Last night was Thanksgiving eve, and with a dinner of linguini and sausage we enjoyed the first of two wines Fresh and Easy sent me last week. I didn't have high hopes for it, expecting something tart and headache-inducing like two-buck Chuck, but I found it surprisingly pleasant. It's not a fancy wine that you'd give as a gift. It reminded me of the table wine that is poured so freely at our old haunt, the hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant Bruno's in Santa Monica.
The wine came with an information sheet that has all kinds of detail (13.3% alcohol) about the winemaking process that went into creating this wine, but really all I care about is how it tastes. I'm not a wine connoisseur, so all I can tell you is that I liked it. At the end of the evening the bottle was gone, and that's a good enough review, right?
Living so far away from any family members, my husband and kids and I have to create our own holiday traditions. For Christmas, these include driving around at night to look at holiday lights, leaving cookies out for Santa, and going to church on Christmas day. Yes, we are that family that our church friends see once a year. Where else are the kids going to wear their special outfits?
I'm hoping the creative little dolls from Elfing Around will help us create another fun Christmas tradition. The dolls are elves that come to visit children during the 12 days leading up to Christmas, and then travel back to the North Pole with Santa on Christmas day. During the 12 days, the elves get into elfin trouble at night. In the morning, the children wake up to discover the elves have been having magical adventures while they themselves were sleeping. For example, the dolls are found in front of the TV with a bucket of popcorn and a DVD case. They had an awesome movie night last night! Or as in the photo above, they spent the night reading books with a flashlight!
Here's what I love about this particular doll: it comes with a book of ideas. You can certainly take any old doll and stick it in weird places and say "Oooh! I wonder how that elf got stuck up in the Christmas tree!" but the Elfing Around dollmakers actually did that thinking for you, an extra step that I appreciate during this busy time of year. While your children are sleeping, you simply follow the plans that the included Parent Adventure Guidebook gives you, and voila. Magic happens every morning, 12 days in a row. You cap off the elves' visit with a note on Christmas day next to the empty cookie plate that tells the children that the elves will be back next year.
Despite my insistence that we only need one elf doll, the company sent me one for each of my children. Since the boys are prone to fighting over every scrap of plastic that enters the house, I am glad they had that foresight. The dolls are adorable and soft, and I have no doubt that my kids will love them. That doesn't even matter. I love them! And if I just keep doing the same thing every year, then it becomes a tradition by default.
One lucky commenter will be visited by an elf doll starting this year! Leave a comment here and include a working email address (if you don't your comment won't qualify, home pages don't count) to be entered into this giveaway - open until November 30, 2009 at 3:00PM Pacific Time. Winner will be chosen at random to receive one elf doll in time to make mischief during the 12 days of Christmas.
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I agreed to review the services of Pixorial quite a long time ago. It was such a sweet offer: send us a bunch of your old home videos, we'll digitize them, upload them to a website, and you can edit and create movies with them. Bam! Considering that most of our home video footage is on mini DV and (cough cough) VHS-C, I loved this opportunity.
I have no way to digitize VHS-C footage, so I appreciate Pixorial's mission. They'll take VHS, VHS-C, MiniDV, Hi8 cassette, 8mm cassette and (GASP) Betamax, all for different prices. Shipping is secure, as far as I have experienced, and you receive your media back once the digitizing is done.
Of course, then it took me almost six months to get my act together. I've had media sitting on their servers for quite a while. Tonight I finally played around with it, and here is one result:
The editing tools are rudimentary and clumsy, and there doesn't seem to be an option to add a music track. But if you want to take a long video tape and break it into shorter clips that you can then email to friends and family, this service is fantastic.
I was inspired to finally play around with Pixorial because today I got my Flip Video camcorder in the mail from Amazon (yes I actually paid for it). It was SO EASY to get it up and running. It even came with 2 AA batteries! Pop them in, turn the camera on, and you're off. Here's my test video:
Videos are loaded to your computer with the FlipShare software that comes in the camera. This, too, has rudimentary editing tools. Very rudimentary. The trim tool is not very intuitive and you have to open separate windows for each file to trim it, then if you want to edit clips together you drag them into another window blah blah blah and then 100 years later you have a movie. At least you get to add music, but after all that, why bother? It is easy, however, to upload videos to the internet. Just click on youtube and it loads right to your account.
The convenience of this pocket-sized camera (well, a large pocket) and the quality of the video is worth the splurge, I say. I used my birthday money towards the purchase. Happy birthday to me! For editing purposes, I will look elsewhere.
Two weeks ago GM gave me a Yukon Denali Hybrid to drive from Los Angeles to the Venetian in Los Vegas for SITScation, a small conference for new bloggers. The conference was lovely, storming the party of Blog World Expo was fun and networky, and staying in the Venetian was indulgent. I learned how to place a bet at the sports book when I bet $10 on Notre Dame and I won even though they lost because they beat the spread. Ha!
But the true luxury of this roadtrip was the vehicle. I really wished I was using it for a family trip because the first thing I noticed (well, besides the sheer size of it) was the drop-down video screen, the DVD player, and the two sets of wireless headphones that came inside. We could plug our kids in and not have to hear from them the whole time. While roadtrips are great for family bonding, sometimes you just want some quiet already.
What I got instead was constant entertainment from my friend Katie, as we shared our life stories on the long drive. The size and cushiness of my seat, the smooth ride, the purring, sometimes soundless engine, all conspired to make me feel very comfortable. The hours passed quickly.
Once we got to Vegas, that's when I got nervous. The Denali's retail price was over $64,000. If I so much as dinged the thing, I have no idea what would happen. Did I mention that it's enormous? We were sitting up so high in comparison to our normal little cars that we actually ducked when driving up the ramp inside the Venetian's parking garage, because we were afraid we wouldn't make the vertical clearance.
Black leather seats. Onstar. GPS with a sassy voice that made me name the car "Supafly." I started to tell people it was like driving a home theater.
As far as gas mileage, here is what I can tell you. I failed to do the math. I guess I was tired or something because at the times when it would have been appropriate to write down the miles and the gas pumped, I did neither. The car itself told me that it averaged 18 mpg for the trip, but I have to say I feel like we did better. We started with a full tank, and only had to put 3/4 of a tank back in to make it home.
If I had a spare $60K hanging around, I probably would not spend it on this. If everything else was taken care of, however, and I had a family of hockey players, well, at least it's a hybrid.
This is one of those posts about a kids' DVD that started out as a quick review and giveaway but quickly devolved into the mad ramblings of a mother sidelined by a terrible headcold. I have been putting off this review for oh, about three months and I feel so bad about it that I am posting this anyway to purge myself of the demon guilt.
I work for a company that does behind-the-scenes stories about the making of movies. Much of what we do turns up on the movies' DVD's as bonus material featurettes. One of our proudest accomplishments are the DVD and Blu-Ray of the movie "Coraline," directed by Henry Selick and starring the voice of Dakota Fanning.
Here's where my foggy brain splits off into weirdness. Henry Selick also directed "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and we went to a Halloween party last weekend hosted by our wonderful friends Dennis and Julie. Dennis happens to be a "NBC" fanatic, and the entire house was decorated with props and images from the movie. He turned the garage into a twisted funhouse, complete with a giant blowup figure of Oogie Boogie. Yikes.
...and Dakota Fanning's little sister Elle voices the title character in "A Very Brave Witch" by Scholastic which I agreed to review. It came quickly in the mail and I let it sit for weeks. And then I showed my children the DVD finally, prepared to log where they laughed and where they screamed.
What surprised me is this lovely little DVD is a collection of short videos that are story books come to life with animation and voice talent. The readings are paced like someone is reading you the story. The music is not overpowering. The animation is not complicated. In short, it is the opposite of sensory overload. And I loved it.
My children, who are accustomed to the slick CGI in Pixar films, were bored. When I showed it to them in the morning they were more engaged by it. And then I showed them "The Nightmare Before Christmas," which is a stop-motion animated film, quite unlike CGI in its way. They loved that, too. And then another showing of "A Very Brave Witch?" Absolutely entertaining. I had to desensitize the kids from the other stuff in order for them to enjoy the simpler things.
Watching this DVD with them made me want to sit and read them the stories the old fashioned way.
GIVEAWAY: Two readers who comment here WITH CONTACT INFO IN THE BODY OF THE COMMENT by the end of this week will receive this DVD as a gift from Scholastic. Comment away!
We're headed to Vegas as soon as I finish this post, for SITScation, a tiny little blogger conference, kind of like the Cinderella to BlogWorldExpo's rich stepsisters. GM kicked down a Yukon Denali Hybrid, which can fit about 3,438 more people, but it's just the two of us. Good thing, more room for our evening gowns.
The car makes little chirping noises even before you turn it on. It comes with wireless headphones for two. It's a sweet ride. Now let's see if I can adjust to a hybrid. More from the road at Whrrl.com when I put up stories.
I have declared the Great Free Crap Giveaway a success. And here's why:
The enormous pile of free crap that was too good to throw away but not useful for me has been reduced to a small tote bag's size.
I may have brightened the days of a handful of people, even just a little bit.
It cost me less than $30.
Now, that $30 is not an amount that I toss around with no thought. I mean, I could have just trucked the whole mess to Good Will or Salvation Army.
This post was meant to be a quick update about what's left. But since I did this, I went to a few events and added three more bags of free crap to the pile. I hope you all know that when I say "crap" I mean it in a snarky, loving way. Some of the free crap I get is not crap at all, like the Hershey's Dark chocolate bar, for example. You can never go wrong with giving me free chocolate. Oh, unless it's made with ground herbs and cranberries and bark, like that one from Barney's I got at some event. Sorry, Barney's, but you cannot give a woman chocolate that tastes like that chocolate bar did. It tasted like SOAP. Even if it's "good for you," a substance does not deserve the name chocolate unless it tastes good.
So. Some people got fun little packages in the mail this week and some of them even tweeted about it. That's all I ask. Spread the word, people. Tell your friends about me. I like the attention. I even buy it with free crap.
