Riot and Frolic

Jello/Kool-Aid Popsicles and a Whole Lot of Opinions

Ever since I can remember, I've been eating those popsicles made out of Jello and Kool-Aid.  I highly covet my mom's classic Tupperware popsicle molds (which OMG I just found on Amazon).  I posted about them a million years ago.  And it's 90º and I'm pregnant and want to chew on ice pretty much 24/7.  

So I'm talking about popsicles.  

Again.

But guess what?  Those "unsweetened Kool-aid drink mix" packets that all these recipes call for must have left grocery store shelves when people stopped pulling their money out of fanny packs to pay for them.  And sure, there's good ol' Amazon that'll deliver 48 packs to your doorstep, but that will get here in two days and I need my quiescently frozen confection ASAP.

So, I did a little experimenting for you and got this recipe:

Jello & Kool-Aid Popsicle (the reboot)

• 1/3 cup Kool-Aid Drink Mix, sugar sweetened, in your flavor of choice
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup granulated sugar (I use 1/4 cup plus a little more because I hate measuring, sugar gives me heart burn right now and I don't like them too sweet)
• 1  box (3 oz.) Jello gelatin in your flavor of choice
• 2 cups boiling water
• 2 cups cold water

Mix first three ingredients in a large bowl or pouring thingy. 

like this

2. Add in boiling water and mix until dissolved.

3. Add cold water.

4. Pour into popsicle molds.

5. Freeze.

6. Wait impatiently.

7. Eat.

I'm enjoying Cherry (Kool-Aid flavor) Lime (Jello flavor) right now.  

i feel like the popsicles are photoshopped and i'm okay with that

 

 

 

Theme Weeks : When Everyone Ends Up Crying

In case some of you thought it was all rainbows and fairies and cupcakes around here, I thought you needed to know about this week's theme : Picnics.

Despite an unbelievable haul from the library, Picnic Week has mainly been a bust because, as you Minnesotans know, it's monsoon season here.  

Two picnics (including an excursion to the St. Paul Saints berm) have been cancelled due to inclement weather.  Boo.  Hiss.

While the food was still great last night (Thug Kitchen's Butternut Squash Queso(ish) Dip! surprisingly cheese-like! way delicious!), it was time for a rain-check craft.  We had a cool t-shirt designing kit that I had been saving for just an occasion.

Despite multiple efforts and techniques used, our t-shirts were a big FAIL and everyone ended the night crying into a bowl of M&Ms (except me! well, I didn't have the crying part, I DID have the M&M part).  

Here's the theme week breakdown for the summer, if you'd like to follow along (you can check out my Pinterest board for theme weeks if you're looking for more projects):

Picnic Week

• um, picnics?
• geocaching
• books (to be listed shortly)

Rubber Band Week

• geoboard
• exploding a watermelon with rubber bands

Butterfly Week

• visit a butterfly garden
• watch Flight of the Butterflies
• books 
• make butterfly pasta

Red, White, and Blue Week

• pick strawberries
• fireworks
• make pinwheels

Rain Week 

• make a rain gauge
• that crazy shaving cream and food coloring rain cloud 
• make a raindrop suncatcher

Color Week

• make rock candy!
• make paper spinners
• rainbow smoothies
• paint on wet glue
• Sharpie and rubbing alcohol t-shirts

Star Week

• visit the planetarium
• watch Star Wars
• constellation flashlights

Nature Week

• scavenger hunt
• nature walk bracelets
• visit the Forest History Center

Boat Week

• make boats out of egg cartons
• ... origami
• ... twigs
• ... corks
• see the Tall Ship Festival

Flower Week

• make paper flowers
• make bubble paint hydrangeas
• make rainbow roses

Heat Week

• play with a giant ice cube
• make paper fans
• make ice cream
• visit a splash pad

Hope you're enjoying your summer!

So You Want To Be a Pro - Part Three: The Cons

Ahhhh, the glow of a new ballroom dance pro. 

"I have my dream job!" they proclaim.  

The magic of partner dance runs so strong with the newly payrolled.  And I hate to crush dreams but

NO I LOVE TO CRUSH DREAMS :

The Cons of Being a Professional Ballroom Dancer

1. Wear and tear on your body. Generally speaking, ballroom dancing is a low-impact exercise, but doing anything 20-50 hours a week is going to wear you down, especially when you are working with a variety of levels of dancers.  No offense to the amateurs of the world (obvs, 'cause you're like my bread and butter and I really do love my job), but ams are subtly hurting you.  I'm not even talking about the occasion elbow to the nose/face/crotch/boob or foot getting stepped on because those are somehow expected.  It's more along the lines of the heavy frame, late leads, and lack of momentum (that is totally part of the learning process and you are both working on in your respective roles!) that will wear down joints and cartilage and cause everyone to get hip replacements at 60 years old.  
2. Your schedule vs. making money.  Like I mentioned in the first post of this series, teaching dance is not glamorous for quite awhile, because you're not making any money at it.  Of course you want to devote all your time and energy to improving your craft, but you probably also have some bills to pay.  Count on not sleeping a lot when you sign on to be a pro.  Grab a part-time early morning shift slinging coffee [talk about a dream job!] or filing papers or anything you can get your hands on until you're making enough in the studio to buy more than ramen for dinner.
3. Compromising situations. You mostly work one on one with your clients, meaning it feels pretty intimate to the uninitiated/insane.  Often, you are a 20-something, fresh-faced sweetheart who wants to share the Love of Dance with someone who is... not 20-something and wants to share more than the Love of Dance with you.  [I made it sound dirty, didn't I?  It's not always dirty, but those are definitely the note-worthy ones.] Depending on how draw your boundaries, you might have a very professional teacher/student relationship or you might be friends with your ballroom babies.  Either way, you will probably get sucked in to situations that are WAY BEYOND your hourly service of Teaching Dance.  I've been around teachers turning into marriage/job/divorce counselors, students falling in love with their teachers, students stalking their teachers, and teachers having to fend off advances/subtle sexual harassment/gross sexual harassment (and I've had my fair share of them, too).  And with the added tension of traveling with those people who involved?  Yikes.  
4. Paying your dues.  Pro ballroomers don't have a union, but that doesn't mean you don't have to pay your dues.  If you want to get anywhere good in your career, you have probably have to give up a lot of extraneous fun things... and cake.  You're going to have to scramble and whore yourself out (NOT LITERALLY PLEASE) to make connections and meet people and hand out business cards and practice and learn and grab lessons and teach group classes wherever and whenever you can.  Friday nights and Sundays are no longer yours, they are your business's.  And even then, you're not going to be the most-booked teacher in your studio after 1 year.  You're not going to make finals at any legitimate competition for longer than that.  If you know you're in it for the long haul, GREAT.  If you're looking for short-term success, look for a different career.
   
   best Jay-Z line ever
5. Code of conduct. There's an code of conduct when it comes to "being good": you teach your students well, you have good results at all levels,  you coach with the right people (I like to call them the Ballroom Mafia - some of them you've heard of and some of them you haven't - they're all wonderful, influential, and slightly frightening), you hit the right comps, you hang with the right peeps, you're skinny as hell, and you have the right lifestyle.  Some of these "rights" change from time to time, becoming a fairly elusive, implicit agreement throughout the industry.  If you don't have someone to show you the ropes, you'll be at best a big fish in a little pond of your region, but never make a name for yourself nationally.
6. Sales.  This bothers a lot of the newbies and clearly, you have to sell lessons and other activities to be able to teach dance for a living.  And it's hard because you feel like it's a lot of money (see the first post of the series) and maybe you don't see the benefits of all the showcases and student night outs and trophy balls and competitions and crazy whosits.  
7. Lawsuits.  Most people won't get stuck with this one, but we live in a litigious society and when someone feels wronged, they can sue you to make themselves feel better.  I've known owners who've gotten sued because Daddy's little princess didn't make the finals and lots of teachers who've gotten sued for breach of contract.  Even if you don't go to court, it's still going to cost you a ton of money and no one "wins" in the end.
8. Registration.  This might sound similar to sales to you, and NO OFFENSE TO AMATEURS BECAUSE IT'S NOT JUST YOU, IT'S ALL OF YOU but registering for people for competitions has been the most aggravating part of my job, always.  Ironically, I have been put in charge of it at three different studios because I'm "good at it", so I can't even imagine what's going on elsewhere.  There's soooooo many different categories and the age groups change from comp to comp and what the hell is Open Bronze and can I be on a full package but not get tickets to that one session I'm not going to be at and I might do it but I might not even though it makes a huge difference in price to everyone who is committed and can I see everything itemized but next time I don't want to see anything itemized and I'll pay 17 days after the due date and this one takes online registration but this one doesn't so I have to mail in 72 pieces of paper and how much postage these days and there's three ladies that want the same scholarship and... *sigh*.  It's not my fav.  
9. Cons.  Literal con artists. I alluded to this in my last post and I really respect and admire a good percentage of the pros in my field, but there are some stinkers.  From being undertrained and showboating otherwise, to lack of current education, to pitching sales like tents at a music festival, to taking advantage of people's trust to overcharge them, to literally stealing money or services from people, to just being plain crazy, there are some pieces of work out there.  

Wouldn't you like to know how to avoid these cons?  Next time on Riot and Frolic, I'll give some hard-earned advice on how to not be an idiot (like I was) when you start out.

 

The Garden of Good (and Barely Any Evil): Volume 3

Four years ago, I had a wee garden.

A year later, there was an expansion.  And compost!

It grew things!

Something happened last year...  Probably a disaster.

This year?

We're going big time.  

Last fall, The G tore up the nasty-to-shovel-snow-off and generally-horrible "patio".  Then his super-cool and helpful uncles came up to ye olde Minnesota to lay a new slab [which is an insane process to watch;  I think the whole thing took about 30 minutes and they just JUMP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT and it goes from looking a mess to being this gorgeous concrete* in no time].

With a new rectangular plot for the garden, there was room for a third bed and time to actually plan what the hell I was going to do with it.  

I picked up an edition of Square Foot Gardening (which had great info, but I hated the dude's tone) and got busy staking out plots.  

When the snow was gone and the grass was green, we built the trellis for tomatoes, sugar snap, squash plants, and other climby things.  I watched this video about 10 times:

 

They were super easy to make and I don't hate how they look. Plus, I'm stringing solar lights between them.  Festive!

Despite planting quite a few varieties from seed indoors, my over-enthusiastic garden hands (aka, children) killed off most of them by drowning them right before we were supposed to transplant them.  So, the first week in May, my sister-in-law came over and helped plant from seed again.  We have:

• Bibb lettuce (which is the same as Butter? Yes?  No?  Because we planted both...)
• Marigolds galore
• Swiss Chard
• Endive
• Romaine
• Dill
• Cilantro
• Basil
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Stevia
• Lavendar
• Tomatoes (4 different kinds)
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Acorn Squash
• Zucchini
• Carrots
• Onions
• Brussels Sprouts
• Sweet Peppers
• Some kind of flowers

So, if any of you need any lettuce this summer, head on over.  SO MUCH LETTUCE.

Each of the girls got their own pot to put whatever they wanted to in it (more on that later), and there's a "mosquito control" pot that I have as well.

We also have two blueberry bushes and one fancy-ass apple tree that are being espalier-ed (yeah, like the French do with their grape vines) to create a fence (and fruit!) on our property line.  

And a bird bath.  

Let's see how this goes.

*JP - Did I refer to it correctly?!