A Pinterest Look at Dieting

This Week in Tweets: The Only Guy That Can Beat Obama

My personal ten favorite tweets from this past week.

This week in tweets made possible by: @JohnFugelsang @JimGaffigan @Brenvolio @BorowitzReport @smonkyou @gonnakillhim @FunnyJokeBook @LOLGOP @Cheeseboy22

Now go... follow the funny.

(FollowtheFunny is a Twitter list of the tweeps that have recently appeared on my This Week in Tweets.)

This Week in Tweets: An Obese Drug Addict

My personal ten favorite tweets from this past week.

This week in tweets made possible by: @jillsmo @LABeachmom @JohnFugelsang @BorowitzReport @SarcasminAction @MomIn_AMillion @MarinkaNYC @Cheeseboy22

Now go... follow the funny.

(FollowtheFunny is a Twitter list of the tweeps that have recently appeared on my This Week in Tweets.)

Story Sticks

This past weekend we had absolutely no plans, so I decided to make Saturday a project day, inspired by a couple projects I saw on Pinterest. The first project was inspired by this:

Photo from: Life in the Green House

It's a cute little jar filled with painted popsicle sticks with date night ideas. Super cute. But I wanted to do something with the kiddo, so I came up with this alternative. It became an entire day activity and kept us both entertained.

I had talked to the kid earlier in the week about what all of his storybooks had in common. We talked about characters and settings and how all the characters had a problem that they needed to solve. So on Saturday morning we headed out to buy some popsicle sticks and paint. We brought them home and painted 80 sticks four different colors, 20 of each. The painting project took about an hour. An activity that keeps the kid entertained for an hour is a win.

Once we were done painting the sticks, I had the kiddo gather some of his favorite books.

We spread out the books and the kid had to place one stick of each color onto each book.

We then went through each book. For each one we wrote the main character on the yellow stick, the setting on the green stick, and the conflict on the red stick. For the blue stick, the kid could choose any other item that appeared in the story.

The blue sticks offset the fact that I was trying to keep the characters and conflicts and settings rather general, so I'd occasionally change what he suggested. So instead of Courderoy's conflict being that he "lost his button," I changed it to "lost something."

This activity amazingly kept him interested the whole time. It was worth the entire project just for this portion. He named the character, setting, and conflict in thirteen of his favorite books and he thought it was a game. Parenting win.

After we finished each of the books, we had extra sticks left over. We then came up with our own ideas for characters, settings, conflicts, and "special items" that could appear in stories. Conflicts were pretty tricky, so I came up with most of those. He did about half the characters and most of the settings and all of the "special items." When we were done, we had this:

I made a little card that showed a little story arc and we looked at each of the books to see how each one had a character that tried multiple times to resolve a problem, and then finally did in the end.

Now for the game. We stuck all the sticks into a tall tin. The game was to pull out one of each color and create a story using what you get.

I wasn't sure if the project was going to die at this point, but he was really excited to play. Daddy went first, then the kid, then Mommy. Then we all went again. As a bonus, I think he'll actually want to play again.

If you're interested, you can check out the kid's first story here: Story Sticks: The Bored Wizard.

This Week in Tweets: I Can't Get that Oompa Loompa Song Out of my Head

My personal ten favorite tweets from this past week.

This week in tweets made possible by: @mikeyversace @sbellelauren @SDenckhoff @Cheeseboy22 @BorowitzReport @MomsBitching @TheWreckingDoll

Now go... follow the funny.

(FollowtheFunny is a Twitter list of the tweeps that have recently appeared on my This Week in Tweets.)

Hope-y Change-y Gas Prices

So I saw this picture on Pinterest the other day. Of course I didn't pin it and now I can't find it again on Pinterest. Dammit. So instead I turned to Google Images. Bam! (Google, you rock, BTW.)

Here's one version of the picture:

Turns out, there are now many of these floating around:

    

Now dear Republicans, I know how you're feeling right now. Really, I do. You really are not a fan of the President and you can't stand the idea of another four years of him in office. Oh how I remember the George W. Bush years when I felt EXACTLY that way.

Unfortunately, there's a little problem with this whole post-it campaign you've got going here. The first problem is that this argument was first posed by Michele Bachmann during one of the Republican Presidential debates, and really, you should think a little harder before repeating a Bachmann argument. There is sure to be a flaw.

Have you figured out what it is yet? No, it's not that gas wasn't really $1.78 a gallon. That part is actually accurate. The problem is that there's just about nothing that the President of the United States can do to impact that number. Sure, he can set the energy policy for the country, but even assuming that Congress got on board 100% (which we know is unlikely), that would still have next to no impact on the actual price of gas.

What's that you say? The President could allow more drilling for domestic sources of oil? Oh yes! I had forgotten how we Americans live in a tiny little bubble and things that happen in the rest of the world do not impact us. Because guess what, it turns out that in 2011, the United States was a net EXPORTER of petroleum products. We actually sold more gasoline products to the rest of the world than we imported.

And here is where you need to remember your high school economics lessons. It's a basic supply and demand curve, folks. Lots of people in the world using gasoline means that the people who produce gasoline can charge more for it. It doesn't matter where those people live these days, because a barrel of oil pretty much has a single price anywhere in the world at any given point. So we can turn to offshore drilling or drilling on "protected" land all we want. Heck we can start boiling baby seals and bald eagles down into oil, and the price of a barrel of oil isn't going to budge.

The only thing that's going to make your gasoline bill go down is you driving less or getting a more fuel efficient car.

So I'm sorry that the President hasn't stopped gas prices from rising. Perhaps you're also upset with him because War Horse didn't win Best Picture or because of the amount of snowfall you received this winter. Sorry folks, but "Hope and Change" didn't mean "I've got a magic wand."

I know you're not a fan of his policies, but how about you complain about the things that he actually does have control over. Go back to griping about Obamacare or the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell or the creation of The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Those are legit and I welcome the debate.

Come to think of it, the President probably does, too.