A Rainbow Notebook and....well...HARD LIKE HEROIC, MORE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE

So, I know I said I'd post pictures and stuff when I finished that notebook I said I was gonna try to make.

Long story short: I have yet to make that one, but I made a different one. Not with coffee-stained pages; a rainbow one.

Obviously it isn't perfect - considering I went into it without any remote type of directions or actual plan. That said, I posted a collage-type picture and some wordage on >my deviantART page< earlier. Thought I'd just repost it here, so here it is; 

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SO. After started making and uploading her own journals, I decided I had to try my hand at it as well. [And therefore, she is what inspired this; as clarification. Massively talented artist, really cool person, and I suggest you go check out her stuff.]

She made her own by taking an old or damaged book, removing it's pages, decorating her own, tying them in, and redecorating the covers. She's come up with some fantastic, really gorgeous journals by doing this.
I, on the other hand, didn't have any old books around. I decided that wasn't enough to stop me from trying it, and so mine is made entirely from scratch.
Basic process;
The pages are simply white printer paper, cut in half and painted on both sides with watercolor paints. Those were pretty simple.
I wasn't sure how I was going to make the cover, but after flinging a few ideas around, I went with a simple method: I had a piece of fairly thick, sturdy cardboard lying around. I cut two pieces to fit the pages, slightly overlapping them.
Just about the hardest part of this, I think, was finding out how to put holes in the cardboard so I could tie it them and the pages together. [The cardboard was just slightly too thick for my hole puncher.] I wound up taking a pen and piercing the cardboard. Took quite a while and some muscle, but it worked.
I then covered the cardboard with a sheet of white tissue paper, gluing the paper to the board. I went a little further, dying two more sheets of paper rainbow-colored and decorating them [the little dots on them are all individually-glued on; I used the extra paper that was punched out for holes], and gluing them to each of the inside covers.
It's all held together by simple lavender gift-wrapping ribbon. [I found it the simplest method; idea again taken from She seems to have used ribbon like this to tie the pages to the books in at least one of her journals.]
I decorated the covers with more water colors; penciling patterns, drawing over them with pens, and then taking the paint to them.
The quote on the front is "Everything has it's beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
I'm filling the journal with some of my favorite quotes.

And that's that.
I plan on making some more; Next probably will be what I thought I'd make first, but didn't, including the pages I previously coffee-stained.

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And there it is.

I'm sure I'll post something similar when I get the coffee stained one finished - no guarantees when that'll be, but in the meantime....

>Some epic WoW nonsense<

Parental Brainwashing and Baby X

So the puppy's going well enough so far. Smart doggy. Still nippy, and getting into things, but for a puppy he's pretty good. [Granted, not everyone's cooperating as well as they could, but all in good time.]

That said, something else I have to mention, since it's now on my mind.
On another site, a decent friend of mine posted >this link<

It's a little lengthy, but if you can be bothered I'd strongly suggest reading it. 

Obviously I like the real message - that parents and everyone else are so brain-washed into thinking that their kids HAVE to act one way or another [decided by their gender] or there's something 'wrong' with them. And that when you stop worrying about what everyone else is thinking about, you and your kid(s) are likely to wind up a lot better off.
That said, it made me think of something else, too: Notice how in that story, the other children took a short time to get used to the new thing [in this case, X], but after they'd decided it wasn't a bad thing, they were perfectly happy and treated it just like anything else - normally. Alternatively, the parents never fully got over it, and were so stuck in their own little world where anything that was different was automatically wrong. On top of that, the biggest excuse for thinking this way that the parents had, was that it might screw up THEIR kids.
I find this absolutely ridiculous, because that's how people actually are: My sisters and I grew up on things like the 'Old' Disney and Nickelodeon. I.e. shows like Lizzie McGuire, Boy Meets World, Zoey 101 and others. There was nothing WRONG with those. Now it's nothing but sugar-coated garbage that makes kids think the world is rainbows and sunshine. They don't even air shows like Boy Meets World on kid's channels anymore. WE didn't wind up screwy - we learned to think for ourselves, not to be brainwashed by the media and anyone else.
Everyone's so afraid of everything. Parents forget that it isn't the shows that screw kids up - it's their parenting. We knew what was right and wrong, and it wasn't 'bad' tv shows or 'good' tv shows that taught us that - it was our parents.
People are so caught up with trying not to offend each other that they forget kids don't actually UNDERSTAND any of the 'bad' stuff - they learn it later, sure, but at 8 years old there aren't too many kids that are grasping any dirty innuendos in otherwise harmless shows. It flies over their heads, and parents don't understand that. [No, I'm not saying let them watch things like the Exorcist or anything horrifically dirty, but don't overreact about everything. My sisters and I were OBSESSED with the movie Grease when we were little. We didn't KNOW what the words to Grease Lightning meant - we didn't care. All we knew was that Danny was awesome, Sandy needed to lighten up, and the guys mooning the camera were goofy in the most epic way possible.]
Be a good, protective parent, yeah - but don't be the one screwing up your kid by trying to keep it sheltered from everything. There are a lot of things in the world, and flipping out over a show or not letting kids interact with people who are a little 'different' is going to leave them with a far more warped outlook on life than letting them figure things out, make mistakes, and actually understand things the way they are.

/endrant

This is Starting to Become a Thing, Getting Dogs on Superbowl Weekend

First off, forgive me for not writing anything the past week. I kind of didn't even slightly notice it had been that long. I've been busier than I thought, I suppose. Also, I just spent way too long babbling too much writing a journal on deviantART. SO, rather than re-write the entire thing, I'm just copy/pasting what I wrote there, here. [You may already be aware of some stuff from reading this blog. You may not. But, now you'll know it all.]

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[WARNING: Long rambling story you probably don't care about incoming. The shortened, lazy-person's version shall be at the very end.]
To elaborate/clarify; We got a puppy yesterday. The last puppy we got, we also got Superbowl Weekend. [But that was like...6 years ago.]
I'll post pictures when I take some/get the chance, but in the meantime:
My dad's been a little obsessed with getting a 'real' [read: Big] dog for quite a while. [We have a Yorkie (9yrs) and a rat terrier (6yrs) - we never got a big dog since my mom wasn't comfortable with them, especially when my sisters and I were little.]
Us being the lazy, impatient people that we are, we didn't do much by the way of training at any point so far in my other dogs' lives. Therefore, Mom's been insisting that we train the dogs we already have before adding another to the mix. [Our dogs aren't 'BAD' exactly - just very anti-social and a little....dominant. LDS, what can you do.]
But then my dad went into excitement-overload mode [MOMMY SHOWED SIGNS OF PUSHOVERNESS, THERE'S A POSSIBILITY!] and began constantly researching bigger dogs. We were pretty set on a Great Dane, until we convinced him out of it due to their massive risk for multiple health issues. [And considering our current funds and whatnot, another dog at all is a little bit of a stretch, but we'll manage. Really not smart to take something so risky since we don't have the money to be at the vet 24/7 as might be necessary with something like a Great Dane.]
After going through alllll the possibilities, we started thinking about a Black Mouth Cur. Then on one of the adoption sites my dad had been frequenting, he found a 14 week old Boxer/Black Mouth Cur mix just a little bit north of us. My mom began corresponding with one of the women running the place at the beginning of the week, and we had an appointment to meet him set up for yesterday morning at one of the local Petsmarts.
So after a few hours of waiting around [ah, they got lost. Happens, I guess?] and making a few phone calls to make sure nothing was out of order, we decided to run across the street and have breakfast. Dad, being the 12 year old that he is, ran back over to the store while our food was being made. Came back all giddy since the dog had finally arrived. [Mom sent him over to check, since he'd have wound up with indigestion if he had to wait through his meal not knowing if they were there or not.]
So after we'd finished breakfast [quickly, mind you. It's a wonder we all weren't sick. Poor Jackie [ didn't even get to finish her pancakes since the rest of us were rushing her.] we all ran back over, made a beeline to the adoption set-up, and....well, it was pretty much a given he wasn't staying there.
Mom made a bit of a deal about his eye, but ah. [He has a fairly noticeable scar on the bottom half of his right eye. We knew this from the adoption site before meeting him. Quoting (copy/paste) from the site, he "has a scar on his bottom eyelid. It seems to be an old njury and the vet said it does not impact his eyesight. He said the lscar may or may not heal completely but eiither way, his vision is fine."]
As a whole....this puppy's ridiculous amounts of awesome. Isn't being a psycho and barking at everyone, gets along fantastically with both people and other dogs, is learning quickly [seriously, he already understands 'sit' just about flawlessly] and is extremely...sweet, for lack of a better term.
He's not getting along brilliantly with our other dogs just yet, but it'll take some time. [He wants to play....they're afraid he's going to squish them....Process, it is. They're getting better.] But he got along awesomely with the neighbor's dogs, most everyone in Petsmart yesterday, and the year-old, 106lb female Black Mouth Cur that lives next to my grandparents.
That said, he's in his inquisitive puppy stage. In other words, he found the red blanket covering our bird's cage, pulled on it, and toppled the whole thing over. I'm sure the bird wasn't pleased.

Ah. His name's Dante. We decided to just go with what the adoption agency had named him, rather than confuse him. [Even though he doesn't seem to really know his name just yet.]

SOYEAH. S'pretty awesome.
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SHORTENED VERSION for the lazies:
Dad wanted a big dog. Mom caved. Found one online. Met and adopted him yesterday. Epic dog, getting along well enough with everyone. Other dogs getting used to him. Work in progress.