Frames

If you remember a few days ago, I posted here about making subway art for my dorm room. Well, I got them all printed out and picked up a few $3 frames at Target, which I figured could use a facelift.

Mainly because white frames + white dorm walls = A LOT of white. So I decided to go with navy blue, one of my room colors.

I propped up my frames on thumbtacks, which makes sure the frame doesn't stick to the newspaper when the paint is wet.

 I thought it would be a simple paint job, but I was wrong. The frames very slick and covered in a type of laminate, so the paint did not soak in at all. That meant that even the brush stroke would cause the paint to slide off and reveal the white underneath.

The right side was my first try. Ugh. The left side was my second try. Much better. I determined I needed to use an enormous amount of paint, a lot of patience, and light, horizontal brushstrokes. After doing a few of those, I got sick of it. It was taking about a bajillion hours to do each one. New plan.

Stripes! Only half as much area to cover, right? This was still time consuming, but not quite as bad. After letting those dry for a few hours, I peeled off the tape to reveal...

Seepage. Ugh. No matter how precisely I tape the tape, paint always manages to get where it's not supposed to. Oh well, not a big deal. I just went around the edges and scraped off the paint with my fingernail (it came right off, due to the laminated covering I referred to earlier)!

Tada! Five beautiful pieces of artwork to hang in my dorm room!

This one is my personal favorite! :) 

Into Darkness

Star Trek is one of my all time favorite movies. So now that Star Trek: Into Darkness is at the dollar theater, I knew I had to go see it.

Overall, I really liked it! I deeply love the characters from the first movie, and they're all in this movie too. The plot is interesting and suspenseful. Of course, there are plenty of fight scenes. There's one major part I didn't like, but I can't say anything without spoiling a good part of the movie! I'd definitely see it again!

Hipster/Hyvee adventure

I leave for college in 12 days!! And I'm so excited. And I have so much to do. 

Apparently, you aren's supossed to wear your high school t-shirts at college, and since that is the majority of my wardrobe, I knew I needed another plan. While we were in Waukee, we went to a Goodwill that had about 4 racks FULL of t-shirts. I decided to head to Ames and look at the Goodwill there for some t-shirts that weren't Roland-Story affiliated.

I found quite a few outrageous shirts, and some that would actually be wearable! I mostly got sports related shirts, since most of the shirts were either team or tournament related, and I like sports! I got an Ohio State one, an "Ames Parks and Rec" one, and an NCAA basketball tourney one, along with a few others! Success!

But then... disaster. My friend's car died in the parking lot. And we had no way home. So we called her parents to come pick us up, but they said it would be about an hour. What is there to do for an hour without a car? 

Answer: sit in Hyvee. Get some Chinese. Play a few games of hangman. Do a lot of people watching. 

Office makeover part two

I love today. I love working hard. I love being able to see where I've been. I love before and after pictures.

Remember a week or so ago when I wrote here about starting this office makeover? This is what the room looked like then. 

EVENTUALLY, we did get the room cleaned out! Honestly, that was the part that took the longest. We sold a lot of stuff, put even more stuff on eBay, and moved the rest of it to the attic.

Then the real fun part started. My mom and I went down to the basement and found leftover paint from the other places in our house and got to work.

The room has slanted walls/ceilings, so it was kindof tricky to paint. We ended up painting one wall red and the other walls tan/taupe. 

And if you know my family at all, we are pretty familiar with giving houses a facelift. We've remodeled our entire house in the past eight years, and we did a majority of it by ourselves. We know how to make painting fun: loud music, endless supply of pop, and frequent dance breaks.

Then we started ripping out that NASTY purple carpet. This carpet was my main motivation for wanting to redo this room. It's a disaster.

I got my revenge. By throwing it out the second story window. 

Of course, things never go quite as planned. When we started pulling up the carpet, we realized there was linoleum under it! Thankfully, the linoleum came up pretty easily too. 

Tada! The room after a long day of hard work! Under the carpet and linoleum was plain subfloor and it was in pretty good condition. We're planning on painting the subfloor with house paint and throwing down a rug. Such an improvement over the purple carpet, in my opinion!

Required reading list

Only two days left with W1 and W2 this summer! I'm not sure if I'm sad about it or okay with it. I haven't decided yet.

In the meantime, they started swimming lessons today. They've passed out of all the public lessons, so they had private lessons, and I got to sit and read. 

While sitting and reading (and watching W1 do a faceplant off the diving board...), I came up with a brilliant idea. Christian teenagers should have a required reading list. Like, maybe not teens everywhere, because there's no way to enforce that. But within youth groups, church bodies, or bible studies, students should be encouraged to read various books that explain and interpret our faith and how we live it out.

For example, right now, I'm reading "unChristian" by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons. And this book should be on the required reading list! Granted, it's kindof a dry read. There's quite a bit of data, charts, numbers, and statistics. But Kinnaman and Lyons do a pretty good job at drawing conclusions based on those statistics, so I just skim over the actual numbers and read the conclusions. 

And they make very good conclusions. They talk about how other people view Christians, as hypocritical, judgmental, homophobic, sheltered, too political. And they talk about why Christians are viewed that way. And most importantly, they talk about what we can do to change these perspectives. 

I am a sinner. I do not portray Christ in my life in the best possible way. I get defensive when people ask about my political views. I judge people who have made poor life choices. I preach one thing, but I don't always live it out like I should. And I know I'm not the only one! This generation of Christians needs to be aware that we are the light of the world and the salt of the earth. How we act, what we say, and who we are influences their opinion of God. 

And that's why I think Christian teenagers need to devour some literature.

Subway art

I spend quite a bit of time on Pinterest. Cause I'm a teenage girl, and that's what teenage girls do. I've been seeing a lot of examples of subway art, and I decided to give it a try myself.

I found a tutorial here at the Ginger Penny Pincher that explained it very well. I simply followed the tutorial, found a few sayings a quotes I wanted, and started designing some subway art for my dorm!

"Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life." -Mark Twain

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." -e.e.cummings

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." -Winston Churchill

"Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me." -Isaiah 6:8

"The only one who can truly satisfy the human heart is the one who made it." -Unknown

Ames Aquatic Center

Today was my first day back with W1 and W2 for over a week! Weird. And on top of that, this week is my last week with them for the summer! They start school next week. And just when I'm getting them broken in... man. :( Haha, I really will miss them though!

So I took them to the aquatic center in Ames today as a fun little treat! 

It was a nice change of scenery from the Story City pool. They have two water slides, a main pool, a baby/wading pool, a lazy river, and plenty of seating in the shade. The boys ran all over the place and I honestly don't know where they were most of the time. Best babysitter ever. I chilled in the shade and people-watched. 

Here's some pictures of the boys jumping off the high platform!

And here's a random boy who pretty much sums up how I feel after an afternoon at the pool!

Peek into the past

For the past few weeks, I've been working on cleaning out out office/store room. Today was another day of sorting and organizing. But I found something truly amazing. 

A box of letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while they were dating. 

I never knew my grandmother, Bonnie, and my grandfather, Richard, died when I was young. My dad loved his parents, I know that, but he never has much to say about them. He always describes Richard as gruff and unsentimental. 

But these letters are poetry. 

"I'll be so glad when we're married and won't have to leave one another, ever. It seems so hard to be apart and waiting and thinking of that time, but I'm sure it will be worth it sweetheart. I'll wait for you if necessary just to marry you, honey."

And he wrote it all in gorgeous handwriting!

Honestly, I loved reading through these letters. They gave me a glimpse at my grandparents in a way I've never seen them. I'm not even sure if my dad has read them, but this Richard is a different Richard than my dad ever knew. 

There were other things in the box too: graduation invitations, a small tin of aspirin, and my grandfathers draft letter for World War 2. 

I am so amazed. 

College prep!

This is my favorite day of the year. 

SCHOOL SUPPLIES!

I get seriously excited about school supplies. As my brother says, "you have problems". It's fine, I accept that.

  

So today I got to load up on awesome school supplies, which include matching notebooks, folders, post it's, and hi liters for each class! So good. :)

And just to make it real, I ate cereal out of a cup, like a real college student. I'm so ready. 

Kids Club

I'm back! This past week, I was in Waukee with a group from my church, which included Becky, Tyler, Grant, Sam, Sara, Jacob, Molly, D, and Jill. We were putting on a Kids Club with the Waukee Community Church, and it was an amazing experience.

On Saturday and Sunday, we did some canvassing around the park where we held the Kids Club. We went door to door and explained when and where the Kids Club was and invited people to join us. I honestly don't know if anyone we gave flyers to decided to come, but it was a great learning experience either way. It's nerve-wracking to approach someone's door like that, especially if they aren't very excited about you being there.

During the mornings of the rest of the week, we did a variety of service projects around Waukee, including mowing, landscaping, cutting down vicious trees, hanging up a downspout, and washing windows. Again, those aren't the most fun jobs in the world, but I really enjoyed it! It's awesome to be a blessing in someone else's life.

In our free time, we found plenty of things to do to keep entertained. We went thrift shopping at Goodwill, played 18 holes of mini-golf, went swimming, spent way too much money at the dollar store, and played about 900 games of Egyptian Rat Slap. I still have broken fingernails from that game.

The actual Kids Club was Sunday through Thursday nights, from 6:30-8. We had around 30 kids every night, along with 5-10 extra helpers from the church. We sang songs, put on skits, played games, listened to a lesson, and did crafts. I actually think my favorite part was before and after the Kids Club when we just got to hang out and play with the kids on the playground equipment. 

God was so good to us this week. He blessed us with a wonderful place to stay, awesome church members who fed us every night, cool weather, no rain, and tons of energy to keep up with the kids. I feel so lucky to have been a part of this group and a part of this Kids Club!