VIDEO // two videos and that is all

Okay, chocolate chip cookie lovers, look inside your cupboard for your chocolate chips if you've been caught in the same heatwave I have. Ours... their consistency resembled toothpaste and thus they had to be squeezed out of the package in a way very similar to toothpaste. (Irony?)

Oh, and there were cool sunflares.

My video quality isn't great because I only have a dinky little Flip camera. Sigh. But the song is "Babe" by Evenings. Very cool little band/guy; he's not even on iTunes yet so if you have a Facebook like his page. We love you, Nathan.

The dress I'm wearing in the video is from here. And though it looks like when I'm mixing things I am not wearing a shirt, I promise I was wearing a sports bra type tank top thing. I had been running. Stupidly.

On a different note, your life is not complete unless you've seen the below video. That is all.

This is what our cats do all the time... except... it's an OWL.

A Tiny Taste of Peru (a guest post by Lynae Rockwell)

Before I write anything I'd just like to explain why this post says that it is by Larry Rockwell. That's my dad's name. He was signed into his google account when I clicked on the link to do a guest post for horsefeathers so it is under his name. My name's Lynae Rockwell, and I will be the one posting today.

Have you ever had a doughnut? That's probably a silly question. A better question might be... have you ever had a churro? I am a missionary kid living in Huaraz, Peru and churros are a doughnut-like pastry that is eaten here a lot. They are extremely fattening, and are basically sticks of fried dough filled with a caramel-y like substance (they are also dipped in chocolate sometimes). In this blog post, I will be sharing a recipe of how to make churros so you can enjoy a little bit of Peruvian culture right at home. I found this recipe online (courtesy of about.com) but this is the second recipe I tried because I wanted to make sure that they tasted like real Peruvian churros. I made this recipe twice and the second time around, everyone agreed that they tasted like churros you'd find here in Peru. Enjoy!


The Ingredients you'll need are as follows:

1/2 cup of water
1/2 cup of buttermilk
1/2 cup of butter
pinch of salt
1 1/4 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of vanilla
3 large eggs
vegetable oil for frying
1/2 cup of sugar plus 1 tablespoon
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
Manjar, Nutella, or chocolate to dip them in


Put the buttermilk, water, butter, salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar in a pot and bring the mix to a boil...

Stir in the flour all at once using a heat-proof spatula (I just used a wooden spoon. Keep stirring until it clumps together and forms a ball. Cook it for a minute or two more, turning the dough over in the pot with the spoon/spatula. Remove from heat.

Add the vanilla.

Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each(just a little tip here - when i made this recipe the first time I used a spoon to mix everything... DON'T do that. Use an electric mixer). After you mix the first egg in your dough should look something like this...

The dough should be shiny looking, but still sticky enough that it doesn't slide around on your spoon/spatula. By the third egg your dough should look like this...

After you're done mixing in the eggs, put the dough in a pastry bag fitted with a star tip that has an opening at least 1/2 inch wide. I didn't use a star tip for mine, in fact i just put it in a pastry bag without a tip on it and hoped for the best. I would advise using a star shaped pastry tip if you have one.

Start heating up your vegetable oil.

While you wait for the oil to heat up, mix the 1/2 cup of sugar and cinnamon together and put the mixture on a plate or in a pan so it will be ready to roll the churros in.

Once the oil is heated, pipe dough into the pan, making the churros about 4-6 inches long. fry them for about 2 minutes on each side until they're golden brown.

Let them cool on a plate lined with paper towels...

While the churros are still warm, roll them in cinnamon in sugar.

If desired, you can also dip churros in dulce de leche or nutella. Normally churros are filled with something called manjar (which is very similar to dulce de leche) or chocolate but filling churros can be a little tricky so I just dipped mine in manjar...

Enjoy your churros!!

OK, so now that you have made some Peruvian food and hopefully enjoyed it, here are a couple of songs that are pretty popular here that you can listen to while you eat your churros. These artists are not necessarily from Peru, but their music is listened to alot where I live. A style of music called reggaeton is very popular here.


This first song is pretty catchy (a little too catchy actually... I found myself humming the tune to this long after I had finished listening to it). It is called Danza Kuduro...




This song is by a band called Camila that actually is from Mexico but is popular here. It is called Alejate de Mi (the music video is a little weird just so you know) ....





Well, I hope you enjoyed your churros and the music. Both of those songs should be available on iTunes. Thanks for reading and I apologize for being so late to post this!! Hasta Luego!

-Lynae Rockwell


PS I also have a blog of my own called One Summer that I haven't been posting on very often (but hope to start posting again soon) which you can find here -

http://lynaerockwell-onesummer.blogspot.com/

Also I have a flickr account which you can find by going here -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60095568@N02/

LOVES // summer is.

001. Fresh strawberries from the garden, with the earthy flavor before you wash them and the juicy one after.

002. Stupid songs sung badly.





003. Haircuts and the lightness you feel afterwards.

004. Pretty new tops. (this one from Target)

this photo was pre-haircut

005. Photobooth.

the words say "my SHELL burst", by the way.

006. Dresses with boots.

007. Awkward tan lines.

What's your summer?

LIFE // ghost girls and madonna on vinyl

So I've been working on this book about a girl whose friend dies and comes back to haunt her. It's my first stab at a full-length horror story, and it's turning out pretty well. But a couple days ago I decided it would also be interesting as a short screenplay. Emily agreed to be in it initially, then got camera-shy and decided against it. So it went from being about two friends to being about two twins. Watch the trailer and tell me what you think... if you can't tell, the straight-haired me (Maia) is alive, and the curly-haired me (Alma) is dead.









We had about fifteen minutes or so (of about thirty overall) filmed, but we just didn't have the equipment to suitably make it conceivable that there were two people when there was really just one. So here's the first five minutes — after this it began to fail, but this bit is okay-ish. I think I need a legit video camera, not just a Vado, before I become a serious indie filmmaker, haha. And some friends who are more willing to act. Besides, you know... just me.








So we gave up on that and started making pancakes instead. Em has this awesome vinyl record player, and Madonna's "Like a Virgin" record, so we put it on and felt very vintage and awesome. They were good pancakes, too.

Inexplicably, there was a baby snail on my strawberry. It was kind of confusing.

And we swung, because swinging is fun. So is, as Emily puts it, "gifing."

Pretty sure this is an awesome gif. If it works. Which it might not. Poll?

And watched SNL while writing blog posts. Very good day.


pea ess: We straightened my hair for Maia's role (to differentiate between the two) and it's LONG. I mean REALLY long. I feel like Rapunzel. I had no idea my hair was really this long, since most of the time it's curly. I haven't straightened it in months. I was kind of in awe of my own follicles.
Getting a cut on Tuesday, but I'm going to keep the length and just get my layers back. The top ones are supposed to be about two inches long... right now they've grown to about fourteen inches. Yeah. It's bad. Pictures tomorrow.


RESPONSE TO COMMENTS
1- I know, I do look like I'm smiling when I cry. It's partially the angle and partially my face. I promise, I had legit tears and everything.
2- I use iMovie '11 and love it. :)

LIFE // how the beatles manipulated my current personality

DRUGS. They mess with your head.

Consider this a sister story to How I Got Nommed By A Snake.

First, a bit of family history. My mother was an art student and painter, and did things like going to nuclear test sites and eating tofu in protest, and chaining herself to cattle grates (don't even ask about that one, I'm still confused), and herding sheep for Pauline Whitesinger.
My father has (at various points in his life) been in more rock bands than I can count, travelled around after the Grateful Dead in a hippie bus making tie-dyed t-shirts and friendship bracelets, kept various reptiles in his bedroom, and (at the time of meeting my mother) had hair down to his waist.

Yes. That is my family. Yay, mom and dad.

Well, when I was a small child, I was introduced to Yellow Submarine. If you are not familiar with this movie, is is by and about the Beatles and is the trippiest thing known to man. Seriously. There should be a disclaimer at the beginning saying "WARNING: This movie was made on LSD. Proceed with caution. Not advisable for small children, epileptics, or people with heart conditions, because it WILL give you seizures."

Naturally, I loved it.

It was my favorite movie. I watched it several times a week. This movie was possibly the most influential thing in my young life.

Want a clip? Want to see JUST HOW WEIRD this movie is? Here's a few for your enjoyment:







Or this one. This is a nice collection of clips from the movie.







I can only imagine what my parents were thinking when they introduced me to such an LSD-laden experience... Probably that it would make me an interesting person and keep me away from Barbie and Hannah Montana (they succeeded with Hannah Montana, but I did still have Barbies. They died interesting deaths... I was a strange child.)

in case you can't read my handwriting: on one side, it reads "what my parents probably expected would happen" and has the legend "yay happy hippy nature time". The other side says "what really happened" with the legend "vaguely hippy internet monster".

I showed a clip to my friend Anne and she looked at me like I was nuts. "Yeah, I grew up watching Disney Channel," she said. "This is, like, scarier than movies I watch now."

To date I have only ever met one other peson my age who watched Yellow Submarine as a child, and that is the wonderful Emily.

Now let me explain my thesis that Yellow Submarine shapes your personality.

I always thought the movie had made me weird. I knew it. But then I met Em. We have the same dress sense, we both like photography and fashion and vintage keys, we like the same music. We're so alike it's a bit scary (except that she doesn't like tomatoes, which I think is insane).

And then, a few weeks ago, I found out that she watched Yellow Submarine when she was young.

I uphold the claim that this movie will make you crazy, and strange, yet completely awesome if watched weekly at a young age.

Sidenote: Em just commented saying "you may be my twin. just a thought. :)" and rdfgkukjfs! I hadn't even thought of that. We could SO be twins. Separated at age, like, seven-ish and brainwashed so we wouldn't remember each other. HOLY CHEESECAKE, you guys! I mean, come on. We look alike. Sorta. Not really. But Shhhh! Stop crushing my dreams. 

not the most flattering pic of EITHER of us, but usually one of us is holding the camera so group shots are tricky.

I'm curious if any of you watched this lovechild of music and drugs as children. Pray tell if you did, and if so if it made you a raving lunatic a stunning person like me.

PS: Ke$ha references Yellow Submarine several times in the vid for Your Love is My Drug. I love her. And this video, between the trippy Beatles animation and the animals and all the feathers she's wearing, pretty much kills me with awesomeness.


PPS: BLOGGER WANTS TO STEAL OUR "EDIT HTML" BUTTON! Please sign this petition to prevent it.

Speaking to the Soul {Sally's Guest Post}

Music touches all of our lives in some way. It's almost impossible for it not to, so think a moment on this:

What would the world be like if there was no such thing as music?

There would be no songs to listen to on the radio and our iPods.

There would be no movie soundtracks.

There would be no singing in the shower.

There would be no concerts to attend.

"Music is love in search of a word." ~ Sidonie Gabrielle

"Music takes out of us the actual and whispers dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and where to." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It's amazing how much would not be, if there was no music. Me? If I was still alive, but there was no music, I would be a living shadow or ghost. Looking at my life, it's all music. Sheet music around the house, trumpet books upon trumpet books, high quality instrument, music scarves and t-shirts and sticky notes and posters and medals and bumper stickers and trumpet figurines and mouse-pads and those things you put cups on so they aren't on bare wood, the amount of black performance clothes in my closet, the calendar filled with band events and rehearsals and lessons, the treble clef on my left wrist and the bass clef on my right. 

All gone? I'd probably die of heart failure.

"To stop the flow of music is like the stopping of time itself. Incredible and inconceivable."

~Aaron Copland

"Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, and the only art of earth we take to Heaven." ~ Walter Savage Landor

Music is so….unexplainable. It's a whole other language, and we musicians, even we don't really understand most of it. It's one thing to read music, or noodle a bit on your instrument, and quite another when you get swept up into the music as you play or as you listen to it being played. It's other-worldly, it's amazing, it's incredible. 

"Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world."  

~ Giuseppe Mazzini

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and which cannot remain silent." ~ Victor Hugo

What IS this phenomenon?

It expresses all that cannot be said, it tugs and pulls our emotions, it surpasses the beauty of anything else on this Earth, but what is it?

It's sound and noise and pitch and tone and so much more that it could only be divine.

"Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is filled with music." ~ Marcel Marceau 

"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" ~ Sergei Rachmaninov 

Music is the language of the soul, the language of the Lord. When you listen or play or sing and you put every ounce of your living energy into this, it's like a direct telephone line to Heaven.

It's bliss!

It's wonder!

It's ecstasy!

It's in these moments when my soul feels alive, like it's on fire, passionately in love with the music.

"The aim and final end of music should be to the glory of God, to the refreshment of the soul."

~ Johann Sebastian Bach

"Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul" ~ Anonymous 

Music simply speaks to the soul.

It captures the mind, and touches the heart.

It soothes, calms and heals, but can also awaken, invigorate and inspire.

It is our wake up call and our medicine wrapped up into one. 

"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to imagination and charm and gaiety to life and to everything." ~ Plato

"Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing
Thanks for all the joy they're bringing.
Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty:
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music,
For giving it to me."

Thank You For The Music ~ ABBA

Music is something that can never be fully explained, yet it's my lifeblood. It keeps me sane, it keeps me alive, which makes me praise God every single day for this divine gift, because really; a life without music? It's no life at all.

"Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try."

~ Mary Kay Ash

"It is better to die young with a song on your lips and a rhythm in your soul then to live a thousand years without ever feeling the power of music within you. For a life without music, is no life at all."                 ~ Anonymous 

'Twas the Night Before Christmas...

And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse.

Ehh... not so much. Everyone's running around like chickens with their heads cut off over here. Wrapping presents, delivering Christmas cookies to the neighbors, baking, cleaning... eep! The mice might not be stirring, but that's only because they're too freaked out by the activity of all the chores we crazy humans are doing.

wrapping gifts
I love wrapping presents. I mean, the way you wrap a present tells a lot about your relation to the person. If you stick it in a gift bag with a premade tag, does that say you really care? No, that says that you know how to go shopping at WalMart. So I always spend way more time wrapping gifts than I ought to.
By the way, our wrapping paper is pretty much all from IKEA. They have the best papers ever. The gnome bags (see cookies section) are also IKEA... so Scandinavian, so epic.

My presents to my parents... proud of my wrapping job. :)

My mom is ninja when it comes to wrapping.

christmas cookies
My mom and I spent all day yesterday baking cookies to give to neighbors and friends... and to eat ourselves, of course. ;)
We made sugar cookies, cardamom balls, and homemade toffee. Mmmm.

gingerbread house
I am proud to say that this year I was the one to bake and decorate our gingerbread house. My mom helped a little — she liked putting in the little green bushes and trees — but overall this is my holiday claim to fame.
And yes, that is the Kraken attacking a sinking sailboat over in the left. It was my dad's idea. I said, "How can I make this gingerbread house awesome? I know! A Scandinavian monster. Dad, what's a Scandinavian monster?" And my dad suggested the Kraken. So there you go.
Have you noticed that my family's Christmas is generally a pretty Scandinavian occurrence? No idea why. It just happens. Every year.
Recipe and house shape by Martha Stewart.

What, your gingerbread house doesn't feature lederhosen-wearing Scandinavian sheep farmers with Kraken in their backyards? What a pity. Next year, you know what to make. ;)

i {♥} space versus speed
Guess what I'm listening to right now? Not Ke$ha or Rihanna or Owl City or even the radio. Nope. I'm listening to my daddy.

My dad's been in more bands than I can count, since before I was born. One of them was so successful they toured cross-country, and guess who showed up to one of their concerts? Sandra Bullock. We have a photo of her holding me as a baby. An album for another one, a very heavy-metal band, contains a good deal of lyrics written by my six-year-old self. Including something about a prince on a pegasus. Don't even ask.

His latest is also getting pretty popular. It's called Space Versus Speed and it's by far my favorite of all his bands (well, maybe tied with one called Lincolnville). It's actually really awesome; kind of pop-rock. Epic.

You can listen to their latest album here. In my opinion the best is "Set It Off". And yes, their leading song is called "Tea and Cocaine". Sigh. When I play this for my friends they always make some smart-aleck comment about that song and what it says about my family. For the record, my dad thinks it should have been called "Honey and Bourbon" instead, that's the other part of the chorus.

If you like it you can buy their album on iTunes. Or, if you live in an area with Bull Moose Music, it's coming out there soon.

I know this wasn't exactly Christmas-y, but I'm listening to it as I type and it makes me happy.

That's my dad on the far right. On bass. Just like me. Love ya, daddio.

oh christmas tree

Loving macro photos of ornaments right now... *sighs with happiness*

1: Venezuelan Virgin Mary my dad and I got for my mom when we lived in the Caribbean
2: Yet ANOTHER Scandinavian part of Christmas
3. Epic disco star
4. Self-portrait. And yes, I'm wearing my dad's sweater and a pom-pom hat.

More Scandinavian stuff. A stacking doll I always called "Babushka". Is that correct or not?

Awesome old Polaroid. This is my mom sixteen years ago today telling her friends that my dad had just proposed to her. Awww!

israel

Part 1 of 2 for my mom's Christmas gift from me comes from an Etsy seller in Israel. (Mom, if you're reading this, you must desist, as I'm about to reveal your gift.) It's a ring made from an antique Israeli coin. I haven't opened the envelope yet, and I just wrapped around it because it's so epic! I think I will need to hang it on my wall.

little black dress (one more time)

I found one more way to wear my LBD. Lacy tights with short retro heels and lots of jewelry. Plus a hair-flower-thingy from Forever 21.

candlelight service

We're going to the Candlelight Service at our sweet, itty-bitty little church tonight. It's awesome and full of songs.

{via}

guys, it's christmas eve.

I can't believe it. December has gone by so fast. When I was little this month - week - day dragged on forever. Now? I blink and it's gone. Wow.