Where are my bon-bons and stories?

Being on summer vacation is kind of weird. I have nothing in particular to do, and all the time in the world to do it. So I have been going through my back-list of things I wanted to do during the semester (or that at least sounded like fun at the time), but didn’t have time for.

I started with my zombie-snails project. Hannah and I made salt dough, which I then transformed into zombie snails, thanks to my collection of escargot shells. We painted a background in grays (Hannah made a bright-colored splatter painting, but I told her I didn’t think it had quite the gruesome effect we were going for, so now it is up on the kitchen cabinet), which I put into a shoebox to house our diorama of doom. Then we whipped up some cornstarch slime, added a bit of fluorescent green food color, and Hannah took on the job of sliming up the zombies. It turned out quite well, eh?



Then Hannah decided to make a video, which you can check out on her ad blog here.

To stave off impending boredom, Hannah got into the Halloween make-up again.



Doesn’t she look a bit like this character from a German children’s book?

I’ve gotten a lot of cleaning done, but it is not as fun as it sounds, because as soon as I finish, I have to start over again.

I also pulled out a sewing project that has been hanging over my head for *cough* more than 10 years. But I have a strong incentive to finish it before xmas, so I will keep you posted on that.

John bought me a tin whistle from the local Irish shop for my birthday (on my request), and I pulled it out after John and Hannah tried to learn how to play her recorder. I figured that a tin whistle would be much simpler to play than my clarinet, but I found the directions too frustrating. Practicing my clarinet would require more of my time, since I would have to build up my embouchure again, but I might try it anyway. My niece is going to start playing the clarinet this school year, so I’ve been thinking about playing more than usual.

I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump, as evidenced in my writing blog, but I hope to find a way around that soon.

We even went to the museum yesterday. They have an exhibit until the end of the month on an early culture around the Alps that built their houses on stilts right on the edge of lakes and rivers. John got there first, and we caught up with him at the exhibit, after we had been through the rest of the museum. Hannah is still not the most patient museum-guest, but there wasn’t too much I wanted to look at in detail, so I went along with the whirlwind tour. John read *every single display* in the exhibit, so he was there much longer than we were. But since we had traveled there separately, it wasn’t a big deal. We came home and made a knock-off recipe of Cinnabon rolls, so if you don’t hear from us over the next few days, we have probably suffered death by cinnamon roll.

John is counting down the days until our Swedish vacation. We’re leaving 2 weeks from tomorrow, so I don’t have to start freaking out or list-making for at least another week. *g*