Can Lanterns

Sorry this post is a day late! I lost track of days of the week...eek. One of the christmas gifts I gave Lilly was a craft that I had been wanting to try for a while, that I kept seeing on sites when looking for crafts to do with my summer campers. Making an empty can into a little lantern candle holder. So when I finally tried it, I decided to put a heart on it, since it's a pretty simple shape that I figured I could handle. They really are quite easy to make and look charming once they're done.

The only other things beside an empty can you need are a hammer and nail, and either a towel or vice grip. When I did this at my parents house I used my dad's vice grip and that was way easier than without it. At the apartment I simply sat with it in my lap on a towel. It was still pretty easy, but not quite as easy as it was at home. 

The trick to the whole thing is freezing water in it. Everyone in my family asks why this is necessary, but it's fairly simple, having the ice makes it so that you don't dent (or potentially crush) the can as you're punching holes in it, and it's also way easier to get the nail through when there's something on the other side to hit against. It makes a huge difference.

I highly recommend if you make one of these to use a grill lighter or something else with a long reach to light the candle in it. This is because the best candle to use would be a tea light, so that the bottom portion of whatever you punch in the can gets lit up. And it's pretty tricky to light the candle and get it in the bottom of the can successfully with a normal lighter or match. 

I made a second one, which I'll put up on Etsy. See you next tuesday guys!

The Plague ... aka Winter Sickness

Did you miss us last week? Our apartment had been hit by the plague... ie: Lilly and I were both sick as dogs. Personally I put off going to the doctor for as long as possible so I tried every possible thing I could, traditional and not, to try and feel better without going to the doctor. It worked for a while, but ultimately I went to the doctors. You see I started to get a cold a few days after Christmas (that's right folks I've been fighting a cold for just about an entire month) and was starting to get better. Lilly inevitably caught my cold and went to the doctors and got diagnosed a sinus infection. After a few days of seemingly getting better I came down with a treacherous sore throat. But I did some research, since I was pretty sure I had strep, and it turns out you can ride strep out without anti-biotics and it's not a completely terrible idea. But then I was doing a nasal rinse (cause they feel amazing, like seriously, so good) and truth be told I was a little too blocked up on one side to be doing the rinse and some of the water backed into my ear. And it hurt. A lot. The next day even, and at that point my throat was still sore and I was running a fever, and that's when I caved and went to the doctors. Good thing too, turns out I had the beginning stage of pneumonia, FUN! (not) ...and that self induced ear infection. 

A little peak into what isn't even all of the the investments that have been dutifully taken over the past month by one or the both of us as part of our cold fighting, or more accurately I-need-some-drugs-to-sleep-and-I-want-them-now, regimen. You might be asking yourself why is there a bottle of Listerine in this picture? Well gargling Listerine makes me feel like I'm killing off whatever germs I've breathed in  all day and have lodged themselves in my mouth/throat area. Now whether or not this is true isn't all that important, since it makes me feel better either way. 

 The hands down winner for oddest, yet semi-helpful, home remedy I found on the internet was from a guy commenting on this page about fighting step without antibiotics where he says:

When the strep came back, I researched natural cures online and found a recommendation from experienced naturopath family practitioners to take a mixture of garlic, raw honey, and cayenne pepper with a spoon. After swallowing wait a while before eating or drinking so that it can coat the back of the throat. The garlic and raw honey kill the bacteria and the spicy pepper draws the blood to prevent healing. Another recommendation was to gargle with raw apple cider vinegar. 

Now that wasn't a ton to go on as far as how much of this to that and whatnot, but I gave it a try. We had honey in the apartment, but not raw, and hindsight 20/20 I think grating the garlic would've been better than my simply chopping it as small as I had the patience for at the time. I expected it to taste horrible, but it actually didn't taste all that bad at all. Though I had some left over that I tried again a couple days later and the garlic had become quite potent in it. At the time of my sore throat we didn't have any apple cider vinegar, so I can't speak to that, although I've read in numerous places of it's benefits, so there's that. 

All in all hopefully the plague is behind us and we get back to normal health and stay that way for the rest of the winter. Because I know if I don't lose the cough and blowing nose noises soon, Lilly might kill me. With any luck we'll bounce back this week, and then maybe we'll get back to blogging about nicer things. And to those of you out there battling winter sicknesses of your own, hang in there, it's gotta get better, right? :/ 

Resolutions

Now that it's a week into the new year, I thought I'd share with you our New Year's Resolutions. To be fair, I normally don't make resolutions, or really goals of any kind, because I'm more in the state of mind that if I want to do something, I'll simply do it. But I suppose that's not how it always works, so this year I actually made a couple of resolutions. Two to be exact. Lilly isn't a big fan of my resolutions,  but I like to keep it simple, and resolve to do something that I actually stand a good chance in succeeding in (although, lets face it, I'm not great at getting in the habit of things, so we'll see). 

My resolutions:

1. To floss daily

2. To take my vitamins daily

That is all. Two things that I have always wanted to develop into a habit, but have always had great trouble remembering to do. But I know that both of these things are ultimately very good for me and my health, from a preventative state, and in theory is quite an easy task. 

 Lilly's resolutions:

(after initially telling me her resolutions are not for the internet, and looking at me disgruntled while I'm typing this)

1. Eat more fruits and vegetables

2. Hula-Hoop More

3. Reduce shoe collection

4. Read more books

Clearly a slightly more traditional list of resolutions. The first two being health related. The third, is perhaps to appease me, since her shoe collection has effectively taken over our downstairs closet (she insists it has not, only half of the closet), though it's fine, really. And lastly, according to Lilly, when she sits around all day watching TV she feels like she's accomplished nothing that day, but if she reads a book or two that day, then she feels like she's done something with her day. 

Frankenphone

First and foremost: HAPPY NEW YEAR! Now that that's out of the way, I would like to tell you about my phone, or as I lovingly refer to it, my frankenphone. You see prior to my family nixing our family plan I did quite a bit of research regarding the most cost effective route for myself in finding a phone. I concluded that the vast majority of the time I use my phone I am in a wifi zone (mostly at home). Now, there are many ways to make and take phone calls over the internet, but what about when I wasn't in wifi, you know those times when having a cell phone can actually be terribly useful? Well I started looking around. 

When looking around I noticed that Virgin Wireless offered something interesting, a 'peel' for ipods that  allowed the ipod to access 3G (currently I do not think Virgin offers this product anymore, though they do have a mobile hotspot unit, which would do about the same thing, but be a separate device). Since i had a 4th generation ipod, this spurred my interest to see if there were any other similar peels out there, because while I loved the concept of this, I wasn't digging the plan option that Virgin had for it. So sure enough there were! I went with the Raisoo peel with two sim card slots. 

[a short aside: I drop my phone...*occasionally*.  Once I dropped it right on the corner, which caused my peel to crack and bend. I was able to glue it back together with super glue pretty well, but now it helps for it to stay snapped together to have a rubber band around it, I use a purple one from produce at the supermarket :)]

I chose to have a dual sim peel because in researching sim cards and plans I made the discovery that some plans are better for some things, and other are better for other things. With a two sim cards I could use the plan that made the most sense for each. So I had my jail-broken ipod, raisoo peel, and I chose the truphone sim card and spot mobile sim cards. The way I set it all up is that I have a google voice account, which is free, and I programed it to forward texts to my truphone sim, and calls to my spot mobile sim.

The truphone sim card, receives texts for free, which is one of a few reasons I chose this card. The other reasons were it had the best mobile web rates a the time I was looking (which turns out to be a non-point, because I've yet to successfully set-up/use the mobile web function that Raisoo claims it can do), it has decent rates for calling home in england which is nifty, and to stay active you simply have to incur a charge to your account at least once every 90 days, so in theory I can receive all my texts for free on this card and could spend less than $2 a year keeping it active (you do have to spend $30 to intially buy the card, but that includes $15 credit on the card to use).

The spot mobile card has great rates for calling and outgoing texts. It's also great in that my balance rolls over as long as I put $5 on the card at least every 90 days, so this card can be active for as little as $20 a year (initially the card costs $15, which includes a $5 credit on the card). Now you must be thinking, 'yeah, but that means you almost never use your phone for it to be that cheap', right? Wrong. The whole point of this exploration was that I'm usually in wifi when I'm using my phone, so when I'm in wifi I do all my texting right through the google voice app, all for free. To place outgoing calls I also use google voice, but unfortunately you can't do that through their app on an ipod without being tethered through a phone, that's where talkatone comes in. 

Talkatone is an app that allows you to place calls from your google voice number straight from your ipod. It's free, but I've opted to pay the $20 a year for the premium service of the app. So all my outgoing calls in wifi are $20/year. In theory the same should apply for my incoming calls, but I haven't exactly figured out yet how to answer before it gets pushed through to my sim card, but it I really felt compelled I could just miss the call and call right back I guess, but usually I'll just pickup the call from the sim card, since I rarely have long phone conversations anymore. 

Now both cards have pretty good reception in my neck of the woods (New England). Truphone seems to be it's own entity and has pretty great reception most places, and Spot Mobile runs off T-Mobile's (and sometimes AT&T) cell towers. The call quality with the peel and over the internet with head phones are decent, though certainly not as clear as my Verizon phones were. The one thing that continually confuses people is the fact that if I have to place a call to them or send them a text when I'm not in a wifi zone, my number shows up as the sim card number, not my google voice number (which is the number they have for me).

All in all the start up cost of this, if you don't already have an ipod touch, is roughly $295, which is a significant amount. But after that initial cost, I pay about $50 a year in cell phone bills, so it more than pays for itself within a year as compared to getting a normal cell phone plan. Now that being said, this is not really a valid option for the faint of heart (there's a lot of trail and error involved in setting everything up just how you want it) nor for those that legitimately need to use their phone to talk a lot for business (or even personal) purposes.

Now what I would really like as a Happy 2013 present (I can dream) is for some Chinese (or really anywhere) company to come out with a peel for the new ipod touch...preferably one where the data function actually works. Fingers Crossed!