Bottle cap magnets

You could do this the easy way like Condo Blues did. With the right pieces and it would be simple and fast. Or you can do it my way and use up some things you have lying around the house and take a bit more time.

The things lying around the house you'll need to have, bottle caps of course, free business card magnets (or any magnets you may have lying around and no longer need/want), and scraps of fabric or even paper/cardboard, perhaps from junk mail if you don't have scrap fabric. I used fabric because I have A LOT of it and no real use for it but I can't just throw it out, think there are some under lying issues there.

Gather all your supplies: desired bottle caps, magnets, scrap fabric, and hot glue gun:

Measure out a piece of fabric that fits inside the bottle cap width wise, fold it up so it all fits in the bottle cap with some space left for the magnet piece and glue it in. Make sure you glue at most/all folds.

Measure and cut your magnets into pieces that will fit in your bottle cap. I choose to go with rectangles versus circles cause they were easier to cut to a correct size for me.

Glue your magnet to your fabric

Stick on your fridge or whatever surface you please.

What's up...

Been busy and dealing with everyday things and some not so everyday things.....lot's done and lot's had to be done.

-My computer crashed while trying to install a game and was revived by the guys at Rich's friend who works in the I.T. department at his work. Luckily I had transfered all my pictures and the few docs I had the day before it crashed. I did lose some bookmarks but mostly just random things I never got around to looking at. I use google bookmarks for the most part since I was having a monster number of crashed due to crappy Vista.

-Computer was taken back so they could help install game properly and in doing so found that my hard drive was just about to die and that was the stem of the issues I'd been having. Got new hard drive and the game installed.

-Tried to play game with a ten day trial but apparently it doesn't work anymore with the version of the game I have, it only works for the OLD version. Makes no sense.

-Took a pet sitting job that was 25 miles away. I did pet sitting for a while a few years back, it was a stressful time I had 4 jobs back then. Talk about working yourself to the bone. I haven't done much since then but do miss it.

-On the last day of pet sitting the blind dog finally warmed up to me and didn't bark at me on and off the whole time I was there. After the first day he would let me pet him but then remember he doesn't know what's going on and who I am and would bark at me again. ;) We became good friends on the last day though.

-Other dog caught a young squirrel for me. That was gross, it was still moving and then she brought it over to me and I told her to go take it somewhere else and she thought I said leave it alone so she dropped it next to me and then went and looked guilty on the other side of me. Eventually she went back to it and gingerly picked it up and went and buried it.

-Rich's computer also crashed and we had to buy a new motherboard. Then ram wouldn't work and now having issues getting it to update to 7. Technology seems to be more trouble than it's worth sometimes.

-Need to learn to eat dinner before 8 pm. Dinner not ready until 9 tonight and then I was no longer hungry.

-Did some laundry and had the extra pleasure of the cat using the litter box that is in the same room, and we aren't talking about pee here.

-Sewed some more book covers. Having issues making them so they actually fit. Luckily all my small paperback covers fit but my large hardcovers keep coming out too small. I just use them for larger paperback books. Lesson: I really need to get a proper ruler, all I have is one that I had from grade school, really not good for marking and measuring for sewing purposes.

-Finally got around to buying my cat's a new scratching post. Got them a cool little post that has a spinning top too. Their old ones were actually scratching boards, they had two that were wrapped in sisal rope and one was crap, made of rope wrapped around two pieces of cardboard, it fell apart and the other was falling apart because it was very old. The cats couldn't really scratch on them anymore and the fatty took to eating the frayed rope. Now I just have to get some sisal rope and cover the posts of the carpet cat tree we have so the fatty stops eating that.

-Rich finally got the raise he deserves and has been due for years. They did an official wage study on his position and a raise of almost 20% was approved. While we are beyond happy it really drives home how over due this raise is. 20% raise is ridiculous!

-Been having constant battles about what needs to get done on a daily basis yet doesn't get done and still doesn't after battles are brought to a conclusion. It's beyond tiring.

-Just finished eating 4 avocados I bought and then my mom brings me 5 more ripe and ready to eat NOW avos. I love being in an area where avos are so readily available and delicious but don't want to eat them everyday for weeks on end. Not sure what I am going to do with these. I guess I could make and freeze some guacamole.

-Wild fire season has apparently started once again and started with a wild fire in the county no less. I believe there was still a hire fire danger heading into December last year. That's just too long for me, it really makes me think about moving out of the area. I hate fire season and have a panic inducing fear of my home and all my animals being destroyed by a fire, especially when I am gone.

-I am being more of a klutz lately than usual, not that I notice doing most of this stuff but the ridiculous amount of bruising on my legs lets me know I need to learn to avoid something, not sure what exactly, ha. I have always bruised very easily and the bruises go through such a gross progression of color and last for ages.

101...why mudnessa

Hey would you look at that, this is apparently my 101st post. So let's have a bit of a blabbering post letting you get a little more insight into mudnessa, you know a mudnessa 101.

If you come across a mudnessa it is most likely me, I did see a mudnessa registered on a racing/car/motorbike site something or other that wasn't me so it isn't ALWAYS me. Before I was mudnessa, way back when usernames were only used for email and IM, I wasWeeMadNessa. I used WeeMadNessa for years, many many years. It was fitting but the mad part only come out if you really really really piss me off or I love you with all of my heart, yeah major character flaw. I'm pretty sure mudnessa all started with a MUD (multi-user dungeon) game my brother was playing and he wanted me to play. It was the Discworld MUD to be exact, I didn't wanna be weemad and he suggested MudNessa because it was a MUD and that's just cool, right? We decided that all lowercase was good since the game is in caps. Didn't hurt that mud is actually a pretty fitting description of me sometimes, ok most of the time. From then on I was and will probably always be mudnessa. It is just so fitting.

Let's "discuss" why it's so fitting. Well my name is Vanessa so the Nessa part is self-explanatory right....I actually had a friend ask why people call me Nessa, not the brightest guy in the world. Nessa started when my younger, not little, I'm the little one, first started talking and he couldn't say Vanessa and Nessa was easy. I rarely hear my family call me Vanessa and even Rich almost always calls me Nessa or sometimes red. I don't actually get called mudnessa it's just used in print.

A few years back my mom asked me why exactly mudnessa, a friend asked and she said it was because I get and don't mind being dirty and muddy and she wanted to make sure that was why. I told her about the Discworld game and then confirmed that it stuck because I am usually dirty. I told a few stories of me being dirty over the years, one of which she hadn't heard/known about that she loved.

Here are a few childhood dirty Nessa stories. When I was a kid we had a LARGE veggie garden and I really enjoyed planting things and digging in the dirt. We had a BIG pile of manure brought over by my uncle. For weeks on end after school I would go and play IN the manure pile digging around for worms. I literally remember digging myself a big hole in the middle of the pile and having manure surrounding me almost past my head. My parents would just smile and shake their heads at me.

I went to work with my dad, who works in construction, one day and ended up playing with wet cement with my bare hands. If you are familiar with cement you know how miserable I was later that night and the next day. If not, basically it pulled ALL the moisture out of my skin and basically "burnt" my hands. Not a happy day, not a happy day at all, but I sure did have fun playing in the wheelbarrow full of gooey cement.

Here is the story my mom loved. We had a sandbox that me and my brother played in a lot. One day I decided it would be fun to see how much sand we could get in my pants. I put on sweatpants and quickly realized the elastic on the bottom wasn't strong enough to hold in much sand. I ran inside, got some super thick rubber bands, something we had A LOT of, dad got a lot of large plans that were secured with large rubber bands. With a roomy pair of sweatpants on secured at the ankles with rubber bands my brother grabbed a bucket and started dumping sand down my pants. We succeeded and got my pants FULL of sand. They weren't really around my waist anymore but they were brimming with sand, it was like a heavy fat suit and if I remember correctly we were hysterical. Guess my pants didn't end up too sandy because mom was non the wiser while doing my laundry. My brother is currently and has always been the clean freak type, but not OCD like, he obviously had no problem helping me get dirty.

Probably somewhere around my 13th birthday I got a worm growing kit. I LOVED growing worms. Obviously I was the kid who had to be forced to take a shower. Which didn't work, as in as an adult I still don't shower that often. I've mentioned it here before but luckily I am not an overly smelly person and showering daily really isn't necessary. My hair would revolt if it was subjected to water much less washing everyday. As it is now as long as I don't get too visibly dirty or play with a stinky animal at work I only shower twice a week. I know gross right, eh, another character flaw.

However the other day when me and Rich were....um......."talking" my over active mind got working before our "conversation" got too "intense" and I noticed he smelled different, he had bought and used a new shower soap. You know how people have their own smell, whether it be their perfume, soap, or whatever. I don't use a scented soap, I don't use perfume or scented anything really so I just smell like me. I asked him what do I smell like, he sniffed my hair and said, nothing really. I had showered the day before so I probably did have little to no smell. Then I asked well if you had to from memory describe what I smell like what would it be, he just looks at me not wanting to piss me off. I say, "poo?" He smiles and snickers while saying yes. We had a good laugh and I realized why again I love him so, because he loves me despite the fact that he can't say his wife smells like roses, vanilla, or something sweet, he know and still loves that his wife smells like poo. Ah true love isn't it glorious, haha.

Now don't get the wrong idea I don't smell like a nasty sewage bathroom gag inducing walking poo stick or anything. It's more of a dirty, nature, gritty smell, perhaps with a little bit of pet shop/zoo on bad days. In recent years it hasn't been so bad because I no longer clean up and sometimes literally roll around with smelly mammals like monkeys, coatimundis, binturongs, pot bellied pigs, kinkajous, opossums, foxes, porcupines, prairie dogs, among a lot of other smelly things. Some days I use to have to drive home with the windows down or I would gas myself out of my car. Those were times when I would shower daily, if not more since I worked 2 short shifts at one job.

I now exclusively work with reptiles and don't do a lot of hands on with them beyond just my hands, as long as I don't spill/drop things on myself I don't get too smelly at work. I am working in rooms full of reptiles, it can smell like the reptile house at a zoo, it's not too bad. One problem though is that I get pretty immune to my work smells so I don't even notice it anymore. Unless something is dead, death stinks even when it's just a tiny little creature and there is no getting use to that or not noticing it.

Every once in a while I will pick Rich up from work right after I get off work and the first thing he'll say will be something about me smelling, I've heard, "YOU STINK!" "Did you play with the dogs a lot at work today?" Lovely things like that are often his first greetings to me. It is usually more my clothes that smell than actually me so once I change I no longer have dog or stink on me.

That's the story, evolution, and why behind mudnessa and why it has stuck with me. Hope you enjoyed. Let's end it with a picture from a few years ago of true mudnessa just home from work one day.