DJ Electric Daddy

Greetings. And welcome to another DIY project. In this video I show you, very roughly, how we built these cool and rugged concrete planters. I don’t go into too much detail in the video, its more of an overview of our process, but I have plans and measurements and materials available to download here . Below are semi-detailed instructions and I cover the following steps: Assess & Design Materials & Tools Building the Outer Form Building the Inner Form Final Preparations Mixing the Concrete Filling the Form with Concrete Removing the Form Curing the Concrete Assess & Design So, what was the objective for this project? We wanted something modern and simple, so we went for the square shape. And concrete is such a versatile material; its cheap, it can look old or new, and its fairly easy to work with. Its also heavy so its unlikely to be stolen, so there's that too.  We wanted something fairly large to take up some of the space on th

It was crazy hair day at Summer Camp, which meant a trip to the beauty supply store for a can of blue spray hair colouring and some Johnny B Super Hold Gel. The result - Gaige en Blue, our little Smurf-like Sprite with craaaaaaazy hair. Gaige en Bleu by GSMWorld on Flickr

Gaige wanted to bake some cupcakes for his classmates on the last day of first grade. He also wanted to decorate them with flags of the world, his current obsession being flags and all. Country, state, county. He knows them all, and the house is littered with paintings and drawings of his renditions of a seemingly random collection of flags. From Antigua and Barbados to Kansas and California. Flag Cakes by GSM World on Flickr So being the adventurous types, we shopped for ingredients and baked our cupcakes from scratch; no Betty Crocker boxes here dontcha know. We coated the tops with thick extra white frosting. Then spent several hours cutting shapes of coloured marzipan to create the flags, We even resorted to hijacking the ElectricMommy to assist in the cutting and assembling. All in all, a good creative evenings work.

Friday at Summer Camp was Rock Star Day, and the kids had to dress like a rock star. Natch, this was a no-brainer for the DJElectric household. Having worn enough make-up in my day to keep Mabelinne well stocked in lab mice, I was ready to vicariously revisit my glam rocker goth punk youth. With a little eye shadow and eye liner, some hair gel, a waistcoat and a Steven Tyler-esque scarf, our little Sprite was transformed into a bone fide Rocker. Sporting a look that was part Jack White, part Alice Cooper the lad wielded his Gibson Thunderbird copy guitar like a pro.

Today was the Kindergarten Awards Day for the second trimester and our little over-achiever took home not one, but two awards certificates. The Sprite shows off his awards One was for Excellence In Writing and the other was for a Perfect Attendance Record. The first comes as no surprize really, he has been coming along leaps and bounds with reading and writing lately. The second is astounding, compared to recent history. To not miss a single day of school through the winter months, to either sickness or laziness on the part of his parent (IE; me) is an award-worthy achievement indeed. Well done son.

The Phillies on Flickr Last weekend saw The Sprite have his first game as a member of The Phillies Little league T-Ball team. This was after the mornings opening ceremony which had every team take the field to present their banners and colors. It was all very exciting, and new to me. Being a Brit, this whole organised youth sport thing is taken far more seriously on this side of the pond. Anyhow, the kids looked great in their bright red uniforms, and they played remarkably well for a bunch of 5-6 year olds who had only 4 practices so far as a team. The other team definitely had the better of the hitting, but luckily at this stage no-one keeps score and the kids are not really paying attention to who is doing better. We have this one kid on our team who is a real gamer, you can tell he's been practicing for this day for years. He's the only kid who can hit the ball clear over the pitchers head past the second baseman. And he has an arm. He can fire that ball from third base li