Friday Fun ~ Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

I our households we get together every two weeks as a family for a fun day. Four grown children, spouses and their children. This weekend is it. We've run into a situation where my grandchildren have started telling fibs. Not the older ones mind you. They've learned they will get caught, but the younger ones not so much. So it's time for "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire."

Years ago I came up with a game when my children were growing up. It was based on the Red light-Green light and Truth or Dare. I'm not the judge. The children are. It gives them a chance to tell whoppers and face the consequences. It also a lesson about lying. All my games and stories have a lesson in there somewhere. The consequences are basically harmless like getting shot with a water gun or sticking your hand into goo and finding a clothes pin of disgrace to wear the rest of the day. I cut the spots out of old carpet or you can use cardboard. They will get messy.

Each older child will serve as the gate keeper to begin with while an adult monitors the game for foul play. They start at the starting line and there are dots for forward progress.  There's about ten spots to the end. When I'm playing this with the older ones, it's twenty. Adults are omnipotent beings which can always tell when children are fibbing in a child's mind although it doesn't stop them from trying.

Playing the game:

• Each child at the starting line and makes the choice to either tell a lie or a truth.

• If they choose a lie, the gatekeeper has to judge whether it's a truth or a lie. This builds decision making skills in the older children.
• If the child telling the lie/truth is judged wrong they put a regular clothes pin on the judge's shirt. Five pins on the judge's shirt gets him replaced. The teller of the truth/ lie step forward one spot.
• If judged right or caught in a lie,the child has to pick a clothes pin out of the bucket of goo and wear it. Five cloths pins and they are out of the game but still need to wear the clothes pins while at Grandma's house.
• This continues on until one child reaches the judge position at the front of the line and becomes the judge. As much as they think of this as a reward, judging right from wrong is hard.
• If a water gun is used no head shots. Those can be painful.

While this is fun for all involved it is also learning.

Now the adults in the group play their own version of "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" called poker. Usually Texas Hold 'em. We all start out with even amount of chips. They put a dollar per player and we put in ten...so twenty bucks is up for grabs, gas money. With my fuel perks I save that much and more each month with 20 gallons costing me $2.20 to $10 per fill up a month so I can afford it. The winner takes it all.

Whatever you do to have fun- be safe, involve others, and relax. You are among friends.

Saturday Saunter ~ Bet Y'all Were Curirous

Just in case y'all caught my post yesterday, I thought I'd show you the results of our Friday Fun.

Adventures in soap making...

No this isn't chocolate cake mix

Once the soap came to a thick trace, we scooped it into the muffin pans. If I had to do it over again, I'd go with a light trace for more time, but with five hands it went quick. We scooped out sixteen "cupcakes."

Wait a minute, Jo. Five hands? Jenn's two, my grandson Grant's two, and my one equals five hands. It was his time with grandma day after school. His brother was too busy with Angry Birds and only seven years old...too young for strong active lye in the soap making process. Although he thought the Playtex gloves and protective eye wear were kinda cool.

Next we piped on the white, vanilla whipped cream "frosting." Neat trick one handed but nothing a rubber band and a big chip clip couldn't handle. See I gave a lot of thought prior to starting on the mechanics. I actually practiced a couple of days before with real cupcakes much to my husband's enjoyment. He's still a kid at heart and loves to lick the frosting bowl and beaters. :)

Then Jenn, my fabulous in house pastry chef, put the final touches to prettify them. Now mind you, soap at this stage is almost 100 degrees and hardening fast unlike regular frosting that warms and thins with the heat of your hand. She also took a toothpick and made cracks in the cupcake like real cupcakes.
The end results...

TA-DA!

Then the "cherries," Grant rolled the red colored soap into little balls. I do mean little. They are 1/4 inch balls. For the mini "cupcakes" the were the size of Red Hots. A bit og vegetable glycerine adds the shine. Jenn brain stormed with left over chocolate soap, we had to reheat it. The sprinkles are regular confectionery sprinkles. They'll melt in hot water.

I can picture them in cellophane bags with curling ribbon and a label. What would be on the label besides the required info? "Your skin needs to eat too. Nourish it. The soap contains Olive, Coca Butter, and Jojoba oils, milk, whipped cream, Vitamin E, and superfatted with Shea Butter. All the essential oils and nutrient rich  elements your skin needs to replenish it. Decadent as chocolate is for the soul. What's not to love?

Like I commented to Shannon, the Warrior Muse, yesterday, good enough to eat. The house is filled with a heavenly chocolate/vanilla scent even this morning. Now the hard part...waiting the four weeks for the soap to cure before we try them out.

What do you think?

Friday Fun~ Childhood Revisited - Mud Pies

Today I'll be revisiting my childhood and making mud pies with my youngest granddaughter, Skylar. Well not really but close.

Last year with my grandkids we started a vermiculture bin. A vermiculture bins, what's that? A highfaluting name meaning worm farming. It was taking too long for nature to take its course with household scraps...almost 6-12 months to get that black gold that does my plants so good in the garden.

It was easy to start with one ten gallon plastic tote, a larger cat litter box, and a drill. My older grandchildren drilled small holes all over the bottom of the bin with several rows at the top rim. Fun with grandma with power tools!

Inside my younger grandchildren layered shredded paper. Doesn't everyone have stacks of old newspapers, checks, and other important or sensitive mail that they need to shred periodically? Even junk mail? I know my mailbox is filled daily with the stuff. We hosed it down and "accidentally" hosed each other in the process. <g>Then they took hand fulls semi composted stuff from my bin about five inches thick. Finally we added some Red Wiggler worms and put the lid on it.

Next, we placed it on the cat litter tray. Oh, I forgot to mention that we drilled two 1/2" holes into one corner of the cat litter tray for draining the worm tea, and I put four wooden building block (from the kid's toy box to hold the ten gallon tub up. We plugged up the bigger holes with old corks. The corks were leftovers from a craft project we'd completed during Spring break. All for about $10 for a plastic tub, a cat litter box, and a pound of fresh worms. It was all placed on a double row of cinder blocks to get it off the ground.

There is more uses for shredded paper in my book, Are You a Survivalist or a Prepper? I'm always looking at things and trying to figure out how to make something else with it. There that's my plug for today. <g> We later moved on to making heater/cooking plugs. It's in the book.

As I told my grands this was a way to fertilize the garden with building up the soil and young plants for yummy vegetables and fruits. Is there anything better than raiding grandma's strawberry patch for fresh strawberries in her old cracked wheel barrow, grabbing an orange, or picking figs off the tree? Not to my grands. It also provided us with plenty of worms to fish with later in the summer and summers to come. They love fishing.

Now it's three months since I last emptied the bottom tub...I have two working tubs as a result of another grandma fun day before my stroke. I've dumped my organic trash into the tub every week, even more goodies with corn shucks and pea pods after the chicken and rabbits finish with them. I do chop them fine so the worms can digest them faster and they love, love, love my husband's used coffee grounds. But it was now time to empty my black gold again. So Skylar was tagged for a one-on-one time with the grandparents. I do a one-one and group projects with all of them.

Since my garden is rotation planting, just before one vegetable is harvested another patch is started that way I have a continuous harvest until the first frost. We all eat fresh for as long as we can.

We dug the worm bin out by the handful, picking worms out as we went. Most of them had worked their way up to the upper container by now for fresh food. All that was left was rich, warm compost. Worm castings (worm poop) was left of all the scraps I had thrown in there. We got the hose and sprayed the picked through "dirt making a muddy mess. Of course we couldn't resist spraying each other. Grandpa even got involved spraying the "dirt" and us with the Super Soaker water gun. When it's reaching the upper 90's  in temperature when you are working/playing everything counts when keeping cool.

Yeah this one is a new one.

Next, I mix in Vermiculite or Perlite into the compost to make it really light and fluffy.  We filled trays leftover from plant purchases for my small annual flower bed, oh too many years ago. Making sure to to make it all squishy on the top to press the extra water out. The cast off water is recycled into my raised bed since its already diluted compost or worm tea. Fun and fertilizing at the same time. Wohoo!

I keep a stack of gardening trays in my shed to be reused year after year. Also assorted sized pots. I reuse things until they can be used anymore before I trash it. Yes it all goes into a landfill, but not until it is no longer in a usable state. I've delayed the inevitable by years. Anyhow back to mud pies, or should I say cakes that will be my seed starters.


There are big advantages for using younger grandchildren for this because they have small hands.  Once all the extra water is drained off,  because grandpa went a little crazy from his chair with the Super Soaker and garden hose, she takes a plastic knife and cuts little cakes into the tray.They are about 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch squares. Grandma will later wiggly the knife down each cut for wider spacing. Skylar presses her index finger about up to her first knuckle into each square making holes for planting seeds. Next she'll plant the seeds and cover them up.

Grandpa will go nuts again with the hose trying to wash all the "dirt" off us and we are done until next time in two or three weeks. Did I mention that it's mandatory for all kids to bring their swimsuits and an extra change of clothes on grandparents day? No, well it is. Yes, I could go out and buy a Jiffy seed starting tray...but where's the fun in that?

On a sadder note...today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my mother's death. I miss you Momma.

But I'll end on a happy note...yesterday was, my #3 daughter's, Keri, birthday. Happy birthday baby!

Have fun with everything you do.

Friday Fun~ Disco Revisited

It's time to kick back and relax. It's Friday Fun time. TGIF, do you remember when that acronym came into being? It was a 1978 disco movie. I rented it for a blast from the past.

The time was 1978. The heyday of disco dancing, mirrored balls, Donna Summer and the Beegees topped the charts, the Vietnam War,Fantasy Island debuted on television, and the cost of a Super Bowl ad was $162,000.

Thank God It's Friday 
1978 
PG 
89 minutes

Genre:

Contemporary Movie Musicals, Disco, Music & Musicals, Comedy

Cast:

Donna Summer, Jeff Goldblum, Valerie Landsburg, Terri Nunn, Debra Winger, Chick Vennera, Ray Vitte, Commodores

It's Friday night and time to head to the hottest disco in town for the big dance contest in this 1970s groove-fest. A wild assortment of crazy characters shows up, and the Commodores supply the music. Singer Nicole (Donna Summer) is convinced she's going to get her big break, while Marv "Leather Man" Gomez (Chick Vennera) wanders the club dispensing advice. Thank God It's Friday won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the song "Last Dance."

I watched this my children. One of whom I was pregnant with when this movie first hit the theaters. The script was still hopelessly hokey, but the music was fabulous. I still have the soundtrack on 8-track tape and a player to play it on. 

"Woman! Don't you throw anything away?" Hahaha, nope! Why should I? It still works! 

We followed that movie up with Saturday Night Fever.and had a disco marathon going.

Saturday Night Fever1977 
R
118 minutes

Genres:

Drama, Classic Dramas, Disco, Dance, Blockbusters

Cast:

John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali, Paul Pape, Donna Pescow, Bruce Ornstein, Julie Bovasso, Fran Drescher, Martin Shakar, Sam Coppola

Director John Badham's musical ushered in the disco craze with the character of 19-year-old Tony Manero (John Travolta). By day, Tony's a paint store clerk, but at night he's a polyester-clad stallion who rules a Brooklyn nightspot with his partner, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney). Although the plot addresses socioeconomic themes, it's the Bee Gees soundtrack and Travolta's strutting, Oscar-nominated moves that have made the film iconic.

After dinner, the grandchildren wanted to try their feet to some of the dance moves they had seen. We have the 8-track of both movies so we couldn't resist playing them while they practiced. Now my husband and I are old disco dancing pros because we lived the era. My husband broke out his wide collared polyester shirts and pants and I put on one of my floaty polyester dresses, and we set up shop as instructors. Well sort of, neither of us can do all the moves like when we were much younger.

We had an impromptu dance competition going with even one-year old James getting into the act. He could shake his booty with the rest of them. Our #2 grandson and #1 granddaughter had the best moves as a couple, while our #4 grandson had the best John Travolta disco stance shown above in the movie cover.

Great fun was had be all. So much for the blast from the past. All together now we are doing the boxcar. Er, um the disco line dance. Er, um the electric slide. Oh heck, every generation has a version.

Friday Fun~ Of a Different Sort

Well it's time again for Friday Fun. Today's subject is not about books, television, movies or interviews. It's all about me. Not that my blogs are usually not about me because, they are all about me and my take on everything.

Today I'm talking about fun away from electronic devices. As much as we've tried to all get together since the last time, we haven't. We try to arrange these things months in advance so that our children and grandchildren can arrange to have the day off. It's hard when you are dealing with twenty heads of people. Well, we finally succeeded. I don't mean the whole family of multiple families like the holidays just my kids, grandkids and us. The twenty odd heads that make up our family unit. Mind boggling, isn't it?

Wait a minute you, said twenty-head something doesn't add up because you have four children, each with two children that's eighteen.  That's because we always invite my dad and his wife. The choice of venue this time was St. Simons Island. A picnic was planned for early March.. Whoa, it must have been freezing, you say. Nope, it was 80 degrees. That's the beauty of living in the Golden Isles, the barrier islands in Georgia. We get on average of maybe a week's worth of freezing temperatures during the winter in December through February while in other parts of the country have below freezing and snow during this time of year.

We picked the pier area versus any other beach because of access issues for my father and I. There are paved walkways and the beach is accessible via raised access points to the beach. There's plenty to do and see no matter what your age is. There is the playground for the younger kids, gazebos and hanging swing for us older folks, majestic old oaks to climb, BBQ grills, bathrooms, and the pier to fish or crab off of. Although the water isn't warm enough to swim in until around May 1st, the grandkids couldn't resist getting their tootsies wet and building sand castles. At high tide the beach is covered with water almost to the top of the rocks.

The guys brought their poles and crab nets. We and our youngest daughter brought chicken necks and backs leftover from an earlier thinning out of roosters from our chickens for the grandkids to crab with at high tide. The pier is too high for crabbing like I did as a kid, a piece of string tied around the chicken piece. They stayed in the covered part of the pier while their fathers took the poles out to the end. Mothers armed with empty coolers stood by while their children dumped their prize catches into the cooler.

We make a whole day out of these type trips. We'll boil the crabs and bake the fish for dinner after a hot dog and hamburger lunch. I brought my 20-quart stockpot for the crabs and a whole roll on aluminum foil for the fish. The guys, son-in-laws, cook while the daughters do the other prep and fix plates. Usually my husband and I will supply the meat (hamburger and hot dogs) for lunch and the sides for dinner. I'll also mix up a batch of terriyake sauce in case one of the guys catch a small shark and one did. Nothing better than grilled shark steaks on the grill. We'll carry the lawn chairs and a hammock to take a nap in...us older folks don't have the energy of the youngsters except for James who's only one year old.

Ultimately, the writer in me, found another what-if scenario to write about when I start writing fiction again.

So what do you to get away from electronics?

Remember to balance work and fun.

Friday Fun~ What I Have Been Reading

I've been behind on my reading lately. There's only so much time I can spend during my day actually reading a book. Reading has fallen by the wayside with my therapy routine, husband's care, and writing...not to mention the seemingly fifty other things I do during the day. Most evenings I carry my book or e-reader to bed with me and fall asleep without finishing a page. Gone are the days I could kick back in the tub and read. I could, but getting out of the tub would be a royal pain. I know I've tried it. I guess reading in the tub will be postponed until I get my step-in tub. <sigh>

Mostly, I've been reading chapter edits from Compuserve Books & Writer's forum, and books about stroke recovery. Neither of them I'll review here. But I want to touch on  two gems I've run across. Some of the books are self-published and well written, or traditionally published.

Rebecca Dutton's book is the one I'm reading now. Rebecca pops in here from time to time. My Last Degree is a compelling look at a occupational therapist's stroke recovery. The shoe on the other foot as it were. It's one thing to know what you know, but quite different when you experience it like she's had to. After I had my stroke, Rebecca's was the first stroke survivors blog I read. She's like me. She'll squeeze a penny until it screams for mercy.

Mark Ittleman's book, The Teaching of Talking has been an invaluable help in assisting me with my own recovery. He is also part of the Stroke Survivor Tattler's group. I read this book before I noticed it was him in the online group.  No, that's not the only reason I joined.

His "Ittle Principles" broke it down to basic information that even I, a nonspeech therapist, could understand and go, "Ah ha!" Now there are some parts that are strictly for therapists, all in all, it helped me understand how to recover my speaking skills beyond the hospital based therapy involved.

As you can tell both books deal with stroke recovery. These two were the best out of the twenty I've read or reading so far. I got anotherbook in the mail from Amazon today, "How to Conquer the World with One Hand...and an ATTITUDE" by Paul Berger. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Remember to balance work and play for a better you.