Niko the American Eskimo Dog and Guinness the German Spitz practice playing dead trick. This trick was super easy to teach them. Both have interesting acting skills. Also look at that huge luxurious bed Niko has! We got it from Costco 
We went to the Big E this year and saw lots of awesome things, including a chick hatchery and this box of baby chicks! They are so cute and colorful. I always want to take pocketfuls of them home, lookit the little wings, their fuzzy heads!!!
When we went to the Franklin Park Zoo, I was sure to take many photos and videos of the animals there. It was a great experience and I want to share it with you!
Zookeeper with Kevin James was filmed here and they were promoting it all over the zoo. These are some photos and video from our 2011 visit to Franklin Park Zoo in MA. Was there just in time for the lion to wake up for one minute, roar and then go back to sleep. It was so cool! Lots of great animals, including a baby gorilla making funny faces, lemur in a bucket, jaguar hacking a hairball, and a scary butterfly sanctuary.
Saw these cutie baby hamsters at Petco so I took a video of them.
Roborovskis (Phodopus roborovskii) or desert hamster is the smallest of all hamsters, averaging under an inch (2 cm) at birth, and (rarely) three inches (7.5 cm) during adulthood. Distinguishing characteristics of the Roborovskis are eyebrow-like white spots, and the lack of any dorsal stripe (found on the other members of the Phodopus genus). The average lifespan for the Roborovski hamster is three (3) years, though this is dependent on living conditions (extremes being four years in captivity and two in the wild). Although claimed to be hypoallergenic, Roborovski hamsters have been associated with the development of asthma in previously asymptomatic owners.
Guinness the german spitz uses LaDiDa on my iPhone to sing a song for us all. He looks just like a cute puppy but he is actually around 4 years old! I got the idea after watching Mishka the talking husky singing using an iPad.
I took a video of my dog playing with his new plushie octopus toy. Guinness loves to play on his back and he loves to shake it violently! He can act vicious but he is only playing.
I tried some speeding up and some slowmotion parts, edited in Adobe After Effects.
Background music from www.danosongs.com
For Easter weekend I decided to make a variation of the tradition Chinese tea egg. These are hard boiled eggs with pretty marble patterns, usually dyed with a tea and soy sauce recipe that both stains the egg and flavors it.
This is how I made them. First make the hard-boiled eggs. I’ve always been confused how exactly you are supposed to hard-boil an egg, different people have their own opinions on how to do it. In my recent experience this has worked perfectly:
Hardboiled Eggs
1. Fill pot with water, enough to cover the eggs when they are submerged.
2. With the eggs in it, bring the pot to a boil.
3. Cover pot and turn off heat, let stand for 10 minutes.
4. Put the eggs in cold water. I’ve read that this step is important, not just for cooling down the eggs but the cold will help make it easier to peel the shell off afterwards.
Now after you have your boiled eggs, we need to put cracks all around the shell. You can do this by tapping the egg with a spoon or whatever way you’d like. Maybe rolling it around on a hard surface, the idea is just to put a bunch of cracks into the shell.
Then I used food coloring gel, mixed with water in cups to dye the eggs. The food coloring gel is not great, but it was what I had lying around the house. You may be able to find better food coloring.
I left each egg in the dye cups for about 10 minutes.. I wanted to leave them much longer but I was too impatient! So I took one out and peeled off the shell, and it looked pretty cool. I repeated this step until all my eggs were done. The many different colored marbled eggs looked great together.
I’ve been putting them sliced up, on a piece of sour dough toast with some light miracle whip and salt&pepper. Easy breakfast, YUM!
Adele- Rolling in the Deep (Jeannette 1st remix) by jeannette-hon
So I found out about this pretty cool site http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk/index.php that lets you download vocal tracks to songs for free. I had always wanted to try my hand at remixing a song because it seemed really fun. Well I started to do this one Adele’s Rolling in the Deep because it’s such an awesome song, but turns out that creating remixes are hard to do!
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the BPM.. I was stupid enough to try doing this by ear for a while, then realized that there are some visual cues and I could match it up visually with the waveforms and it was super easy.. duh! Well next time I’ll know better. This is just my first attempt and I may be working on it some more, will keep you guys updated
Here are the lyrics to her song after the jump..
Niko helps me demonstrate good canine hygiene. In this video I talk about some good tips for keeping your pooch’s chompers in tip top shape.
When I first got Niko I bought him a mint toothpaste thinking that it would give him nice minty fresh breath, but it turns out he’s not into that taste of mint. So now we use poultry or beef flavor and he gets so excited when he sees his toothbrush! Other important items for teeth include rope toys, nylabones, and to feed mostly a diet of dry food.
If you love DIY projects, then I have a fun idea for you! Paints are not only useful for adding color and texture to surfaces but Rustoleum has a whole line of really cool paints like chalkboard, whiteboard, magnetic, and more. At my home, the boyfriend is always working on various projects around the house. He’s very handy and is building a very interesting entertainment center that I should blog about later. The basic premise is that the TV will be housed in a rotating box in the wall. This allows us to view the TV from the living room, or spin it around so that the TV faces into our kitchen which is on the other side of the wall. Well we plan to have a TV on one side of this rotating box, and thought how about a mirror for the other side? How about artwork?
All of a sudden it came to me.. hey it reminds me of a chalkboard! Oh and it would be awesome to make it into a chalk board! Luckily for us, this solution was extremely easy to pull off. I already knew about all these interesting paints so picking up a small can from Home Depot was the next step. We’ve started painting on a couple coats and I really love the finish. The color is black and it’s very smooth and matte finished, beautiful. They also sold the chalkboard paint that you could mix any color with. ANY color! But I like the black a lot.
I will surely be posting photos and writing more when we finish up. So how about you? Share your DIY tips and tricks in the comments. Thanks!
