Makes 16-18 cupcakes

Ingredients

1 box (18.25 oz) cake mix
2 eggs
1-1/4 cup water
2⁄3 cup corn oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 tubs (16 oz each) cream cheese frosting (you’ll have some left over frosting)
18 marshmallows
5 or 6-in. Lollipop sticks
Black food-safe writing marker
72 yogurt-covered mini-pretzels plus extra to allow for breakage
1/2 c white candy melts

What to do
1. Heat oven to 350°F. Line 18 medium sized muffin cups with liners.

2. Beat cake mix, eggs, water, vanilla and oil in large bowl on low speed for 1 minute until blended; increase speed to medium and continue to beat for an additional 2 minutes until batter is smooth.

3. Immediately pour batter amongst muffin cups, filling each 2⁄3 full.

4. Bake 20 to 22 minutes until a wooden toothpick inserted into the centres comes out clean.

5. Cool in pans on wire rack 10 minutes before removing cupcakes to rack to cool completely.

6. Frost cupcakes with frosting (I used a large tip and decorating bag).

7. Insert a lollipop stick into the long side of a marshmallow. With the black food-safe decorating pen, draw the skeleton face.

8. Melt white candy per directions on bag.

9. Carefully thread the lollipop stick through the smallest hole of the pretzel. Secure with some melted candy (use another lollipop stick to smear the candy – especially under the pretzel so it doesn’t fall down.)

10. Repeat with two more pretzels so you now have the skeleton ribs. Make sure you leave enough room at bottom of the stick to insert fully into cupcake. (BUT don’t insert them yet!)

11. Lay down carefully on cookie sheet to set (about 5 minutes).

12. Repeat with remaining lollipop sticks until you have enough skeletons.

13. Once set, insert into cupcakes.

14. Cut two more pretzels in half legthwise to use as arms (see picture as a guide). Again use melted candy to adhere them to the rib cage.

Spirit Day is annual day in October when millions of Americans wear purple to speak out against bullying and to show their support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth.

Millions wear purple on Spirit Day as a sign of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth and to speak out against bullying. Spirit Day was started in 2010 as a response to the young people who had taken their own lives. Observed annually, individuals, schools, organizations, corporations, media professionals and celebrities wear purple, which symbolizes spirit on the rainbow flag. Getting involved is easy — participants are asked to simply “go purple” on October 19th as we work to create a world in which LGBT teens are celebrated and accepted for who they are. Learn more & go purple at www.glaad.org/spiritday.

PURPLE represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality.

I had a movie weekend this weekend.

First I watched Cabin in the Woods. I really liked this movie. If you haven’t seen the movie you might now want to read what I have to say about it. I thought it was really cool about the fact that it was a twist on the whole woods horror thing in how there were people behind controlling some aspects and the fact that they choose the big bad that is coming after them by what they chose in the basement. The need for sacrifice and all the other areas that failed and what happens if they all fail. I really liked it. I thought it was a really good movie and a twist on other movies like it. 

Resident Evil: Damnation- It is a CGI movie. It is the second Resident Evil CGI movie. The first one took place in an airport. This one takes place in a small Eastern European country. I didn’t like this one as much as I like the live action movies but I think that is because no Alice (Milla Jovovich). If you really like Resident Evil though then I really think you should check this out.

I am Legend – This movie has been out for a few years. I am not sure why I have put off watching it for so long. This movie was actually pretty good. I like the alternate ending better then the original ending after watching both of them. This movie centers around Robert Neville who is trying to cure a virus that he is immune to. He is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and he thinks he might be the last man on earth. The lack of human contact has made him a bit weird where he is talking to manikins. 

The Tourist – This was my third time watching this movie. I love this movie. Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie together in the same movie….great movie. Elise (Angelina Jolie) sits next to an American tourist, Frank (Johnny Depp), on a train going to Venice. She has chosen him as a decoy, making believe that he is her lover (Alexander Pearce) who is wanted by police. Not only will they need to evade the police, but also the mobster whose money her lover stole. Even after knowing all the twists and turns I still love watching this movie.

Prometheus- I can totally see how this is a prequel in the same “world” as aliens. I really don’t have a lot to say about this movie. I enjoyed it but really not to much to say about it. If you like the alien movies then you should watch this.

Marvels Avengers – Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Loki all in one movie. Loki thinks he has a plan to rule the earth and all the others come together to stop him. Stan Lee even has a cameo appearance in the movie. Joss Whedon is awesome so when he is in charge of a TV Show or Movie it is awesome. 

This stunning first novel from Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist Ted Kosmatka is a riveting tale of science cut loose from ethics. Set in an amoral future where genetically engineered monstrosities fight each other to the death in an Olympic event, The Games envisions a harrowing world that may arrive sooner than you think.
 
Silas Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S. entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event. But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.
 
The result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears, can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a computer’s cold logic. 
 
Now Silas races to understand what the computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia João. Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength, speed, and—most disquietingly—intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion: sheer terror.

This book is amazing. I would recommend it to everyone. I loved this book. I didn’t know what to expect when I started it. It is so much better then I could have imagined. I would say go read this book!

Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath. Now she’s returned–to her old life, her family, her boyfriend–before she’s banished back to the underworld . . . this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can’t find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists.

Nikki longs to spend these precious months forgetting the Everneath and trying to reconnect with her boyfriend, Jack, the person most devastated by her disappearance–and the one person she loves more than anything. But there’s just one problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who enticed her to the Everneath in the first place, has followed Nikki home. Cole wants to take over the throne in the underworld and is convinced Nikki is the key to making it happen. And he’ll do whatever it takes to bring her back, this time as his queen.

As Nikki’s time on the Surface draws to a close and her relationships begin slipping from her grasp, she is forced to make the hardest decision of her life: find a way to cheat fate and remain on the Surface with Jack or return to the Everneath and become Cole’s queen.

This is book number one in what is planned to be a trilogy.

The story of Hades and Persephone. A girl tricked by the God of the Underworld to spend half the year in his domain, and half the year she can escape. But Brodi Ashton takes the story further in Everneath by exploring the daughters of Persephone and the hell they live… literally.

Everneath is where immortals feed on emotions of humans called forfeits. This feeding is what keeps them immortal. Each Feed lasts 100 years and normally sucks the Forfeit dry and the forfeit then goes to the Tunnels.

Nikki wakes up after the 100 years and instead of going to the Tunnels she goes back to the world. In the world only six months have passed. She has six months in the world until the Tunnels will be comming for her or until she has to go with Cole.

This book is a page turner, and is full of exciting events.

“I was picturing his face – a boy with floppy brown hair and brown eyes – when the Feed ended.

At first I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know where I was or why it was so dark. I knew only that the pain inside me – the feeling that I was being drained from the inside out – had subsided, and now everything was numb. Maybe I no longer existed.

“It’s over,” Cole whispered in my ear.

I wanted to answer, but my mouth wasn’t working.

“Nikki, try to open your eyes.”

That was why it was dark. My eyes were closed. I’d been squeezing them shut for I don’t know how long. The muscles around them had forgotten how to relax, so it was some time before I could pry them open.

When I did, they stung, like a fresh wound exposed to cool air. After a hundred years they had forgotten how to produce tears.”

This is a really good story and I look forward to reading book two when it comes out.

“Why won’t you help me? You could be a hero for once.”
“Heroes don’t exist. And if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them.”

A gay couple in Clarendon, Texas, awoke Monday morning to find a death threat spray-painted on their front porch, an act of vandalism that has left them both fearful for their lives. Joshua Harrison and Jeremy Jeffers reported the hate-filled vandalism to the local police, according to Pronews 7. The message read, “Leave or die fags,” and it appeared not long after an area minister’s antigay advertisement was published in the local newspaper. Clarendon Church of Christ pastor Chris Moore’s ad listed the “platform” of the “Homosexual Movement,” which included this line: “Folks, don’t be fooled, the ‘gay’ agenda isn’t about ‘equal’ rights for gay couples. Their agenda would force everyone to compromise their values, make our children legal prey for pedofiles.”

Pronews 7 reported that the “source” of information cited in the ad, the National Coalition