Hanukkah 2013: 6th Night- Meth, Just Meth.

On the sixth night of Hanukkah, your Cheeseblarg gives to you:

A bag of meth from Heisenberg 

It is damned near impossible to make rock candy in Montana... or maybe it's just my house, which seems to have been partially built on top of an Indian Burial Ground. One of the bedrooms and the kitchen are always about 20 degrees cooler than the rest of the house (which obviously means it is haunted, right?). Rock candy making doesn't do well when it is 50 degrees. Not much evaporation happening at that temperature. I don't know how all the meth makers here do it!

I actually tried twice to make it (rock candy, not meth), carefully following directions each time. The first time, I got a thick blue syrup that did nothing (until this Thursday when I moved it out of the kitchen so I could cook for Thanksgiving). The other try started out as a blue syrup but then turned into a glass of semi solid sugar in a couple hours. I have no idea what the hell that was about, again, since I carefully followed directions. It is still sitting on a shelf in our hallway. I have no idea what to do with it, and frankly, I am a bit scared of it. I'm still contemplating taking pictures/videos of it to share on the facebook fan page.

Today, my husband finally bought me some rock candy from a store and suggested I paint it blue because I have been freaking out about my rock candy not forming for about a month. Since finally moving it to a shelf right above a heat registered worked, I now get to eat a quarter pound of store bought rock candy. Yea! It's a Hanukkah miracle!

Pintester Movement: That's Not A Moon!

It is also not a dented flamboyant golf ball though it looks like one of those, too.

So, I am back, thanks to Sonja Foust's Pintester Movement again. She really does a good job of getting me to post once a month. This time, we're all making ornaments (serious, go look at all the awesome ornaments in the links!), and I wanted to try out this awesome Star Wars Disco Death Star that I found on Pinterest.

This picture is not mine. This is what it should look like. This is awesome. 

It should be noted that there are no square sequins in all of Montana... in fact, there are hardly any sequins at all. I guess when you live in a place where eagles pick up baby deer and fling them at power lines, sequining shit is not a priority. After checking every other store in town, I finally found round silver sequins and since we are pintesting here, I figured, 'fuck it, that will do.'

Also, I don't know if this phenomenon is widespread but it seems that Montana thinks that Styrofoam is made out of unicorn spleens, because they are seriously pricey here. This tutorial was all, "under 5 dollars" and I was all, "bullshit!" So my ball is much smaller than their ball because I am cheap, and I wasn't paying over 6 dollars for a stupid ball, though I suppose it will never decompose, so maybe I'm supposed to be paying for longevity.

Anyway, once I started the project, it was pretty easy. Took me about 2 hours to finish it while not really paying attention to a football game on TV. I was kinda of tired of being covered in glue by the end of it, and of repositioning sequins that my giant clumsy fingers knocked out of place.

It doesn't look like the Death Star really because round sequins are built to reflect light everywhere, so it just looks like a gaudy silver ball really, but I am sure that if I tell everyone what it is when I put it in my tree, they will be able to see it... if they squint.

And, I don't really like sucking at things so I made another ornament to show that I really am good at things when I am given the correct supplies. This one is from the following tutorial I found on Pinterest, which I used as an inspiration, again, because I couldn't find exactly what it called for and these bitchin' hollow glass globes were on sale at our fancy craft store.

Here are their versions:

source

And here is mine:

TOO SOON!

I needle felted the landscape from polyfill fiber and various colored wool, and the T-Rex came from our local animal feed/farming store. I have no idea why they have tiny dinosaurs in the farm store, but I am glad they do, because, while it is insensitive to dinosaurs, apocalyptic dino deaths are one of my favorite art subjects. Should I find the appropriate medium before Christmas, I may even glaze the back of this with reds and orange to really drive home the "imminent death" thing.

As a reminder, if you are sending Cheeseblarg's tree an ornament (and thank you to those who already have, they are all AWESOME), they should be to me by the 21st (if it is a day or two late, I'll cope, but I do need time to get them photographed and coded). I can't wait to see all the ones that are on their way! You guys are super awesome!

And while I am showing off my needle felting, though it has absolutely nothing to do with the Pintester Movement, this is still my blarg, and I can show off why I haven't been entertaining y'all as frequently. Part of it is getting Hanukkah presents ready for you guys (Starting Thanksgiving night, there will be daily posts coming for eight whole days), but mostly, I have been stabbing things and making money doing so to replace my husband's lost unemployment.

If you are interested in buying a felt from me, I have the white and black Dalek on Etsy (the rest have been sold), and I am happy to make almost any felt sculpture that someone is willing to pay for (unless it is a human baby) as long as you are willing to wait a week or so for it to be done. Remember, these are not sewn pieces, they are all stabbed and are solid (but soft). They are art pieces, and not really suitable for playing with, because tugging can pull the wool out of place. If you're interested, I can only manage about 10 of them before it becomes too late for gifting for Christmas, so feel free to contact me at cheeseblarg at live dot com so I can get a piece done for you. Fair warning, I am working at 15 bucks an hour on these, and most take me several hours to do, but as you can see, they are pretty damned awesome.

Pintester Movement: DIY Vintage Inspired Bell Jar Ornaments

Sonja Foust, The Pintester, is having another Pintester Movement extravaganza for all of her Pintestes.

This time, since I am having my first family Christmas Tree (because, if you don't remember, I'm Jewish, so we never got to have one growing up) I'm starting early on making my own ornaments. I found a few discounted ornaments to go with my discounted faux tree that was bought for me after Christmas last year (THANKS, MOM!), but that sucker is 6 feet tall, and my 7 ornaments are not going to do it.

So I have pinned a buttload of ideas that tickle my fancy on my ORNAMENT-O-RAMA board on pinterest. But the one that I love the most, because I collect plastic snow globes, was this awesome ornament:

DIY Vintage Inspired Bell Jar Ornaments

from My So Called Crafty Life

Seriously, guys, look at that adorable fucking deer and those fancy trees! 

Unfortunately, Montana does not have adorable fucking anything... so I had to improvise.

I learned, on my wild quest through my way-too-small-for-the-capital-of-a-state city, that apparently, only very rich people ever do crafts here. There is no way I can afford most of the pins I want to try. Thank goodness for Amazon.com, but alas, having just ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon, I knew that I wouldn't have time to have things shipped for cheap to try stuff and possibly fail, having nothing to show for this pin,  so I began my mostly fruitless quest to find things to assemble an attractive, or at least funny, Bell Jar Ornament. I didn't find much, and what I found is... decidedly Montanan.

I also learned that my mother has WAY too many craft things to not have a freaking glue gun.  Seriously, she has an ENTIRE room of craft shit, and no way to stick it all together in a giant stringy finger-burning lump. Now that I have a glue gun (that I went out and bought in the middle of this pin test, after calling my mother on vacation in Florida to ask her if there was a glue gun hiding anywhere in her house) I may just end up making some abstract craft art to surprise her with.

So, after having my husband go cut plastic wine glasses with a dremel tool (he was slightly annoyed with me for forcing him to stop something else he was doing to cut them for me, so they are kind of passive aggressively uneven) I spent about 20 minutes trying to attach a buffalo to another buffalo. I finally gave up after consulting the instructions for my pin (hadn't done that yet... there were pictures... that I apparently didn't pay very close attention to) and I realized that I would need a glue gun before I could go any further, so I also gave the buffalo task to my husband, since he told me that the super glue we did have was dangerous, and went to the store.

Once I got back from Walmart with a glue gun... AND glue sticks, and other things to stick in future ornaments, the progress on the pin went pretty quickly. I am very happy with it and can't wait to put it on my tree, though I am trying to figure out what to tell my nephew should he ask why the buffaloes are attached.

I call it:

Buffaloes in Love

or alternatively:

Buffaloes who Love Playing Leap Frog

Adorable fucking buffalo. 

See what I did there?

Want to make ornaments for my tree and send them to me to be featured on the blarg? Details coming next month!

Hanukkah 2011- 1st Night- Pee Wee's Playhouse

Like last year (and as I plan to do as long as I write this blarg) I am celebrating Hanukkah with all of you.
Don't get excited. Hanukkah gifts are never good, unless your parents are really rich and have something to prove and I am neither your parents, nor rich. I am funny... so this Hanukkah will be funny, and cheap, and fairly inappropriate.

On the first night of Hanukkah I got you:

(If you are visiting the site, you get to click the link below to open your presents...otherwise it will just look weird and you will have to pretend you are opening things as you scroll down)

Da dun, da dun...

Shark week has been near and dear to my heart since the first time I watched it, the summer before my 11th grade year.  As I've watched it through the years, it has always reminded me of my best high school boyfriend, Alex (who reads this blarg, incidentally, hi, Alex!) because it was in his living room, on his couch, that the greatness that is a week full of terrifying shark facts was introduced to me.
And sharks are friggen awesome.  I mean I wouldn't want to hang out with one necessarily, or like... be eaten by one... though it would make a good story, being eaten by a shark in Montana, far away from places where sharks live... but still, not really up for that. So yes, I like to watch things about sharks, because they are fascinating and it gives me great information on how to avoid being eaten by them... which again, is much less of an issue now, living in Montana, than it was when I was growing up 8 blocks from the Atlantic Ocean.

My favorite shark fact: Sharks use electrical impulses to know where to bite, instead of their eyes, which are covered when they go all bitey to protect them from injury due to animals fighting back, because animals really don't like being bitten.

What's your favorite shark fact?

The Wrong Number

Yesterday, as I was jazzercising*, my crappy borrowed cellphone rang.  Since I am currently out of the service area and it costs like 2 dollars a minute to take a call, I just checked the number, realized it was no one I knew and went back to my squatting jazz hip thrusts, ignoring the ringing, which is more of an ephemeral ghostly wailing than a ringing, but you probably wouldn't have known what the hell I was talking about if I said I ignored the ephemeral ghostly wailing without letting you know that that is my ringtone. I only chose it because it was the least aurally offensive of all the rings available, and because I was unable to program Hedwig's theme into this phone by hand, since I am certainly not going to pay for a ringtone for a phone I hardly ever use.

Anyway, the phone then made a tinkling shooting star sound, which is the sound it makes when I get a message of the textual persuasion, which I always get when I ignore a call or miss one by accident, which I also usually ignore if I am doing something else, but then... I got another tinkling shooting star sound and I wondered, 'well, what the hell was that?!' So I checked and the person who I did not know had left a message.  And curiosity beat out. My logic being, if it was actually an important call for me from a number I didn't recognize I should know what it was, or if it was something important for someone else like "Billy, it's Devon, mama's being mauled by a snow leopard, you have to come home from the bar RIGHT NOW!" I might wanna let them know that they dialed the wrong number, for mama's sake.

But it wasn't for me, and it wasn't Devon calling for Billy, it was Ron, calling for Josh.

Hey Josh, it's Ron.  I'm in Montana for a few more days so give me a call when you get off work, dude, okay?! I wanna hang out. See ya man!

I can only assume that Ron was in town for something having to with a medical marijuana convention because this was the rest of the exchange when I texted to let him know that Josh was not getting his messages:

Me: Wrong number- sorry!

4:40pm Ron: What is the #

Me (thinking, doesn't your phone have that feature where you can see who you dialed? I thought that was standard, but fine, whatever...): XXX-XXX-XXXX (only I put my phone number instead of Xs, obviously, although I can't see that it would have made a difference had I not used numbers).

5:09pm Ron: Got it dude thanx when u off work

Are you fucking kidding me?! You were asking me, the person on the receiving end of the wrong phone call, what Josh's actual number is... *facepalm*

Me: This really isnt josh. XXX-XXX-XXXX has never had a male owner. (Screw capitalization and punctuation for wrong numbers, let them think I am dumb, what do I care?)

5:59pm  Ron: Cool send me a pic so I know this aint josh

FFS... really?! Now I have to sext you to get you to stop calling? But I would have sent a picture if I had had the capability to send pictures just to get him to go away. It would have looked a lot like this:

Yes,  I would have hired a skywriter for the occasion.

But instead, I just ignored him, while being annoyed and partially amused. Until 8:46 pm when I received yet another call from Ron, which again, I ignored. And again, he left a message... and again, I was too curious and had to listen to it.

Josh- Ron. Dude, give me a call.

*blink*


If he calls again, I am texting him a link to this post.


 *fine, I wasn't really jazzercising, but that is more pleasant than what I was really doing, just trust me on this one.

Road Trip

Drove to Washington from Montana today. Here is a recap of my trip.

1st hour:

On the MP3 player: Cars Greatest Hits

On the road... only not like the book... which I half read in college because I was bored by it.

• Got stuck behind a slow-assed truck for many miles because I was on a two lane road and I am terrified of passing.
• Also terrified of rocks hitting my windshield, I have found.
• Thoroughly picked my nose.

2nd hour:

On the MP3 player: Cars Greatest Hits- For crap's sake, how long is this album!?

I think there is a bunny staring at me from the rock formations on that hill.

• Begin having mini panic attacks because I suddenly become incredibly aware of my body.  
• Wonder if combination of the Imodium, headache medicine, and gas-x I took before leaving was somehow having hallucinogenic effects.
• 1st rest stop... toilets are made of metal.
• Washed hands thoroughly.
• OMG WIENERMOBILE!

Metal Toilet... very airplane like.

3rd hour:

On the MP3 player: Cyndi Lauper (She's So Unusual and True Colors Albums)

Random snowy pass, where construction soon intervened.

• The hour of construction... it just went on and on and on.
• Began contemplating how incredibly strange driving is... just sitting in a box that is moving me along in space based on where I move my hands and feet.
• Got gas in Missoula, MT.

4th hour:

On the MP3 player: Dirty Dancing Soundtrack

Trout, up the wazoo!

• Second rest stop.
• Visited the Trout Museum.
• Drop my camera on the bathroom floor, hence breaking the display and making me sad.
• Try to get picture of the Idaho sign but fail, because the display of my camera is now broken and I cannot see where the camera is pointing. 

5th hour:

On the MP3 player: Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, F-Boys (80's punk band my sister's bf was in), and Gnarls Barkley

• Make it through the rest of the mountain passes, in snow, Gojira attacked but unfortunately, the camera was broken so I couldn't capture it.
• Fail again to capture Washington sign because of broken camera. 

Texx with Two Xs

I saw some amazing driving today.

See, it is tax time, which means that expensive automotive death is bound to happen in my life, and this time it was my husband, in the station wagon,with the fuel pump.  Last year it was Eunice, with the timing belt, on the interstate... 50 miles from home.

But the fact that cars don't like me to have money is neither here nor there.  What IS is that I think our amazing tow truck driver, Texx with two Xs (and a fancy hat that you likely won't see outside of Montana), either has some sort of magical power, or clearly is some sort of creature with the ability to see out of the back of his head, because the feat of backing up I just saw-- around corners and perfectly into a parking spot, and THEN into a mechanic's garage port that had about 12 inches leeway on each side, with about 30 feet of truck and car in total, was bordering on mythical. I think he might actually be hiding a horn under his hat.

Licence to Abbreviate

While out today on "Mission: Last Minute Cupid," I saw a vanity plate that I couldn't quite decipher.  I decided that the person was either a rodeo clown or did animal husbandry for a dairy farm...

Here in Montana, there seem to be an inordinate amount of vanity plates.  Assigning a story to each of them makes for an enjoyable pastime, especially while waiting at train crossings.
A word of advice though, (also from an example found in town) if you are going to get a vanity plate, have a friend look it over for you, just in case.

SNOMG!

So, uh, I know I have said that I live in Montana, but I have also indicated that I am not originally from here. I am, in fact, from Florida originally. I've lived here in Montana for three years, and as such, driving in snow still scares the holy living hell out of me.

Today, I was coerced into driving to do stupid errands that totally could have waited, in the middle of what should have been labeled a blizzard... and would have been if people without meteorological degrees from Florida were in charge of classifying northern weather.

I missed one turn because this was my view:

And then I hyperventilated as I drove further and further out of town because I couldn't tell where the median lumps broke because everything was covered in snow.  Finally about a mile or two later the median lumps disappeared and I then flailed as cars whizzed passed me at 50 mph while I looked for stop sign shapes to try to turn left to get off the road and turn around.  Have I mentioned I'm afraid of left turns?

So I managed to turn around and get where I was going and then sent a text while I waited for the first errand to be done, informing my loved ones that I was going to die while driving in crazy snow storm (thankfully I received a reply that was not "K"). And then I promptly experienced the joy of my car pretending to be a Disney ride while trying to enter an intersection as I lost traction and slid at 90 degree angles left and right while begging my car, Eunice, to 'PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! for the love of weasels, go forward,' so that we were not smashed by the people approaching way too quickly.

I managed not to die, as you can probably deduce, but I think I might now need blood pressure medicine, or some sort of anxiety pill as a result of my crazy snow storm adventure.