Book Review

I really wanted to like this book. I love doodling and I liked the idea of having a draw in book to learn some new things to doole. 

I don't like this book. Some of the drawings are cute, but the instructions are terrible. You would think the first section of the book would be the easier one, especially considering this is basically a workbook. It is not, you clearly need some previous drawing experience. The drawings aren't doodle cartoons, they look like full on anime characters. Not easy to just doodle. 

I also didn't like the physical size of the book. With a name like doodletopia you would think you would be making little doodles. The pages are huge. When you start adding shading and such, it becomes a lot to do. It isn't a little doodle anymore it is a full on art project.

I did like one section of the book. It was making two different things, animals usually, using the same starting shape. I thought that was interesting to see. I would have liked to see that section expanded more, with more options and practice pages.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Escaping the Madness

In what turned out to be a highly successful attempt to avoid the absurd traffic a large sports inconvenience was going to cause, we ran off to the top of a mountain hoping it would be far enough. 

On the way up I spent the whole car ride trying to finish this cowl for Steven. My original plan had been to make two. It did not go as quickly as planned. I got Steven's finished though. It was so warm he basically wore it for this picture and it spent the rest of the day in his pocket. 

These are the previously mentioned skis. I love my skis. They are the best skis. They would only be better if they were blue and had the same pattern on both skis. I will just consider this encouragement to not look down while I ski. The poles were nice too, and since our last lesson taught us what to do with them they weren't just an annoying stick to carry around.

Since we had these fabulous new skis I braved the full mountain trail. It wasn't as hard as I remember it, so that was nice. It was still long and I got tired. We took a break here. Not a terrible place to rest at all. It had a great view and the other way a view of the really steep part we had just gone down. So there was a fun mix of really awesome skiers and people falling all over the place. 

On our second night we tried out the local sushi restaurant. Squaw Valley has much better food options that dodge ridge... One of the house rolls was topped with seared beef. Weird enough to try and take a picture of. It was actually pretty good. 

Our second day of skiing had even better views than the first. The sky was soooo blue. The birds were really enjoying it too. I know this because one almost ran into me while I was starting down the slope. It almost made me fall over. I thought birds flew south for the winter...

Steven made a giant snowball and threw it at me. 

Squaw Valley has an Olympic Museum which I wanted to see before we left. I planned to see it Monday morning before we left, but we finished skiing early Sunday, so we were going to wander over there right before it closed. Luckily we did this, because it turns out the museum is at the top of the mountain. So our wandering turned into rushing out of the room trying to get to the tram in time, which takes 15-20 min to get to the top and hoping to get to the top. We made it, good thing too since we didn't have tickets for the tram that worked on Monday. 

The thing that I found the most amazing was how terrible their equipment was in the 60's. These were the kind of ice skates used. These look awful! I had better skates than this and I was never even a senior level skater. Their skis weren't much better either. Crazyness. 

This is the rink at the top of the Mountain. I almost wished I had my skates with me, but then I remembered how tired I was from skiing. I took a picture instead.

Book Review

I have mixed feelings about this book. There are some good points in it. Some good enough that I am going to pass it along to someone I think it will be good for. Going over the good parts in this case would be more like a book report than a book review, so I won't be doing that. There are good things in this book. If it looks like something that would appeal to you, it is definitely worth a read. 

However despite giving it a pretty good rating I did have a few problems with it:

The book is very clearly written by a woman for women. She tries to avoid this fact by repeatedly saying that anyone can benefit from it, and denying that it is geared toward women. I found this distracting. I think she should have either owned that she was writing to a female audience or just let it be. 

The author has a tendency to have large quotes from other sources. I didn't find the first few to be overly relevant or helpful, and I found myself just skimming over them. I think a good portion of them could have been weeded out. She had plenty of good things of her own to say, she didn't need to waste space repeating other people's words.

Lastly, there are some exercises in the book that are supposed to help you think about a certain thing in a new way. They seem overly involved to me. Most of them seem like they might have a purpose, but in order to do them you would need to have a dedicated time to sit down and do them. But, the way they are presented in the book is more of a quick thing to do. I may try a few out sometime, but overall they don't seem to be as refined as they could be. 

Cuteness

I have been meaning to make a bear for a long time. I got this yarn from a friend doing a stash purge and I thought it would be the perfect color for a teddy bear. I finally found a pattern cute enough. 

It was a quick project to make, it only took a few days of working on it. He turned out kind of floppy so I made him have a cute pouty face. I think he needs a scarf or a sweater, or maybe a hat. So maybe one of those will be coming next. 

I didn't quite have enough stuffing to make him. So I had to go get more, and Steven needed new shoes. This led to a day of shopping at Pacific Commons. I wanted to look at ski jackets, since I didn't 100% love mine and wanted to return it for a different one. At the ski store we ended up looking at skis. They had some reasonably priced ones that were on sale because they were last season's models. We spent a lot time there looking at skis and talking with their ski expert, but we ended up with skis that will be perfect for our ski trip next weekend. So apparently cute bears equal skis.  

Weekend Ski Trip

Since it was a 3 day weekend, we decided to take a trip. I wanted to go skiing, and in an effort to avoid the large crowds and traffic we went to Dodge Ridge. We rented a cabin nearby with some friends. 

Our first day of skiing was Saturday. Dodge Ridge has a pricing system that makes it ridiculous to not take a lesson unless you are a good skier. It is cheaper to rent skis there and get a half mountain pass with a lesson, than to get a full mountain pass with skis and no lesson. I had no intention of skiing the harder stuff anyway, so it worked out.

I was debating between signing up for a level 2 or level 3 lesson. I have the ability to do the harder things, but I'm worried about falling so it doesn't work as well as it should. For the first day we went for the level 3. I wanted to ski a bit before the lesson to warm up. It wasn't as easy as I remember it; I was considering going down to level 2. I stuck with 3 so Steven wouldn't be bored. Our class ended up being higher than a level 3. Most of the people in it could have been in a level 4 or higher. So really not the best class for me to be in. I was tired after the class and went to knit in the lounge area, while Steven kept skiing. Once he was done we took a picture remember that we were there. I wasn't convinced we'd be back the next day.

This trip was also an excellent time to wear my hats. This is one of my favorite ones. I made it extra large and felted it to fit my head. Then I lined it with fleece around the ears. So it is almost impossible to get cold in this hat. Also since I live in California, most of the time it is impossible to wear this hat. 

On the way back to the cabin we stopped to take pictures of the beautiful view. We took quite a few pictures. Most including this tree. It wasn't until we got back to the cabin that we noticed this tree was full of shoes. We totally missed it while in front of the tree. 

We did end up making it back for the second day of skiing. The 10 am lesson was full, so we signed up for the afternoon one. This turned out to be great since while in the lesson you don't need to stand in the long ski lines. The second day's lesson was a lot better. This time most the people in the class were actually level 3, except one guy who was probably level 2. It was so much nicer having a class full of things I could actually do. 

This is a google auto awesome gif of Steven skiing.

This is a picture of me looking like I know what I am doing. I was much more comfortable on skis after this lesson. I hope that sticks around until our avoiding the super bowl ski trip. 

The next morning we took some time to walk around by the cabin. There was a sledding hill a short walk from it. I built a snowman with a top hat. He is only two balls high because I was too tired from all that skiing to move. 

This is another auto awesome of Steven. Google made a lovely panorama, but forgot to make sense. Still a neat picture.

Book Review - Asian Dumplings

Another book review. You'd think I like cooking giving the amount of cookbooks I seem to get. I got this book because I thought it would be fun to learn how to make those white dumplings you can get at an asian market. 

I like this book because it has very clear instructions. It seems easy enough, although very time consuming. 

The instructions on how to use a chinese bamboo steamer don't seem as thorough as I would have hoped them to be. Perhaps better instructions come when you actually purchase one of them. 

The other thing this book is lacking is enough pictures. I prefer cookbooks to have pictures of every recipe. This book has some very nice pictures, but not nearly enough of them. 

I think I will keep this book, but I doubt I would have purchased it if I had just seen it in a store. 

Holiday Road Trip Day 6 & 7

The next stop on our trip was a cute little town called Solvang. It looks like a little town in Denmark. We arrived around 3 and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around town. Not to much to tell, but we took some fun pictures.

Steven in the soldier booth outside our hotel.

Windmill selfie

Funny sign in a store

The cutest little yarn shop. (Later I found out how rude they are.) 

In the morning we had our hotel's continental breakfast at the bakery across the street. It was considerably better than a regular hotel's breakfast. I wish I had taken a picture of it. We got a cup of coffee, orange juice, a pastry of our choice, and a roll with cheese. I don't normally like pastries, but this one was delicious. 

The bakery also had a giant gingerbread house that makes the huge one we decorated at a friend's party look tiny.

After breakfast we rented bikes from out hotel and went to see the Hans Christensen Andersen Park. It was a cute little park, but not to much space for biking. So we biked around town to check out the little side streets we missed the night before. 

Tiny version of the Copenhagen Mermaid Statue

After visiting a few stores that were closed the night before we headed up the coast. I found another little yarn shop. This one didn't have a clearance section and nothing overly interesting. We took a few ocean pictures and one last selfie before it started getting dark. 

The end of our trip was a bit annoying. Apparently a traffic light went out on Highway 1. This cause a 10 mile back up and and hour and a half delay. We stopped in Carmel for dinner and to rest a bit from all that traffic. Then made it home to get yelled at by the cat.