crafting with the craft-less.

Crafting easily makes it onto my list of top ten things I’m incapable of doing. Other things on said list include using a remote, surviving a haunted house without screaming and attracting every stupid zombie and ax man in there, and waiting until someone’s birthday for them to open my gift.

But the thing is, even though I can’t use a remote I still try. And yes, I end up deleting DVR’d shows and get stuck on the fishing channel but still. I try. And so obviously I still try to craft. And so far, after nearly 25 years, I’m still straight terrible at it. For the life of me, I cannot come up with creative ideas. I could never just think up something cute and crafty. What I can do (sometimes) is copy. I can copy things that more talented crafters have done as long as it doesn’t include anything complicated. I can tie ribbons, I can paint squares and I can use a toothbrush to splatter paint anything you put in front of me.

But a couple weeks ago I decided to stretch my craftabilities and paint pumpkins. Note that the thought of carving pumpkins did not even cross my mind because using a knife on a hard vegetable isn’t on my resume. So I spent like an hour looking at ideas on pinterest for pumpkin painting. Turns out some people can paint complicated things on pumpkins. Jealous. Anyway, I finally found a few things I liked like a simple zig zag or some polka dots. Those seems straight forward, am I right? How could you mess those up?

Obviously you can or this post would be over by now.

So I went to tape off the zig zag for the pumpkin and all was going well until I finished painting it and realized that the whole spherically-shaped pumpkin thing had apparently thrown me off because dear old zig zag was practically at the bottom of the pumpkin. I look at that pumpkin every day now and I cannot figure out how that happened. Spheres, man. They’ll get you.

Polka dots. I only had those foam brushes (you can only invest so much when you’re a self-proclaimed non-crafter) and turns out those are not the easiest brushes to paint circles with. Totes cray, right? So after attempting like three circles and realizing this was a no good situation, I tried to wipe them off. Also a bad idea. Mostly I just smeared white paint all over one side of the pumpkin. So that pumpkin was off to a great start. Next, I tried making a potato stamp. I had read that you could cut the shape you want into a potato and then use that as a stamp. Again, spherical issues. So I ditched that idea real quick and said sorry to the potato for wasting it. Then I spent about 15 minutes looking for something that could be used as a stamp. Searched the whole dang apartment for a small circular item that could survive having paint all over it. After 15 minutes of fruitless searching (apparently the Heperi’s aren’t much into having small circular items laying around…could have something to do with Levi continually purging my piles of random things, who knows), a lightbulb finally came on in my head! The other end of the foam paintbrush! So I mean, winning. Once I realized I could use the end of the paintbrush, ol’ polka dot pumpkin was done in 2 minutes flat. (Except don’t look at the back of it because it’s still a white smeary mess from the foam and potato polka dot attempts).

And then finally, I had one more pumpkin. I had already done the zig zag and I had already done the polka dots. I was pretty sure there were no more shapes I could confidently pumpkin-ify. I scrolled through the ol’ pinterest and saw that some people would tape off and paint the shape of the state they lived in and then put a little heart on it where they lived. I thought about it for a while and then decided I could challenge myself. I mean, Oklahoma is a fairly simple-shaped state. And so I did it. And after a number of tape recalculations after having made the skinny part of OK way too skinny and almost falling into the spherical trap of putting the state too low like I did on zig zag pumpkin, I succeeded. And I painted. And I hearted. And I won! Then I put the shape of Utah on the back because I mean, I lived there for six years and also it’s practically just a square. And I won at that one as well! I maybe would have liked to do California on there, too, but who are we kidding? My crafting capabilities had been maxed out.

And so there you have it. An adventure in crafting for the ultimate non-crafter. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to decorate the rest of my apartment using Oklahoma-shaped items. Which is truly a bummer.

hiking with the boyz.

So here’s something. Hiking in Oklahoma. It’s not actually a thing. Now, I could be wrong, but I generally define hiking as an activity where one experiences at least some degree of incline or decline. Oklahoma does not have either of those things because Oklahoma is flat with a capital F and a capital L and a capital A and a capital T. Like way flat. I personally think it’s at least a little more interesting than places like Kansas because at least we have trees and shrubbery and the like. When we drove through Kansas I could have sworn we weren’t even moving because the scenery stayed exactly the same for like 6 hours.

Anyway, so this hiking. Levi works with the Young Men/Boy Scouts in our ward, and for the boy scouts to achieve their hiking merit badge (or in order to get ready for trek coming up in a few weeks) they decided to go on a ten mile “hike” around the lake last Saturday. Which was really code for “walk” around the lake because again, no incline. Levi so kindly invited me to join in on the fun! by waking up to meet at 8 am for this awesome! and exciting! hike! Being as I’m such an awesome wife (or that I had no other commitments and I just wanted to hang out with Levi), I agreed to wake up suuuuuper early at 7:30 am. (Although I think my exact words the night before were “I refuse to wake up any earlier than 7:30.”) We headed off and met the strapping young men ready to hike.

It was a very nice day, I must admit. It was like in the seventies temperature-wise, so it was warm, but it wasn’t so super mega hot. And at this moment I would like to pause and remind everyone back in Utah or basically anywhere besides here that I am so jealous of you. You get to have fall right now; all I get is a never-ending summer. Sniff. Anyway, hiking. We headed off around the lake, carrying our water and our snacks (read: Levi carrying our water and our snacks and me carrying nothing. Confessions of an adult-aged drama queen.) The plan was to walk five miles out and then five miles back. Sounded like a great plan to me.

Some of the boys weren’t quite as active as others so the hike was a little rough, but they all finished and that’s what matters! Plus, there were gummy bears and cookies along the way, so what could be better? We finished without losing anyone to exhaustion and that was quite an accomplishment. There are a few who aren’t looking forward to the additional 4 10-mile hikes and the 20-mile hike they still have to do to earn the merit badge, but hey. Let’s just celebrate our accomplishments for now. Plus the pain and sadness that they may have experienced at the end was nothing that couldn’t be solved with an orange sherbet push pop. No, but really.

What I would really like to focus on now is again the fact that it is still basically summer. At the end of September. In Oklahoma. Also we were walking around a lake. Also science. All of these things play a part in the crime known as “Now I Have a Crispy-Fried Sunburned Face”. Even though it wasn’t so mega hot, we were out there for 4 or 5 hours and mostly not in the shade. Also I think there’s that science thing where the sun reflects off the lake and that doesn’t really help. And gosh darn that sun, it just works on you so slowly you don’t even notice until you get home and realize that you’re so red you’re not sure if it’s really you. And then you have to go out in public and your face feels really tight and constantly hot and it burns and is sore and then a couple days later your entire face starts peeling off and anyone you interact with at work stays back a few feet so as not to get the close up and personal view of a crispy flaky face. It’s rough.

Now some of you may be thinking, well gee! I’ve never been sunburned that bad! In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever been sunburned. And skin peeling off? Unheard of! And to you I say, I know your name is Levi Heperi. And it’s just not fair that you can’t feel my pain and that your only comment is “Hey, lobster. Are we having lobster for dinner?” The only thing I have to say to you is that you had better have strong enough genes so that our children get beautiful dark skin and that they don’t get sunburns. I’m completely serious. One would have thought that my own mother was tan enough that at least some of her offspring would be able to maintain some degree of a tan, but alas, it was not meant to be. The powerful forces of my father’s whiteness overruled it all, so now we’re all very pale. So don’t drop the ball, Levi. Unless you want crispy-fried crying children in the summer. The choice is yours. I’m just sayin’.

(Also, that picture. I just love it.)