Don't feel too bad-I'm behind on the library blog too, and I get paid to write that

I have been neglecting you, but it's only because I've had to read soooo much lately. I'll post about it soon. But to tide you over, here's a few blogs I've written for Pratt lately.

Here's a post I wrote about Lloyd Alexander. If you've never read any of his books, then look at your life, look at your choices. His books are amazing and had a huge impact on my childhood.

Next, did you know that Pride and Prejudice is now 200 years old? I did, and I wrote a blog about it! I've decided to reread P&P sometime this year because of the anniversary, but I haven't done it yet. I'll be sure to report back when I do.

Last, but probably not least, a blog about reading series vs. reading stand-alone books. I tend to do more series, but I think that's because everything seems to be a series these days. It can be pretty frustrating.

That's all for now! I'll try to do better next month, honest.

I've redecorated my room!

If you've been a faithful reader of this blog for a while, you'll know that my room is really, really dark. For reasons that are best known only to people who don't live here anymore, the entire room, 4 walls and ceiling, are painted a lovely shade of maroon. Truly, it would be lovely as an accent wall. But as an entire room, it kind of creates the sensation of being in a cave. A maroon cave, but still. Not helping the situation is the fact that my bedspread, which I already owned when I moved in (I would not have purposefully done this), is almost exactly the same color as the walls!

I like to think that my room was pretty cheerful anyway, and not just because of my sparkling personality. I also have colorful decor and whimsical puppets. But it was time to spruce this place up with a new bedspread. And bonus, this bed-in-a-bag also came with curtains! Also a pair of slipper socks, but since I've never owned curtains as a grownup and have multiple pairs of slipper socks, the curtains are more exciting.

Behold, my curtains!

Mom, Maren and Gracie helped me pick out my new stuff, and then Dad put up curtain rods so that I could actually hang up my curtains.  We had to move my desk and my bed to get to the windows, which was kind of a pain, since one wheel of my desk is broken, and I keep everything I own (slight exaggeration) under my bed. Unfortunately, as Mom will readily tell you, I am no good at doing big projects. They make me cranky. Or scary, depending on your point of view. It is true that I get short tempered and irrational when forced to do any sort of unusual household undertaking. Imagine if it had been something bigger that putting up curtains! Wait, don't, it's unpleasant.

 Bed shot, and a view of my colorful decor. I painted that mural myself. 

It was totally worth it, though. My room looks awesome! So much lighter than it used to, and I think having curtains makes me seem really classy. I still live in a cave, but now it's more like that awesome cave that Kissyfur and his dad move into and less like Trapped in Death Cave.

I guess that's all for now. Tune in next time to see my new miniature Holly Hobbie China Tea Set! I'm not kidding. I just got one, and it's pretty awesome.

Have I lost my muse?

I used to be a prolific blogger. I would write about anything and everything, and also, sometimes, nothing at all (this is probably one of those posts). But lately, in the last couple of years, I have not been feeling very bloggy. Am I not interesting anymore? I'm pretty sure that's not it, because I hang out with myself in person and still have a lovely time. Maybe it's that blogs are kind of dying out. That certainly seems to be the case. Most of the individuals that I follow in the blog world only blog once a year or so now.

It could be because so many people are on facebook. They can learn all sorts of stuff about my life there! Or maybe I'm just not interested in telling people all about my life anymore. Perhaps with age comes experience, and with experience comes the realization that there are some things you don't want the internet to know. But since I never really posted that kind of stuff anyway, that's probably not it.

I think the real culprit here it laziness. And I refuse to let it conquer me! I want this year to be the  year that the creative juices start flowing again! So I'm determined that I won't just post links to my blogs for the library. But since I haven't done that in a while, here's a few links. First, I wrote a blog about Lloyd Alexander, one of my favorite authors. And a few weeks ago, the blog posted an interview with me! It's pretty great.

Ok, so the point of this is, I'm going to be more awesome about posting this year. But if no one reads this and comments about it, how will I ever be held accountable??? Hold me accountable, internet. It's up to you.

More library blogs!

I know you think I've been neglecting you, Internet, and I totally have. But not really, because in the time that I haven't been writing lots and lots of posts for Twin Like Me, I have written 3 new posts for Pratt Chat, the official, award-winning blog of the Enoch Pratt Free Library! It's true, we won a Mobbie. Pretty exciting stuff. I'm going to put my award on the wall in my office.

The first one is about judging books by their covers, a time-honored (by me) practice. I was also excited by this one because I got 4 comments, which is a pretty good amount for our blog. BSP, please read these posts and comment.

The next one is about when I went to the Baltimore Book Festival and met famous authors. I tried to make it pretty professional, but if you want to hear a more accurate (read: sillier) version, I can tell you sometime.

The last one is about our new art wall at the library. I'm very pleased to say that this has been a success so far, and that it was totally my idea. Yay for the art wall! I'm currently planning our December wall. If you guys have any awesome ideas for the wall for future months, let me know!

Happy (late) Halloween! I made you these crafts.

So, I've been meaning to post pictures of my awesome Halloween crafts for quite some time (since September, when I actually made them), but I'm just now getting around to it. It was my birthday. I was busy. Just kidding, I was lazy. Anyhow, these awesome spiders are a craft that I made at Family Home Evening with a bunch of Young Single Adults. I've also made this craft with kids at the library, but I'm not gonna lie, I had a lot more luck with the grownups. They were able to follow the directions better.

This is my FHE spider. We had a special, Halloween themed craft pack, with festive pipe cleaners, puff balls, and googly eyes.

 The Spider I made at the library to show the kids how easy it was. It didn't work.

I also made these cute pumpkins out of old books. Don't be alarmed, they really were books that had seen better days. I was recycling them! Anyhow, basically, first you break the spine of the book so you can bend it all the way in half. Then you fold each page of the book in half. It takes a long time, but the one that turned out best was the one with about 500 pages. Then rip off the cover, and glue the spine together so the book is in a column shape. I painted the books orange and cut leaves out of the discarded covers that I painted green. Then I glued the leaves to the top and put a stick for the stems. Okay, I'm sure I just made it sound really hard, but it wasn't. Just time-consuming.

Ta da! Super cute and impressive.

 

My final crafty thing for the month was my costume. I'm a camper from Camp Half-Blood.  If you don't know what that is, Shame! JK, it's from Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan. Technically, I wasn't any specific camper, although I guess I could have been.

Should have cleaned my room before I took this picture.

 

This is a super easy costume, and people who've read the books will for sure know what you are. I took an orange t-shirt (that's what they wear at camp), printed a camp logo off the internet, and taped it to my shirt. I also wore a necklace of clay beads (which we made at a different FHE once), because campers always get a bead at the end of the summer if they survive. I made up great stories for each bead, deciding what we had done that summer. You can't really tell from the picture, but the beads are a blue flower (from the summer those Demeter kids were completely out of control), a pink star (from the summer that Poseidon's kids took us on an underwater field trip and we saw starfish), the moon (from when we had a quest on the moon), a flat blue and green disc (when we found out the Earth really is flat), a pink horn (the summer we killed that crazy unicorn), and a lemon (the year we had that lemonade stand). I also carried around a magic pen. If you can't tell that it's really a sword, then you're not a half-blood. Lucky you. And, of course, I have my super cute Rasta hat that my sister, Missy made for me. I mean, I borrowed it from one of the satyrs. They were them to hide their horns, I wore it because it was cold. The hat is definitely the hardest part of the costume, but since I have a generous and talented sister, it was no problem. You could leave that part out though.

There you have it. My Halloween. I hope you also had an excellent and craft holiday!

More from Pratt

So, I've still been kind of a slacker about this whole posting thing. But I've written two more blog posts for the library, and I'll link them here.

The first one, I'm pretty proud of. It's about the large amount of authors and illustrator's who've died in the last year or so. Seriously, it's starting to become alarming. Since this post was published, I think I've read about at least 1 more person dying, maybe 2. If I were an author or illustrator, I'd be getting a little nervous. To be fair, most of these people were really old, so that's some comfort. Read about it here!

The next one isn't as exciting. It's a back to school blog that was published on the first day of school. It's more of a "services we offer" type of thing, which leaves less room for my trademark wit (not really trademarked. I don't think that you can trademark your own personal speaking style, can you?). But still, hopefully it has some valuable information. Do your homework, you rotten kids!

Well, that's about it, although I have another post due this week. Hopefully, I'll also find time to do some posting here. I just made a very impressive looking craft that I'd like to show off, so that might end up on the blog. I'm sure that I'm also very exciting and interesting in other ways, so hopefully I'll figure out a fun way to show that on the internet.

Happy reading!

Introducing: Molly the Muppet! (Finally)

I know I said I would post about my Muppet that I got in NYC back in May. I lied. But I'm here now, ready and willing to share the joy with you, dear readers. So yeah, first things first, I named her Molly! Kind of in honor of everyone's favorite spunky redhead who's also a witch (so, not Anne of Green Gables, obvs.), Molly Weasley. Also, I like the name Molly.

I don't really remember what was going on here. Obviously, we're upset about something.

She's a super fun, super spunky Muppet/puppet. I'm still working on finding the perfect voice for her. Which is one reason why there's no video of us together, although you do get more from the live action rather than just the pics. Also, she's actually pretty hard to maneuver. As you can (maybe) tell from the pictures, the puppeteer (me, in this case) can work the mouth with one hand, much like a regular hand puppet. Except that she's really heavy duty, so if you have super wimpy hands, like I do, it's kind of hard to do. Also, one of her arms has a little wand thing attached to it, so the puppeteer can also move that arm around. I refer to her other arm (the non-wand one) as Molly's stroke arm, because she/we can't do anything with it.

 

Right arm is stroke arm. You can sort of see the wand handing down off the edge of my bed (it's that black line). You can also see that my walls and my bedspread are almost exactly the same color. Good times.

Also, she doesn't have legs. I think that typically, Muppets don't have legs because it's much easier to just show them on TV from the waist up, rather than making their legs move. But since I always carry her wherever she needs to go, I don't think she minds.

Anywhoodles, sometime I'll bring her to a family party and put on a show or something. Or at the very least, I'll do a show with her and have someone record it so you can see how she really moves. She has very bouncy hair that I'm actually quite jealous of. Aaaaaand now I've ended a sentence with a preposition. Bummer. I like to think that, while I'm at work, Molly and Zefron party it up in my room. He definitely needed to hang out with some new people. Or Muppets. In any case, I've got quite the little inanimate family to keep me company. You should all be jealous.