Use your imagination

okay, I need your help. Remember that skunk cabbage picture? Well we're going to use it, and that one by the famous dude with the tree thing. And those six new shelves/shadow boxes I bought in the bright colors. Help me arrange them on this wall in the living room.

What, you can't see them?

Yeah, that's because instead of taking pictures of the wall with one lamp in the middle, the wall with two lamps, one on each end, and all the individual pieces of my decorating puzzle, I ate baked cheesy potato chips and then napped.

So ... I still need some closure on the decorating problem, but I didn't yet take the time to put all the pictures in one of my many layer-based-image-editing applications and drive them around until I liked the layout or had several to ask your opinion on.

Sure, I could just hold stuff up, but it's too many pictures ... I'd need a whole herd of children each holding up one item. And then you'd need to mentally delete the children from the scene, for the sake of the arranging.

Maybe someday soon I'll have digital decor for you to help me arrange.

For now, just use your imagination.

Wednesday Morning Rambles

I didn't put enough creamer in my decaf coffee this morning. Every sip reminds me of that. but I'm too lazy to go fix it.

Today I need to drive 10 children to a choir event, so I need to have my own children help me empty out and clean out the van. It's hard to clean out a van if you don't clean it regularly. Bits of granola bar are, in particular, no fun to clean.

I'm still walking walking walking but so far my dream of walking whenever I'm at my desk hasn't come to fruition. The treadmill is a little loud, and I find it difficult to feel like I can really hear what's going on in the home. Plus stepping on the treadmill *feels* like I'm going to stay put, there, whereas sitting on my rear at my regular desk at least provides the illusion that I might hop up to do other things.

It's a cloudy morning here, chilly in the house, and I am running behind. See why "I should blog!" occurred to me? Uh, yeah. I'm also behind on sorting clean laundry. I was doing really well for awhile, but got behind over the weekend. So today I'll try to catch up. It's very doable, I'm not that behind. My new plan is that I sort it out into small baskets and let the kids each fold their own. I fold the littlest ones, mine, and The Grand Lunar's. It works very well when I do it.

Well, I really do have lots of things to be doing, and can't really count blogging as work. Plus I suspect you may be noticing I don't actually have anything to say. I could tell you about my bizarre dreams, but they were just bizarre, and my memories are fragmented. So I'll spare you that, today. No promises for the future, though.

What i really need to do is spend some time redoing my blog layout and colors and all my very pathetically out of date links to friends and things. I never did fix and put back the little list of friends that wasn't functioning right. But that's one of those "if I'm going to do it I should do it right" projects that I keep putting off. Which, really, is a mode I'm stuck in far too often. Doing anything is often better than waiting to do something right.

Right?

And The Boy Turned Seven

I think I've done a poor job getting birthday news and pix to the blog this past year. Of course we did celebrate and take pictures for each child's special day ... I just don't always get them to press ...

anyway, yesterday was Tobi-Wan Kenobi's seventh birthday. Hard to believe it's been so long!

His day started with Strawberry-Banana bread* with white chocolate chips. Mmmm nummy!

And ended with some presents (cool Spiderman skateboard not pictured) and cake ... a robot cake!

I stumbled across the cake at Instructables.com -- I wasn't familiar with the robot, but he was cute enough and easy enough. I did take some artistic license with him, but less than I usually do.

*The Strawberry Banana Bread with White Chocolate Chips was a hit, so here's the recipe for you ...

Strawberry-Banana Bread with White Chocolate Chips

modified (of course!) from http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Strawberry-Bread/Detail.aspx

INGREDIENTS:
1 pound fresh strawberries, sliced -- about 3 cups
3 1/8 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups white sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 bananas
1 cup butter, melted (hey! it was a birthday treat!)
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/4 cups white chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Butter and flour two 9 x 5 inch loaf pans (I used one 9x3 and one 8"x2" heart pan)
2. Slice strawberries, and place in medium-sized bowl. Sprinkle lightly with sugar, and set aside while preparing bread mixture.
3. Combine flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and white chocolate chips in large bowl: mix well. Blend banana, then add melted butter and eggs, then mix in strawberries. Add flour mixture into wet ingredients, blending until dry ingredients are just moistened. Divide batter into pans.
4. Bake for 35 to 50 minutes, or until tester inserted comes out clean. (Heart pan was done in about 38 minutes, 9x5 pan cooked 50 and fooled me, it wasn't quite done) Let cool in pans on wire rack for 10 minutes. Turn loaves out, and cool completely.

Mmmmmm it was very tasty

if I were to do it healthify it, I would probably reduce or even eliminate the butter and add more banana, halve the sugar (bananas sweeten it, too, it was quite sweet), and maybe use half white whole wheat flour. :) And substitute flax for the eggs.

Maybe I'll even do that on Monday.

And Then They Were Socks

Well, I had joked that the yarn looked like an easter egg, and maybe if I were lucky I'd knit them by Easter. But, in the end, after the detours to knit manly mitts, R2D2, and C3PO hats, I didn't finish by Easter.

I did, however, finally finish them! Ladies and Gentlemen, I now present.... The Kool Socks.

KOOL because they are hand dyed with Kool Aid.

Here's the Extreme Close Up of the sock, taken out in the sun -- the colors are fairly accurate, at least on MY monitor.

They're nice and bright and fun. And no, they don't smell good anymore, although they did when I was dyeing them. The scent rinsed out.

The Pattern is Grumperina's Jaywalker Socks -- the pattern for which seems to be down right now, I'm not sure why. I'm about two years late on the Jaywalker craze, but pleased with myself for finishing my first pair of socks for myself.

But, to avoid having this post ONLY be self-congratulatory, I also offer you my favorite sight of spring: When my squill bloom at once and make a small ocean of blue:

Isn't that beautiful?

Fit is Hard

you know that song about Major Tom and he just goes off into space ... do you ever feel like that? No? Okay, moving on then.

Getting Fit is hard.

I got a new exercise video and the person was talking about helping me become an athlete. I don't want to become an athlete. At this point I don't see how that could ever appeal to me. I've always been very unathletic. But I do want to be fit.

You would think switching to eating healthy and getting in a regular exercise habit would pay off quickly. And maybe it does in some invisible way. But you know, most of the time it's just hard. Pressing on, seeing slow changes, hitting plateaus. Sometimes it seems like not making progress at all.

I thought I was over the hump of healthy eating, settled into my groove, but it's hard for me to stay in my groove. I keep bumping up out of it, trying to get down into it again, finding it a rough and wobbly ride.

And some days when I look at the results in the mirror of all the extra walking and the wobbling and trying to press on eating healthy, it doesn't look much different than before, eating junk and not really trying. I know it IS better, but ...

It's hard to persevere.

The First Day Of Grill

We have successfully completed The First Day Of Grill of the season. Although the children informed me that the neighbors beat us by a day. Fortunately, I did not know until they informed me of this that I was racing the neighbors, so I was not upset.

I have no pictures of the First Day Of Grill. I didn't think of that until later. You'll have to imagine.

Once, last year, I bought a box of frozen pre-formed "beef" patties to grill. Everyone ate them the way cats chew things - you know that open mouth suspicious kind of chew where some of it might just fall back out? 'Cause it turns out "beef" patties aren't. If they don't say 100% beef, they're not. They're soy patties that have had a cow walk past. And shredded newspaper, I'm pretty sure that was on the label, too. They were gross. I wanted to throw them out, but my mom thought that was wasteful so she took the rest home and I guess they must've choked them down, chewing like cats, and trying to pretend they weren't awful. But they were awful.

So that was LAST year and, trust me, I learned my lesson.

Do you think it's cheating to buy the pre-formed burger patties? Did you know they sell them in the frozen section in giant boxes, and you just pop them on the grill? Okay, I suppose it's not cheaper, but hey, it's soooooo easy and they come out perfect unless you flip them badly and they fall between the bars of the grill and onto the coals. But that was last year, too. I'm learning. Getting better all the time.

Maybe you don't remember, but last summer was The Year I Learned To Grill. Because my family likes the idea of grilled animal flesh in the summer, yet getting the grill ready and standing over it and getting a head full of smoke does not appeal to anyone. So I decided I would take on that role.

This year is a year to build on last year's success. I will learn how to better clean and care for the grill, how to drag it across the lawn to the Pit of Yecchhh without the back leg coming off and dumping the ash-tray on my shoe, and how to grill things I've never grilled before.

But here's the amazing part about today. As you may recall, I am not currently an eater of animal flesh. For health reasons. I won't pretend it didn't look and smell realllly good, nor that I don't miss it at all. But I can live without it most of the time for the benefits in health and healthy weight. But I digress. I bought myself some vegan grilling patties. With much fear and trepidation. Because I've done that before and hated them. HATED! They were almost as bad as the "beef" patties. Not quite. The "beef" patties were that bad. But I was feeling adventuresome and so I tried again with the vegan burger thingies.

I got the Morningstar Farms Grillers' Vegan Patties and noticed after I'd bought them that there were no grilling instructions. Apparently you are not supposed to actually grill "Grillers' Vegan" patties. This did not bother me. I am not a rule follower, which of course you all know. So I just plopped them on the grill next to the sizzling grease splattering beef. You see I am not a purist.

The surprising part is that they were good! They were not great - i.e. they did not taste like a greasy hot burger. But! On a whole wheat bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, and a little horseradish mustard, they did have that smoky "something grilled is in here" flavor and no weird soy taste. Perhaps it was the fine spray of smoky burger grease splattered on my vegan meal, but I really felt like I was participating in the family grilling night. I hardly knew it was faux. AND I didn't feel all fat and greasy afterwards.

So there you have it, the shocking news. I would do it again. That's how not bad they were. And, if you knew my soy aversion, you would know that's pretty high praise.

What should I grill next?
I would like to try pork chops this summer, and will have to do ribs again, and I'd really like to learn how to grill good steaks, but I'm afraid I'll ruin them.

I'd also like to pick up some good veggie-and-side dishes -- with no added oils! -- to grill, but then again on a little Weber charcoal grill there's not a lot of room for a large family's meatsy meat plus a vegetarian's meal's worth of veggies. So maybe I'll stick with the non-grilled sides.

And thus endth The First Day Of Grill.

When Did They Discontinue Camel Snot Brown?!?!

So today a painting job estimator dude came by. A very nice young man. Doing the College Pro Painters thing. He's a writing major at my alma mater. Which is not really my point here.

So ... I looked in vain for the match to our current house color:

Since when did they discontinue "Camel Snot Brown" ???

Well, if I can't have my camel snot, I may as well go for something strikingly different.

I must admit to being tempted by the Electric Lime - who knew exterior paint came in so many lovely colors? And it would certainly make for a unique house.

Some of the colors had exceedingly stupid names. Some were a bit too "clever" for my tastes. Do you think this color would never change, despite how much sin and evil went on inside the house?

So, in the end, here's my top for contenders. White trim, blue-gray paint. Yeah, I know, you were hoping *I* would do the lime green, so you could say you know a crazy lady who painted her house lime green. But ... I like the deep colonial blue-gray. You'll have to be your own crazy lady. Or gentleman. Depending on your gender.

Clockwise from upper left:

Sporty Blue, Bracing Blue, Distance, and Denim.

Stay tuned, sometime in June, for the final verdict.

---
oh, wait, a little blast from the past -- I found these old pix from a few years ago, before whacking out all the bushes, when I was dreaming of a slate gray house. It doesn't quite look like this now, but oh well. Close enough.

the house, then:

the house, then, photoshopped to a slate gray:

What do you think??

The Day Of The Suited Moving Men

So ... did I tell you we ordered a treadmill?

The Grand Lunar got an incredible deal on one ... and today it arrived.

Of course, when you get a great internet deal, and then they have someone deliver it freight, it means a giant truck shows up at the end of your driveway, and some poor guy with a dolly stands in there, staring at the 2 foot by 4 foot by 8 foot, 241 pound box, wondering how to get it to your door. I got the impression he didn't pack his own truck, and was surprised at how big this particular residential delivery was. His truck didn't have one of those lift things.

"Does Mr. Lunar happen to be home?" he asked.

"Nope!" I replied cheerfully.

"Well ... can you help me guide it out of the truck?"

"Uhhh ... sure." -- perhaps he didn't notice I was just a little short girly girl?

We got it out of the truck. And he brought it up near the door. I politely held the door open. He said, "There's no way I can get that in the house. Is this good?" and set it down with a thump right outside my front door.

And he was gone.

Uh huh.

I thought maybe I could take it in piecemeal.

There looked to be a lot of pieces.

I took the first layer of stuff in, piece by piece.

Then it was time for a nap.

Ha ha! No, I kid. But look at how big that box is, I fit right in there!

So then, for the next hour, I shoved and pulled and tugged and pushed. I managed to get the huge heavy base piece off of the pallet* -- no small feat! -- but for the life of me I could not get it into the house myself. It was too wide, too heavy, too cumbersome.

So I left it like this, and emailed the Grand Lunar to bring home a dolly and some helpers.

And then I started making cookies for the helpers.

Promptly at 5:10 the helpers -- Daniel and Justin -- arrived. They came in suits. Are they not the sharpest looking movin' men you've ever seen?? And they're not just suited movin' men, they're blog friends, too! They arrived before the Grand Lunar even made it home. They spoke with the most amusing Bronx "Mover Guys" accents. And they got right to work, almost before I could take pictures.

White Glove Service has never been so good as the Suited Guys From Work, I tell you.

They even stayed to play on the fort. In a suit.

And they left. And the Grand Lunar left, to take Gark out for dinner.

And there I was with my treadmill.

Some assembly required.

And you know what? I did it! All by myself!

All the big kids and I got a chance to try it out. Here's me, gleeful... or was it dorky? I get them mixed up.

One big reason we got one was because we'd read about treadmill desks and wanted to build one. Turns out we were able to quick-rig one using a currently unused shelf from the basement and two bungee cords! I was able to bring the kids' school laptop out and check their school while walking!

I've never been so excited about exercise. The plan is to get a splitter and extra monitor to mount on the wall, and a wireless keyboard and mouse for me, so that I can still use my computer while walking. The Grand Lunar has his own laptop, so he can just hop up and walk while surfing and working at home.

At 11 pm, walking and checking school, I realized I was starving -- because I had been so excited about setting it up, I forgot all about eating dinner. (Or maybe because I'd eaten about 20 cookies worth of dough?)Whoops.

Woooo hooo! Isn't this fun?

* Special thanks to Pickle for the spelling correction :)

Not Quite What I'd Planned

You know, I don't see a lot of flops posted on knitting blogs.

And I guess I could wait until I had something good to post.

But ... I'll show you my flop. Or maybe it's not a flop, but a rough draft.

'Cause sometimes things don't turn out like I planned.

I give you: The C-3PO hat - Attempt II

Attempt I was frogged before you ever saw it.

Attempt II didn't go quite like I'd envisioned, but it was a learning experience, and in some ways I needed to press on to see how I'd like it in the end.

So here's the idea:

From the front - a regular beanie, yellow/gold. The BACK of his head.
From the back - C-3PO's face, with an extended "chin" panel.

Why? Because, like Kelly said earlier, "Wouldn't a C-3PO cap just be yellow?" -- I needed some way to get his face in.

Some problems I ran into:

Well you know when you're knitting a rib and the purl columns pull back? That doesn't mean they'll do that if you're working horizontally - a purled section puffs OUT ... thus the spookiness around the "cheekbones" ~ in my head it was going to pull back, not puff out. I should've known that, because I know knitting horizontal ribs the purls stick out. But ... oh well. I didn't think that through.

Stranding and Intarsia. Wow, they're just hard! Getting the tension right, not gapping, not puckering, especially working in the round. This added to the spooky eyes. So next time (yes, yes, there will be a next time. But I should really finish that sock, too ... Hmmm) I will try the "duplicate stitch method" which makes more sense on this anyway, being that there's not really a LOT of other-colored parts to deal with.

I tried a pseudo-bobble for the eyebrows (because I was too lazy to learn how to do a horizontal cable) and should've purled instead of knit the extra stitches.

And I guess it needs to be a little smaller. Or I need a bigger headed model (looks around for Gark) ...

Since I haven't started Attempt III yet, I'm open to gracious suggestions. :)

Enough babble, here's what you really wanted to see. Just don't laugh at me too much. I've already admitted it's not what I intended. But I still have high hopes for next time. Plus, I made everything but the shaping up myself (I did use the shaping from the R2D2 hat) so I figure I should get some points for that, right?

April Fools Food!

A few years ago my friend Katie introduced me to the April Fools Food ideas at familyfun.com ...

So this year it was "apple pie" for dessert -- you won't find that one at the above link, I made it up -- and spaghetti & meatballs & garlic bread for dinner. Or wait, the other way round. :-)

The Main Dish:

Apple Pie made with chicken and potatoes. It looked amazingly realistic, if I do say so myself. I made a clear gravy sauce. The only thing that didn't turn out was that I couldn't get the pieces out in neat picture-perfect pieces (I have that issue with real pies, too) so I don't have a plated with mashed potato "ice cream" topping to show you ...

And Dessert:

The meatballs are chocolate covered donut holes. On hindsight reflection, I wish I'd gone with the chocolate *flavored* clear glazed donut holes, instead, because these were too dark. And I'm not totally happy with the transparency of the jelly spaghetti sauce.

Like other years, the meal was quite a hit for novelty's sake, but not so much for enjoyment. The Grand Lunar assured me the pie was actually very good, but the kids, being NOT-fans of potatoes, weren't so impressed. Sometimes you have to sacrifice happy palates for the art of foolery.

For anyone interested in making such things:
I used regular store bought pie crust, cut up poached chicken pieces, cut up canned white potatoes, and a cornstarch-thickened gravy for the pie. It would've been much better with homemade crust, but I was in a hurry.

The spaghetti has a single layer cake cooked in a bowl (for the mound shape) covered with round-extruded frosting, with the donut hole meatballs and mostly strawberry jelly (I added a little apricot, and a little food coloring, to bring it closer to what I'd envisioned). I was going to make cocoa-cripsie "meatloaf" meat balls from the other familyfun.com recipe, but didn't have time. I really should plan this ahead a bit more. Shopping the afternoon of April 1 limits my creativity a bit.

The garlic bread is sliced pound cake with yellow-tinted frosting and some green sprinkles mixed in before spreading.

Next year I should really do it on March 31 or something, since the children have come to expect it and were hoping to be food-fooled.