Portable Snacks

Busy or not so much, Saturday's can be long days.  Often we bring potluck so when there's a chance we can just grab a little lunch but still be ready to help if there is an influx of customers.

Gaye brought these today.  Ranch dressing in a cup with veggies, nestled in a dish of ice to keep them cool.  Simple, not too much prep, and great for outside on the patio.  I love them!

When the veggies are gone it only makes sense to drink the dressing.  :-)

QOTD

Customer:  I hope you can help me, I'm having some trouble with my flying ducks.
Clerk:  You mean flying geese?
Customer:  Oh!  Maybe that's why I am having trouble!

Honk, honk!

The Good, the Bad, the Dead (again) and the Ugly

Heavy Sigh.  My Sunbeam iron, far right, stopped working.  I really liked it.  I have only had it a year but it was an inexpensive iron from KMart so I thought I would just go back there and buy another.

Of course, they no longer had it.  So I stood there for 30 minutes, gazing at the irons, reading the details on the boxes and ultimately bringing home the Black and Decker Classic.  Using it was not enjoyable.  Too heavy and not slippery enough .  When I had told my neighbor about the iron dilemma she offered to let me use her iron, a T-Fal that she has had for 8 YEARS and loves.  I said, oh no, I can't do that but after my dislike of the B&D and the five one-star reviews of the Sunbeam on Amazon, I called her back and took her up on her offer.

How many times can you test drive an iron?  I like the T-Fal and am now waiting for it to be delivered.  In the meantime MNDeb says I can use hers and if she needs it she will borrow it back and then return it to me until the new one gets here.  Now there's a friend!

Notice the ironing board cover?  That's the Ugly.

QOTD

"If you don't pay for it, you're not the customer, you're the product."

On NPR this morning - the tech report, talking about Facebook, etc.  

 

Sent to me by my sister.  I also found a good CNN article here about Facebook that uses this phrase and is quite enlightening.

 

Usage

In a recent chat with my youngest sister, I mentioned that I had an Excel spreadsheet titled Usage.  In it I keep track of how long it takes me to use up a bottle of lens solution, 30 lbs. of dog food, etc.  I also keep track of my frequent junk mail, which consists mostly of Xfinity, Direct TV and an astonishing number of hearing aid companies.  There must be a lot of money to be made on hearing aids.

She asked if she should be concerned about this compulsion and I scoffed at that idea.  But today I wondered about...

Does everyone remove/store their eggs symmetrically?

Design Wall Monday

Top row is blocks that will go in the zig zag quilt.  The blue and white strips are the ongoing F4 (fat quarter) project as are the red and cream finished blocks.  That F4 bundle had a couple of greens in it and as I as searching through the fabric pile, my hand touched a plastic bag that had remnants of a quilt I made at least 15 years ago.  There were some HSTs (half square triangles) in the bag which was not what the quilt had used so at some time I must have thought about using up the scraps.  I could have made pinwheels but I have already done a pinwheel quilt this year so I set them differently.  The name of the block escapes me.  Should be enough for a baby quilt. 

Stash Report #26

Added this week           1.5
Used this week             2.33
Added year to date   124.90
Used year to date        56.58
Net year to date        +68.27 YARDS

Brilliant!

Of course highly dangerous.  I don't know why it took someone so long to get this on the shelves.  Since this is the house brand, I have to think that the Chex people have a product like this as well but I didn't see it. 

A good thing it is too hot to put on the oven,

Trees in Their Places!

And even though it doesn't look like it from this angle, the first tall one on the right is lined up perfectly with my sewing room window and their back door.  (They only had two tall ones left at Home Depot.)

Thank you Larry!

Design Wall (Tuesday!)

By the end of yesterday I had made progress on a spur of the moment stash quilt.  I had seen a simple zig zag quilt tutorial yesterday morning and there was fabric sitting on the back of the living room chair that sang out take me, use me!

The row I worked on a bit this morning is actually the "middle" as each subsequent row now gets shorter.  It's very odd to work on the diagonal like this. The quilt pattern was shown with the zig-zags running vertically and I had a very hard time switching that in my head, so much so that I had to draw the first row out on graph paper and then color it.

I'm pretty sure I have enough fabric to make the quilt big enough for a twin bed.

Design Wall Monday

I haven't posted the Design Wall stuff for quite awhile and this morning it looked like this.  Quite an assortment.

• The black and turquoise half square triangles are a use it up project
• The red and lighter turquoise blocks were done to practice with a new ruler
• My ongoing Dresden plate project
• Each of those pink blocks has 32 2-inch squares.  It takes two fat quarters to make these three blocks and there is almost nothing left over!  It's a plan.
• The strips of fabric on the far right are cowboy prints from a quilt that didn't work out.  I think I have figured out how to make something work so I will leave these up on the wall so I can gather them as I run across them.

Really?

I love the attached wand tool on the Dyson Animal.  I use it to suck up dog hair along the edges of everything.  Today, on accident, I sucked up the spool adapter.  It was really wedged into the hose.   Too deep to pop out with a pen, seam ripper or screwdriver.  I disconnected the hose and used the handle of the dust mop to just push it through.  Got the mop handle stuck in the tube.  Looked around to see if I was being filmed.  Decided that the bottom half of the aluminum flag pole was thin enough, held it between my feet and with some force slid the tube, spool and mop handle onto the flag pole.  Spool and mop handle popped off nicely, flag pole and Dyson were re-assembled and vacuuming resumed.

I'm pretty sure I heard the big dogs snicker.

Stash Report #25

Added this week        22.51
Used this week             0.00
Added year to date   123.40
Used year to date        54.25
Net year to date        +69.10 YARDS

Stash Report #24

"Forgot" to put this up last week.

Added this week        11.96
Used this week            0.50
Added year to date   100.8
Used year to date       54.25
Net year to date       +46.59 YARDS

Ray Bradbury Quote

“In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.”

Last week,after his death, NPR ran two interviews with Ray Bradbury they had done many years earlier.   He was delightful to listen to and I realized that I need to add some of his books to my summer reading list. 


Here is the article about him in the Deseret News.

The Utensil Drawer

A couple of my friends are currently in purge mode.  Perhaps it just happens to we women of a certain age.

So not to be left out, today I filled a third of a paper grocery bag with stuff from the utensil drawer.  A strawberry stem remover, not to be confused with the strawberry huller, also tossed, FOUR citrus peelers, chopsticks from carry-out, the odd plastic spoon, a handful of plastic straws and you can imagine how they looked kicking around in that drawer for who know how many years!  Plastic caps for bottles from the days before plastic bottles with screw-on caps.  Oh my what a lot of junk!

I have four drawers in one cabinet and each one is deeper than the one above it.  Silly.  Much easier to have shallow drawers and more of them but I'm guessing more drawers means higher cost.

This was just the first pass through the utensils.  It would probably be a good idea to just dump the drawer and then put everything that seems worth saving into a plastic box and put that in the laundry room.  If I never go into the box, well there you go, decision made.

I did not throw out the turkey basting pins because do they even make those anymore and they take up no room at all.  Plus, I found a couple more plastic pan scrapers from Pampered Chef!  I am always semi-hysterical when I think the one on the sink is lost.  Best tool ever and most often used!

Chain Saws

The guy who painted the house last year is really a tree man.  Actually did both but currently is a tree man.  I had to get the rogue trees along the west side of the driveway trimmed back and today is the day it happened.  At noon we are only up to 53 so a good day for tree work.

Before the chain saw fired up

I moved the old fencing out of the way and a table and some composting cans.  There is a very old juniper on the left that doesn't show up much in this picture.  A big limb was leaning on the roof of the garage and there was a lot of dead tree that made it hard to maneuver the trash cans that should reside there.  The big deciduous tree had some limbs that needed trimming back as well, especially one that made any passenger safer to exit the car well before it actually got close to the garage.

After

 You can see there is a lot of dead juniper now exposed.  It's okay.  The big tree has some shape now and that's really nice.  There is still some more work for me to do and the tools in the foreground belong to the landscaper who I hope will be here in the next couple of weeks to finish up the flagstone.

What I am not crazy about is that renters to the west have an improved view into my house and yard.  They are also dog owners and dog owners, me included, tend to leave doors open to fenced yards so the dogs can go in and out as they want.  One of the men who lives there was already standing on the stoop surveying and giving me a friendly nod.  Uh, no. 

I'm already planning on some judiciously placed evergreens.  Then I won't feel like I am looking in on them either.  Okay and hopefully the trees will absorb some the smell of smoking so it doesn't come through my open windows.

The view from my sewing machine

Stash Report #23

Added this week         10.33    
Used this week              0.0
Added year to date      88.88
Used year to date         53.75
Net year to date         +35.13  YARDS

Farmers' Market

Saturday was the season opener for our Farmers' Market.    Too early for produce, of course, but lots of plants.   I mostly went for eggs and I was hoping the beef guy was there.  He was not but the honey people were!  I also came home with a lamp and Janie and I had fabulous Korean beef and rice and fresh squeezed limeade.

Can't wait to go again but it depends on how many Saturdays I will be working.  The market is only open 9-2.

Preston & Child

Actually Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, authors that write singly and also together.  I have enjoyed their books in the past.  Mystery/thrillers, some close to horror, some just creepy, and most with some supernatural element.  The last book of theirs I checked out I did not finish, it was just so embarrassingly and disappointingly trite.

So when I was at the library on Friday and saw a new book of theirs on the shelf, I thought I would give them another chance.  I mean, even Michael Crichton wrote a stinker.

Now I realize that that first disappointing book was most likely titled Gideon's Sword as the one I just finished is titled Gideon's Corpse.  Also trite and predictable but not quite as bad as the first one.

So what's the story(hahaha)?  It seems like more than just dumbing down to reach a wider reading audience.  I think they've gone the way of Robin Cook and John Grisham and are really writing movie scripts and just calling them books.  Saves time, makes more money.

Preston & Child

Laugh Out Loud

I found this hilarious and possibly one that should be on my shelf because sometimes a person just needs to laugh out loud.  The book is small in size and also in length and is a recounting of Steve Martin's experiences tweeting.  Very minimal swearing but it is the word that starts with f.

You can click on the picture to make it larger so you can read the back cover.