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Sacramento Coupon Examiner

After a long spell of trying to get in without success, i've finally been able to access my dashboard to post. In this economic crisis, i have a few ideas still in hatch stage for EtherealRhapsody so stay tuned.

My latest exploits have come upon www.Examiner.com and i have decided to try my hand at writing non blog style. Check it out and let me know if you too are interested to sign up, will be glad to visit your pages. Look here

Tried it: Ice Orbe

Seeing that the schedule maintenance is going to happen in about 7 minutes, let's see how far i get with this post. Tried a new gadget of sorts from Solutions.com (by the way, if you want to shop there, check out my links on the right)
Anyway, my workplace has a really little, close to a mini, refrigerator, therefore it's freezer compartment is even tinier. There is no ice. Well there is but the lone ice tray is about the size of my palm. With the hot summer months coming up, this is me planning ahead.
Here is the ice Orbe. I can't find it anywhere else yet but the concept is pretty cool. Take the blue insert out, fill it was water up to about the first bump, push the insert back in which squeeze the water all the way up to the top to fill all the ice cube cavities and freeze on a flat surface in the freezer. It's totally cool! Had to really read the instructions which of course i assumed i was intelligent enough to bypass, to get the ice cubes out. Boy, did i struggle. Then i went back to the instructions and it worked like it was supposed to with little effort. Imagine that!
So i've reviewed the product for them and gave it 4 stars (what can i say i'm a perfectionist)
So there's my 2 cents

Adopt a Creature

Meet the latest and newest line of my creativity. SockCreatures

Since i'm still no good at knitting socks from yarn, i thought i'd start with brand new baby socks i found. Am finding it fun and relaxing and it adds to a different category in my store.

This is my first attempt. I labeled this guy "thirty" not as a name but i had it list it as something and i chose thirty as i turned 30 the day i made him last week.

Some make their first million by the time they turn thirty, but i made my first sock creature =)
Looking forward to making another!

Time for a good revamp!

Gonna revamp the way this looks time for something new and splashy...stay tuned

Childish Chickadees, Immatured

Learned that chant from a friend of mine years ago as a line to tease others playfully when they were doing something off the wall. Have not thought of it in years till i was drawn to figure out making a chickadee out of beads.

So here's my latest creation and addition to the store: http://etherealrhapsody.etsy.com/

What do you think? The trick is if i will be able to make it a sibling....heehee.

Keep Crying

Had a growing experience yesterday when my 3 yr old sprayed sunblock on the left directly into both his eyes on a single spray. Will never forget the panic when my husband and i looked up from our conversation to find him screaming and holding his eyes. I thought the worst had happened in that he had cut or hit his eyes on something when Brian grabbed him off the floor and ran for the kitchen sink, and annouced that it was sunblock.

So began the frantic attempts to wash it out off his eyes. Ever try to get water in a screaming child's eyes? First we tried to pour water into them but of course his eyes were squeezed shut and he was trying to rub them. Then we tried to use a water squirt bottle to spray water into his eyes, then we placed him in the bathtub fully clothed and Brian even got in it with him and tried to get him to place his head in the water and open his eyes. Then we muscled him and filled a brand-new infant nose sucker bulb with water and dripped water into his eyes. Then i held him and told him to weirdly enough to "keep crying, so that your tears will wash it out"
What a scare because during which he told us that he couldn't see. Then we got on the phone with Kaiser and the poison control center. What a lesson to learn! Here are some steps that in hindsight are easy enough but in the moment might be valuable to you.
1. Flush out the eyes. Poison control Dr indicated that the best thing was to sit them in the bathrub and pour water on his head, the water and the combination of that likely to make the child cry will help to clean the eyes
2. Kaiser had us try to check to make sure that his pupils looked the same and that he was able to move his eyes to follow our movements/direction.
3. Check for redness in the eyes, even an abrasion could be expected (of the cornea) which would be bloodshot in the eyes for the next 24-48 hrs and to seek Medical advice if that occurred in that timeframe
4. Sunblock per the Poison Control Dr does not cause blindness, the aftermath will very much be discomfort like getting sand of an eyelash in the eyes
5. Could possibly give the child a tiny bit of Tyenol to ease the discomfort. We did not even need to go to this step
6. Always good to know what the Poison Control number is to get reassurance and to give detailed information such as the child's weight and age to adjust the above
7. You never know when your child might do something so unexpected, best to be doubly aware of all potiential dangers.

It took about an hour after the incident for him to be his normal self again, and i'm pretty sure he was rather scared by our reactions as well, he was seeing fine, eating dinner fine and went to bed his normal self a few hours later. What a day.

Diaper Cake for Violet's sister

So i took it upon myself to make a diaper cake because we needed a centerpiece for our office shower. So i buy the diapers and grossgrain ribbon and figured i'd wing it and see what happens.
Well it was a little tricky than i thought but i managed without a single rubber band.
There was a fair bit of slippin' and sliding till i figured out how to use the ribbon as a much needed "extra hand" I'm even told it was sturdy enough and made it's way to it's new home in her SUV.

Ready to see the cake?

Brillante Weblog: Premio-2008

My fellow EtsyMom Rebecca Maples of http://rebeccasrags.blogspot.com gave me this award. Thanks Rebecca for thinking of my blog. So now per the rules I get to pass it along to seven other worthy recipients. Here are my seven, in no particular order do check these sites out when you get the chance.
Liv'n Good at http://livngoodjewelry.blogspot.com,
Crafty Equine at http://craftyequine.blogspot.com ,
Mallory at http://yesiambakingapie.blogspot.com/ ,
Nakpunar at http://nakpunar.blogspot.com/,
Thumbelinacreations at http://thumbelinabeadedcreations.blogspot.com/,
BabyLyons at http://www.the-giveaway.com/ , and
BeadedSocks at http://beadedsocks.blogspot.com/
So here are the rules for those of you that I have nominated:
1) Add the logo of the award to your blog
2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you
3) Nominate at least 7 other blogs
4) Add links to those blogs on your blog
5) Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs

9 Hour Scissorgami

Ok, so i am so not going to take on a paper box project for awhile. 9 hours back to back paper cutting was not my idea of trying to make a deadline. As usual over extended my creative spirit and did not fully anticipate the task for juggling the family and also trying to get my latest project commitment done. I am scissor-gami-ed out. A term coined by a co-worker who saw my antics with the scissors.
Time to drop everything and take care of number 2...my family. No, number 1 is not me. I hope the time spent pays off for my buyer whose wedding is coming up at the end of this week.
I've apples to dehydrate, desserts to make, carpets to clean, laundry to get through, HR block classes to complete, Dad's stuff to ship, Bro's stuff to buy, gather my belonging for the upcoming trip and playtime with my kids! Yeah!

Trivia Answer: 60 Crabby Cream Cheese Wontons

One of my favorite recipe websites is www.allrecipes.com One of the many benefits of the site is you can instantly customize the recipe for the quantity you want to make in a batch, larger or smaller...On there you can find a recipe i first used to make Crabby Cream Cheese Wontons. They were excellent! What is the number of wontons on the "Original recipe yield"?

Congrats to serendipityrose for getting the Crabby Cream Cheese Wontons trivia correct! She will be featured as of 8/15/08

Leavin' on a jet plane

I do hope i'll be back again...i have the plane tickets to at least. Going to visit the little red dot, my country's fond nickname as it is so tiny that it is just big enough for the little red dot to mark its spot without any real landmass on the World Map.

My hubby and i expect great changes in the near future as far as our day jobs and if i don't seize the chance to go now, i will not have the chance to take a good vacation back home. So i'm looking forward to seeing all my friends, gouge myself on Hawker Centre Food, watch the beach and water alittle from the other side of the Pacific.

So i'm counting the days! Making a list of food that i NEED to eat AND we're going to take little Ellie. I thought Nathaniel's record of 1 year and 2 months would not be broken but she going to break it at 11 months. I hope Nathaniel is going to enjoy himself more this time as we'll have more time to look around.

Paper Plus Supplier

Ventured out of my comfort zone this week and wehn into the industrial park that is on the way home from work. Have been seeing their sign about Paper Supplies and given the limited variety in the carft store, i figured now was the time to venture out. Especially since a potential customer wanted boxes in the right "blue" in the UK. ( I also sold something for the first time to a buyer in Rio De janero...woo hoo)
I go in thinking this will be an easy zip in an zip out errand...an hour later, i emerge with in depth knowledge about how the paper mills work, how not every paper in the same sample book is available in the same weight. How to gauge paper weight and how the mill has to start with white and work all the way down the color scale before coming back to white. I also left armed with sample books and a new friend at the paper store.
Am rather happy about my accomplishment, really feels like "i'm in business" So...here's to more paper and scissor-gami!
Click the title header to be directed to the Store i found!

Tomatoes: Before and After

Before: a bowl full of Roma Tomatoes that are starting to over-ripe...what to do?

After: I made sphagetti sauce. Throw in some garlic, parsley, olive oil and onion and voila! they passed the Nathaniel test and so that's always a good sign. If he eats it, it can't be too bad

And...the tomatoes just keep coming...i think i'll sun dry them next....stay tuned for more on Rachel's Roma Tomatoes

What i was doing 4 years ago

Four years ago, i got married yesterday and today would have been my first day of my honeymoon. It all just seems like yesterday though. Can scarely believe that i already have 2 kids and have moved 3 times since then to the home we now live in. Wow...where does the time go. I even have the floorplan of what it all looked like and how it was setup and planned. I have been so blessed with a wonderful husband and a pair of children. Wonder how much more will happen in the next 4 years that i can't fathom at this moment will be in store for the future.

The Lost Picture

So assuming you have a digital camera, have you ever had the most dreadful experience of mistakenly hitting the delete button and not only that the delete all button and even worse hitting the yes, delete all button? I did. This was when we had a regular digital camera that shook the picture with my unsteady hands. Before we got our intelligent digital SLR.

Well the one and worst experience that i had of the above was when i deleted Nathaniel's first christmas pictures...yes all of them. The gravity of my error was compounded many months later because it happened that that would be his grandfather's final Christmas before he passed away the following year. I could not have felt more bad! I even tried to run some sort of card recovery program on the card but was not successful in recovering anything. I assumed the pictures were lost...yes, forever.

Yesterday, my dad, who happened to take the old digital cards without my knowing, ran his program on them and he's retrieved a number of them. Here's the most precious one.

Yes it's blur, yes the background does not make sense but that picture says a great deal to me. We'll never be able to take this picture again. But i hope it will really contribute a great deal in our trying to bring across to Nathaniel who his grandfather was

Letter to Luis

writing a letter to a child i have been sponsoring in Bolvia...Think it would mean so much more to him if i were able to write him a letter in his language...Hoping the translator tools will be of help.

Dear Luis Alfredo,

Am always so happy to receive a handwritten letter from you. Am trying a new program that will allow me to translate my English words into your language. I do not know how this will work out but hope you will understand most of the letter.

I hope you keep warm during the winter. It is summer over here and is very hot. It is nice that you are interested and enjoy sports and basketball and are even on a team. Maybe someday soon, you will get to be on your city's team.

How is your family? I remember that you have a twin brother? I remember this because my husband also has a twin brother. Are you best friends?

I have 2 children now, Elizabeth was born last October and Nathaniel is now 3 years old. I hope you continue to grow strong and healthy and that you will continue to learn about God and His love for all of us.

Take care my friend. May God bless you.
love,

One of my first creations

The paper box. Simple, fundamental paper. I've had the chance to make hundreds of these since i opened Etsy. Did some for school functions but most for weddings. I hope to broaden the design capacities in the near future. Thing is, the more labor intensive they get, the most i will have to charge and right now, i'm pretty happy with the cost-price ratio, and so do my buyers so we'll see what happens...These are the small size.

I am an Alien

If you want to experience a really long application process, then look no further than filing an application with the USCIS aka the US immigration department. It's more complex then itemizing your taxes or taking your calculus exam. With all due respect, all the folks behind the glass have different answers to the exact same question. It's just so not fun, but thankfully everything happens ok in the end...just don't lose your alien number...ever

2 more holes

Do you have a recommendation? Do they offer this service at a clinic? Is there somewhere that you trust that you can go to? These were all our thoughts and questions in trying to find the right place to get Little's E's ears pierced. That was just a short 2 months ago. We ended up settling for Claire's near our house. Brian of course interrogated the poor man, a pretty young fella with at least 5 piercings in one ear. "How many have you done? Have you been doing this for awhile? How many babies' ears have you pierced?"
Well, we definitely wanted them done right and were rather worried about her sensitive skin and how it would react to the piercing. So we finally braced ourselves and with protective big brother Nathaniel by her side, Daddy holding her with apprehension and Mom just hoping it'll work, trying to make sure he pinpointed the exact spots correctly on the ears, Little E began her ear-piercing journey. He fired the first one.
Took about 2 seconds before Little E's face started to crumble. At that point Brian wanted the second one done and over with as soon as possible. We all them heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Thinking about my own ear piercing experience when i was 12, my first pair were sapphire colored earring studs my mom bought me as we went to a jewelery store for my ears. Like injections, i hate it when people try to tell you it "does not hurt" or "it hurts only a little" to try to get you to be less afraid in the anticipation of the procedure. My thought is, if it hurts, tell me it hurts so i'm not alarmed that i'm the only one on that feels a great deal of pain and that something must have gone wrong. I have to admit, after the first earring went through my ear and the stinging began in real earnest i had, at 12, to tell them to hold off for awhile and it took more mental preparation of my 2nd ear. To this day, i only have 1 set of ear holes. I don't think i will want to go through that again.