Let it snow!!!

As you may have guessed, we rarely get any measurable amount of snow in the valley. The pictures I posted a few weeks ago included the last real snow here and that was two years ago. But this past week, we had a winter wonderland! It took me 3.5 hours to get home from work. I have not had to deal with this since I lived in St. Louis and then I fully expected to be off from work with almost a foot of snow outside my apartment. Growing up in Nashville spoiled me. Oh the days of waking up and praying that the snow bird report would show Davidson County with snow falling as the background. I had such high hopes of Bill Hall telling me that I did not have to go to work Thursday. HA! Even though I still have some snow in the yard, the streets were practically dry the next morning after the "big snow". But if Bill Hall had been here this week, the kids in our town would have heard him say they were out of school. Too bad my kids were on track break (they have been out of school on break for several weeks now), they could have experienced a true snow day. It was fun while it lasted.

Spam...can't do it

Well maybe if it is in the form of Spam Musubi. A couple from the Kingdom Hall took me out to dinner at a little Hawaiian restaurant Friday night. As a treat, P ordered spam musubi. She had mentioned it last week and of course I turned my nose up at the thought but let me tell you, it was very good! It was as good as the sushi Spelly and Spam had introduced to me in Nashville. So now I have another pit stop to sneak too while I am out and about by myself. R and P sure do make me long to visit Hawaii (they are natives of the islands) with their stories and now I am longing for the food.

Another positive baking moment...

I have been trying so hard to make homemade biscuits for some time. I always end up with flat hockey pucks. Then I found Alton Brown. I tried his recipe but did not weigh my flour and again came up with hockey pucks. Then I tried weighing my flour (AB's way) like I did for my cookies, and wow, I had high fluffy lite biscuits.




They weren't the prettiest shape but they were good. We had a nice brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon and homemade biscuits today. Did you know, you eat much better when you cook?

Store bought cookies are out and homemade are in!!

Again, to save money, I have been forced to make homemade chocolate chip cookies. I think I have tried before years ago but have blocked it from my memory. But tonight after going a week with no real junk food in the house, Jason was more than eager to make a run to the grocery store for brown sugar and vanilla extract. Thus at 8:30pm I was pushed in the kitchen with Alton Brown's recipe for chewy chocolate chip cookies. I followed the recipe to the point of weighing the flour instead of using a measuring cup (Alton's way) and I think the cookies came out great.

That is saying something from me because I don't feel it is a great "home baked" CC cookie unless it comes from the Pillsbury Dough Dough Boy. With the log, I don't feel the need to even bake cookies, spoonfuls of dough do just fine. I have even been known to make a run to the grocery store in my pajamas to get a log of dough only to get back in the car and use my keys to poke a hole in the plastic and squeeze the dough directly in my mouth. Now before think of me binging behind a dumpster on cookie dough, the time this incident happened, I was with friends and we all had the intention of going back home to bake the cookies and we all passed the dough around. By the time we got back to the house, half the dough was gone and we were sick. I am sure my two faithful readers will remember this story.

Anyway..I digress...

The kids really liked the cookies and big Jason ate several with a smile and a tall glass of milk. So now I know for sure that I want, I mean need, a 5qt stand up mixer like Alton Brown. I don't have to have flames though. Oh wait, I am making cookies to save money. Shucks, I guess my $10 hand mixer will have to do for awhile.

Thrifty times call for thrifty measures

In these hard times, I have begun to look for ways of saving even more money. Tonight I finished up a quick project that should save me $12-$24 per month. I made my own re-usable Swiffer Wet Jet pads. For the price of one month's worth of disposable pads I was able to buy the materials to make six re-usable pads. I tried to make them very sturdy by serging the edges and triple stitching the Velcro strips. The website where I got the pattern and material list said the homemade pads would use more cleaning solution, but to combat that expense, she figured out a way to refill the solution bottles with a homemade cleaning solution. The pad I used tonight worked great and I did not feel any extra solution was used but I do have my parts ready to refill my bottle! The only difference I saw, actually felt, was my pad did not glide along the floor as easy as the disposable pad. But I felt like my pads cleaned better. I would have shared the "after" picture of my first go around with my new pads but I hated to deepen your already firmly ingrained mental picture of my dusty house with a picture of a dirty mop head. So, I share a front and back view of two re-usable pads proudly displayed on my sewing machine.

My next attempt at saving money will be to make washable nursing pads for my friend Danielle. She is due May and now that the cat is out of the bag, I can share that project too with all of WWW land.

A few of my favorite things...

There are many things that bring me happiness and many things that bring an instant smile to my face but one thing that stands in the forefront is of Bro. R in his purple suit. He just pulls this look off so well. How many people can wear a purple suit and look this nice? He and his wife are such a nice couple and they seem to always have up building experiences. Bro. R definitely has a way with words, and when he wears his purple suit, it brings an instant smile to my face! Its odd how the sight of him in this suit brings such a feeling of happiness to me. It is almost a calming effect. I was able to talk him and his wife into letting me take their picture with his suit so I could hang it in my house. I thought I would share it. I hope it brings a warm fuzzy feeling to you too.

Random pictures

I just found out that when I send pictures from my phone to "my album", they go to an online album at T-Mobile. I often wondered where this album was...

Since I have now "found" my "lost" album, I thought I would share what I had. Most all the pictures are from 2005 and 2006.