Text and Java

  Last night we held our third annual PeepApalooza, which for the uninitiated, is basically all of the leftover Easter candy+shoe boxes+creativity I stocked up on Peeps a few days after Easter and the ladies at Payless really hooked me up this year with four trash bags of shoe boxes. All with lids! We had a great turnout, mostly families. I wish I could post more photos here, but I took pictures of the kids holding their masterpieces and I'm not sure what the legal situation is with library kids on personal blogs. If you want to see more, check out the pix on #bclsreads, our Instagram tag. Or check out my post on last year's PeepApalooza .       As usual, my boss outdid herself with the Peepbusters. She says she was inspired when she found the oversized Peeps at a local store. I love the effort she put in on the background.      Not to be outdone, I redid the cover of one of my favorite books.  It never fails to amaze me ho...

My library is encouraging everyone to take photos of their bookshelves and share them (aka "shelfies"). I shared mine, and thought it would be awesome to post it here as well. This awesome Tardis bookcase was a birthday present from one of my best friends. She made it with her own two hands!

Last summer I was eavesdropping on some of the ten to twelve year-olds at a craft program and they were talking about Gravity Falls. That night, I went home and found it on demand. AND I WAS HOOKED. I even have a Gravity Falls quote as the signature on my personal emails. That said, the library was way overdue for a Gravity Falls party. I tried to keep it in the spirit of the show, and tried to tie the theme of exploring the mysteries and legends of a town to our local towns. This is what I came up with, please don't sue me Disney. We began by watching the first ever episode of the show, in case any of my kids had never had the chance to check it out. They had all actually seen it, but not in some time, so that worked out. I set them up with popcorn and it took about 15 minutes to watch. I set up a "Mystery Shack" on one side of the room, the food table on the other, and for crafts we HAD to make Dipper's journal. I folded a piece of red construction paper (...

Once upon a time, in 2012, I read a book on my Kindle called Wanted Dead or Undead by Angela Scott and I LOVED it. Now, I am not a fan of old west lit, and I was kind of at the end of my zombie obsession, but there is just something about Scott's writing that sucked me in. It's storytelling magic. These are fun reads that feature a smart, fearless hero who can not only think for herself, she is strong enough to drag a posse through a desert wasteland of biters. Red rocks! Now, two years later, there are two more books in the series. And it is just as much fun as the first one. In honor of a very "Red" holiday, Valentine's Day, I am super please to be able to present, along with Angela Scott, a chance for one lucky winner to get the complete Zombie West series and a 10 dollar gift card for Amazon! How much does that rock? a Rafflecopter giveaway

 My daughter and I found these awesome plastic ornaments at Walmart for .84 each. We grabbed three and both said (at the same time) Doctor Who ornaments! We needed one Doctor Who for the house, one for a gift, and the third we decided to make Minecraft themed. I had a pile of useless Scrabble tiles laying around, so I printed a bunch of images in squares. To size them, I created a square in publisher the exact size of a tile and measured each image on the square before moving on to the next one.  Then, I went on a glitter hunt. Warning! I found the perfect Minecraft green in a very fine glitter, but it turns out fine glitter is the last thing you want for an ornament like this. Seriously, the chunkier the better!   The images were cut out and modge podged onto the Scrabble tiles. I made larger images and modge podged them onto the front of the ornament (I wanted them on the back of the ornament, but the plastic created some sort of warping effect that made...

 I just had to post about our Doctor Who Anniversary Party at the library. We made it all ages and this is one of those times when I really HATE our library's policy of not taking photos of participants without getting all of the forms signed (which more often than not is just impossible). So I have only shots of our food table and the "museum", but the real stars of the show were the families who came out to celebrate. Almost everyone was in costume. We even had a baby Tom Baker and a baby Matt Smith.  I made the "fish sticks" and custard the night before. The custard was instant vanilla pudding and the fish sticks were sugar cookies rolled in brown sugar and cinnamon. An idea I stole from here. We had "Weeping" Angel Food cake, bananas for the 9th doctor, and "jelly babies" for the 4th. The jug on the table with the yellow and red lid was actually filled with water and human hand prop.  We led our guests chill for 15 minutes. W...

That's not me in the picture, but I loved it and had to share. (It's from girlslife.com) 13 in 13 Horror Challenge  I was in the mood for a truly spooky read. Blame the cold fall nights, or the crunchy leaves on the sidewalks. Blame my weird taste, or just my mood. Whatev's. It's time to get the horror on. What I wasn't really prepared for was the complete lack of horror books out there. Seriously! Where are they? Good luck finding them in Barnes and Noble. They have reshelved the little they sell into general fiction or SciFi. I kid you not. What they have on offer is all old boy's school (King, King, Hill, King).  So, I dedicate this challenge to the ladies of horror. I am also going to pound out some classics I have missed over the years. My major focus this year will be on HAUNTED HOUSES.  I used this list and this list as well as this to formulate a general pile of titles to get going on. I'm not going to list them here in case I ...