Lost in Space!!!

Maybe, I don't know.
I keep losing track of time, and objects, and memories, and oh my god did I feed the dog today?! It kind of feels like my brain has melted, or I'm going through puberty again. *shrugs*

Anyways. I think I announced on this particular space that Jex and I are going to Thailand soon.
We just got back from Storm Con last Monday and I think I've been fighting the germs of 500 people since then while trying to still be a responsible adult. I think so far I've gotten a C+ for my attempt.

So, Storm Con 2014.
Jex decided that it would be a GREAT idea for us to sell Foam Swords or 'Boffer Weapons' at the con this year because we were having LARPers this year and a group of Knights of the Fiat Lux (look 'em up, they're kind of ligit). It didn't turn out so well in that the con was on a UTA weekend thus I was alone running the damn table, and the vendors were cordoned off in a room away from all the gamers so we had very little traffic. But I did get to play in a Call of Cthulu game that was streamed over youtube (didn't see that till the next day, I really just wanted to play with Lance and Amber in a fun Cthulu RPG setting) where I totally choked, and Jex and I won a game called Belfort (so many tiny pieces!!!!). Oh and I LARPed for the first time ever! It was fun. The group wasn't psycho crazy or anything, they were actually all really really nice and helpful to the noob, it was kind of like RPing at a table but we all stood more and were in costume.
Can't find them online though, I'll have to ask the GM about it next time I see him.

Anywho, I met some super rad people I want to tell you about. I guess being a vendor is kinda like being a Gypsy, the moment you're in the ring of tables you're all accepted and stuff (one of us, one of us). I loved all the other vendors that hung out and watched me table for me so I could go to the little girls room. No really you guys are awesome.

Begin the shameless plugging!

The first guy who made an impression on me was this super cute kid (hell he might be older than me, but he seemed like a college student) who was running a booth by himself as well. He just had the best attitude. His name is DJ and this is his booth.

That's him painting away. He and his family will be at Dragon Con this year. So be sure to keep an eye out for them. They're stuff is really cool. They even have an Etsy store if you just HAVE to HAVE a captain america or galifreyan clock.

This was my sad little table. To be honest I had no idea what the crap I was doing. I think if Jex want's to keep doing this as a side job we need to make some weapons racks.

This is the super rad comic book guy, Jerry, corner. He let me watch world cup on his smart phone. Best dude ever!

He has a facebook page if you want to find something particular: Facebook.com/ParkCircleComics

These are the Impudent Mortal guys. I didn't get to talk with them much, they were on the other side of the room and I didn't wan't to shout over the Event Horizon guys. I did walk over to see their stuff though. They have some super rad buildings for RP and Warhammer stuff. 

You can take a look at www.impudenmortal.com .  No really their stuff was amazing. 

 This is Mia and Will. I thought their stuff was all one booth but I was wrong.

 Will makes these patches and cuppy things.

Buy his stuff on Etsy!

 Mia makes all this stuff. And this stuff is amazing. If I wasn't going to be near a Mitsuwa here in a couple of weeks I would totally be rocking that Tardis dress right this second.

 Mia will be at Dragon Con aswell this year if you want some incredibly awesome Nerd Accessories. Or you can visit her portfolio at: artwanted.com/miacorn Or her Ebay store.

These are the beautiful brains guys. They're business cards are also savage worlds playable adventure cards!

 You can visit them Here.




Last, but certainly not least are the Henna/Glitter chicks. They're only local to the Charleston Area, but they're work is really good. I forgot to take a picture of the Henna Desi did for me, but she free handed it and I was impressed, and I'm not easily impressed.

If you're in the Charleston area and interested in her services you can find her on the Book of Face.

Net Neutrality?

Hey guys.
A lot of you have probably heard about the issue with American Law Makers and Net Neutrality. It's hard to understand and there's all this crazy legal speak and internet companies assuring us that 'nothing will actually change'; if that's the case why are they even doing anything?

Here is an amazingly well put together bit on Net Neutrality and what little bit we can do about it at the moment by John Oliver.

I'm working on my comment to the FCC right now. I want to make sure I don't say anything that can be twisted around by lawyers. Bleeeeeh. If that's even possible.


Just a little heads up; Jex and I are going to Thailand in August. I'll have to manage two blogs, a facebook community page, and a bunch of teenagers.

Pray for me. *laughs*
No really, I'm not joking; I'm going to need divine intervention.

Till next time my lovelies,
~The light heart lives long.

But... what would we do without Facebook?

It's something a friend asked recently.

Facebook has almost single-handedly taken over the internet in my opinion. Only a handful of years after it's creation did other websites start emulating their super post modern minimalist design. MySpace died a horrible death; I liked MySpace. *sadface* But for some reason a page with less options, less customization, less... well everything... exploded and eats up more of people's hours than anything but the Google search engine.

And they're getting scary. First it was the maps thing that tracked where you were posting things from by examining your IP location. I don't know where that thing has gone, but I hope it's far away and forever. Now their app is going to have the option to listen to you, aaaand I really just hate having to reset all my preferences every few weeks. It never fails that something turns itself on to email me every hour, pages I've never been to show up in my "liked" feed, people wondering why I posted something so incredibly right wing when all I did was like a picture of a kitten my friend shared that gave some political page the right to post for me for some reason I can't fathom... *deep breath* Then there's just the crap.

I've been thinking about saving all the pictures I've been tagged in that I don't have personal copies of, like my sister's wedding, and bailing off the Facebook ship.
But... it's so easy to see what people are doing and share little tidbits and pictures and Facebook owns all our content and... and... and... what would we do without Facebook?

What we did before it ever existed! We'll post blogs and use emails for more than spam catchers. Maybe, just maybe, we'll actually call one another to tell some one about our day. Also who said you can't put short posts on your blog?
Imgur is full of fun pictures and the Google engine is more than capable of finding all the memes. I don't see why Facebook has to be the center of our online socializing universe.
I have made more real relationships with people on forums than with people who I've met in real life and been Facebook friends with. I miss you FPians! I'll come back soon... I hope.

I don't need to shout things into the internet in short bursts of fire, my life is not an assault rifle. I don't need to have people click a little button approving of my choice of content to share. We don't need Facebook to keep the friends that matter to us.
I don't mind social networking. Honest. I just don't understand how we've let it blind us to the fact that we have other options, that if we really don't like it we can leave.

... then again that worked out really well for me and the blogger... didn't it? *laughs*

Till next time lovelies,
~the light heart lives long

Vegan Wednesday

Good evening! I thought I would share the experiments going on in my house today.

Breakfast is not very vegan friendly. It just isn't. Every culture I've been exposed to eats some kind of meat in the morning. The United States and the United Kingdom both have classic bacon and egg breakfasts, though rashers (UK) and streaky bacon (US) differ a bit, still the same concept. German breakfasts are equally not very vegan friendly. We eat breakfast sandwiches with butter, cheese, deli meats and some kind of crunchy green thing like lettuce or pickles, maybe an apple too. Japan has miso soup, the broth of which is made with tiny little dried fish. Some kind of leftover meat from the night before and rice with a raw egg yolk (My favorite!).

Vegans can have non of this. Out of the four above Japanese breakfasts come the closest to vegan. I've tweaked the broth for miso soup and it was palatable (but not awesome), rice, pickles, and grilled veggie slices (I like sweet potato and asparagus) are all great first thing in the morning. If that's all you eat though, it gets kind of old.

So, instead of a fruit smoothie, or some strange almond milk pancake (those never turn out well for me), I decided to try some stuff from one of my favorite vegan cooking sites Olives for Dinner. I love her because she typically doesn't use things like vegan sausage, earth balance (pretend butter), or vegan cheese slices (dear god, why?!), and the food still turns out pretty tasty.

This morning I fed Jex Coconut Crepes with Smokey Herbed Mushrooms.
I have never actually made crepes before. My sister and I made them together once (I think) but she was the baker in the family, still is, so she did most everything and I pulled out and put up all the ingredients. But I'm confident in the kitchen, this should be easy enough.
Oh no Batman!
Crepes are kind of hard to make. For me anyways. The first four were mangled beyond recognition before I was able to get the hang of it (then I promptly did a victory lap around the house). Even with all the mistake making I had enough batter to make enough crepes to hold all the mushroomy goodness.
Don't worry. As long as you spray/grease your pan between crepes, let them sit long enough on the pan, and have a goodly amount of time to make breakfast in the morning you should be able to pull it off.

It freaked Jex out a little when the crepes were savory instead of sweet. Which kind of made my day. *laughs*

The black bean soup I made for lunch wasn't the best ever, but I'm really not a big fan of the veggie broth I had in the fridge. 'Better than Bullion' how could you make something so nasty?

Then we have dinner. My crowning achievement for the day; General Tso's Cauliflower. Oh my goodness those little fried Cauliflowers were yummy! Even with the bad luck I have with battering things for frying they turned out perfectly crispy with a warm, soft, center. Mmmmmmm.
Rice flour is hard to find where I live (so is everything else I need/want) so I simply added equal parts starch and flour to make up for it.
I found the sauce entirely too gingery. Dear god, a 1/4 cup of ginger. Half of that was a touch too much in my tongue's opinion. With a little tweaking to one's own palette though it should turn out very nicely the second time around.

Eat well my friends!
~the Light Heart Lives Long~

I've decided to stay... ummmm

So I've decided to keep this blog and not completely abandon Blogger.
Why?

Well for one there was some begging by a pair of people I love more than chocolate, and that's an amazing amount of love right there. For another I really wasn't all that impressed with other sites.
Being a frugal gal I really didn't feel like paying to make my blog look the way I wanted it to. Picking colors should be free in my opinion. Nothing about the competition really stood out as amazing to me. A lot of the same stuff  mostly in a stark two color scheme and menus that were all pretty much the same. Interface varied little enough that what was different felt dumb instead of innovative or easier to use.

I'm still upset with the Googlesphere for not giving me options with my Nexus linking up with blogger but I won't be abandoning ship just yet. I suppose I'll just not write blogs or upload pictures directly from the device; even if having it around for instant posts when something interesting happened was one of the reasons I got the little thing.

On a completely unrelated note I found out that I say "ummmm?" when I get cut. Which totally makes sense, right? I mean, if one has a medic for a spouse "ummmm?" completely conveys that you're in pain and bleeding everywhere, doesn't it?
No not really.
I thought of all this while trying to find something to hold over my finger. Why "ummmm?" instead of "Oh My God!" or even a simple "Ouch!"?

Oh, I guess I should let you know how I sliced my finger open.
My awesome dude bought me a set of Cold Steel kitchen knives. Those puppies are incredibly sharp, and so much better than the set we had cobbled together from Goodwill and various garage sales. I really wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been while washing dishes and a bowl I was holding slipped and in the juggling of pottery and splashing of hot sudsy water I managed to jam my finger right into the back corner of the chef's knife waiting to be cleaned. I won't need stitches or anything, but it bled like a glass cut and hurt like a colorful expression.

I'm almost done with my second quilt ever! Yay! I'm excited to post a picture because the thing is awesomely technicolor.

Anywho, that's about the most exciting thing going on in my week so far.
I'll just leave you with a little gem I found on the cooking channel website.

Till next time lovelies,
~The light heart lives long.

The End?

Hey guys.
Google has recently cured me of using any of their services other than their search engine... and even that isn't so much to my liking anymore. This unfortunately includes Blogger. *sadface*

I'm looking at Wordpress and Tumblr as alternatives. Actually I think I have a dusty Tumblr account floating around somewhere. So if anyone knows much about either of those alternatives let me know what you love and hate about them.

The reason for this is that recently all my blogger pictures sync'd themselves to my Nexus. No big deal right? Except I already have all those photos on my desktop, I don't want them on my tablet, and it won't let me erase them. That is only the beginning of my huge issue with the new and improved Google machine.
I've been on the interwebs for a little while now, and I really hate where it's going.
It used to be a fun place full of imagination and colors and poorly designed webpages and you didn't have to pay for access to things. It just was, and it was great. Now everything is stark colors, blue and white, orange and gray. Minimalist... boring.

Well anyways. This blog wasn't doing what it was supposed to anyways. So I guess this is The End. Maybe I'll catch some on you guys on the other platform I try to figure out. Maybe not.
Thanks for being awesome.

The Light Heart Lives Long~ Old Irish Proverb

Cheaters Never Win

My Vegan experiment is up in two weeks. Well, actually a week and a half.
Even with all the complaining I've done it has actually been a very positive experience. Being forced waaaay out of one's comfort zone is a good thing every once in a while. I've learned all kinds of delicious recipes and so much about veggies in general. Jex has been very supportive, even if he was a jerk and told me about how great the beef jerky was he was eating on our drive to Sandland while he sat there next to me filling the car with meat smell. *laughs* We're going to have Vegan Vednesdays. You know, German pronunciation... *coughs* well we thought it was clever.

Since the race and promptly after the start of my cycle I hit another "all things meat and cheese" wall. I've researched the hell out of what to eat to make sure I'm getting iron and all the protein I'd usually get from meat. Nothing I've eaten has been enough. I swear that salad burns up on entry to my stomach. I'm back to that first two week starvation period.
Jex being the loving husband that he is (probably tired of my puppy faces while I watched him eat hamburg steak) declared that I could just do a juice cleanse and shave a week off before I go Vegetarian (milk + eggs). Of course in my weakened state I was all over this idea. That's not cheating, nooooo.

Today, day 1 of the juice experiment, I learned that cheaters never win. The juicer that my mother in law gave me was fine when I tested it last week. Halfway through my breakfast juice it kind of exploded. I spent the last hour taking it apart. Everything looks fine. It's a balance issue that I can't get to without actually cutting into the case around the little motor. Annoying.
No big deal I'll just use the Ninja and juice like I have before. The ninja apparently needs ice or water or some other liquid to do it's damn job. Oh and my mesh strainer is 4 inches in diameter. Gah!!! It took me almost an hour to juice my breakfast juice.
Snack juice #1 is straining as I type.
On top of all this I just got over a head cold and my left hand is some what useless because of a deep tissue injury on my middle finger.
I'm sure there are a zillion proverbs about adversity one could whip out at a time like this.

So, let's see them.
What is your favorite saying about adversity, trouble, trials? No really I want to see them. Don't be shy interweb friends.

In any case I'm still going to juice. Because I started, there's really no stopping now. I just need to figure out a system for it. Hmmmm.

Oh yeah... race pictures. I don't have any good ones. So I stole a couple from my sister in law.

The obligatory PreRace Group Photo

Jex being all manly. That's a pipe filled with water, and I think maybe sand as well. It was really hard to keep the balance right.

The crawl under barbed wire. FW and the Sister in Law there at the bottom of the hill.
I swear there was broken glass in that mud.

And the obligatory PostRace Photo.

Till next time my lovelies!
~The Light Heart Lives Long~