The Gratitude Project - Day 3

I am grateful for my feet, that allow me to walk, run, and dance with the man I love.

The Gratitude Project - Day 2

I am grateful for the beautiful morning; a big red sun rising, barely breaking through the fog hanging among the trees.

The Gratitude Project - Day 1

I am grateful for my compassion that teaches me to value life, be it human, animal, or something else.

What is the Gratitude Project?

As written by my dear friend Liz Jacobs on the Friends of Shadow Grove Facebook page:

"The Gratitude Project was started by Julie McCord and has been adopted by many Pagans throughout the community. We think it's a wonderful idea and invite you all to share in this activity which starts on Wednesday, August 1st! Thanks to Irene Jericho for the reminder that this is about to begin again this year.

The Gratitude Project runs from Lammas to Mabon. It entails you being mindful of whatever brings you Joy and you journal "the something" you are grateful for each day between those Sabbats. No repeats - you can be grateful for your spouse/kids/job/friends, but the reason for the gratitude needs to be different for each entry. It can BIG or not, your journal/blog entry can be long or short. It can be on paper or in pixels and public or private.

If you would like to post your entries here, we would love to hear from you about what you are thankful for.

Brightest Blessings to all"

For the next 53 days (assuming I'm counting correctly), I'll be posting what I am grateful for each day.

Birthday Cupcakes

Dav's birthday was May 18th. One of his gifts was a Pirate Gnome. He has a piratical tattoo, which is why I thought about a Pirate Gnome. But you know, dear readers, that I can't celebrate anything without baking something! I know exactly what kind of cake I want to make for him, but it's going to take time to practice and with VARF and all the related things I had to do that Thursday, I just didn't have any time. So I had to come up with something simpler. Simple, but still significant in some way. (And, if my past cakes are any indication, three hours is a pretty standard amount of time to spend decorating, so that is considered simple.)

Cupcakes! Cupcakes are easy, bake faster and are (usually) less of a pill to decorate than an entire cake. Dav said he doesn't have a favorite cake, so I just had to come up with something. At first, I thought I would go with chocolate cake and vanilla icing, but I decided to reverse that. I'll tell you why in a minute. And then I decided chocolate on chocolate was even better. 

Dav is a video gamer like me, so I thought a video game theme on the cupcakes would be perfect. But what game? I turned to Google for inspiration and came across these cupcakes. He has a tattoo of the crest of Hyrule, which he said had meaning for him and two of his friends, so I knew instantly this would be perfect. I began plotting items I could put on cupcakes! 

It's been a long time since I played the original Legend of Zelda, so I searched around for images and ideas and found this: an image of the map that came with the game. Notice all the items in the lower right corner, and how they're all on black backgrounds? That's why I needed chocolate icing. 

There were no bells or whistles about making the cupcakes. Just mix, pour, bake, cool, and ice. Tada!

Icing Cupcakes

For the item shapes, I used four colors of fondant; yellow, red, blue, and white, and a black icing marker for fine outlines. I got 24 cupcakes out of the mix so I planned out the images for each.

Cutting Rupees

The beauty of an 8-bit game is that pictures are blocky and simple, so cutting the fondant sheets into the images was way easy.

Drawing Details

Then I drew on some details and added a tiny bit of white for shine. Rupees have to sparkle!

Items Important to Your Quest

Look at all those shapes! The three triangles of the Triforce got brushed with pearl dust to give it a bit of luster.

Collect Your Items

And then onto cupcakes they go! I cut out all my shapes free-hand. Now that I've done it, if I were to do it again, I'd make some paper patterns first. That way at least the rupees and bombs and hearts would be more uniform.

Completed Cupcakes!

It looks like Link has taken a bit of damage, but he's got a fairly full rucksack! There are rupees and bombs, a bow and arrow, five hearts, two candles, the magic sword, the magic book, monster bait, a key, and the all-important Triforce.

Behold, the Triforce!

I'm told that the cupcakes were well-enjoyed. I had such fun making them! Happy birthday, my darling!

Goddess Grant Me

The power of Water, to accept with ease & grace what I cannot change,
The power of Fire, for the energy & courage to change the things I can,
The power of Air, for the ability to know the difference,
And the power of Earth, for the strength to continue my path.

Yikes

Blogger's new layout is busy, cluttered, and just plain weird. This is going to take some getting used to!

End of an Era

Today, they loaded the space shuttle Discovery onto a 747 and flew it from Kennedy Space Center, around the nation's capital, and landed at Dulles International Airport, where it will soon be on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly VA.

The aircraft flew over my office building, which is directly under the Dulles flight path, three times this morning. The first was a bit unexpected because they were ahead of schedule. We all gathered outside waiting for the second flyover, and the third was their landing maneuver.

It was an awesome sight! I'm really glad I got to witness Discovery in the air, even if not under her own power. This video was shot on my iPod from the top of our tiny office parking garage. It's a little shaky at the beginning.





There are some neat things already at the Udvar-Hazy Center: the Enterprise, the Enola Gay, an SR71 Blackbird. If you ever get a chance to go, it is well worth it. Pack a car full of people because parking is $15 but there is no admission fee to get in the center.

I wonder if they'll remove the Enterprise and put Discovery in her place.

Permanence

I took a moment last night to pull some files from my oldest computer of some of the early stuff I've written. The vast majority of it is in a Word Perfect format, which I don't use anymore, and I'm not sure if that old computer can bring it up anymore either. Some things were missing from my writing files altogether, which leads me to believe they're probably on a 3.5 floppy somewhere. (*GASP!* Who still uses those!) That old computer has the 3.5 drive, of course, it's the only computer of mine that does. I suppose I could always bring it to work too. That tower has a drive as well. But, I have to find the disks! Programs like Open Office should be able to read the .wpds that I do have, but I really want to find the tales that are missing and saved to disk too.

I had a private blog at one point some years ago and a few of those early tales (mostly EverQuest fan fiction) were posted to it. I spent some time this morning pulling them off and putting them on a thumb drive. That's certainly not everything, and one of the longer fanfics is even incomplete on the blog. That's a little disturbing. I started writing that story in 2001, and already lost it once six months later due to a computer crash. That's actually when I stopped saving my files only on the computer and started putting them on floppies. I also had one floppy completely die on me and was thankful that I had the forethought to make a back-up. I then made two more. The disks are out there, I know it! Hopefully my drive can still read them!

But it got me thinking. In this digital age, is anything permanent? A computer crash means your files are gone. Those old disk drives wear out eventually. Would my thumb drive do the same? I haven't had one give up the ghost on me yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. Is a hard copy the only way to really save something anymore?

I do have hard copies of some of these. Some of the EQ tales were printed out and put in my EQ notebook. I actually self-published that one that I lost in early 2002 via CafePress, and I think I still have the .pdf manuscript file as well. But there are some fanfics I started and never finished. They're only saved on one of those disks. I don't write that kind of story anymore, but some day I might be inspired to finish them. Or to re-write them entirely to take them out of the EverQuest world and put them in their own (thus making it completely original and something I could publish, not that I'm actually looking into publishing anything, but it's a thought nonetheless).

It makes me sad that some things I've written may already be lost forever. I'm surely not a perfect writer, but I must have thought they were good enough to write them down at one point. And it'd be nice to see how my style has grown and changed. Maybe that early stuff could be revised and refreshed. Alas, at this point, my only hope is to find the disks, and to hope they haven't died of old age yet.

Then I think I might have some serious quality time with my printer.

Important Work

I caught Phantom pawing all over the blanket on the bed last night...

What followed was a bath, but the whole video was too much to send from my iPod through e-mail. Apparently he needed to make the bed just the right space for his bath!