Why Cosplay?

Once a year for the past few years, at least a few of our family have attended either Denver Comic Con or StarFest. It's hard to explain if you've never been to one, but it's basically a convention for geeks and nerds and fans of all sorts. If you're into sci-fi (books or movies), super heroes, fantasy, table top games, comic books, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, programming robots, building models, meeting actors from TV shows, listening to panel discussions on how to write Steam Punk, attending workshops on how to draw manga or apply monster makeup for horror movies, there's something for everyone (okay, maybe not everyone . . . but you get my point: it's more than just comic books).

One of my favorite parts is Cosplay (playing dress up). People dress up as characters from books or movies or TV shows or web comics, etc. I love looking at the costumes. The time and effort some people put into creating a costume and/or applying makeup is impressive. Take this "Groot" for example:

I first tried wearing a costume to a convention mainly to bond with my daughter. I mean, look at a couple of the amazing costumes she has made:

Once there, I realized how much more fun it is when I'm in costume! You get some interesting looks walking down the streets of Denver! 

At the Con, I keep my eye out for others dressed as my same character and we have fun comparing costumes. One year John and I dressed as Kaylee and Jayne from "Firefly" - I found two other Kaylees and John found two other Jaynes (actually, I think he saw about 10, but we only got a picture with 2):

My favorite thing about Cosplay is creating the costume. I have always loved arts and crafts, and I rarely get the opportunity to play with my art supplies. Choosing a character, designing a costume, sewing bits of it, painting other parts, making jewelry and accessories, . . . it all appeals to my inner artist.

This year, I'm taking Helene and her friend Becca to StarFest. The girls decided to be campers from Camp Half-Blood (the Greek demigod camp in the Percy Jackson books). So I decided to be Athena to go with their theme. Here are a couple of images I found that I wanted to model my costume after:

The first part of the fun is hitting the 2nd hand stores and craft stores and trying to envision what I can make without spending a fortune. I wanted my Athena to have some battle armor on - at least a breastplate. Do you know how hard it is to find breastplate armor for women (that isn't totally revealing, anyway)? So I made my own, using a $1.99 corset from Goodwill.

I knew I could find a disembodied baby doll face at Hobby Lobby. How did I know that?? Kinda creepy, but I figured that plus some rubber snakes would make a good Medusa head (which Athena wears on her armor).

Figuring out how to make this look more like armor:

 Trying the breastplate armor on over my sheet (Greek peplos) to see if this will work:

 Figuring out how to make the snakes less floppy:

And an obstacle I didn't expect: I bought the corset large, knowing it would have to go over my toga/peplos. I did not account for how much stretchiness would go away once I painted it! So I found these little fasteners to extend the existing fasteners and give me a little more breathing room:

It's all these little challenges that make creating the costume even more fun.

Another fun part of the process: getting to show off the final product!

Easter Egg Hunt 2017

Our kids are getting older, but I'm not quite ready to abandon the egg hunt, so we took it up a notch this year. The kids were provided with clues that led them to their jackets, then their water bottles, then their shoes. . . A filled plastic egg and another clue was in each of those locations, and they were instructed to gather all of those things in their bags as they went along.

The clue in their shoes led them to the cabin and instructed them to look for Ernie (the elk skull hanging in our cabin). Those are Easter eggs in his eye sockets.

Ernie's clue led them to the tree house, and that final clue led them to the lake. This was our way to sneak in a little hike! The Easter bunny had dropped a few eggs along the trail. See if you can find the blue egg in this picture:

Best of all, the Easter Bunny had left Easter baskets at the lake, and the Mama Easter Bunny had a picnic lunch with her.

Greta had the happiest Easter ever:

My Review of the Great Wolf Lodge, Colorado Springs

We spent a couple of nights at the new Great Wolf Lodge over spring break. We also stayed at the GWL in Dallas a few years ago, so I will make a few comparisons to that. Overall it was fun, and I recommend it. Just a few tips and things to be aware of:

Arrival/Check-In:
They say if you check in at 4:00, your room will be ready. This is highly unlikely. They were still cleaning rooms and trying to get them ready for guests past 5:00 pm on the day we arrived. The lobby was full of families, luggage, and screaming toddlers. My recommendation is arrive early (officially you can arrive as early as 1:00, but the manager said they would let people in even earlier to avoid big lines at 1:00). Leave your luggage in the car. Bring in a bag of swim stuff. You check in at the front desk, then head to the water park and play until you eventually get a text notifying you that your room is ready. There are lockers in the water park area and several places to eat (without even needing to change clothes). When you check in, you get a wrist band that acts as your room key and can have charging capabilities, if you want. It's nice not having to carry around a key or wallet or anything while you're playing.

Rooms:
You can see all the options on the website. In Dallas, we stayed in one of the themed rooms. It has a layout like this:

I thought our kids were too old for the theme this time, so I got a standard room (layout below). The advantage that I now see to the themed room is that the kids' bunk beds are almost in their own separate room. There's no closable door to their area, but it's almost entirely walled in and provides parents with a little more privacy and less noise at night (as opposed to having everyone in the same big room, listening to each other toss and turn).

The rooms are new and clean and spacious enough. There were adequate outlets and USB ports in the nightstand. 

Complaints: 1)The beds are uncomfortable and the pillows are too big (John was calling me the princess & the pea for feeling this way, so maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I would at least bring my own pillows next time.) 2)The walls are thin; we were awakened by a crying baby at 3am. Bring earplugs. 3)The bathroom does not have enough places to hang wet swimsuits and towels. I would recommend bringing suction cup hooks. Our bathroom had one double hook on the door and one small towel rack. That's it. Not even one of those retractable clothes lines in the shower. We had to take our swimsuits off of the shower rod every time someone wanted to shower.

Activities:

There are special passes available that include activities. We didn't do that. The water park is included, and we did a couple of extra activities at an extra cost. 

The Water Park is great. It was not as big as the one in Dallas. No lazy river. But it was also less crowded feeling than Dallas, so that was nice. Lines were not too long for rides, especially in the morning. There are several big water slides of different types (some scary, some just fun and relaxing), a wave pool, and a play area in the middle where you can climb, shoot water at each other, and so on.

Mini-Golf is $7/person. It's a small 9-hole course, but fun.

John and Helene both enjoyed the Ropes Course. I think it cost $13/person.

There was an arcade and several other activities available that we did not do. The kids did MagiQuest a few years ago in Dallas and loved it. I think it's worth the money if your kids are old enough to let them run around the hotel on their own. It's around $30 because you have to buy a wand and activate it.

Food:
There are several restaurants in the GWL. We didn't try all of them; we went out to dinner both nights just to get out of the hotel for a while. We had breakfast included in our stay one morning, and it was great! A big breakfast buffet with lots of fresh fruit, oatmeal, grits, waffles, bacon, sausage, eggs, potatoes, good coffee, ... All the usual hotel stuff, but much better quality food than the typical (Hampton Inn level) hotel buffet.
The next morning we had to leave pretty early, so we got breakfast sandwiches at the Dunkin' Donuts (in the GWL), which opens at 6:30.
We had lunch at the Barnwood restaurant in the GWL, and it was surprisingly good quality, locally sourced, freshly prepared food:

The Barnwood also has happy hour (1/2 price drinks and appetizers) every day from 3-5:30, so we took advantage of that, too.

It was a fun staycation. I recommend it if you can get a good deal. The best option I found was to book at least 60 days in advance, so you can take advantage of the Early Saver deal (40-50% off). https://www.greatwolf.com/colorado-springs/deals

Kitchen Remodel

We have a wonderful kitchen - it's large; it has an island; it has wood floors and granite tile countertops. We've left it alone for the first 10 years of living here because it's been serviceable, and in the grand scheme of things, actually very nice. But I never did love the color of our cabinets - with the wood floor, I just felt like it was too much brown/yellow/tan. And while the countertops were awesome because I could set hot things down on the granite tiles, the tile aspect had some drawbacks. It's difficult to clean the grout, and the vertical tiles starting coming loose, falling off and breaking!

Here you can see one missing tile and one repaired tile that had fallen and broken:

Very nice - nothing to complain about - but a lot of brownish yellow going on:

The sink was a pretty standard double sink. I thought about getting one big sink (kinda like a farm sink, but without the apron on the front because that wouldn't work in this corner), but I leave dishes "soaking" (okay, just piled up for no good reason) on one side of the sink too often to go for a single sink basin. I need to have one side to pile things and one side available for washing my hands, vegetables, etc. I ended up getting a sink that is bigger on one side, and I love it. (picture later with the "after" shots)

Another odd thing about the kitchen was that the island had an overhang on the left side, like you should put stools there and use it as a breakfast bar, but it would have been too crowded with the fridge over there. So we never did, and it was just wasted space for 10 years.

To eliminate that wasted space but still keep the island as wide as it was, I decided to build a set of shelves under the overhang. It would be a good spot for cookbooks and spices.

Lucy and Greta "helped":

After I got the shelving unit constructed, I added beadboard to each end of the island. I bought the version that was already primed because I knew I was going to paint all the cabinets white eventually.

We hired people to tear out the old countertops and tile backsplash and to install the new countertops:

Julie helped:

The new countertops are granite, with a leathered finish instead of the traditional polished finish. It has a little bit of texture to it and a more natural stone look.

My new sink, with my very biggest pan fitting all the way flat in the bigger side!!:

Tobie and Lucy supervised the work. Lucy is sitting on an area that used to have a small bar made of 12" wide tile. We did not have this replaced with granite because I wanted to find some different material to go here (perhaps wood), and I wanted it to be wider than it was before. Wide enough to use as a breakfast bar, since there's actually enough room for people to sit over here without being in the way.

Another already-present feature of my kitchen that I've always loved is these slide out shelves. So I kept all of my existing cabinetry and just started painting everything white. I won't include many pictures of the painting process because it took forever. I sanded everything, then applied primer, then applied 2 - 3 coats of paint. With all the drying and clean-up time in between coats, the process was extremely time consuming. Sure, I could have hired someone to do this, but I saved several thousand dollars doing it myself, and I ensured that it was done the way I wanted it done. :)

My dad has done quite a bit of DIY tiling, so I grabbed his help with the backsplash when he was in town. I thought about doing a gray backsplash, but those tiles were backordered and not available until after my dad would be back in Texas, so I went with white subway tiles instead.

There were some tricky corner cuts. I'm glad we invested in a tile saw for this and future projects.

New tile illuminated by some LED under-cabinet lights:

And the last major part of the project was the new breakfast bar. I found a place in town that had slabs of live edge butternut in their kiln. I believe butternut is related to maple; this particular tree was from Wisconsin. I bought an 8' long piece and had them plane it and round off one edge for me. The pieces on the left are cherry; butternut is on the right:

Here is the piece I bought, after I sanded off some of the bark from the edge:

My next step was to make a template and take it to a local welding shop to have these metal supports made:

Then I hired a friend of mine who is in the construction business to use a router to carve out spots for the metal braces and install the bar top. This is shot from the underside:

I did not stain the wood - just used Enduro-Var varnish to bring out the beautiful natural color of the wood. (The finished half is on the left):

Isn't this wood beautiful? (Please ignore the fact that there are dirty dishes in EVERY picture.)

Another part of the project was to clean out my pantry. Our shelves are two feet deep, and I found things that had been shoved to the back years ago. It looks fairly organized in the picture on the left, but in the picture on the right, you can see some of the mess that was lurking behind, out of reach and out of sight:

So I installed these pull-out shelves and have been very happy with them so far:

And...drumroll please...the final product:

And a couple of before/after comparisons...

Before from the family room looking into the kitchen:

After:

Before:

After: