How To Make A Ghostbusters Proton Pack

Ok, so I was basically meant to be a Ghostbuster at some point in time for Halloween. This year turned out to be the year. I didn't have any problem picking up the outfit at a second hand store, but the proton pack that I found to go with it was a blow up super cheesy kind that I had no interest in. So I decided to make my own. 

Here's how you can make one too. 

Step 1: Find yourself a backpack. Any kind with black straps will do. I got this Disney Cruise Line pack at Good Will for $1.99

Step 2: Get a stitch ripper and take off the entire front of the back. All you need is the flat black base and the straps. Everything else can go.

Step 3: Find a bunch of crap around your house that you don't mind destroying. It really can be anything you want. You're going to end up painting it so make sure it isn't anything you'll want to use again in the future. I used a breakfast sausage box, an old handle from my daughter's plastic sand shovel, a large plastic Lego, a Tupperware lid, the plug bottom of a burned out night light, a cable splitter, a metal hook and a handful of random vacuum attachments. 

Honestly, a pile of trash. 

Step 4: Take your trash, spray paint it all black and hot glue gun everything to the back pack. Make sure you lay it all out first and have all the pieces where you want them to go.

Here's what the original looks like in case you need a point of reference:

As you can see from above, you need wires. You'll need to grab some sort of used electronic for step 5. Again, I hit up the Good Will and found an old speaker box from a computer and the guy sold it to me for a dollar. 

Take apart the box, be careful not to cut yourself, and pull out all the old wires that look proton-packish. Go for the ones with lots of colors. 

Grab your hot glue gun and glue your wires wherever they fit. Sorry to be so vague, but your pile of trash is going to be different than mine, so just use your best judgement here.

I used sticky label paper from OfficeMax to print out some stickers from the internet.

For my ghost trapper, I used an old Kleenex box.
Step 1: paint it black.

Step 2: Put your stickers on. ( I found a black fan inside the previously pulled apart speaker box and glued that on for good measure.)

My cord is just an old coaxial cable. Feel free to add a handle or whatever else to it. I wasn't going to make another trip to the Good Will so I just called it a day on this one. 

Happy Ghost Busting!

Want to hear more from me? Follow me on Instagram! @thebrighterwriter

Dollar Store Halloween Skeleton Trophies

It's no secret how I feel about Autumn.

Something about the air coming out of the crisper drawer to play makes my heart skip a beat. 

Halloween has a hold on me in a way that no other holiday ever could. I'm in love with vintage Ouija boards.  I'm in love with the witching hour. I'm in love with the giant orange full moons. 

I have traditions, just like any other Fall junkie, that I happily look forward to all year and it's about that time to start crossing them off my list.

For instance, every year I watch The Shining

And I watch Clue because I LOVE Tim Curry. He's just the best. 

I also watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show because the only thing better than Tim Curry is Tim Curry in drag.

We watch It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown because no Halloween season is complete without a visit from the Great Pumpkin. We pop some popcorn and watch this one with Kalynn every year. I'm not sure if she remembers, but she's seen it every Halloween season since she was born.

And then of course there is the pumpkin patch, the pumpkin carving, the roasted pumpkin seeds, the home churned pumpkin ice cream, the pumpkin cheesecake and the pumpkin spice lattes.

Last year on Halloween night I worked a double at the bar and helped judge the annual costume contest. This year, I have the night off, but even though I won't be there in person I wanted to make something that would still let me be there in spirit.

Enter: The best Halloween costume contest trophies in the World...

Above is the final "Sexiest Costume" and "Best Couple Costume."

Below is "The Scariest Costume" and "Funniest Costume."

So here are the step by step instructions on how I made these guys:

At most Dollar Stores around town during the Halloween season you can pick up these skeleton garlands. They usually have 4 skeletons per garland and they work perfect because they're little bodies and heads are pretty amusing the way they are. Something about them just make me laugh.

You can also find these cheap plastic wine glasses in a pack of 5 or 6 for $1. 

The first thing you need to do is un-string your skeleton from the garland so you're left with just his skinny stick body and snap off all of his bones at the joints. I said my apologies to him before I did this with the promise that, like any surgery, he'd be better than new once the healing process happened. 

Next, you start rebuilding from the bottom up. You'll flip your wine glass over first and use it as the trophy base. Get out your trusty glue gun and form your little guy the way you want him. Start first with gluing his long skinny little toes to the bottom, and then his ankles and so on. 

Once you've got his knees and hips done, it's time to figure out what you want him to do with his hands. 

This guy is the Sexiest Costume man so I made sure to glue his head and arms just where I thought they'd look best. 

I followed the same basic assembly for all five trophies. The couple was the hardest to do but with patience (of which I have very little) I think it turned out the best. 

Next it is time to spray paint. You can find metallic gold stray paint at almost any hardware store. It runs about $6 per can. 

The great thing about the cheap wine glasses is that they come apart at the base, so when it was time to give them their color, it was super easy to separate them with out disrupting their pose.

The stem and cup of the wine glass are used as the base of the trophy so I opted to go with a flat black color which will most likely run you about $1. What's great about the project is that the whole thing total is doable under $10 as long as you already own a glue gun. But even then, a glue gun is only about $8 at any Target, Walmart or craft store. 

Once you put him all together, you can make his sash and base labels. I already have a label maker and construction paper so I just printed out his "Best Over All Costume" banner. 

So that's all there is to it! I hope every one is having a great Fall season and good luck with your contest!

The Biggest Loser Drinking Game : The Biggest Boozer

The Biggest Loser is back, ladies and gentlemen!!

It has been 7 long months of waiting since the March finale of season 14. But with our livers well rested, it is finally time for Fat Tuesday to join our family's calendar once again!

It has become a tradition for my husband and I to grab a babysitter, a good bottle of whiskey, and settle in on the couch for what always promises to be some good old fashioned entertainment on the wide screen (pun intended).

The Biggest Loser is a reality television show in which obese contestants compete to lose the highest percentage of weight loss with relation to their starting weight in order to win hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Let me start by saying that I'm not trying to be cynical here. I realize there are few reality shows out there with a healthy plot geared towards inspiring people all over the world to do something genuinely good for themselves.

That being said, my husband and I have chosen to cheer on these large and in-charge contestants in our own way. We don't mean to offend any one, it's just that this show has seriously gotten so fantastically predictable, we decided to have a little fun while we watch our favorite trainers crack the whip on their individual groups of heavy weight champions.

So here's the rules for those of you who want to play along. There are 12 of them so you're welcome to mix and match. For instance, throw them in a hat and pick out however many you deem appropriate in correlation to how your day was. Last Tuesday was a pretty good day, I may have only chosen 3 rules to work with. However the Tuesday before that was just awful, I may have chosen 7 or 8 to help deal with the annoyance.  If it is the worst Tuesday in the world, I see no harm in playing with all 12 rules. You get the picture.

1. DRINK whenever someone falls off a treadmill
2. DRINK whenever a contestant sheds tears
3. DRINK whenever a trainer sheds tears
4. DRINK whenever you see the full moon slide across the screen before a weigh-in
5. DRINK for every product placement advertisement for Subway, Sugar-free gum,  Jenny-O Turkey, Brita Water Filters, Walgreens etc.
6. DRINK whenever Gillian yells at a someone (trainers and contestants alike)
7. DRINK Whenever a former contestant shows up
8. DRINK when a trainer kicks a contestant out of the gym
9. DRINK for every motivational talk between trainer and contestant. (look for the phrases "I believe in you" "You're an inspiration" "You just have to believe in yourself" etc. Also look for the words journey, pain, dream(s), and accomplish(ment)(s).
10. DRINK every time Alison Sweeney says something is going to change the face/course of the game forever.
11. DRINK anytime a contestant screams/yells/makes strange noises while exercising.
12. DRINK when a contestant blames taking care of everyone else besides him or her self on their lifelong decision to choose deep fried cheesecake instead of movement.

Keep in mind, as the season progresses, the amount of drinking occasions change with the different dynamics of the game. For instance, as the contestants get more familiar with their new gym life, the frequency of someone rolling off the back of the treadmill declines. However, you'll start to see a noticeable incline of grunting montages during the challenges. The game really takes care of evening itself out.

Be safe everyone and as always, drink responsibly.

Oh, you're welcome.

Cheers!

Notre Dame, The Louvre, and the Place de la Concorde

So, I'm putting my scrapbook together, and I'm going through all the odds and ends that I picked up along the way in Paris.

I've kept every brochure, every ticket, every receipt.

I've kept little leaves I picked up off the ground.

I even kept the french sugar packets off the cafe' tables.

I literally kept every souvenir I could get my tiny little hands on.

I didn't really have enough time to do a travel log while I was there, but I found on the back of one of my receipts some scribbled down notes. They aren't like "today I went to the Louvre.." kind of notes, but instead they're of the "Why do all these beautiful fountains smell like dead fish?" variety. Just a few very unfiltered thoughts about the way I felt about Paris while I was there in the moment. So for whatever reason, I'll share.

*My tour guide just told us about our meeting place for the afternoon and then repeated it in 3 other languages for everyone on the bus. Impressive. Everyone here seems to be bilingual except me.

*This city is clean, CLEAN, CLEAN!! I haven't seen a piece of litter in 3 days.

*I had no idea Paris was divided into quarters. 

* Everyone is very polite here. I wonder where the "Parisians hate Americans" stereotype came from?

*Every single building looks like a castle. Even the public toilets. 

*How can a city smell so sweet like crepes and also like piss at the same time?

*Even the graffiti is gorgeous here. 

*It's true. French people really stink. 

*I wonder why there are virtually no fat people here when all they eat is cream filled pastries. I haven't seen any joggers so...?

And there you have it. Those were my intimate thoughts about the City of Lights.  

My family literally did 5 million things in our 4 days in Paris. Our plane landed at 9am, we dropped our luggage off at the hotel and we hit the ground running. By noon on the first day we had already walked from our hotel, down the Champs-Élysées, to the Grand Palais, to the Petit Palais, to the Pantheon, to half a dozen bridges, and then here to the Louvre. We literally walked for miles with our heads looking up at all the architecture and our jaws open. And I'm so glad we walked and didn't take a cab ride to all the main places we wanted to go otherwise we would have missed all the details along the way.

But anyway, the Louvre! Talk about grand, this place is gigantic!

It was originally built as a fortress by King Phillipe-Auguste to protect Paris from a viking invasion but when that never happened, it was turned into an enormous royal palace. After decades of use through the middle ages, Louis XVI decided he would rather live in the palace of Versailles with his wife Marie Antoinette so they kept all the spare stuff here kind of like a storage garage. In 1793 it was opened to the public as a museum to show off all the royal paintings and sculptures.

The Louvre is the largest museum in the entire world and houses over 1 million pieces of artwork, the most famous being the Mona Lisa. I heard a tour guide saying that if you spent 30 seconds looking at every single piece of art, and you never took a break to eat, sleep or pee, it would take you just over 9 months to see everything.

We didn't go inside, the line was hours long and I didn't want to spend that time waiting to fight with a million other tourists to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, so we just hung out in the courtyard for a while.
The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was also designed for Napoleon's military victories but in comparison to Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, this one only took a couple of years to build instead of 30, and it is only half the size.

The Place du Carrousel is the courtyard just outside the Louvre. It is home to the Roue de Paris which was installed in 2000 for the millennium celebrations. We didn't ride on it but I'm sure the view from the top of the wheel is outstanding.

So, right down the street is the Place de la Concord and it has a seriously creepy vibe to it. It's the largest open public square in the city and it happens to be where the main guillotine was during the French Revolution. The guillotine beheaded over 1,300 people in just one month during the summer of 1794's "reign of terror," with a total of just under 3000 people total being killed there including Marie Antoinette and her husband King Louis XVI. There is an old wives tale that a herd of cattle once refused to cross the square because the smell of blood was so strong.

The tall pointed obelisk in the middle of the square is called Cleopatra's Needle. There are three of them in the world, the other 2 in New York City and London. All three are original ancient Egypt stone monuments but they don't really have anything to do with Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt.

From there we headed to a little Gothic cathedral called Notre-Dame.

Notre-Dame de Paris, French for Our Lady of Paris, holds some of the most first class pieces of Catholicism history including the Crown of Thorns, one of the Holy Nails, and a piece of the True Cross.  

The detail in the stone is like nothing I've ever seen before. To think about the fact that the ground breaking for this cathedral was in 1163 to be "completed" in 1345 blows my mind.

Obviously, there have been many changes and restoration done throughout the years, but the main structure remains the same. My favorite part of the additions are the gargoyles which are actually functional water spouts used for drainage.  

There was a mass going on while we were there with bleachers set up out front for everyone to sit. There was a large projector screen and a giant camera and boom microphone to broadcast the ceremony to the people outside. It was extremely hectic.

Roman Catholic Saint and French heroine Joan of Arc has a great statue right as you're exiting the church. I think it's great that there are so many fantastic women in French history and that they are celebrated the way they are. 

There it is; our first morning in Paris. I've been trying to blog as much as possible so that I have a reason to go through all my pictures and remember everything I learned. If I don't write it down now, I'll forget all the details. Since The Brighter Writer is kind of a melting pot of my ideas and experiences, all of you have to sit through every vacation I ever go on! Ha!

Seriously, I appreciate all the love lately and thanks for reading! 

Next week, I'll start writing about my trips to the Palace of Versailles and Claude Monet's house.  Have a great weekend everyone!

Monet's Garden: Giverny, France

When I thought about France as a general whole, I suppose I never included the city of Paris. I always think of Paris as a separate entity for whatever reason. When I think of everywhere else in France however, I think about a rolling countryside, quaint little villages and far off castles. 

My daughter watched the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast a million times right before I left on this vacation, so in my tiny little pea brain I guess I figured I was going to the opening scene of Belle singing about her provincial life...

Like this:

Or like this:

 I know it's horribly corny, but it's embarrassingly true. I didn't even know this was a concept in my head until we drove through it and I thought to myself, "why does this place look so familiar?" 

And then it shamelessly dawned on me...

Oh.

Yes.

I'm in a 3-year-old's imagination.

That's right.

But it was seriously like something right out of a fairytale.

Imagine driving down the one way road, windows down, clean air blowing your hair in the wind, and when you look strait ahead you see the remnants of an old abandoned castle.

This particular one is called the Chateau de la Roche Guyon. After I got home, I was trying to find some information about it, and this is what I stumbled across from one grumpy historian: "At the summit of a steep promontory, dominating the bank of the great river Seine, rises a frightful castle without title to nobility, called La Roche. Invisible on the surface, it is hollowed out of a high cliff. The able hand of the builder has established in the mountainside, digging into the rock, an ample dwelling provided with a few miserable openings".

!!!

A dwelling providing a few miserable openings?!

I suppose in comparison to some of the other castles in the neighborhood it may fall a little bit short, but it's still beautiful nonetheless. I wouldn't exactly call it a shack...

These kinds of little tossed aside treasures were everywhere. This "dwelling" on the right of the road had an underground lookout tower which looked like it hadn't been stepped inside of for years.

But upon closer inspection, it had a bulletin board posted to the left of the staircase so it must be used for something.

So we kept driving, and I kept daydreaming of what it must be like to live here. I didn't see any schools, I didn't see any businesses,  I didn't even see any people. I just saw these gorgeous houses made of beautiful stone and every one has climbing roses all the way up each and every side. Quite a different smell than I had just left behind in Versailles.

Our completely insane tour guide (who was arguably one of the sweetest men on the continent) drives us the wrong way up the steepest one way street I've ever been on, as fast as he could take us, turning corners so quickly it was making me dizzy. There wasn't a knuckle in the car that wasn't white. Finally with one sharp left turn, the mini-bus comes to a halt and parks.

Just like that.

And as I look up and to the opposite side of the van, this is what I see through the window:

SERIOUSLY?!

This place is Le Moulin de Fourges. It is built as a replica of one of the buildings on the Versailles grounds which was used by Marie Antoinette when she wanted to pretend she was a farmer. She had an entire village constructed so she felt like she was a commoner away from Court constraints. It's hard to imagine a place like this as someones playhouse in their backyard.

We were running late due to someone spending more than their allotted time in the Versailles garden gift shop (I don't have any idea who that could have been...) and so we were escorted immediately to our table for a quick lunch before heading to Claude Monet's gardens.

So here I was, in the middle of France, at Belle's house, sipping extraordinarily fancy wine (at 11am) and spreading my fancy Pâté that tasted like cat food on my fancy french bread with my fancy napkin on my lap, and my fancy 5 forks that I couldn't for the life of me differentiate between.

They're lucky I put the water in the big wine glass...

The chicken marsala was amazing but the fresh apple strudel for dessert was even more amazing.

Our guide Max gave us about half an hour to wander around the grounds to "make pictures" before we headed to Monet's Garden.

One last look before we were off again.

Pulling up to Giverny came along with a strong sense of calm. We had to walk a few short blocks to get to the gardens and every street we came to looked like a Disney movie set.

We started getting closer to the entrance sign but even before we could see the garden we could smell it. The sweet scent of lilac and rose could have taken you to the front gate even if you were blind. 

The intoxicating aroma of thousands of flowers hit me in the face like a punch and reminded me how tired I was. It just seems like a place built to take a long nap in the shade of the summer heat. It is just so completely relaxing.

Claude Monet was famous for being one of the founders of Impressionist style oil paintings.  He produced hundreds of them in the late 1890's and early 1900's. Having a strong passion for art throughout his entire life, he moved to his house located here in Giverny, France in 1883 because of the inspiration from its small garden. From then, he cultivated a living masterpiece which continued to inspire him for the rest of his life. His most famous works are all impressionistic visions of places found in this garden, perhaps the most famous being "Water Lilies" which is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California.

It is unbelievably cool to see the same yellow flowers grow in the exact spot Monet planted them over 100 years ago.

This piece tittled "Water Lily Pond and Weeping Willow" is one of my all time favorites.

In person, it's everything you'd expect it to be.

There was a very strict "NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED" rule enforced once we were inside Mr. Monet's house seen below. So I'll end today's post with this little peak-a-boo view and with the words of Monet himself:

“It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”