Hasta La Gadget!

Congratulations to my friend who just had a healthy, handsome baby boy! It seems as if just yesterday I hosted a baby shower for her and here he is!

I designed the overall theme after being inspired by old-fashioned organic wooden toys which I found in Washington D.C. on one of our street shopping outings. For my friend’s shower I had envisioned pale yellow and grey color combinations which seemed like an interesting creative departure from the traditional baby blue palette. These two otherwise basic toys- a yellow giraffe and a grey elephant served as the thematic basis for the shower tablescape and atmosphere. Find what inspires you and think about the future mother to be – her style and personality, things and colors she likes! Then go ahead and be bold in choosing the creative direction, theme and colors for the occasion.

When planning a baby shower it is perfectly alright to make it your DIY project, you can also have fun doing it. Alternatively you can order the printables from one of the websites to make it more uniform and color coordinated. There are a lot of options available- the fonts, shapes, colors and you can also personalize it with your friend’s name, date of the shower and the gender of the baby. There are plenty of colors, patterns, cartoon characters to choose from; anything that will work with the theme and colors you came up with.

Decide on the menu

The menu has to be simple but offer the guests some variety; think vegetarian, seafood and meat options. Choose the menu that’s easy to prepare and can be eaten without forks and knives. It creates a relaxed, no-fuss required atmosphere.

Savory bites

Small savory bites like my Chicken Roulettes can be served hot, cold or at room temperature they are simply delicious and the texture perfectly lends itself to any serving temperature.

Slice up some bright bell peppers and blanched asparagus spears and serve them crudité style with spicy ranch sauce in individual shot glasses.

Sliders are another excellent way to feed the crowd and who doesn’t like mini-burgers anyway? Mine were seafood burgers made from a combination of shrimp, scallops and squid all mixed in the food processor for some seriously delectable treat. Serve them with a slice of tomato & lettuce and some spicy condiment on a tiny challah bun and watch even your most mannered, sophisticated guests lick their fingers with delight!

Sweet treats

For the expectant moms that like to have desert for two, go all out and create a beautiful dessert table with cupcakes, macaroons or home-made Panna Cotta with Passion Fruit Puree.

Guaranteed to satisfy even most voracious sweet tooth!

A special cake

The cake is always a centerpiece of any baby shower thus it has to be a showstopper. Our two-tiered baby shower cake was designed by the cool Duet Bakery in Brooklyn. Artfully crafted in keeping with the animal theme this cake incorporated all the fun elements we had at the table like hand-appliqued giraffe and elephant wooden toys, as well as the alphabet cubes.

It played off the color scheme of pale yellows, greys and white colors! This two-tiered wonder was really fresh and equally incredibly enjoyable to eat as it was to gaze upon.

What to drink

Even though flutes of fuzzy champagne or delightful sweet cocktails are totally appropriate at the baby showers these days, I decided to serve freshly squeezed lemonade instead. Make it extra special by serving this thirst quencher in individual glass jars with personalized sticker (mommy’s baby shower, date of the occasion and who is expected), I guarantee that it will taste so much better! Tie a rustic twine around the bottle’s neck with “best wishes” tag and color-coordinated straws for added impact. Keep miniature bottled water on display as well for those who prefer plain aqua.

Flowers with personality

To stay consistent with the theme my friend from Blooming Bears, the company which specializes in floral sculptures, designed the adorable giraffe and floral alphabet cubes that spelled BOY and made a terrific centerpiece for the table!

This is a very unique way to bring more excitement and a greater sense of festivity to the event. The guests couldn’t stop gushing about this arrangement!

Pom poms are a must

Pom poms are an easy way to decorate the space. They are somewhat time-consuming to assemble but are very inexpensive and add a multiplicity of dimensions to the event. If you’ve been following my blog you probably know that I like to suspend object from our crystal chandelier, find a way to incorporate the pom poms in your space. If hosting the shower outside, hang them from the tress in your garden.

Game time

Before mommy-to-be begins the gift opening ceremony have some fun with the guests by playing couple of fun, easy games to elevate the entertainment aspect of the experience. My friend Vivian asked all the guests to bring their baby pictures. She displayed them on the pin board and asked the mom to be to figure out who was on the picture. My 1st grade portrait was the hardest to guess! Cheers to that!

Guest favors

Party favors are an ideal way to thank your guests for joining you and the mommy-to-be to celebrate the beginning of a new life and the new chapter in couple’s life. The personalized body lotion at our baby shower was adorned with a bird on a birch and the date of this joyous occasion.

Where to buy:

Personalized Baby Shower Milk Jars and Straws at Beau-coup website.
Personalized Baby Shower Hand Lotion at Beau-coup website.
Martha Stewart Tissue Paper Pom Pom Kit, White and Yellow at Michael’s or at Martha Stewart’s website.
Two-tiered Baby Shower Cake and Cupcakes by Duet Bakery.
Sculpted Floral Giraffe and Cubes by Blooming Bears.
Yellow and Polka Dot Tablecloths by Art de Fête.

Members of Congress are scrambling to preserve a major infrastructure fund, but their urgency isn’t necessarily shared by the public, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, which finds Americans moderately concerned about infrastructure problems, but divided on increased spending and unenthused about paying more themselves.

Politicians now seem close to averting the lapse of the Highway Trust Fund, which uses federal gas and diesel taxes to help states pay for transit repairs. A House bill that would sustain the fund until May 2015, authored by House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), passed easily on Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that Senate Democrats will begin considering the House bill next week.

Just 8 percent of Americans in the online HuffPost/YouGov poll cite infrastructure funding as one of the most important issues facing the federal government, while 37 percent say it’s very important and 34 percent that it’s somewhat important.

Forty-five percent of Americans say the federal government should spend more on infrastructure, while 15 percent say that it spends too much and 31 percent that the level is about right. By 20 percentage points, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to favor an increase in spending.

Age also plays a factor, with older Americans far more likely to display concern. Those aged 65 and older are 24 points more likely than those aged 18-29 to support increased spending, and they are 20 points more likely to say funding infrastructure projects is very important or among the most important issues.

When asked if their local roads and bridges are in good or bad condition, the majority of Americans say they are “somewhere in between.”

Here, the most prominent divide isn’t by age or party, but by region — those in the West are three times more likely than those in the Northeast to report quality infrastructure. Three-quarters of those in the Northeast say at least a few roads or bridges in their area are unsafe.

Nationwide, 64 percent say they live near at least a few unsafe bridges or roads. That includes Kristin Coker, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and says she has worried for years about the state of the small, worn bridge that connects her dead-end street to the main road.

“It’s a state of Florida bridge and when I complained to [the Florida Department of Transportation], they plastered and repainted it but did no structural repair,” Coker told HuffPost. “I am nervous when any large truck passes over it. There is supposed to be a weight limit but we get construction trucks all the time. Even the garbage trucks are probably over the limit.”

In response to a request from HuffPost for examples of aging infrastructure, other readers shared photos of bridges used for mass transit and shipping.

“Every day, the CTA Red and Blue Line trains run over this bridge in Chicago (Uptown) hundreds of times,” Thomas Polk wrote, saying its current state concerns him. “It is fairly representative of many smaller bridges along the Red Line.”

Another reader shared these pictures via Twitter:

trestle in St. Louis carrying several trains of coal daily across river pic.twitter.com/AV7QUfonm9

— Madam Margaret (@teragramus) July 8, 2014

The tax used to pay for the Highway Trust Fund, which isn’t indexed to inflation, has remained unchanged since 1993, at about 18 cents per gallon on gas and 22 cents per gallon on diesel. One proposal for a long-term fix, from Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), would raise the gas tax 6 cents annually for the next two years, and then tie it to inflation.

But even some of the Americans who support increasing funding in abstract balk at the idea of paying for that increase at the pump. Even the first phase would be a tough political sell: Just 30 percent of Americans say they’d be willing to pay an additional 6 cents per gallon for gasoline, while 50 percent were opposed and 19 percent uncertain.

HUFFPOST READERS:Live near a crumbling road or unsafe bridge? Email us here to send us your photos of the worst infrastructure in your area.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted July 15-16 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected fromYouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here.

Mike McAuliff and Emily Swanson contributed reporting.

If you want to see man evolve into apes like the ones in the original Planet of the Apes, check out this time-lapse video, in which Emily Van Tassel transforms an ordinary man into an ape. Damn dirty apes! Damn dirty makeup artists.

What is amazing is how good it looks and that Emily isn’t even a professional makeup artist. She should be. That is some talented ape-making. This makes me look forward to more ape movies. The makeup in Tim Burton’s stupid Planet of the Apes movie was good, and the CGI in the recent flicks is impressive, but this is closer to the original movies, in that more of the person underneath shows through, and that gives more personality to the apes.

Awesome job, Emily!

[via Mashable via Fashionably Geek]

By now, you’ve likely seen the mysterious, yawning hole that appeared in Russia’s remote Yamal peninsula, a place whose name literally means “the end of the world.” How perfectly spooky! But now that scientists made it out to investigate the hole , let’s sort out the facts, conjectures, and conspiracy theories about how it came to be in the first place.

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The Oculus Rift promises to make Star Trek TNG’s holodeck a reality, but only in your head. You can’t spend every moment of your life with a goofy visor strapped to your face, and that’s why this alternate approach to the holodeck—using projectors to make a tiny non-descript room appear massive—seems far more plausible.

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