Bailey Anne Bravely

What if disaster were to strike tomorrow? Would you be prepared? The Vermont Department of Health would be, and if you live in Vermont you should feel in good hands. In early June 2014, they conducted an Emergency Preparedness exercise that was two years in the making.  I was voluntold to participate, even though I do not normally work in that division. It was a tiring, stressful, fun, and highly educational experience. The biggest part of my education was essentially learning a foreign language. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the government—or any business—uses a wide assortment of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. It felt like alphabet soup! But I acclimated, and soon I was spouting off sentences that included such soup as HOC, SEOC, CAT2, DLAN, CWD, GI, Epi, EPA, DMAT, SNS, and more; not to mention all the initialisms for all the hospitals’ names. When we talked about improvements for next time, I definitely suggested a translation document! When you hear or ...

Dressing up fancy is one of my favorite things. My fingernails from my last post were for this event last Saturday  (click that link for more photos), the Grand Opening for Groenfell Meadery . Shannon (on the left) did my hair in a braided crown and I felt just awesome. Our trio received some nice compliments at the event. It was a fun time. Shannon is friends with the owners of Groenfell Meadery, Kelly and Ricky. They are super nice and I am very impressed with their meadery operation; it's a cool place. The mead is made right there where the gala was held--I got to see it earlier when it was much more empty, and it's since filled in with more equipment, more furnishings for the tasting area, and more finished product waiting to be shipped. Oh, and more plants.  But wait, some of you readers who know me are asking. Aren't you a non-drinker? It's true. I have never imbibed alcohol and don't plan on it in future. (Meh, reasons for that can be another bl...

Good evening, readers--I'm off to a grand opening gala black tie event, and wanted to share my nails with you before I go! How did I get the dots on my nails so small, you ask? Magic! And that magic is Sharpies. Paint nails with base coat of white (to make the next color show up brighter) Paint with two coats of shiny pale gold Wait for it to dry; really dry, or the next step won't work. Like, wait a couple hours at least. Draw design in black Sharpie, also wait to dry. Spray nails with hairspray. You read that right! This prevents the clear topcoat from smudging the Sharpie designs. Wait to dry. You may need to repeat this step a few times if the topcoat does smudge in the next step. Your hairspray may be stronger than mine; I hairsprayed and let dry three or four times. Top with clear nail polish or topcoat. Again, if it smudges, stop, and go back to the hairspray step before proceeding. Start the topcoat with a little pinky nail so you can tell if it's going ...

I love Easter eggs! Today I painted my nails to be like these fun decorations. Here's what I did: Paint entire nails pastel green Paint top 2/3 of each nail pastel blue (in this picture the middle looks green, but I promise it's blue!) Paint top 1/3 of each nail pastel purple Using a toothpick, paint hot pink zig-zags along the color divides. This winter has been so icy and blah; I am very excited for spring. Time for bright, fun colors! Looking forward to seeing some family this afternoon. I hope you all have a wonderful Easter. <3

Lake Champlain Chocolates makes some excellent Apple Cider Caramels . I tried some, which was a mistake the best idea. They're truly delicious, but rather expensive. I do recommend buying some (maybe split it with friends!). However--as their website points out--their apple cider caramels are often in limited supply and high demand, so what are you to do when the shelves and/or your wallet is empty? Make your own, of course! My initial Google search led me to this Brown Eyed Baker version of the recipe, though the commenters below pointed out that it could also be found at Annie's Eats , and both had sourced their recipe from Smitten Kitchen . None of these had chocolate-dipped caramels; I added that detail myself. So now that you have the bibliography, let's get candy-making! And first, let me tell you: do not be afraid. This recipe may be time consuming but it is super, super easy. I promise. I use too many words in this version of the recipe but that's only be...

Happy Mardi Gras! I need a better macro lens. :-/ This nail art started out with the intention of being neat little stars, but I was in such a hurry that the stars turned out more like fireworks. I call this a success anyway! Proof that you can still get a cool look without too much time and effort.  The steps: Base coat of purple nail polish Acrylic paint and a tiny brush: one green star on each nail, along with little rays coming off the star Same tiny brush, two acrylic yellow stars with rays Clear nail polish to seal. In case you weren't aware, purple, green, and yellow are the Mardi Gras colors. Mardi Gras means "Fat Tuesday" because it's the day people indulge in all the things they won't be able to eat during Lent, the period of fasting before Easter, which starts the day after Mardi Gras. I'm technically a Methodist but the whole giving things up for Lent was never drilled into me (sorry Mom), but Mardi Gras is still a fun time t...

If you've never heard of Orisinal Games , you're missing out. The site has been around since 2000 and the artist, Ferry Halim , just keeps adding content. There's no schedule; the additions are random, but I just keep coming back. One commenter on the site's guestbook made the comparison to opening an old toy box. So true! I hadn't visited in years, and then I accidentally imported some old internet favorites, and there it was, sitting waiting to be clicked. I used to play these games all the time, and my very favorite used to be Bungee Bear . The game, like all others on the site, is beautifully crafted. Soft colors, pleasant music, and simple but original game mechanics add up to a really fun time. Now, the plot of Bungee Bear is this: you are a cute, hungry bear, and you are on a bridge just downriver from a waterfall, and below you in the river are delicious apples. You have a backpack and a bungee cord. How are you to get the apples? Jump off the bridge...

A custom ecard, because all the good ecard sites make you sign up for an account and/or pay. This is what you get when I come up with an idea on the day it needs to be completed; could be better.  For anyone interested in how I did it, PowerPoint 2010 and above lets you export a show as a video. (I think there are sneaky ways to do this with earlier versions as well.) So I set up the slides, put in the animations, added audio, rehearsed/recorded the slideshow timing, and then exported as a video. Anyone who makes videos frequently is probably cringing (Sorry Spence) but it got the job done. Audio is "An Awful Lot of Running" by Chameleon Circuit, used with permission of http://dftba.com . Check out their Music Video Program for more songs by more artists you can legally use in your own work. And to my brother Spencer, Happy Birthday! You are my best friend and I miss you! Have a super fantastic day!

Watch it, and then fund it. What is it? This is a movie by Sunao Katabuchi, the assistant director of Kiki's Delivery Service, which was by Hayao Miyazaki. As I have written before , I love love love Miyazaki movies. Here I am, being sucked into spending more money due to my fear of Miyazaki not making any more movies. But I have no regrets. This movie looks amazing. Why does it look amazing? For one, the background art is enough to justify the movie on its own. It's like watching a moving art gallery, with the paintings parading by in orderly rows. From what I have read of the plot, which you can read on the Kickstarter page , it's about two young girls, one of whom has an enormous imagination and likes to imagine vividly and on screen what her world was like a thousand years ago. The girls essentially time travel through imagination. How awesome is that? I am not an anime connoisseur by any means, but I mean to educate myself. This film was never able to b...

We had a frozen pipe in the apartment last week. I was the hero who saved the house. I came home from work Wednesday night to find the temperature in the apartment was 57F. We'd left it at 62 for the day, as we always do when we're not at home. House rules from the landlord state that we can't set it below 60, so we're always within the rules. We've lost heat once before, but it turned out all that was needed that time was to reset the gas: flip the switch off and on and voila. So, I tried that. Hard reset the gas, hard reset the thermostat and cranked it up. Then I waited to see if it was going to heat up any. 45 minutes and nothing. Still cold. Called the property manager, who called the plumber who set up the system in the first place, but nobody picked up. So the property manager left messages with the plumber, then called me back to give me the plumber's numbers in case I didn't get a return call, and he instructed me to call his cell as well if I...

Movie Poster from Wikipedia Internet ads! Usually people actively ignore them. Usually I have my ad-skeptic-filter at such a high setting that even ads for things I already know about have no click-inducing power. My brother and I used to play a game with TV ads: who can guess what it is about first? And then we'd go into a session of making fun of the ad and talking about why it was so pointless and awful. This honed my resist-the-actual-intent-of-the-ad skills. However, I must confess I was caught by an internet ad recently. The text: DISCOVER THE NEXT MIYAZAKI. If you know me well, you will know that this caught my attention. Miyazaki is a Japanese genius, well known for directing amazing animated movies. I grew up renting My Neighbor Totoro enough times to have bought it several times over before we finally found somewhere to buy it. Then followed the magical years when we found out he made other films, and every year at Christmas there would be another Miyazaki film ...