POP BOMB VID!!!

BOOM!!*

OK...now that you've seen it...

Here are some fun things to look for whenever you go back to watch it again, like we all know you will:

• At the beginning, we have 2 cameras, so you're getting what Trina's seeing inside the obstacle course while Johnny's outside filming. This only happened at the beginning of the event, while we were still somewhat sober.

• Trina on the hop-n-bop is similarly captured and while we were still somewhat sober.

• A lot of what you're seeing throughout is timed with the lyrics you're hearing.  Example: When Chrystal's got the whipped cream...it's not on accident that you were also hearing the words "milky way".

• When you see StayPuft dancing to "Party Hard", it looks like Johnny (Steve Irwin to the right) puppets the echoing "Party Hard" and it makes me laugh every time.

• All the pics included at the end were ones you guys posted on the event page. Thank you for those!

I might have enough footage of everyone looking at the camera to see if "it's on?" to make a montage of just that. Stay tuned, maybe.

PS. I don't wanna hear any bitching about how they look fat or bald or wasted or ridiculous.* We're being captured in our natural environment, not posing for Olan Mills.  Believe me, there's way worse I could've included in here. You're welcome very much.

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*Yep, I said it.

YouTubesday - My Shaytards Fascination

Remember when I told you about my family falling apart and said that it would lead into next weekend's confession?  Well, I've bumped it up to Tuesday cuz it fits.
Anyway, right around the same time as all that crap, my YouTube palate started defining itself.
I've talked about that before & in that rambling, I linked this video:

For the past 5 years, that family has done a daily vlog. Most of them are about 20mins long and he, Shay, edits together their Christmas footage into an hour long "Christmas Special".
It's a 20min window into another family's daily life.
And it's all the fun happy moments captured (except when their old dog, Malachi, passed...that was sad). But they include the random daily silly stuff that happens, like this, and then just this past weekend they were on Jimmy Kimmel because of this:

And yes, I've been watching them for that long.
And yeah, I'll admit that it's kinda weird - to watch a family on the webbernets. But they look happy and functional and I watch them because they restore a bit of hope for people/families and it's an awesome thought to be able to edit out the shit you don't wanna see. Plus, I selfishly wish my NJ cousins & Breeder friends would start recording and editing together their own little windows of their daily lives so I could watch them all grow up online and see the silly stories I only hear about when we're able to get together or those they occasionally post on Facebook.
It makes better reality tv than shit like The Kardashians or Honey BooBoo or whatever's currently sucking for entertainment on the cable channels we no longer have.

Aside from the Shaytards daily vlogs and the vids that Shay puts up on his channel, he's also involved in this kids cartoon series:

and has been working on this documentary where almost everyone cries in the trailer:


Lately Shay has been talking about his Mormon upbringing & experiences.
Some of it's interesting, some I don't agree with, but he's putting it out there. He's opening himself up to a broad audience and I have mad respect for anyone who's got the balls to do that and get conversations going.  Especially when it comes to complicated subjects that take people out of their comfort zones.

I love my little interweb family.
And, No...watching them does not make me want kids of our own.
My list of reasons to not birth any babies has only grown since watching them.
20mins is a lovely small dose and then I can click to see talking animals or watch someone play video games.

Sunday Confession - A Dissection of Emo

"...I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why." - VanGogh on The Potato Eaters.

"Art with a story behind it is the best kind, silly." - Martha M.

I made this 36x24 piece of whatever a few years back after my family fell apart. I treated it as an outlet for all the pent up crap being dealt with during this particular time in my life.
I've never really explained any of it in detail or have been comfortable enough to, but I've often thought about sharing it & how to go about doing so.
Time to nut up or shut up.
Plus, looking back at it - my style has changed a little and this looks like a kid did it.
Reckon that might've been my frame of mind at the time. Or maybe my style is just kid-like.
Not that my shit recently is great, or even good...it's not about that. It's about putting it out there.*
What if I died tomorrow and my family goes through all my crap and looks at this and they go all, "what the fuck is this?" on it and never know what it meant to me?

Right then...here we go:

The dollhouse torn into 4 parts: That's a B&W photo on cheap paper of the dollhouse my father's father built when I was a kidlet. Grew up with that house and there was a time when it was given to another family while I bounced around between apartments and whatnot. The house was returned to me about 5 years ago (a strange precursor to what happened a year later). Each torn piece represents a member in my immediate family. The upper left being my brother, me on the upper right (which is how our rooms were set up in the house we grew up in), my mother on the bottom left, and father on the bottom right. There's a round oil can stain on my father's section because he was a mechanic and antique boat restorer. My mom's section has cuts in it cuz she's a self-admitted emotional force and it amazes me that with so many fractures and cracks, she hasn't completely snapped. My brother's section is on fire with the bigger flame because he was in a wreck 8 years ago. The car he was in slid off of the road and into a tree, bursting into flames, killing both him and his friend that was driving. My section has the smaller fire - my brother's catching part of mine on fire....the flames a bit of a high-five between us.
My & my mother's sections have snippets of this song lining the edges.

The edges of the house are torn but being held together by a frayed and strained red yarn. Red for blood, of course, because we're family....& meaning that not even blood can really keep a family together.
Not when built upon an unstable foundation.

The Unstable Foundation: This area has a bit of a complicated meaning for it being such a simple shape. The instability under the house being a mix of sand and acrylic paint. It stems from my father coming out to my mother and I about 4 years ago. Their divorce followed shortly after but the house we grew up in was finally split and sold just earlier this year. My father has gone through a few boyfriends since the initial "outage" and we rarely speak. Mostly because when we do, I can't handle the dumb shit he says. Like the time he told me that if my brother had lived, none of this would've happened. Which is the other meaning for that section, for the sweeping & winding escape into the night sky, and because snippets of this song line the edges of that section and I imagine those words coming from my brother/me:


The Moon & Stars: Metaconfession: I have, what some would call, Pagan tendencies. Though the generic category label on society's filing cabinet for Belief Systems would have me under Agnostic....aspects of Paganism make a lot of sense to me. Balance & cycles. The moon is a Goddess symbol. The full moon has always been hopeful & comforting to me and along with her in the night sky, I included raised silver stars for an Orion and a dipper (or saucepan, as Kim B. would call it). Reminders that there are still things that...remain...***

And that about wraps things up.
For now.
Hope it wasn't too awkward and you feel like maybe you know me a little better.
If you have any thoughts or feelings or experiences to share, please...feel free.
If you have any shitty/nit-picky/snarky comments to make, please....also feel free because I've probably been lookin' for a reason to punch you in the crotch anyway.

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*plus it's a nice lead into next weekend's confession
***(I was going to put another word or three there, but "remain" seemed to be enough).

Christmas Favorites

I think we still have about 3ft of torn up wrapping paper in the living room.

I'd clean up, but Snoop looks so cute in it.

This is what it looks like when you see all of my Christmas presents at once:

This view was a bit distracting on Xmas Day.  Anyone else ever run into this problem?

Matthew's mom sent me the faux fur vest & the necklace.  Matt said I looked like a villain.  I thought it looked a bit Jersey and made me feel like a stuffed animal.  The petting was nice throughout the night....even if it was just me doing the petting.

Hope you turds had a very merry.

Cheers to a Happy!!

Abbey

This is my 6 (almost 7) year old cousin, Abbey.
She's obviously a shit ton of fun, but for whatever reasons, we don't see her that often.
We saw her this past weekend, but I think the last time I saw her was in September?...when they stopped by to see our deck that her dad was working on.  Until I stopped to think about it, it really didn't seem like it had been that long.
That time, she came upstairs to my lair and started pokin' around.  She disappeared behind the closet curtain and reappeared with a fake plastic chainsaw and a huge grin.
She also saw this print that I have in the hallway, and when we were sitting downstairs chatting, she tells me, "I like that picture of the girl with the lollipops."

Anyway, back to this recent visit.
We got monster hugs before we could even put down the things we brought and then she ran off to show Matt her tennisballyellow shoes (he has a pair of these that he wore at her request).
After visiting for a bit, she disappeared and reappeared holding a box.
This box was full of game.
My eyes lit up after reading "Memory" on the lid.
Memory was one of my freakin' favorites, too.  I even have a memory game on my ipad.
This Memory game took up the entire table.
Everyone said I would lose.  They said that she stacks them up and you get either one match or none.
I think I racked up a whopping 7, maybe 8 matches.
Abbey's a little shifty though - you gotta watch her.  She doesn't like showing the 2nd card she flips and will put them back down in different spots.
I told her she should always say, "IN YOUR FACE!" when she wins whatever she's playing.
Later on & just after dinner, she sat on my lap and made up a game using the napkin rings that were on the table.  She was playing with my mom, sitting next to me, when mom said, "HA!  I win!" and I said, "Mom, what do you say when you win?"
Mom shouted, "IN YOUR FACE!"
Shortly after that Abbey won her made up napkin ring game and there was more shouting and then she looked at me with big blue eyes, giggled, farted* on my leg (three times, she'll tell you), and then hid under the table.

Later, from the living room, she grabs my hand and says, "Come here.  I want to show you something."  We go to the computer where she pulls up some Barbie Game page where one of the games is like a babysitting thing and there's a little girl you have to navigate through a Barbie Dream House with obstacles and the object is to get her to the toilet before she pisses herself.  Once she's on the toilet, she makes a face, you hear a noise, and when she gets off the toilet, you see yellow water and a floating turd get flushed.
Here - if you don't believe me, go ahead and see for yourself.

Abbey's coming over this weekend to go swimming.  I'm sure there will be more similarly entertaining stories to share.
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*farts are called "boom-boom"s in their house, apparently.  doesn't exactly roll off the tongue & "farts" is funner to say.