Ten Years Later: Remembering 9/11

I was a senior in high school. I had been listening to a CD on my way to school. When I arrived, early (I hate being late), the halls were unnaturally quite. The TVs in all of the classrooms were all on CNN. I found some of my friends, and was shocked to see their worried and tearful faces. A plane has hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. I had no idea what the Twin Towers were at that time, but I understood the terribleness of the event that was happening. A second plane has hit the towers. I remember sitting in choir, every eye glued to the TV, when the first tower fell. A collective gasp rang through the room. Then the crying began. Even here in Boise, ID, there were kids, teachers, and friends who had loved ones in New York that they were now fearing for. I remember that day as a day of silence, questions, tears, prayers, and hugs. Every class was spent watching and waiting for more information. I had to work that night at the fast food place I was employed at. We were really slow. A woman came in and said that she worked at the mall. They closed four hours early because nobody wanted to go out into crowded public areas. There was a fear because of the military bases in the area. Would they be a target?

I saved the papers from that week. There wasn't a single section of the paper that wasn't devoted to reporting the attack. Yesterday, I spent a few hours photographing these papers and putting a slideshow together. I am not a professional photographer, cinematographer, nor am I a computer expert. I know enough to get by in life. For some reason, blogger won't let me load the slide show, so I will just put up a few of the photos. I am sorry for the blurriness of some of the photos. We will never forget.

Favorite Landscapes

Some of my favorite landscape shots that I have taken have been from the trip I took to Hawaii in October of 2008. I love the beach, so naturally I love taking photos of the surrounding landscape.

Our trail to the Waianapanapa Caves

The Legend of Waianapanapa Caves:
     Once upon a time, a Hawaiian princess named Popoalaea fled from her cruel husband. The chief, Kakae. She hid on a ledge just inside the underwater entrance to this cave. A faithful serving maid sat across from her fanning the princess with a feather Kahili, symbol of royalty. Noticing the reflection of the Kahili in the water, the chief, Kakae, discovered Popoalaea's hiding place and killed her. At certain times of the year, tiny red shrimp appear in the pool, turning the water red. Some say it is a reminder of the blood of the slain princess.

These caves were really cool, with pools of water deep enough for swimming. One of the pools looked really inviting, but as we weren't wearing our suits, we didn't take a dip.

water rushing into the lava tube

This photo was taken from inside a lava tube. A lava tube on the surface, such as this one, is a tunnel left behind from the lava flow. This was on Maui at a small black sand beach.

These next three pictures were taken near Hana, Maui, Hawaii. It is a long and winding drive to Hana. The road is very narrow in most places, especially around the corners. You cross over 59 bridges, 46 of which are one lane. There are approximately 620 curves. Not a good road for those who experience car sickness, but a very beautiful drive.

This last photo, also taken during our drive to Hana, is of the Seven Sacred Pools. They are a series of waterfalls, which pool under each fall to create one of the Seven Sacred Pools. The stream then flows into the ocean. There are actually more than seven pools, but there are seven that are easily seen while walking the trail down to the coast. The pools are bigger than they look in the picture. They would easily fit about three people in them.

Seven Sacred Pools

Harry Potter Templates, Instructions, and Recipies

So, I have had a number of people asking for the templates for the candy boxes and what not that I used for the Harry Potter party. Here they are! I hope anyone who wants to use them finds them easy to put together and helpful in planning a great Harry Potter marathon.

Click here to go to the template for the Chocolate Frog Boxes. Click on the "Download Image" to get the template. I had to re-size mine a little so that the chocolate frogs I had would fit in them. I found a chocolate frog mold on Amazon. The chocolates were just slightly too big for the original size of the box.

 
Click here to get the template for the Bertie Botts Beans Box. Again, I re-sized this once I had it downloaded to make it easier to work with. I have since found another template, click here, that I think might be easier to make. I haven't fully read the instructions on the second template, but the first doesn't really show you how to close the top. I punched holes in each section and strung red raffia through the holes and tied the ends together in a bow. For the windows, I took transparency film and cut the pieces slightly larger than the windows so I could glue it. You could use clear cellophane, but I thought the transparency film would be stronger and hold up better. WARNING: if you plan to make a lot of these boxes, they hold quite a few beans in them. We made close to thirty boxes and went through about fifteen pounds of jelly beans. The cost can be high, though the guests reaction to getting them at our party made it worth it in my mind.

For the logbooks that I made, I wanted to cover them with Harry Potter paper. The problem I ran into was that all the HP paper I found in scrapbook stores wouldn't work well for what I wanted. The solution: I made my own paper. Click here to get the paper to use for any number of HP crafts you want to create. If you want to create your own paper, wordle.net is a great site, though it does take some getting used to. You also have to do a download in order for it to work.

My sister made the Marauder's Maps. She followed the directions on the site with only one change. She aged the paper by spraying it with tea and baking it in the oven. She found the map by looking through the craft links on The Leaky Cauldron site.

The wand making instructions can be found here. We filled our wands with sand to give them a more realistic weight. Everyone had fun making these and then dueling each other.

Recipies:

To make the acid pops, you will need sour suckers, pop rocks, and water. I had trouble finding sour suckers in my area, but finally found them at Zurchers. They also had the pop rocks there. I just love that store! Anyway, to make the acid pops, you'll need to unwrap the suckers. Fold a paper towel up and place in a small bowl with a little water. You just need enough water to soak the paper towel through. Roll the sucker around on the paper towel to get it damp. Next, roll the sucker in pop rocks until the surface is covered. You will hear the pop rocks pop and fizzle, but don't worry, there will be enough pop left in them. Wrap the suckers in wax paper. I would advise making these within twenty-four hours of serving. The longer they sit, the less the pop rocks react when eating.

The stand was made from a styrafoam cone. I simply painted it green and stuck the sucker sticks in it to create my own sucker tree. You can purchase a lollipop stand if you would like to reuse one. Amazon has a fairly simple one for a reasonable price.

The cockroach clusters were easy to make. I simple broke up pieces of pretzels and covered them in chocolate. They did look like they might have pieces of cockroaches in them, but they tasted great!

The pretzels wands were even easier to make than the cockroach clusters. I simply dipped the ends in melted chocolate and them took chocolate drizzel to create a zig-zagged look.

What did that road sign say?

I've seen some pretty weird road sings in all of my travels, but this one is just hysterical to me. It can be found just outside of Custer, Idaho. This little town is a ghost town, and after viewing the sign, you might be able to guess why.

I wonder if the townsfolk drew a lottery to decide who would be the speed-bump for the day. Like in that movie from the nineties, "The Lottery", where every year one unlucky person had their lot drawn and they were stoned to death to keep the town's population down. Then again, maybe they just don't like to have pedestrians walking around.

Harry Potter Party: The Stamps

Oh the stamps, the stamps! I have found a new hobby in carving my own stamps to use for various things. I spent three months finding the images and carving the stamps. I made twenty-seven for this event, and would have loved to make more if only I had time. I might still! Only two stamps are missing in the above photo due to the fact that my eldest sister has borrowed them. They are the stamps that I carved for the Hogwarts wax seals that I made for the invitations, and the Gringotts stamp made for the money bags.

Ron, Harry, and Hermione

I put a lot of effort into carving these and really pushed myself to carve more and more detail. It was kind of funny, I was sitting there thinking

Hogwarts Castle

that I wasn't going to be able to do a good enough job on the carves because they are so detailed. I was scared to start carving because I didn't want to mess up. I actually had to tell myself to just start and take my time. It can be difficult to see the detail of the stamps in these photos, especially since they have been stamped so many times over now and they have ink in all the little crevices. We cleaned them up the best we could after the event, but we could only get so much of the ink off of them. It doesn't help that Carma, Joyce, and I then went and stamped them in our logbooks in the various different colors we wanted to use.

Below are some scanned images of the stamps that were hidden around our property for the guests to go and find, with the help of some clues, of course. Some of the ink colors don't quite show up, but you get the main idea. Also, some of the images didn't stamp very clearly, but I went with the pages that had the best results.

So, all of these stamps were hidden in plastic boxes, painted so that they would blend more easily into the surroundings. The boxes are shown below.

I then had to type up clues to give them so that they would be able to find the boxes. I tried to incorporate anything from the Harry Potter movies and books that I could when writing the clues. I even made one of them into a poem, and believe me, it took awhile because writing has never been one of my strong points.

As you were able to see above, one of the images is of a dementor. Those who are Potter fans will know that the best way to recover from being near a dementor is to eat chocolate. Therefore, I made some chocolates, wrapped them up, and made labels for them.

Harry Potter Party: Honeydukes

At our first Harry Potter marathon, we had some treats. We had chocolate frogs and pretzel wands. This time around, we took it up a few notches. Well, you'll see in the pictures below.

I made twenty-seven of these Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans boxes, and quite frankly, if I have to make one more it would be too soon. 

These all had various flavors of Jelly Bellies in them, but none of the disgusting flavors.

We made thirty-five chocolate frog boxes, with the chocolate frogs to go with them. This year they had famous witch and wizard cards in them. I made twenty-three different cards in all and all thirty-five boxes had one in it.

We did have a jar of the gross beans. Unfortunately, the gross ones and the good ones looked exactly the same so you never knew what you were going to get. We added cockroach clusters and acid pops this year, pictured below.

Sorry about the acid pops picture being fuzzy. The guests were starting to arrive and I never had a chance to get another photo taken before people started taking them.
Carma made the marauder's maps again this year for everyone to take. We also had Honeyduke's bags for them to put all of their goodies in.

And finally, a photo of the whole Honeyduke's Sweet Shoppe.

And here is the link for the Marauders Map template and instructions. My sister made them. She put tea in a spray bottle and sprayed each map and them baked them to make them look old. 

Harry Potter Party: The Crafts

This is going to take at a few posts to cover. Partially because there was just so much going on, and partially because my sister took most of the photos (I was hosting and didn't get much of a chance) and she is on vacation right now. As soon as I get some photos from her I will do more posts. Right now, I'm going to focus on the things they made.

We had a couple of crafts available to the guests. One of which was making their own wands. Well, really, they needed to do this because what's a witch or wizard without a wand? So we sent them over to Ollivander's where Luna, aka Carma, gave them instructions. Luna was kind enough to fill in for Mr. Ollivander while he is recovering from his recent abduction by the death eaters. Here are some pictures of the wands, in varying degrees of closeness so you can see the detail.

The one in the center is mine!

These were made with paper, sand, hot glue, and three different paint stages. They were really fun to make. No two wands turned out the same, which was perfect, because no two wands in Harry Potter are the same.

We also had the option, mostly for the young kids that were there, to decorate their own Death Eater Mask. I spent some time painting plastic masks black so that they would be ready to decorate using paint pens and silver sharpies. Below is the mask I made to be an example at the craft table.

My Death Eater Mask!

People were seen wearing their masks and having duels with their wands throughout the second half of the day. It was great fun! The kids kept coming up to me and asking me how to do certain spells. I later found out that Carma/Luna kept telling them to go ask Professor Trelawney (me) when they were asking her. Thank goodness I'm a Harry Potter nerd and was able to tell them all the answers, even if it took me a while to remember the incantation.

Next post: Honeydukes!