Ticket To Ride

There are so many ways to get into the spirit of the Wild West, and one of those ways is through the most excellent board games coming out that use the West as their theme. One such game that George and I highly endorse is Ticket To Ride.

It's easy to learn, easy to play, and scores pretty low on the "will ruin friendships" scale. 

Monopoly: Who knew that a little pewter Scotty dog could cause such violence? 

You take on the role of an 1800s railroad tycoon, trying to complete your train routes before your competitors can. You earn points for each train you place on the map and for each route completed. The player with the most points wins!

A quick summary of play: As a player you're given a set of plastic trains and are dealt several train tickets which depict different routes on the board. The routes you keep are kept secret. You're also randomly dealt four colored cards to begin collecting, which you'll eventually use to build your routes. Certain route options require a specific number of a specific color of card, and once you have collected all of the color you need, you "purchase" that length of track and place your little trains on it to claim it as yours.  The challenge and the fun is when multiple players end up with routes that collide, and you have to find creative ways to make your route work and claim your lengths of track before other players can! 

You can find Ticket To Ride at most neighborhood board game stores and on websites like Amazon. You can learn more about this version of the game (and more!) at a website devoted to board gaming, Board Game Geek. Happy gaming! 

Photo Craft: Christmas Tree Charm

Here you are, having a wonderful time dressing up and getting your photo taken, and after carefully choosing which shots you want to print you think, "I want them all! But what will I do with them?"

Why not turn one into a Christmas tree ornament?

In this tutorial I show you how!

Pain Is Beauty, or Corsets and Rib Removal

There's a belief that Victorian era women removed a rib to get their tiny waists.

Exhibit A.

Though rib removal seems like a plausible way to get things done in our modern day, back in Victorian times surgery was quite different. Anesthesia was not what it needed to be, and death by infection was very high. If rib removal were an actual thing, about half of the women attempting it would have died.

This was a time when even Coca Cola was considered medicine. On second thought, maybe Victorian medicine wasn't all bad. 

The old "Remove A Rib" tale is just a myth, I'm happy to say! Instead, women achieved the wasp waist through tight lacing, a method of tying corsets tighter and tighter over time, permanently altering the shape of the body. They key is the amount of time it took. Some women may have tightened their corsets to make their waists six inches smaller in one go, but it was more likely they tightened them two or so inches at a time, eventually working their way down. As many girls began wearing corsets as early as age thirteen (or sometimes younger), they had years to work toward a desired size.

If you keep your eye out, you can see the influence of corsets all around you, sometimes in the form of wedding gowns,

haute couture, 

and even medical devices.

Or the odd souvenir photo, of course.

Through my theatrical experiences I've had the good luck to wear a corset a time or two, and I can enthusiastically state that they aren't nearly as painful or uncomfortable as feared. Indeed, the most frightening part about them is simply sitting down.