It's A Wrap!

The last couple days have mostly been focused on finishing my dad's birthday present. I tried not to blog about it because I didn't want him finding out exactly what I was making, even though I put up some pictures of Brittany earlier and mentioned frames, I think. Anyway, I used a frame from Ross to make a collage of sorts with seven pictures each of Brit, Kels, and myself, and eight pictures of Sam to fill all the spaces. I also had four 5" x 7" frames from Wal-Mart to put a picture of each of us girls in. Here are the ones I chose for the 5" x 7" frames:








Here are Brit's seven chosen shots:














Kels's seven:














Sam's eight:
















...and my seven:














...this is going to be a long [actual length, not word count] blog. Anyway, I finished all the pictures by about 4:30 today, giving me an hour and a half to get everything printed, set up, wrapped, and over to my folks' house.

This morning, Andrew and I put the pictures that we had [all but Kels's] into the montage frame. The dimensions given for each picture hole weren't for the picture needed; they were for the actual hole itself. So when I printed out the pictures at the correct dimensions, they ended up having some spaces showing on the sides. I figured that we could flip the backing around so that instead of the cardboard brown side facing inward and the black matching the back facing outward, black would be facing in and take away from all the spaces and it wouldn't matter about the back view because no one looks at the back anyway. It was a good idea. But also, for each picture hole, there wasn't a nesting space for the picture. So Andrew [so kind to put up with my frustration] taped them onto the plastic covering between the frame and the pictures while I laid underneath the glass table and told him which way to scoot the picture before taping.

No wait, it gets better.

After taking Kels's pictures in the afternoon, I realized that I had forgotten to get wrapping paper and a card at Wal-Mart earlier when we got more photo paper and a color ink cartridge. I asked my mom if I could use some of hers because she had extra and she said that I could. Looking at the selection, it was nothing but small rolls. I decided to go to Fred Meyer and get a big roll and just use that for other presents when the time comes [Andrew's birthday is coming up as well as Sam's]. At Fred Meyer, I picked up a shirt for my dad to go along with the picture gifts, a funny card [the front said something along the lines of "I wanted to give you the sun and the stars..." and the inside said "...but I decided to give you the moon instead!" and it had a picture of a cartoon man pulling down his pants. Of course, I taped a picture of my head on this guy's body. No big deal], and 2 rolls of silver wrapping paper [to go along with some bows I snagged from my mom]. When I got home I undid the plastic around the wrapping paper of one of the rolls and started unraveling the next layer of plastic. I thought to myself, "When does the wrapping paper start?" and realized what had happened:

They used a silver roll on the inside for clear wrapping material for gift baskets.

Of course this would happen. I call Kels and ask her to bring me a roll of my mom's stuff that she just bought. She does and it ends up being literally one tiny piece of wrapping paper [on an un-opened roll, no less] that barely covered one side of the photo montage frame. I decided that it wasn't meant to be, so I grabbed some boxes from the garage, put the frames in a Cheez-It box and the shirt in a food chopper box, put a bow on each, taped the wrapping paper sheet to the front of the montage frame, put a bow on the top, and called it good. At least the card had the proper "wrap job." Here are my presents mixed in with some others:


Don't be jealous of my skills. After my dad got home, we started up on the food.




Don't be jealous of my dad's cooking skills. Okay, you can a little bit. Although I didn't eat much [ate a muffin and some pizza earlier in the day], it was delicious!

From here we took a whack at the piñata that Sam picked out of a Barbie.


After it was decapitated, my mom tossed out candy, first tossing a large bag of Reese's Pieces to my dad.




While everyone headed inside, B-Ray checked out Barbie's head and SCORED!




Then we did gifts, and here's my dad [new du-rag in place] opening my presents that he loved:




Here's a semi-distorted final version of the collage thing:


After receiving many sweet presents and sweets themselves, we sang "Happy Birthday" and he blew out the 41 candles:




The brownie cake was very VERY rich but very VERY good! Then people began making their way to their cars and my folks turned on the television. This is when I called it a night because honestly, all there is on cable these days is reality shows. My mom told me tonight about some show called "G's to Gents" where some gang member G-thugs are transformed into gentlemen. How honestly stupid are the minds of this country to actually want to watch this? Is this show getting good ratings? I am not even going to waste any part of my life Googling it [is that an official verb yet?]. I am so glad we don't have cable. I don't care about thugs turning into gentlemen. I am kind of looking forward to hearing about the next idiotic reality show so that I can get a good laugh and maybe a paragraph or two of a blog out of it.

Murphy is tossing and turning next to me. I'm going to let Jewel lull him to sleep. Not "LOL," which is by the way the all time most annoying thing in the entire history of anything. End this please, as well as the stupid <333093985730984752 thing, the =] smileys, using more than one comma at a time for no apparent reason, and the stupid [HxC] crap. You are not "hardcore" if you say you are. It's like when you're young and adults say, "That's cool!" and it's so not because they say it is. Thx [which is NOT annoying].