In Which A Nerd Attempts to Discuss Fashion

Warning: May use sarcasm! If you are easily offended by my weirdness, consider abstaining from reading the following post...

Weird Fads
Call me a nerd, but I really don't get it. I'm not sure which is worse - the obsession with men's facial hair, or the obsession with curly strips of meat.

Facial Hair...

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Look, duct tape even comes in a mustache design!

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Or, curly strips of meat.

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Look, there's even bacon duct tape!

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Help! If you are part of these fads, please explain to me why they are so amazing! (and please don't just say, "Because they're awesome!"... even if you believe they are...)

As an aside, the Paris fad is becoming insane. In my defense, however, I was interested in Paris before it became a fad... and I'm kinda sad that it's a fad, since that means it might fade after a while! *sniffle* Oh well; I'll survive. {Btw: I'm in favor of the owl fad. Owls are cute and colorful. Owls look at you and seem to be smiling. Or they seem to be angry. Either way, they're interesting, and can be used in all manner of products, such as jewelry, notebooks, and scarves. However, a BACON scarf? I don't know... I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just too particular}.

"Klarabelle"

One of those things & Christmastime (two posts in one!)

(Part I)
I have always wanted to do one of these!!! So, I guess now is as good as a time as ever... (is that the expression?) (inspired by this post)

Listening to: If I Walk Away by Josh Groban (surprise, surprise0
Reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo... or at least, trying to.
Wearing: An Aerpostale t-shirt I found at the thrift store (mwahahaha), blue jeans, a purple sock and a grey sock, an Alice in Wonderland necklace I got for my b'day (thanks, Audrey and Natalie! :)) and my purity ring. And a flower in my hair.
Excited for: The Hobbit (December 14th!) and Les Miserables the movie (Christmas Day!).

(from)

You should probably know, if you don't already, that I am kind of a musicals nerd. Especially when the said musical involves 1800's times, revolutions, handsome young men, and France. I will freely acknowledge here that Les Miserables the musical does include some objectionable content and is not "for everyone", but I do believe that it can have redeeming value because it is a gorgeous story about how one man's mercy changed a life, and how the life he changed was able to influence others. Les Miserables teaches us that one little act of love can go a long way, and that hope and love are real, and they are worth fighting for! But, I also understand the objections some people have to the book / movie / musical; this is just my personal opinion and you may ignore it as you see fit! : )

Christmastime (Part II of the post! heehee)
Now, about your lovely selves... how are you all doing? Are your CHRISTmas decorations up? Christmas Day is coming so fast... I haven't even finished Christmas shopping! Today I got caught up in the stress and havoc that Christmastime can bring, and I realize that I need to slow down and focus on what Christmas is really about.

I love Christmastime. One of my chief pleasures is giving a gift and seeing it loved and cherished. I adore picking out the "perfect gift" for a friend or family member, and seeing their face light up when they open it. So I guess I need to stop stressing about gift-giving and simply enjoy the process!

Have a blessed day!
"Klarabelle"

P.S. Now listening to Josh Groban's version of Little Drummer Boy and not only anticipating two movies, but dinner as well. : ) Parmesan chicken... yum! And wishing my computer wasn't being difficult... but hey, we aren't perfect, so I guess we shouldn't require our computers to be perfect, either. : )

P.P.S. Ooh! I almost forgot to mention. Hobby Lobby, the amazing craft store, is facing some tough stuff right now. They didn't want to provide abortion-causing drugs to their employees (as part of their health insurance), so recently they were forced to file a lawsuit... an excerpt from the e-mail that Hobby Lobby's CEO sent out reads, "... Hobby Lobby and my family are forced to make a choice. With great reluctance, we filed a lawsuit today, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious LIberty asking a federal court to stop this mandate before it hurts our business. We don't like to go running into court, but we no longer have a choice. We believe people are more important than the bottom line and that honoring God is more important than turning a profit." Read the whole letter here and read more about it here. Please be in prayer for this situation!

SMASH Journals - a fashionesque post

Hey all!

What's up with ya'll? Hope you're all doing well! :)

The other day I was at Michael's and saw something called a SMASH Journal. I love journaling, scrapbooking, and squishing things, so I took a peek at it but then ahd to move on. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet... they look so amazing!

I'm guessing it's just another gimmick, but it looks like scrapbooking... the un-traditional way! :D I was never a committed scrapbooker (that's my mom's job), though I loved the photos, stickers and pretty paper. It looks like with SMASH, it's a journal / scrapbook made so you can write your thoughts, stick in special things, and smash it all in!

I'm enraptured!!!

Here are some pages from Smashbooks / related entities

(Pics from Pinterest)

The journals remind me of a special book my friend made for me when I was in the hospital for cardiac arrest. She decorated the pages with cute paper and different decorations, and made it so that visiting friends and family could write me a note in there. It's a book I will always love, cherish and be forever thankful for!

I'm famous for falling for gimmicks (I want an air plant...randomly) and it's typical for me to see something and think about it continually until I eventually buy it. I'm crazy, but I'm me. (I'm working on turning into a reformed me, the me that Jesus wants to be - it rhymes! - but it's a "me" long in the making.) I'm thinking about getting one of the journals and using it to chronicle the next year of my life... (I'm about to have a b'day). I journal obsessively and also enjoy handwriting random scenes of my book(s) in the same journal, so I would probably keep two journals, a SMASH one and a "normal" one.

I love looking at all the different pages people have uploaded on the internet. So inspiring...and each journal page is customized to that person's interests / thoughts of the day!

Anyway, what do ya'll think? Do you think they're a cute idea? Would you get one, or would you rather come up with your own version? :) If you got one, do you think you'd use it?

*A couple days later*
AAARRRGHH, I keep finding excuses not to post this! I wanted to put a pic up of me and my Smashbook (yes! I got one!), but I'm just going to publish this. :p

"Klarabelle"
*I am in no way affiliated with K&Company or their amazing SMASH journals, or Michael's, for that matter. I'm just a random blogger who saw their cool products at a cool store. :D

Impulse Buys...

I'm in the car, talking to my mom. I've just met my friend's adorable new puppy, and though I'm not even completely comfortable with dogs, I occasionally wish for one, so naturally I compensate these thoughts with discussing how one day after my current set of mice, Latte and Mocha, go to Mice Heaven I would like to get a hamster. Mom and I have just been to Good Will (after going to my friend's house), and I ask if we could go over to PETCO to look at hamsters "just for fun". Mom agrees and we walk into PETCO. After ooing and awing at the hammies, we of course, walk over to look at the mice. We see one there that's adorable! Her fur coloring and design is like we've never seen before, a little light brown coat with a white stripe across her face! My mom suddenly says something to the affect of, "Maybe you should add this one to your mice collection." Before I know it, we've got a PETCO guy chasing the mouse around the cage, trying to catch it. Of course, I want to buy two mice, because that way, when the new mice were introduced to the "old" mice, they wouldn't feel so outnumbered. :) The guy grabs the striped mouse, and we ask him to pick up another one, but he grabs the wrong one. I decide it's a sign [from God] that we were supposed to get that one, so we head back home to introduce the mice.

I begin to think my new mice are the youngest mice I've ever had because as I introduce them to my older mice, one of them looks for nipples! Then suddenly, as we we watch them, the striped mouse leaps into the air! I think she's still in the "flea" stage - a time young mice go through while growing up, involving lots of hopping.

Though Latte and Mocha seemed to enjoy meeting the newcomers, after putting them in the cage, Mocha acts aggressively towards them, and even makes one of them start bleeding! We move Mocha and Latte to my hamster cage, and leave the new mice in the old mouse cage. We realize that we need to get another wheel, so at the same time Mom decides to pick up some pictures she had framed.

The picking-up-the-pictures doesn't go so well. Mom has some problems with the way the framing and dry-mounting turns out, so after we finish at the craft store, we head off to PETCO to grab the mouse wheel and manage to pick up an Arby's sandwich on the way back.

After much annoyingness, we manage to give Latte and Mocha back their wheel, and give the new mice in the mouse cage the new wire wheel. However, Miss Stripe Mouse (who I nick-named "Flea") is climbing all over the bars and looking for a way to escape. I have never had a mouse do this before! While I walk in the bathroom to wash my hands, she sticks her head through a hole in the cage and almost gets all the way through! Thankfully Mom is in the room and stops her. (It's quite confusing but there is a large gap in the cage bars where the door hinge opens, and I've always worried that mice would escape from that hole!) Anyway, we decide that there's no way we're going to let the little mice stay in that cage, so we move them into a smaller, no-bars (more like a plastic aquarium) cage that I used to take Latte and Mocha to biology class earlier this year. After much stress, we all settled down for the night.

Now it looks like Latte and Mocha will be moving back into their old cate, and the mice will be staying in the aquarium until they are big enough for the hamster cage. (I can't put them in there now, because the bars are farther apart, being a hamster cage, and the mice might try to fit through. That's the reason I got the mouse cage in the first place).

ANYWAY, I have no idea why I wrote The Tale of the Impulse Buys in the present tense, I rarely enjoy reading books written in the present tense, much less enjoy writing that way myself. I guess you could say the impulse buys (Now named Countess Zinzindorf and Duchess Lavoisier...after people I read about in history and science - respectively - this year) have made my brain go haywire............................

Don't forget, it's still September! :)

"Klarabelle"

My Latest Thrift Store Find!

Greetings, to each and every one of my amazing blog-reader-cool-persons.  Hi!

How was your day?

Today Mom and I traveled to the thrift store because I had accumulated some items to donate there...  While standing in my favourite thrift store, she found me an epic shirt that's bright colors (I love bright colors!) and a cool brown coat, as well as some other clothes (like I needed more clothes...  but hey, shirts for $2?  Why not!?).  

I also decided to transform my room from: Meg's Lair (aka Phantom of the Opera theme) / Somewhere Over the Rainbow / the horde of stuff I don't know what to do with to... (drumroll, please) Meg's Lair / Somewhere Over the Rainbow / the horde of stuff I don't know what to do with / Christine's (or Lucie's) cool epic room, which I would kind of picture as white objects, roses, dressing tables, etc.  Not that any of that will actually show up in my room, but...  Since it's already an menagerie of disturbing-ness, why not make it more so by adding more splashes of color or more wall hangings or more random objects to distract the eye? (As you can tell, the theme of this blog post is kind of, "why not?"  And btw, Lucie is from A Tale of Two Cities.  I'm reading the book for school and there's a part of it that discusses her making the house into a home...very inspiring).

Then, Mom and I headed off to the BX.  The trip was ill-planned from the start because instead of going to the eyeglasses shop first, we became distracted and went into the BX.  So after we shopped there - ooh!  (I like to interrupt myself)  Mom got me these epic, rainbow, sparkly pencils!!!  (See below)

...and again...

Okay, I'm done.  I have yet to try them out, so I will try and let you know how cool they are.  But I am very pleased that the manufacturers included turquoise, the color of ovarian cancer awareness...  

Anyway, going back in time, we went to the eyeglasses place to get my bluebird glasses adjusted (oh, I haven't posted pics of my new glasses, have I?  Sorry!) and then ran back into the car.

On a side note, why are moms always right?  Not only do they have eyes in the back of their heads, they also seemed to know, 90% of everything!  For example.  Mom says, "You need to wear a heavy coat."  I don't, and then end up freezing, and then she tells me I can get frostbite.  Anyway, I was freezing because I layered instead of wearing my heavier, feather-filled coat.

But going back to the subject at hand...  we were unpacking our latest finds at home when we realised we'd left the stuff we'd bought at the BX (including the epic pencils) AT THE EYEGLASSES PLACE!  So we called the eyeball people, drove back, picked up the stuff and came home again...

So that's the story of today.  Except I'm not quite done.  Going back to the "Christine or Lucie's room" deal, I got this little mini chandelier votive holder thingy for $2!  (i.e. the title of my blog post!)

(I'm looking for a candle to put in it, but right now the scenty thing fit perfectly, so...yup!)  So the moral of this blog post is...

1 - shop at thrift stores!

2 - don't leave your bags at eyeglass places.

A temporary goodbye for now!  

"Klarabelle"

You know you have a weird life when...

...you're excited about going to Wal-Mart!  :)

I'm just gonna say...  I <3 Wal-Mart!  It has the best prices on yarn, jewelry (except for maybe Claire's - on clearance!!!), felt, googly eyes (actually I haven't done a price-comparison on googly-eyes...so I can't say for sure.  I'm just adding that in for fun.  :)) and Oreo Cookies ~ I think.  Anyway.

You know how, when you're super excited about something, you can't go to sleep?  Yeeah.  I had major issues last night, I stayed up until midnight, so then when I was s'posed to get up this morning...  well, let's just say I fell back asleep and had a weird dream about, I think it was...a hallway?

Update: I went to Wal-Mart and bought some more yarn for a scarf, and some treats for my mice!  I also found them some new soft bedding which hopefully, they will like...by the way, I adopted two more mice!  I forgot to blog about that - *fail*!  

DON'T PUT A GOOGLY EYE IN YOUR EAR!
"Klarabelle"

How to Shop at a Mall and Only Spend $1

Okay.

So, I really, really like to shop.  It's an interest that grew along with my age...  When I was 7, the last thing I wanted to go was go shoe shopping, but now, if someone asks, "Do you want to go shopping?" I'll say yes before...well, before they can ask twice!  (Admittedly, I still don't like shoe shopping, but clothes shopping is more acceptable to me than it used to be...)

So, recently I was invited to go shopping at the mall and I just got back home about an hour or so ago.  And I only spent $1.  Okay, technically, $1 and 25 cents.  I think it's a record...

What did I spend this small amount of money on?  Well thankfully I managed to escape Claire's and Justice without buying ANYTHING.  That probably broke one of my personal record's because Claire's clearance rack  usually has me, um...  wracking  my purse for money.  Or, alternatively, wracking  my brain for ways to make money...  (Pardon both of the super LAME puns).

The gumball machine got me.  That's right, it was the gumball machine that convinced me to spend my $1.  (Technically $1.25.  But I'm actually not sure how much I spent because I couldn't figure out if the machine ate my money, or if I bought an item, put it in my purse, forgot I put it in my purse, and then announced that the innocent machine had committed the horrible crime of stealing my money).  What did I buy?

Aren't they cute???  And they're super tiny...

So yep.  Cute little turtles, lions, penguins, IDK's, and crabs...  that's what I spent my $1.25 on!!!  (I will take this moment to point out the lil animal in the lower photo was given to me by a friend, so I didn't buy that one. :))

Okay, so I titled this thing, "How to Shop at a Mall and Only Spend $1", so I'm guessing you're waiting for some kind of amazing, money-saving ideas.  Here you go...

1. Only bring $1 to the mall in the first place.  Endeavor NOT to ask for favors, loans, or gifts from anyone else that you are shopping with. (You might want to bring money for tax, since items are labeled $1 but with tax, cost more than a dollar...)

2. Search the clearance racks, BUT, if you don't find anything you like, don't feel obligated to buy anything, even if you're shopping with friends who are dragging around bags and bags of items that they've purchased.  (On a note here, I'm generally the friend dragging around the bags of stuff, saying things like, "Will you buy something?  I feel like I'm buying too much...  If you buy something, it'll make me feel better..."  Note to self: BREAK THAT HABIT, KARA!  You're not helping anyone!  Except the stores...)

3. If you find something you really, really like that is over a dollar, wait a while before purchasing it.  (You kinda have to...if you've only brought a dollar...)  You might decide you don't like that item anymore.  OR, if you do really like it, you might come back and find the items all sold out, so, it was not meant to be.)  I struggle with this one, because sometimes I buy items and think, "Well, I really didn't want this."  But other times I DON'T buy items and then wish I had.  It's hard to figure out which items you really want / need / can use and which items are just impulse buys, luring away your money with an evil laugh...

4. Okay, I think that's it.  I might update this with ideas later, but...  OH!  Don't be influenced by, "Buy 10 get 1 free" if you didn't want the 10 in the first place.  Cashiers catch me off guard when they say, "You can get another of those for half price.  That's a really good deal."  But don't give in!  Unless you were planning to buy one for a friend, or something like that.

On a side note, I went shopping with really nice people who got me socks!!!

Aren't they epically cute?  :D

And we did a photo booth...  I've always wanted to do one of those since I saw "Stormbreaker", where the main character Alex enters a photo booth and is taken to the MI6 headquarters in London!  Yup...  so, I didn't get taken to MI6 or CIA (If I was, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you anyway...  although I wouldn't lie to you and say that I didn't, so you can know I'm telling the truth because I wouldn't lie to you...  But, I could be lying to you, saying that I'd never lie to you, but I wouldn't do that.  Trust me.) but I did have fun.  Side note to self though: Bring a pillow next time!  (I'm really short.  So, the photo was our heads, and a lot of blank space above our heads...  But the pics turned out amazing, so it doesn't actually matter.  :D)

Anyway, that's enough about my shopping experience...  I just wanted to share the joy and excitement of entering the mall of temptation and only spending $1.  Not spending any money at all however... that goal is far, far away.  :p

Hugs and Dreams,
"Klarabelle"

P.S. On a side note here, I think this is my longest blog post yet!