Things you don't know

It occured to me yesterday that I've been remiss in my blogging. There are SO many things I haven't told you, or shown you. So, I made a list of things that are sorta important. Gardening things, house things, eco-things, hippie things....you know, things that I fill my life with.

Item 1 on the agenda is my solar oven. I built one. I made mine out of 2 cardboard boxes, a couple of newspapers, some tin foil, matte black paint and a piece of clear 1/8th inch plastic that was on a shelving unit in my sewing room. You can see how attractive it is. :) BUT, amazingly enough it works. I put my oven thermometer in there and the temp, so far, has reached 220 degrees F. To go along with my solar oven, I got this great crock pot cook book to maybe come up with some new recipes. I actually got one that has food you would really want to eat in it. The most important fact is that crockpots cook at 180 degrees, so using my solar oven to cook in is perfectly safe. It's also FREE and doesn't heat up my kitchen, which in this house of no central a/c and no insulation is vitally important. It's eco-friendly, made from recycled products and it's pretty damn cool, if you want to know the truth. I've been cooking about 2-3 meals a week in it so far. The only problem I've seen so far is that I have to bring it in when I'm done using it and put it in the sewing room. It's biodegradable. My family thinks it's pretty cool too, hubby asking me when I was going to build a permanent one out of wood. Still thinking on that one. I'd still like it to be made from recycled products, and I'm not sure what to insulate it with yet. I'd love to have one I could leave outside. Next on my hippie list of things to build is this fabulous rocket oven. I figure with the solar oven and the rocket stove I could almost do all my cooking the eco friendly way.


Item 2: Harvesting my onions/garlic. I harvested all my onions and garlic before we went on vacation in June. I got them all cured and ready to go, braided them and hung them from my pot rack. As it cools this fall, I'll most likely move them out onto the covered front porch for storage. The warm temps in the house will shorten their storage life. Besides what you see hanging, I have a big basket of the smaller onions and I also took all the very small pearl onions and pickled them. I just couldn't stand throwing any away, and they were really too small to cook with.

So that's today's update on what's been going on around here.

Woke up to thunder and rain this morning at 6 or so. Didn't even know we were supposed to get any rain. But they're saying we'll get 1/10th of an inch. Anything is good.

BIG NEWS: The "Half Blood Prince"(Harry Potter) trailer came out last night. Looks really good, and so far, pretty accurate to the book. Now to wait til Novemeber. Also, book release for "Breaking Dawn", the final installment in the "Twilight" series is Saturday. I'll be escorting C and her friend to the local book store for the midnight release party. I just love those! It's pretty cool to be around a whole bunch of people who like books. Just does my heart good.

Deb

A friend in need is a friend indeed

A really good friend of mine valiantly offered an older monitor up to me, and I snatched at it with both hands. She even made the drive out to the boonies to bring it to me on Saturday. So, I'm back in business.

The hallway looks great, but I want to the get the moulding up before I take the "after" shots. It's like a whole new room. It makes me happy. C and I are even decorating it, which is unheard of here. It's more of a throw things anywhere sort of scheme at this point. We don't want to buy anything, but we figure we have enough stuff laying around covered in dust that we can find stuff to put in there. We're even talking of an area rug to go in there. I know! It's very motivating.

I joined the FLY lady webgroup the other day to get a little better about being clean and orderly. I've gotten my DIL and my friend, Jack to sign up too, so we're all working on the babysteps portion. It's a pretty cool system. It's a NO STRESS system. I'm fairly tidy anyway, but I get overwhelmed by our "extreme dust" and just give up most of the time. I'm learning how to approach the mess and the clutter from a different angle now.

I've started my annual "summer's almost over, I better get a routine again" program. No more sleeping til 9 and hanging out for a couple of hours doing nothing until someone says they're hungry. I get that way when it gets really hot and I don't want to go outside and work in the yard anymore. I'm kinda whiny that way. I really work hard in the garden/yard until about mid July, then I'm indoors until October. Meanwhile, Nature hits it hard and takes over and then I have major work to do when I get back out there. I really don't want to let that happen again, so last night after dinner, I set a timer for 15 minutes and worked on weeding/clearing the iris bed out front. 15 minutes goes by fast, and I was surprised by how much I got done. So, that'll be my after dinner thing for awhile. I also forced myself to get up while it was still relatively cool, cut okra and peppers and take care of all the outside chores before it gets too hot. I even did my 10 minute workout dvd this morning. Routines make me feel better and I tend not to just wander around the house all day, eating something.

We're really looking forward to the Olympics. C and I watch them together when they're on, and we have some really nice memories of them. We also watch the X-Games together every year. So, this weekend coming up is the X-Games (7/31-8/3) and then, of course the Olympics. We have our favorite athletes, and enjoy rooting for them.

One last item.
Uh, I thought only Garfield liked lasagna? This is C's cat Bam. Needless to say, I used a different pan. And the bowls were already empty. :)

peace,

deb

ps: Welcome to my new readers!

Houston, we have a problem

My monitor died on my birthday, and we're replacing it this next weekend. Right now, using my daughter's laptop, which is pretty cool of her! Just can't upload any photos. Dying to show you all my new fab hallway. I painted it last week while C was gone camping with her friend. I didn't have anyone to play with, so I painted. I even remembered to take before and after photos, amazingly enough. So, next week you get to see. :)

C has a job interview this afternoon. Wow, my baby is growing up! Hmmm, what does that say about me? I'm NEVER growing up.

talk to you soon!

Big Red

Yeah, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! I've wanted one of these fabulous mixers since I worked in the kitchen of a small restaurant, 9 years ago. Hubby surprised me with it as an early birthday gift and it is glorious. C and I wanted to use it so we made cookies, and then I used it for the pizza dough on Friday. It's AWESOME!

Deb

Food of the Gods

Wednesday brought lunch with 2 good friends. We all used to work together at a quilt shop and even though one of us has moved away and abandoned the other two of us, we still are able to get together for a meal twice a year. This time The Cheesecake Factory was chosen. And it was chosen well! The meal was good, but the dessert....holy cow! We split a piece of Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake. To DIE for. I think that will start being an afternoon treat when I take C to the mall for mall stuff. Pictured above is (left to right) me, Cathy, and Sue. A more unlikely trio you'd never ever see, but for whatever reason, it works and it works well. It was a lovely time, but it ended too soon. Cathy was in town to visit relatives and we didn't get a lot of time together, but it was really fun. After Cathy had to jet, Sue and I drove to a local quilt shop that is going out of business and spent an undisclosed amount of money on an undisclosed amount of fabric. That's info is need to know....and no one needs to know. :)

Job Update: I have acquired a job at another local quilt shop (not going out of business) entitled Happiness is Quilting. I start tomorrow and I'm really excited about being back in a quilt shop. Sue still works at the quilt shop that we all met at, and now I guess we'll have to be rivals and have weekly quilt wars. That could really put a damper on our private Civil War block swap though. Or I guess we could pool resources...hmmm, have to think on that one.

Deb

Major Girly Moment!

Hubby was off today for the 4th, so we decided to go to the mall and see "Wanted". Pretty good movie, I liked it, didn't love it.

Anyway, after the movie we were walking around the mall and of course, Charlotte Russe had some cute shoes in the doorway. And a sale. I didn't want to go to the back of the store because I knew what might happen...and...it happened.

Hubby bought me the CUTEST shoes in the universe. The most perfect shoes ever created. And here they are. Aren't they gorgeous! And only 23 bucks! Elle Woods would be proud.


And then...they were buy one pair, get one for $10, so I picked out another pair. Got to the register and they were only, get this...$4.99! I did still have the opportunity for that other pair at $10, but didn't take it. I didn't want to push my luck.

I even got some new hot pink toenail polish. *sigh* What more could a girl ask for. :)

Happy Independence Day, Y'all!

D

Running on empty

This last weekend was a whirlwind of fun. My daughter and I drove up to the town my parents live in and met up at my sister's home. As did my son and DIL. Headed over the church and set up for the party.
Here is a picture of the finished quilt. I think everyone liked it, and I know my Mom and Dad loved it. The party went well. Dad knew about it and had prepared a presentation with their love story accompanied by music. At the close of his speech, he asked my mom to marry him again and their Pastor stood up and performed the ceremony. Not a dry eye in the house, I gotta say. It was very touching.

Another piece of news, maybe not QUITE as big, but almost. Feast your eyes on this! It was our first chicken dinner! It was so moist and tender. C (my daughter) told me that she learned that the difference between white meat and dark meat is the amount of oxygen it got while it was still alive. Almost my whole chicken was white meat since they were all free range and had plenty of exercise. We are now looking forward to getting another batch in before the season is over. I think I might have mentioned that before.

Today was job hunting day, both for C and for myself. This was her first time asking for employment and found the whole process somewhat depressing. This was NOT my first time asking for employment and also found the whole process depressing. We consoled ourselves by digging change from our purses and having tacos and water at Taco Bell on the way home. Paying for tacos with change scrounged from your purse certainly makes the job hunt seem a little more necessary. LOL. We will persevere. Ironically, both of us have some chance of being hired at book stores. Different book stores. I applied at a different branch of the book store that my hubby works at part time. C applied to 2 bookstores. What a bunch of nerds. And I mean that in the nicest way. We know we're nerds and revel in our nerd-dom. It's so nice to own the fact that you're a nerd and not try to fit in with the "cool" people. Takes off a lot of pressure.

I snagged 3 bags of grass clippings from the neighbor yesterday. I know she doesn't spray her yard, so I hot footed it over there as soon as I saw her bagging them up. I have one of the veg beds that Hubby built that never got filled with dirt, so it's sitting on newspapers (to kill the grass under it) and I dumped in all the clippings. I smooshed it in as far as it would go and then planted some leftover bean seeds in it. Just finished watering it again and we'll see what happens. I also put in some corn seeds in the onion/pumpkin bed for a fall batch of corn, as well as filled in some holes in the pepper bed with some more okra seed. Pulled up the radish that I had let go to seed and then put in some lettuce seed where it was. Maybe, just maybe I'll get those things to sprout. I'm learning that gardening is constant, especially in the part of the country I'm in. We have a 10/11 month growing season here, so I can get 2 crops of corn and beans and most other things. As one crop is harvested, another one can be seeded into the empty spots. It's pretty fun experimenting with things. I harvested onions yesterday, and man, there's a ton of them. Trying to figure out storage now.

My Sis in law gifted me with a beautiful wire egg basket this last weekend, and now it's the daily harvest basket. It looks so nice filled with home grown goodness.

Thanks for listening and I'll keep you posted on the job front.

d