I’ve been editing videos for some three or four years now. When I look back at my early efforts, I can see how far I’ve come.
Then I see something like this and am reminded of what I have left to learn.
Watch especially how Jamin Winans cut setting up and tearing down the turntables, and how that sequence gets shorter and shorter, both because he can summarize what you’ve already seen and because it serves as a joke and indicator of the main character’s emotions.
Eli starts soccer camp tomorrow. He’s declared these his new favorite shoes.
Liza loves her some butterflies almost as much as our nephew Sam loves trucks. How much does Sam love trucks, you ask? When they get car inserts in their newspaper, Andrew or Joy has to sit with Sam and read the insert cover to cover many, many times and even after that, Sam saves it for reading later.
Liza never gets tired of pointing and shouting frantically, “Buh-Fie! Buh-Fie!” Taking her to the botanical garden butterfly house is like taking an addict to a dealer.
So after I made Eli’s robot I thought I’d attempt to make Liza a Buh-Fie.
Here are my supplies or I should say, prospective supplies. I radically paired down what I used after I started. The beautiful butterfly silhouette I adapted for this pattern can be found at Preschool Express Pattern Station.
Pinned pattern on two colors of pink and the body in black.
I had originally thought to do beading on the wings but it looked bad and I was afraid to give Liza so many beads to pull off and eat. Bad nutrition.
A change to felt dots worked much better.
Stuffed and getting attached to the body. I shouldn’t have segmented the wings like I did. If I had done each wing in a whole piece of felt, I think the whole butterfly would have been much more stable.
Liza admires the finished product. I took it in after her nap this afternoon and before I even handed it to her, she was shouting, “Buh-Fie!”
Liza still inspecting. She seemed to like the feel of the beads on its face.
The nice thing about the segmented wings is it flaps really nicely, which Liza discovers here.
Finished ‘fly.
My next project are some birds. Made with a sewing machine. Send the Gen-X police, Martha Stewart ate my brain.
Yesterday was the end of Eli’s two weeks of swimming lessons. He completely loved it and I think he did pretty well for never having had any instruction whatsoever. The best part is he isn’t afraid of the water, which can only mean he’ll grow up to be an Olympic swimmer.
It was 80° at 3 o’clock this afternoon. We spent a good chunk of time outside then and I snapped these photos.
Click through to see the whole set.
Liza kills a red popsicle. See those two teeth? There are finally two more coming in on the top!
When I ask Eli to smile for the camera, this is what I want and never get.
Incidentally, while I was taking these photos and several others off the camera tonight, I realized that the picture’s filenames had gone back to “img_0001.jpg”. We’ve taken over 10,000 photos with our “new” camera.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been slowly upping the temperature in our house to see what the maximum comfortable temp is for working, playing and just plan ol’ living inside our house.
This past week, I’ve been working on 77°. Now last summer while I was nursing Liza, this place was regularly down to 73° and if I was having a particularly hot moment, 71°. By comparison, 77° is practically desert heat. Well the past couple of nights have shown me that 77° is actually too warm to sleep in.
Friday night I dreamed that I lost Eli and Liza in a mudslide. I survived but they didn’t.
Saturday night Stephen dreamed he punched Eli in the face.
Last night I turned the thermostat down to 76° and I dreamed of moving into a new house with two kitchens and beach access in the basement.
Does being too hot make you have bad dreams too or are we the weird ones?
I’ve long rolled my eyes at intelligent design proponents claiming that intelligent design is so very different from creation science. The celebrated intelligent design textbook, “Of Pandas and People,” originally referred to creation science before a search-and-replace operation changed the references to intelligent design. The current US administration’s approach to the war on terror is similar. “Prisoners of war” was replaced with “illegal enemy combatant”; “torture” by “enhanced interrogation technique”. With new shiny words in place, the administration was free to shove people into Gitmo limbo, where they were neither prisoners of war nor criminals.
[T]he Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.
In reading the text of the ruling, Justice Kennedy stated that Congressional branch and the Executive branch can’t “switch the Constitution on or off at will”. I’m reminded of a bit from one of my favorite plays, Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”.
Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Due to Stephen’s LOLprowess, our site now has enough Diggs or Technorati gold stars in heaven to rate us being approached by marketing firms. The first couple of times we got emails, I was like, “Huh? They want to do what? What’s the catch?” The catch is that these companies want to send us free stuff in exchange for us giving them shout outs about their products or services. Apparently this phenomenon has a name: “Word of Mom.”
The nice part of the deal is that they send us free stuff but we don’t have to talk about it unless we like it, mostly, I’m guessing, because they don’t want the bad word from us moms. But it takes the pressure off of me because I don’t feel obligated in any way. I can pick and choose what is interesting to me and talk about only those things. Isn’t the internet a powerful thing?
Most of the email traffic has come from the PR firm representing the Turner TV channels. The first round of swag was disappointing, mostly because I didn’t read the email carefully enough. I thought she was sending me new shows of Saving Grace and The Closer. I was having puppies over the prospect of new episodes (and early, no less) because I love those two shows. In actuality she was sending me the greatest hits collections of those shows and a few others in the hopes that I might be interested in them and willing to plug them on the blog. Oops, I think I played right into their hands there, didn’t I?
The second round of swag was a book called The Best Old Movies for Families. This book is very cool. It’s funny and well written, and it’s made me want to further my own movie education as well as introduce my kids to a whole range of movies that don’t involve Dora, Diego and the dreaded Disney princesses.
In the intro, Ty Burr suggests to use the book as reference material to get you started introducing your kids to old movies. But I found the book so readable, I was well into the fourth chapter before I thought to get the remote and set up the TiVo to record some of these shows coming on TCM this summer.
I’m excited about watching some of these shows (most of which I’ve never seen) with Eli. Especially the musicals, because I have a feeling he’s going to love those. And it’s always pleasant to think Dora and Diego aren’t the only options.
