I tried out my new salad spinner tonight. It isn’t the best quality, but it was $5.99. It is one of the smaller ones, perfect for me.
The tomatoes are from the garden. There are ton of romas to be picked. I cannot decide whether to make salsa or tomato sauce. (I think mom is wanting salsa and I am wanting tomato sauce.)
My kitchen has managed to stay clean for two days now. I’ve been making a point of not dropping stuff on the table when I come home, but actually putting it away. What an idea. *grin* I’ve also washed the dishes as I’ve used them.
My house will be clean and simple one day. Really.
And I know I have ignored this blog for the past month and a half…maybe more…but life happens sometimes. I am trying to simplify everything in my life though so I have more time to do the things I want to do, rather than the things that just need done.
My new policy is that if I have some bit of clutter that I move around from place to place, and it doesn’t really have a place of its own, then it goes into a box to be donated. There is still clutter around, but it is mainly doll house and miniatures supplies/items/works in progress. I’ve even managed to kill off quite a few houseplants (odd for me) so there aren’t even as many of those to keep watered.
Ryan is coming home for a week, the first week of September. I am also taking a week off then.
Today Mom and I redid part of the kitchen. The landlady didn’t want the paneling painted, but I did get rid of the country blue wallpaper.
This is what my kitchen looks like now:
At least the side with the sink. The opposite wall has the refrigerator, microwave and a metal shelf with lots of glass jars and colored bowls on it. And that curtain material? It took -months- for me to find it, but I absolutely love it. Retro in muted colors. The painting you can sorta see over the stove is one I did in college, it is ribbon candy, I just never took it down after Christmas. The flowers are fresh cut zinnias.
Now I just need to get the rest of my house that clean…
As for this template, the blue text needs to go away. And those smiley faces…I assume those are new with the theme I was redoing, but they have to go. I’ll get to it soon. Really. I try anyway.
I have a (want)to-do list a mile long for this four day weekend, yet the weather has put me out of the mood to do any of it. It’s rainy and breezy out, it won’t surprise me if the fireworks get canceled tonight since it is supposed to be this way all day.
To Cook:
I want to ‘learn’ to use the charcoal grill. Mainly for me, this has to do with the amount of charcoal to use. I bought a whole chicken, two pork steaks and a steak.
I want to make the bread recipe from my new book ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day’.
I want to make homemade pizzas to freeze.
To Do Outside:
Clean the garage (mainly I just need to take the canning stuff back to my parents’ house and sweep it out, I reorganized all of Ryan’s stuff in there awhile back).
Weed the garden and plant the celery (if it isn’t too far gone already).
Make some wooden spools for embroidery thread (I don’t remember the website where I saw these, I’ll post pictures when I make them).
Finish Painting my new coffee table and end table (the rain will hamper this).
Paint my grandma’s old desk and an antique table for the back sewing room (the rain will also hamper this).
Paint the two metal vintage lawn chairs my grandpa gave me last year.
I need to run to town at some point today. I didn’t plan to, but I’ve been thinking of things I could use. Right now that list is:
BBQ/High Heat Paint for the grill.
New Hinges for the antique table.
Three cans of spray paint to paint the vintage chairs.
Lawn bags for yard waste.
My dilemma is what town to go to (not much of a dilemma, but with my mood, it will be). If I go to Wilmington I could go to Big Lots to browse and I could get my other stuff at Ace Hardware. If I go to Washington Court House I could go to the thrift store and browse and get my stuff at Ace Hardware. Hrm. If it weren’t raining, yard sales might be the deciding factor. :P
I waste insane amounts of time trying to do things, just to realize there was an easier way to do it many steps/minutes/days ago.
For example…this new theme I want to do. I’ve went through every theme in the theme viewer looking for something similar to what I want (which is something very similar to the default WordPress theme). I haven’t been able to find anything though. What I sort of like has things I don’t like. So I knew that whatever theme I would download I would modify til it was unrecognizable. So why didn’t I just modify the default theme? Because of those rounded corners, but tonight I finally decided to look at the code to see if it was just a part of the php that could be removed, only to realize they are images-not code. I don’t know why I would think that they were code instead of images. Anyway, I will stop wasting my time searching for something ‘almost’ what I want and just modify the default, but not tonight.
Saturday Mom and I finished painting a baby nursery. The designs were taken from a Pottery Barn Kids quilt. We added touches of ‘ceiling’ glitter to the clouds and bugs.
Meijer had these giant dog biscuits and I had to get some just for the novelty. After I took the pictures I gave Gurney one of them and went to the living room. I had forgotten about the other being on the edge of the table and a bit later heard a thump from the kitchen. Gurney doesn’t often steal things from tables and counters, but when he does normally he eats it to quick to get it taken away (like bacon). I took the bone from him though til the next morning.
I talked to Tana this morning (one of my cousins) and she wants to do stuff together on Saturday. She wants to go yard-saling in the morning and scrapbook the rest of the day. I won’t be scrapbooking, probably working on stuff for a festival I agreed to do in November. On the subject of yard sales…Mom and I went to one on Saturday and I think the lady just wanted to get rid of stuff. For $10 I got a solid oak coffee table and end table of the mission style. She threw in a wooden box that mom wanted and a new set of oil pastels for free. The tables had some water damage (discoloration) about an inch up the legs, but no matter as I don’t like light oak anyway. I sanded them down and painted them black. They are drying in pieces in the dining room right now. This weekend I will polyurethane them. When I was telling Ryan that they had ‘these oak tables for $5 apiece’ he commented, “And you had to buy them didn’t you?” Of course I did and he knows that perfectly well.
He will be coming home at the end of October and that makes me very happy. It also makes me happy that the new GI Bill will most likely pass, that will make life easier once he is home on the monetary front.
I am going to change my theme a bit. For headers I am going to try to rely on photography, I like the look better. I’m going to get rid of the title/subject line as many times I sit here pondering what to put in it. It will be replaced by a larger date. Also, I wasn’t aware that the theme doesn’t display right in Internet Explorer (at least the version my parents are using). I also need to put in the ‘go back’ and ‘go forward’ links. I’m not sure that will get done this week, but hopefully this weekend at least.
On Saturday, Dad, Mom and I went to Findlay Market in Cincinnati. The farmer’s market is open now. I bought a some plants there-six lettuce plants, basil, cilantro, oregano, thyme, some hens and chickens and notably a mimosa tree. I have nowhere to plant this tree, but I am going to try and keep it in a pot till I have a place I can plant it. Sometimes it is raised as a houseplant in climates like Ohio’s, but I’ve read that it is a finicky plant. I’ve wanted one for a long time as they are so interesting. Their stalks of leaves are normally spread out, until you poke them, then they fold up like a venus flytrap. In the actual market I bought some peppers, grapes, a fryer chicken and an apple scone. Here is an example of what the mimosa does:
Sunday we had a grill out for Father’s Day at my aunt’s house. That was a pretty good time, but in the 15-30 minutes I sat out by the pool I ended up getting sun burnt.
For Father’s Day I made my dad a stuffed teddy bear. While that might sound strange, in actuality it is pretty sentimental. He ‘had’ this pair of cowboy boots from when he was still a bachelor. They were made of eel skin and honestly, they were falling to pieces-but he still wanted to keep them. Mom and he were cleaning out the storage closet a couple weeks ago though and he decided to get rid of them. Mom kept them without him knowing though and gave them to me. Dad was very happy with the result.
Today Mom and I went to go draw a mural on a nursery wall (Mom will be painting it this week while I’m at work). After that I made a Lowe’s and Wal-Mart run while Mom and Kaylee waited in the car. Afterwards we all came back here and Mom helped me get the house clean-really and truly clean. I have a few things left to put away, and the sewing room is my job, but all the ’seen’ parts of the house are spic and span. We had fun figuring out how the new slipcovers actually fit the furniture.
Ryan was talking about coming home over the July Fourth weekend, but come to find out he has a blood drive that weekend. It’s looking like I might not get to see him until October. That’s a long time-a month short of a year in fact. But we’ll handle it.
I had a fairly good weekend (except for a few things that started Sunday night…).
Friday night I spent the night at Mom and Dad’s house. I reformatted their new HP computer to put XP on it. I was advised not to (by HP), but I did it anyway and it works just fine. Even as they advised against it, they told me where to get all the XP drivers for the hardware.
Saturday I spent a lot of the day at their house transferring files and installing programs. That evening Dad went to a hospital to visit someone while Mom and I went to the thrift store, the Mexican restaurant and Wal-Mart. I have pictures of what I bought, but my card reader is at their house and the cord isn’t wanting to work, I’ll get that worked out tomorrow.
Yesterday I went to church, then the three of us went to Columbus. We went to the hospital (the James Cancer Center, one of their friends is pretty bad off) and visited awhile. We went to North Market, which isn’t nearly as good as Findlay Market, but still a market. I got six gerbera daisies which are a satisfactory replacement for zinnias til they begin blooming. I have pictures of the flowers too, but as I said above.. After the market we went to Utrecht (really I was the only one that had a real interest in that store). I do love Utrecht. I could have spent a lot of money, but I was good. I bought a palette for watercolors. It has four mixing wells, but then on the sides it has little removable-sealable jars. I also bought six individual Prismacolor colored pencils to keep with my sketchbook. Oh, and a stick of Kiss-Off. If you’ve never tried this stuff you need to. It is a stain remover stick, but better than anything you buy at a normal store (since it is made for people who tend to get pigment in their clothes).
Today I finished transferring some files to my parents’ computer, then I ran to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things. Otherwise I’ve been cleaning all day, the down on your knees scrubbing sort of cleaning.
My clumsiness has worked against me in the cleaning aspect though… Last night I decided to dye some yarn while I was cleaning the kitchen. Whatever off brand drink mix (think Kool-Aid) I was using, grape, exploded in the microwave about nine minutes in. I had fun cleaning dripping purple water out of the microwave, really. Today I made sun tea and when I was bringing it back in I was holding it by the handle. The handle did not break, I’m not really sure what happened, but the jar came undone from the lid and shattered spectacularly all over the patio. A gallon of tea and a million shards of glass. Gurney couldn’t go out until the tea dried and I swept up the glass, though when I was out there when the sun was setting you could see it glinting everywhere. After that I was cleaning the bathroom. I picked up a full package of those little latex hair rubber bands-it was open-and I flung them everywhere, including in the toilet. Tonight I took a pitcher full of chicken broth over to Mom. It made it fine down my driveway on a hill, a stop at the highway crossing, and for whatever reason, when I stopped at their house the pitcher tipped, the lid popped off and about five cups of chicken broth ended up on my front passenger floor board. I really, really hope that the shampooer sucked it all out.
So now I am going to sit here and relax til I go to bed and try not to break anything else.
I’ve been so tired lately and I can’t quite place why.
I’ve also been pushing the blog to the back burner and I need to stop doing that, because blogging is something I really do enjoy doing.
Camping was fun last weekend. I learned to build a campfire. Sunday it was pretty warm so I let Gurney get in the lake on a 20 foot leash (no pictures of that though, I’d be highly upset if he pulled me and a camera in the lake).
He spent some time on a leash at the bottom of the hill in front of my parents’ camper, but he was pretty clingy all weekend. I had another leash that allowed him to be on the deck and just off of it. He was pretty content with that and slept on the deck a lot, until he would see a bird or a kid on a bike. He was wearing a coat because it was still pretty chilly in the mornings (and as my dad says, ‘He’s a wuss’).
Gurney took to doing something I had never seen him (or any real dog for that matter) do. I gave him a treat bone figuring it would occupy him for awhile-which it did, just not in the way I expected. He took it off the deck, dug a hole and buried it. He was then very diligent about reburying it in a different location every couple of hours. I gave him a milk-bone at one point and he buried that too. He dug the milk-bone up and ate it, but the bone is still buried down there, I lost track of where it was and couldn’t dig it up to bring it home.
My parents have one of the best campsites at the lake and it has nice scenery right beside it. This little stream is nice in the spring, but it will dry up soon and just be a dry bed.
We ended up leaving early on Monday. I made the decision to stop at Wal-Mart to see if they had any more Wii Fit’s in stock. I figured they wouldn’t, but they had one left. I didn’t need to spend the money, but I did and I am extremely happy with the thing. I told Ryan though, I’ve never had a video game make me feel guilty, but that one does. I’ve used it every day though and my weight has gone down and I can see that my muscles are getting toned. I spent a lot of my week messing with that.
Saturday of this weekend I went to Waynesville to go fabric shopping. I needed something for a cover for my moleskin sketchbook. I didn’t end up actually making it, but I did get a few different fabric choices.
Most of the rest of the weekend I have spent doing some major organizing/getting rid of crap/laundry. I put away the winter bed clothes and flipped/rotated the mattress.
I made homemade granola tonight which got a little dark, but luckily I didn’t burn it.
Well I’m off to go clean some more before work tomorrow.
I’m looking for Gurney’s raincoat (already packed his heavier coat).
I baked Ghirardelli turtle brownies.
I’ve put Revolution on Gurney.
I’ve packed more than enough clothes for myself.
I’ve packed treats/food/an extra leash/an old towel/toys for Gurney.
I need to feed the guinea pigs and fill their water bottles.
I need to change Paul’s litterbox, might wait til tomorrow to do that though.
I need to pack art supplies and whatever else I am going to do.
I’m sure there is a ton more to do and it is already 10:30, but this is how I function lately. Everything last minute. It seems that Gurney needs more stuff than I do. The house is also a wreck, but it is going to have to stay that way.
Gurney is following me around the house watching me collect his stuff and put it in a bag. Total confusion. We’ve never gone away for this long before.
So anyway, I’ll be back Monday sometime. Have a happy Memorial Day.
Paul got to come home today. He’s touchy and sore. He’s hopped up on the couch once. I finally had to take a newspaper to Gurney to get him to leave Paul alone. Gurney was trying to get him to play, but Paul does not feel like playing.
I forgot I have a doll house swap due to be postmarked by this Thursday. The theme is gardening. So now I have a bunch of mulberry paper with wires embedded between two sheets drying on the coffee table. I am going to make boston ferns. This month I need to make five things.
As for media…
I uploaded two videos to YouTube. One is of Miles and Max meeting for the first time, the other is of Miles chirping because he was upset. (I only have three movies on YouTube now, which are sadly, probably only of interest to me. Although a video of Gurney after a bath has been viewed four times.)
I uploaded pictures to Kodak Gallery (I didn’t get to Flickr, I’ll do that tomorrow). To prove how far behind I’ve been on uploading…I uploaded pictures from March.
Also of note…
After my rant about Quark yesterday-they released to the news that this fall they will be introducing Quark 8. Really? What would make them think that the offices who switched to 7, then back to 6 are going to say, “Oh sure, here’s more money for 8.” I say if Adobe were to come out with a new version of InDesign at the same time and sell Creative Suite at a promotional price they would make a killing.
I am thinking about canceling my WoW account. I have not been in the mood to play for about two months now. I log on, but no one is ever on to socialize with (in my guild I mean, there are always people logged in to the game). Still thinking about it though.
Saturday Mom and I finished painting a baby nursery. The designs were taken from a Pottery Barn Kids quilt. We added touches of ‘ceiling’ glitter to the clouds and bugs.
On Saturday, Dad, Mom and I went to Findlay Market in Cincinnati. The farmer’s market is open now. I bought a some plants there-six lettuce plants, basil, cilantro, oregano, thyme, some hens and chickens and notably a mimosa tree. I have nowhere to plant this tree, but I am going to try and keep it in a pot till I have a place I can plant
it. Sometimes it is raised as a houseplant in climates like Ohio’s, but I’ve read that it is a finicky plant. I’ve wanted one for a long time as they are so interesting. Their stalks of leaves are normally spread out, until you poke them, then they fold up like a venus flytrap. In the actual market I bought some peppers, grapes, a fryer chicken and an apple scone. Here is an example of what the mimosa does:
For Father’s Day I made my dad a stuffed teddy bear. While that might sound strange, in actuality it is pretty sentimental. He ‘had’ this pair of cowboy boots from when he was still a bachelor. They were made of eel skin and honestly, they were falling to pieces-but he still wanted to keep them. Mom and he were cleaning out the storage closet a couple weeks ago though and he decided to get rid of them. Mom kept them without him knowing though and gave them to me. Dad was very happy with the result.
