Look Mom – I Did it Myself!

These are the words that make a mother deliriously proud.  Or cause her to weep uncontrollably, depending on the situation.  Either of these reactions have also been known to follow all do it yourself projects performed by me in the privacy of my own home.  Friends and family will see and be prompted to praise the results of the successes, and the failures will die with me, along with other various missteps, fiascos and sordid secrets.

Prompts for the Promptless:  Do it yourself (DIY) is the method of building, modifying, or repairing something without the aid of experts or professionals.

What do we need experts and professionals for when we’ve got Google?  said a lot of clueless people who went on to learn that experts and professionals are not completely without merit after all.

For my do-it-yourself project today, I will be making a sun catcher.  I don’t really need or want one, but I have plastic beads hanging around which no grandchild seems at all gung-ho to string.  And I don’t want to throw them out and be all wasteful.  Better to throw out the finished product and feel good about myself for having at least given it a try.  Or file it under F for fiasco.  It’s kind of exciting to have no idea how something will turn out.

I am using an old pie tin that I will not miss if this whole thing turns out badly.

I am also using one of the good pie plates because I have way more stupid beads than I thought.

Notice the artistic arrangement in both cases with some opaque beads in one and only clear green, blue and purple in the other.  This is about as artistic as I feel like getting today.

While waiting for the oven to heat to 400 degrees, on the other side of the kitchen counter I ponder what to do with these three avocados I bought because they are supposedly so good for me.  The creative, multi-tasking side of my brain thinks putting them in a smoothie might be interesting, while the other side of my brain reminds me that I haven’t yet had breakfast.  Voila!  Coconut almond milk, a banana, scooped out avocado, key lime greek yogurt (which I bought accidentally thinking it was vanilla) and a bag of frozen spinach and kale results in this delightful looking concoction.

Before blending.

After blending fuzzy close up. Do it yourself photography is a topic for another time.

The consistency and color are great, but the taste is rather disappointing.  In fact, there is no taste.  So I add a squirt of lemon juice, a shake of cinnamon and a couple scoops of frozen blueberries.  This makes the smoothie look like mud, but a lot easier to swallow.

Starbucks is in no way responsible for this goop in their glass.

I can’t say for sure whether the aroma of melting plastic is adding or detracting from the avocado smoothie taste experience.

The melting process is supposed to take twenty minutes, but I’d suggest forty is more realistic.  This number comes from my admittedly limited experience – please note that I am not a professional or expert melter of beads.

Sun catchers fresh from the oven. Wow, look how clean my stove top is!

The next thing to do is let these things cool, slip them out of the plates (ha – I’m not optimistic about that one), drill holes in them and hang them up with something like fishing line to catch the rays of the sun.  It’s cloudy today, so I’m not optimistic about that one either.  I notice the one on the left already has a hole close to one edge, so how forward thinking was that?  Flukey forward thinking is probably an apt name for it in this case.

Oh. My. God.  They really do pop right out of the pans.  And there is a little hole in the second sun catcher as well, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no luck like dumb luck.

Now I will pretend that I was never skeptical, and expected nothing less than these amazing results. Because that’s where real DIY people truly excel.

Okay, all that’s left of this Sunday project (which didn’t turn out to be from hell after all), is to air out that burnt plastic smell from my house and wish for some sparkly sunshine.  Plus think up some totally awesome weird thing to do with the two remaining avocados.  That should not be a problem as I appear to be on a roll.