Archive for July, 2009
Cake!
Yeah, I know the previous post was about eating better, but you have to have cake sometimes.
Last weekend Mom and I were asked to make a birthday cake for a little girl’s first birthday.
We decided to experiment with the types of things you see on tv. These decorations are made from gum paste, but now I think fondant might be more appropriate:
The design is based off of the mural we painted in her bedroom which is based on a quilt set from Pottery Barn Kids (not in production any longer).
Addi enjoyed her own personal cake:
July is my month to do birthdays at work. I put it off as long as I could (sparing a couple days) and I decided to do fancy cupcakes:
I have been missing zinnias this year as I never got them planted, so I made fake ones. 24 fake ones.
Eating better…
Last week I decided to go back to my old diet. For the last six months due to a variety of reasons my diet has been really unhealthy.
My old diet has these rules:
•No Aspartame.
•No High Fructose Corn Syrup.
•Limit processed foods or cut them out completely.
•Keep calories somewhere around 1500 per day.
I did really good up until yesterday. McDonald’s and Graeter’s…but we’ll just pretend yesterday didn’t happen.
For breakfast I had organic yogurt (this coming week it will be homemade yogurt), fresh fruit and homemade granola. For lunch and dinner I had a lot of salad, stir fry, sticky rice, uncooked vegetables.
And some days I really, really wanted a cookie.
Happy 4th Birthday Gurney
Today to celebrate Gurney’s birthday (yes, I celebrate the dog’s birthday) we went to Cincinnati to go to the Morrow dog park and to Petsmart.
I debated going to the dog park with his history of getting bitten, but as I pulled up to the park there were two people walking in and no one already there. The people walking in had a boxer mix and an english setter mix (strangely enough).
At first Gurney was nervous when they were smelling him, but he got over it pretty quick. Once he was off his leash he only stuck around a couple seconds anyway.
Afterwards we went to Petsmart and bought some squeaky tennis balls and Gravy Milk-Bones.
Things
I’ve been thinking a lot about material ‘things’ lately. When I moved out of my rental house I got rid of a lot of junk. I either donated it or just threw it away. I decided that I needed to seriously simplify the things in my life. I am not the best housekeeper in the world and I’ll be the first to admit that. I like to believe if I were home more often I’d be better, but I’m not so sure.
In my new house I’ve done a good job of keeping the bedroom sparse and picked up and I’ve even managed to keep the dog hair off the floor for the most part. (Thanks to this sweeper Mom and Dad got me that can be used on hardwood floors.) That room has been limited to just what is needed there…no clutter.
I’ve done pretty good with the living room too…though it feels too sparse…it has no decorations yet-or at least not cohesive decorations. There are odds and ends things that were in my last living room, but they really don’t fit the scale of the new room. This house has 10.5′ ceilings.
The craft room is the one room that I planned to have ‘stuff’. Art is a big part of my life and art has many accessories. Long term I plan to make built in cabinets for all that ‘stuff’ though.
The bathroom is making do until I remodel it this fall.
The last three rooms are driving me crazy though-kitchen, dining room and mud/laundry room.
The kitchen and mudroom are just getting by. The kitchen has some semblance of order when the dishes are done-but for a person who likes to cook and loves kitchen accessories, two feet of countertop and one drawer just don’t cut it. I can’t fix that until next year. It will be an expensive project. The mudroom will be fixed before winter, but right now it has no electric, no walls and a hole in the floor. (There technially are walls, but they are the exterior sheeting and the studs on one side and the original wooden siding to the house on the interior).
The dining room could be put together though…there’s just all this ‘stuff’. The dining room is where I drop my bags/purse after work, where I sit in the evenings to use the computer, the table where random stuff sits… All of it has a place it could be put and yes, I could try to not put it there as a dropping off point, but I’m not very good at that.
Some of it I am noticing is this ‘stuff’ I’m trying to weed out of my life. On my desk there are little notepads that I brought home from work because I didn’t use them there, so I don’t know why I would use them here? I have six glass globes (for candles or flowers) sitting on the library table that I use as a buffet table. I don’t think I even have places to put six of them, so why do I keep them?
I think there is a lot of worth in having few things that you really love, compared to many things that don’t matter to you. I’m becoming a lot better at that, but obviously I still need to work at it.
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