"Hibou"

As part of my 22nd birthday gift in March, my mom got me a wooden owl puzzle. It wasn't anything super-high-quality or expensive. Just something fun to do. At least...it looked fun, until I got into it. Let me take you through the process:

The lighting in our living room in the evening is pretty horrible and everything is drenched in a yellow-hue, so bear with me. The point is, it looks really cool when it's all assembled, and I dig owls, so I dove right in.


Every individual piece of the freaking bird had to be punched out of the sheets of wood (shown bottom-most picture, right). Keep in mind: These are WOODEN. Splinters were involved. But fear not, they gave me a 1"X1" square of sandpaper to fix any rough edges -_-


I finally got each sheet punched out and arranged like it is in the diagram on the back of the 1-sheet instructions. Here's a close-up!

And then construction began:

This was after perhaps an hour of searching, finding and forcing together. The instructions recommended glue to hold pieces together, but I did not have glue of any kind and there was no way I was going to glue pieces together if I wasn't 100% sure they were the right ones to go together only to have them be wrong.

At this point I was getting pretty exhausted/frustrated but also excited/accomplished. But then, pieces started to come off when I tried to attach others. It was like putting together a card castle, but with wood and a lot more swearing.

Here's the "finished" product:

And I have all...these...pieces left:

Yeah. Those are individual feathers that I could not find a place for, and therefore decided to disregard. They were probably extra anyway...right?

In the end, I showed Jay and Garret who both showed mild interest, and then I put it in the garbage. Sorry mom. ^_^ Thanks for the thought! At least I tried.

Floral Arrangement and a Potter

It's May. Time for flowers.

I picked a tulip out of my parents' yard last week and one of our glass soda bottles (that we apparently collect and display on the stove now) was a perfect vase.

I've started a Harry Potter binge. I saw these screenshot comics the other day and they make me laugh so hard every time I read them. It rekindled my lost love of The Boy Who Lived. For those of you who don't know, when I was the age of a Hogwarts first year, I was a Harry Potter fanatic. I knew spells, I owned Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them AND Quidditch Through The Ages. I regularly purchased Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, I role played (yes...yes I did) on the Harry Potter web forums. I was into it.

While waiting for the release of the 7th book, the fangirl in me withered away, favoring a new wizard named Harry (The Dresden Files) as a supplement. I still saw the films and appreciated them, but it took me one long-ass time to get through Deathly Hallows. Took me two tries, but I finally did it.

Last night, sitting home alone in the dark, baking even though the windows were open and both box fans were running, I read most of and finished The Sorcerer's Stone. This morning I started up Chamber of Secrets and my Harry Potter fix is being sated. I seriously doubt I'll get through all 7 by the time the last movie comes out (July 15th) but being reintroduced to characters that have helped define the person I am today stimulates some part of my brain that I can't identify.

The only downside is that I've seen the first three movies so many times (Memorized them. I was kind of a lonely middle schooler/high schooler) that the inflections of movie lines are penetrating my head when I read dialogue from the books. It gets kind of annoying and I have to re-read lines so that it's my reading of it (because I'm picky about stuff like that, so sue me).