M&M's - Ms. Brown

This commercial has had me laughing all day XD

Anonymous

It could be because I'd gotten an email reminder to purchase tickets for this year's Renaissance Faire, but I found myself in the mood for a medieval-themed movie. Shakespeare in Love is one of my frequent go-to's, but I was yearning for a different story.

As I was cruising the on-demand movie listing, I came across Anonymous. Starring Rhys Ifans, (remember Hugh Grant's bizarro room mate from Knotting Hill?), I couldn't resist.

The premise of the movie is that Shakespeare was a fraud and that all of the plays, prose and sonnets were actually written by the Earl of Oxford. During the time of Queen Elizabeth I, writing was frowned upon by the Puritans and plays were deemed sinful. He was forced to hide his writing and thereby paid a barely literate stage actor named William Shakespeare to take the credit for his work.

Produced and directed by Roland Emmerich of epic disaster movie fame, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had actually become engrossed in the movie. If you find yourself looking for something different to watch, I'd recommend giving this one a go.

Happy New Year!

All in all, I've had a nice set of holidays starting with Thanksgiving. Well, except for catching the creeping crud that resulted in losing my voice. I've been without the ability to speak above a whisper for about 4 days now. While I'm sure some will count this as a blessing, it makes it quite difficult to vocally discipline my puppy. She's having a field day.

Others within my circle of friends don't seem to be faring quite as well through the gathering of relatives as the image I received from one of them below indicates. Ahh, the holidays...


I no longer have any blood relatives - at least none that I will claim. The Almighty has decided that I [evidently] will fare better on my own. I'd really like to discuss that with Him when the time is appropriate. But I guess there is a blessing in that I no longer have the holiday relative frustration. Silver linings and all that rot.

So as I sit here on New Years Eve contemplating the past year, I am thankful for the friends that I have, the job that I [still] have, the family that I have adopted to be my new 'blood' relatives while I work on that list of people and appropriate tactics to remove them from my life (or at least squelch them into non-importance.)

I hope your year was as blessed and I wish you and yours all the best for 2012! See you on the flip side ;-)

The First Hobbit Trailer!

Non-Chocolate Halloween

I thought I was all set for Halloween until I read a post from Arthur Johnson at G+. It's so hard to be conscientious with all of the stuff going on in the world! To read his original post that describes how the major chocolate companies allow slave child labor to supply us with our chocolate, click on his name above and scroll down to October 14th.

The challenge was now on. After spending 3 days writing software requirements, I needed the diversion anyway :P So, off to the stores I went. I typically have 100+ kids each year, and because I have a tendency to overdo, I hold myself to a $1 per kid allowance up to $100 maximum. The ideas below definitely do not need to be at that level, so anyone should be able to replace chocolate regardless of the budget they have by only using one or two of the ideas. More ideas can be found here and here. I'm sure even more can be found on the net, just search using 'no candy Halloween' or other similar key words.

For my neighborhood kiddies, I picked up party favors at Michaels and Goldfish snack packs and fruit treats at the local Target. Since I was done shopping at that point, I didn't hit the local Dollar store which I'm sure would have produced some fun and inexpensive finds, but would have likely run me over my budget.

The Goldfish came in a bag of 30 snack pouches and the Fruit Snacks came in a box of 80 for $4.49 each. My Target purchase came to $29.01. I will likely have snacks left over, but that's OK as this stuff I might actually eat myself.

The party favors were $2.99 each and came in packages of 12, 18, 20 or 36 depending on the item. A real good find were Glo bracelets that came in a package of 15 for $1. The cute spider web treat bags were $1.99 for a package of 25. The total price tag was $70.89.

Grand Total: $99.90. I came in under budget by 10 cents! LOL

Next year I'll be better prepared as the stores were pretty well picked over at this point on the party favor front. I'll have to now add Halloween to my "after holiday shopping" routine to pick up deals for next year. I can also sew treat pouches from cute Halloween fabric much cheaper than buying pre-made pouches. It's all in the planning, isn't it?