crafty little devil

here's a picture of those yoyo things i made last night (per my previous entry). i don't like the buttons so i might take them off and replace them with a different one.

i wasn't kidding when i said i would give handmade gifts from now on (sang pls let me know kung dili ka gusto ug handmade gift for ling ling hahaha!). my friend lori's daughter sydney's bday is coming up and she's the kid that has everything so i'm making this for her.



it's not quite done yet as laziness has hit me and i've decided i shouldn't kill myself doing crafts i.e. finish a project completely in one sitting...so i'm going to finish this tomorrow and find something lovely to wrap it with.

vaughn and i went to joann's today to scour the fabric remnants bins -- i have decided that my new hobby will be fabric hoarding. hahahah! at least it's cheap and it will keep me away from the shopping mall. plus now everytime i'm attracted to something in a store, i tell myself: hey i can make that! which prevents me from buying desired thing and then hopefully forget the "i can make that" proclamation later.

vaughn had so much fun looking at all the colors and of course basked in the attention of the sales people cooeing and oooh-ing over him "he's such a cutie! how old is he? so alert! look at those eyes! hello there cutie cutie!" fortunately for them my son rewards them with a great big gummy grin and the old ladies would chuckle in delight. sigh! he's only six months old and he already knows how to work it. man i'm gonna be in so much trouble...hahaha

anyway, here's some stuff we found:

i already have an idea what to do with these fabrics (other than make them into name things) and i figured out what i'm gonna do with vaughn's baby food containers that i saved, voila! instant button keeper. i am secretly pleased with myself these days heeheehee =)

hmmmm

somebody gave me valentine m&ms at work yesterday...didn't put who it's from and disguised the handwriting so i can't tell who it is. so so highschool. it still made me giggle like a schoolgirl though, kamabaw ba sa akong kalipay!

what are you addicted to?

currently i'm addicted to this website: http://www.etsy.com/index.php

i think i'll put some items to sell (lia you probably heard of this site waay before i did, but you should sell your stuff here)

i dream of becoming (brace yourselves...) MARTHA STEWART! i don't want to work anymore, i just want to stay home, take care of vaughn, and do crafts for a living =)

sigh! i think i had too much starbucks coffee today. oh yea, i made my first yoyo last night (actually i made 2) it's not very neat but it looks good! i'll post pics asap. i'm thinking about stenciling some white onesies with funky designs for vaughn...and my nieces and nephews will hate me as will my close friends, because i have now decided to give hand made gifts for people. if you are opposed to such idea [and your birthday is coming up] lemme know. hahaha!

ok, back to slavin'

xoxo,

teray

p.s. purchasing a lottery ticket today, i might win and this dream might become a reality

The $10 solution

I saw this article in Time magazine a few weeks back and meant to post it on this blog, $10 is a very small sacrifice on our part but gives so much to the suffering people of Africa. Please help!


The $10 Solution
Thursday, Jan. 04, 2007 By JEFFREY D. SACHS

Listen for a moment to the beautiful and dignified voices of Africa's mothers. Despite their burdens of poverty and hunger, they will tell you not of their endless toil but of their hopes for their children. But softly, ever so softly, they will also recount the children they have lost, claimed by a sudden fever, children who died in their arms as they were carried in a desperate half-day's journey by foot from the village to the nearest clinic.
This is the ineffable sadness of malaria. Another African child has died of malaria since you started reading this article. Perhaps 2 million children in all will succumb this year.
The long-term consequences are insidious as well as tragic and even relate to the ability of the U.S. to prevail against the jihadists. Not only does malaria sap worker productivity and scare away business investment, but it also, paradoxically, increases the rate of population growth. Instead of having two or three children, couples in a malarial region often choose to have six or seven--unsure how many will survive.
Malaria also helps create a poverty trap with special ferocity in Africa. By a quirk of ecological fate, Africa has the world's heaviest toll of this disease, the result of its tropical climate, its specific types of mosquitoes and its limitless mosquito-breeding sites. Children are struck down in unmatched numbers. And Africa's disease toll from malaria may be even higher than previously recognized. Recent research has found that malaria infection increases the likelihood that an HIV-infected individual will transmit the AIDS virus to others. Many millions are also infected simultaneously with malaria and worm infections, multiplying the disease burden.
Osama bin Laden has called for jihad in Africa, trying to capitalize on its extreme poverty. Here's how we can respond. While malaria has shaped Africa's poverty trap, it is a trap that can finally be unlocked. Spectacular technological advances, some stunningly simple, offer practical and low-cost solutions. The most obvious one is insecticide-treated bed nets, now cleverly engineered to last up to five years. The cost to manufacture, ship and distribute each net is $10. A new generation of medicines based on artemisinin, an extract from a traditional Chinese herbal remedy, is remarkably effective in treating cases of the disease, at a cost of about a dollar per treatment.
Yet these solutions still aren't reaching the vast proportion of Africans in need. Hard as it is for us to imagine, Africa's households simply can't afford even $10 for a net, or a dollar for medicines when a child falls sick. Nor can African governments carry these costs on meager budgets or take extra vital steps to train local health workers and ensure that every village has reliable access to effective medicines.
Here is where you and I come in. Considering the costs of the nets, medicines and other components of malaria control, a comprehensive program would cost about $4.50 per African at risk, or about $3 billion a year for the whole continent. This is an amount that is too large for Africa but truly tiny for the rich world.
Let me put the $3 billion in perspective: there are a billion of us in the high-income world--that amounts to $3 a person, or one Starbucks coffee a year. It's around 12.5% of the estimated $24 billion in Wall Street's Christmas bonuses.
We should bring forth armies of Red Cross volunteers to distribute bed nets and to offer village-based training for tens of thousands of villages across Africa. In a brilliant demonstration of people power and modern logistics, Red Cross volunteers distributed nets to more than half the households of Togo in 2004 and Niger in 2005 in a matter of a few days in each country. That successful delivery model should be replicated across Africa, by 2010 if not earlier, but this will depend on mobilizing the needed resources.
New citizens' movements, including Malaria No More malarianomore.org and Nothing but Nets (nothingbutnets.net) have been established to achieve the needed breakthrough. We can each contribute $10 for a bed net. We can each learn more about the disease and become antimalaria leaders in our communities, schools, churches and businesses. We can urge our governments to work with the private sector and citizens' groups to win the fight against malaria during this decade. President Bush recently took a good step in scaling up the U.S. government's malaria-control efforts, but much more needs to be done to ensure that aid reaches the hundreds of millions of Africans at risk.
Together we can choose peace over jihad and life over violence. Through our common resolve, we can prove the power we each have to save a life.

will have time to blog...soon

been super super busy. went up to big bear this weekend, went to SD last weekend, going to disneyland this weekend with isang's highschool bestfriend, superbowl party on sunday, work's busy busy. so i'll blog about feelings and such later on if i can ever find the time anymore. but i will definitely post pics from the big bear trip soon...meanwhile check out the pics i took at SD. hope everyone is well.