will hurt you.

c. Spray painting plastic frames is a pain in the rear. 

I've also decided to set up an etsy shop in the future and thought about doing a few different type wall art projects like I did with the cherries and fork. What's your opinion on them?

My writing and creating space

When I moved into the Little House, I was so excited to have a separate room for me to write my little heart out, and be able to created whatever I wanted with many crafty projects. But life is life, and I FINALLY got the place all together.  For some reason the lighting and my camera weren't really working with me, but none the less here is a looksie!

This is what the place looks like from the door. I keep my Cricut set up on the smaller desk. Underneath is a few boxes full of craft stuff. 

 

Storyboard for GUS NOVEL. It's now up to just one bulletin board and making the second one into FAIRY TALE since both stories won't leave me alone and demand to be written at the same time.

Left bookcase is more of women's fiction and right bookcase has a little bit of adult fiction and TONS of young adult contemporary. And yes, I'm aware none of my bookcases match. See the bottom part of the left one? That's what happens when you have a roommate who owns a dog. Never again.

Here is my 'imagination station'! 

My desk is really never this clean.

Best. Poster. Ever.

This bookcase is a mixture of classics, odds and ends, paranormal, and bottom shelf is all things novel writing related.  I usually have a binder for every story I work on. I told you if a novel ever needed a beginning I'd be a best-seller by now :) Everything on the other shelf is for craft stuff.

A trip to Laura Ingalls Wilder's House!

I had been promising my niece since last summer that we would go to Laura Ingalls Wilder's home and museum so last Thursday that's exactly where we went!

The scribbles and words you see are written in the dust on the sign. 

We weren't allowed to take any pictures inside the museum or the houses which was a bummer. I always find people's lives who have accomplished something so huge fascinating.  In the museum they had everything from clothes Laura wore to the things that were in the buggy when they came to Mansfield. There were photographs of the real Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace. As people trickled into the museum while we waited (for-freaking-forever) for the next tour to start, several questions were being asked about how different the TV show was from their real lives. One big thing was that in real life Mary never regained her sight nor was she ever married with children.

Front view of house

When the tour started we went into a small room that played a mini documentary with Laura speaking on some parts of it. As a writer I find it amazing that Laura didn't start writing her books until she was 65 years old! Because of her sister's blindness she had adapted a key sense of description so she could always explain things to her which is why her memory for the books held out so well. After the documentary we started on the tour.

Back porch which was actually the first part of the house that had been built.

In some ways it was like a time wrap and in other ways it seemed like I was walking into someone's grandparents house. The fact that the house hasn't had much done to it and is still in great condition is amazing. Laura's husband, Almanzo loved to woodwork and put a lot of different things into the house like all the cabinets, sitting areas by the big windows, and I loved-loved the mini library that was set off to the side of the living room. The only downfall of the tour were these four bratty boys that were all under the age of seven or eight. I know they were kids, and I know they were on a family vacation, but c'mon now, what two-year-old is going to be interested in an old house?  Plus a very snooty woman was driving me a bit bonkers with questions like, "Did he really do that? That seems like too much work for someone of the time period." It's called people actually busted their butts back in the day, lady.

Walkway up to the Rock House

After the tour we went into the gift shop, got a few things then headed down to what they call the Rock House. The Rock House was the retirement house that their daughter had built for them. They never got to see what it looked like until Christmas day when it was all finished. Talk about one awesome Christmas gift! And guys, I fell in love with this place. So gorgeous and so many little details on the inside. I want to live there!

So. Freaking. Cute.

I want this door!

Speaking of....what is really neat is that the Rock House sold back in the 1940's and a family friend of ours actually grew up in that house during the 70's! Me and Bree ended up being the only two people down there at the time to go to the tour (the bratty kid pack showed up but luckily we were already inside so they had to wait -- hoorah!!) so I was telling the tour guide about how I knew someone who lived there. She got all excited because the historical society didn't get it back until 1990 and spent 7 years restoring it back to how it used to be thanks to a lot of photographs that were taken when Laura and her husband lived there.  They only lived there for a few years before they decided to go back to their bigger house on the other side of the property because that was what was really home to them.

We headed back into town where we stopped at Laura's Sweet Memories. It was mainly a candy type store, but the cutest little old lady who I assume owned the shop along with her husband, told us that she was the fourth cousin of Almanzo and talked to us a bit about the books and her husband told us about Pa's fiddle which is taken out each year at an annual festival and played. I plan on attending next year!

Fun Facts We Learned That Day:

Laura said she wanted to live to be 90 years old. She died three days after her 90th birthday.

Laura hated baking bread so she had her husband put in two big windows on both sides of the bread making table so she could look outside at the animals or see when company was coming.

They were the first people in Mansfield to get running water.

All their friends convinced them to purchase an electric stove when it first came out. They used it a few times, but Laura said the food tasted awful and went back to cooking on their wood stove up until they day she passed away. Both stoves were still in the kitchen.

Their daughter, Rose, lived in their bigger house after she built them the Rock House. She wrote a few of her own novels while staying there.

A guest bedroom was put on upstairs and the only person to have ever stayed in it was her sister, Grace, who visited her 3 times. 

They loved their dishes and had many collections on so many shelves including a lot of Depression Glass.

Laura was only 4'11 so when her husband started to build the house he built it for her size. Low ceilings and cabinets where she could reach. In the Rock House her daughter made sure the shower head was also her size. 

Most of the Little House on the Prairie books were written in Laura's kitchen until her husband started adding onto the house and built her a small office where she had a writing desk, a lounge chair, and a big window to look out from.

After that we came back home, freshened up a bit then hit up the carnival that was in town! (And dumb me forgot to bring my camera with me!)  I was all excited, but it ended up being such a small one and not many adult rides. There was maybe 4, I think. We ended up just going on two ride, Bree played a few games and she won two stuffed animals out of three, ate cotton candy and snow cones then ended the night eating Chinese food for dinner. I was out of it by the time I dropped her off, but it was such a fun day! I can't wait to have more of them with her this summer!

Writing, writing, writing, and then....nothing.

I know I am. so. not. alone. in this horrible moment where you're all excited for your story, and your fingers cannot pound out the ideas fast enough.  You have no problem spending all your free time sitting at your computer, cluttering it up with dishes, music blaring, and ignoring phone calls unless it happens to be your writing buddy (ies).  You think to yourself: This is it! *insert crazy mad laugh* This is going to be THE story!

And then....

It just kinda dies.

I'm not experiencing writer's block. Trust me, I know when I have that. I'm experiencing....well, I'm not for sure. I don't want to call it boredom because writing is anything BUT boring. Laziness, maybe? No drive at all?

Due to me reading more fantasy novels and watching Game of Thrones (ohmoigah - loovveee), I started in on Fairy Tale Novel again.  Now I told myself I wasn't supposed to touch any other ideas until Gus Novel was done, but two wise writing buddies told me to just go where my muse was, and it was there. So there. I'm talking like the above paragraph kind of there, and then I just lost my desire to keep writing it. Or ANYTHING for that matter. I have all these ideas. Tons of notes and storyboards crammed full of inspiration, but still I don't want to write them.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

But I don't like it.

I no like it at all.

Happy Father's Day!

thank you 

for always letting me tag along.

for taking care of us even when you were having your own bad days.

for making sure things were kept sane (or as sane as our family can be - ha!) while mom went back to school.

for a ridiculous nickname like sam hambone lollipop hobo melon belly jones.

or just sammy jones for short.

for cool family outings like going to the imax to see the rolling stones.

for allowing us to play our music as loud as we wanted, as long as it wasn't rap or country cause you didn't like it.

for 'daily doses of the dead' car drives and stories from back in your day.

for making sure we know how much you and mom love both of us.

for never telling me that being a writer was a burnt out dream.

Easter Sunday 2012 - the day Padre got baptized!

for giving us faith.

for reminding all of us that God has our backs.

for never giving up even though I know some days you want to.

for always being open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

high-sign.

love you, padre.