Saturday, July 28, 2012

Quick project!

I'm part of an iFamily. When the extended family gets together at my sister's place, we have 7 iPhones, 5 iPads, and at least 6 iPods that I know of. That makes for a lot of chargers hanging out, and they're all identical. Until now!
Today, I made charger art. I used Recollections brand double-sided adhesive in two widths, and pink and purple Recollections fine glitter, all of which lived in my craft stash.
First, I covered the charger in adhesive, alternating wide and narrow pieces. I removed the backing from the wide strips and sprinkled on the pink glitter. I pressed it all in, and tapped off the excess, then removed the backing from the narrow strips and sprinkled on the purple glitter.
I also covered the USB cable end with adhesive strips, and used just the purple glitter.
Voila! Now, no one will accidentally take my charger halfway across the continent when we pack up to leave :)

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Cooking like a madwoman!

In general, I don't cook.  I bake.  I'll make a loaf of bread every day if I have someone to share it with.  I bake cookies in batches of 12 dozen.  But I don't like to cook. This weekend, though, I went shopping and got stuff together to make dinner.  Lots of dinner.

It all started with this post I saw on Pinterest.  It's a woman who did a whole pile of prep work in one two-hour period, and froze everything for a bunch of slow-cooked meals.  I love my Crock Pot.  I love it so much that I have two of them, actually.  I can have a good meal that's ready when I get home from work, and it doesn't heat up the whole kitchen like the oven will.  I used a couple of her recipes, and then went through my three slow-cooker cookbooks and grabbed some more.  In all, I made 9 different meals, which broke down into 17 batches that are now taking up the bottom of my deep freeze.

It was a LOT of food: 18 chicken breasts, 4 lb stewing beef, 2 lb kielbasa, 8 italian sausages, 9 onions, peppers, carrots, celery, potatoes, spices, soups... that shopping trip included more food than I normally buy over the course of a full month!  But I worked it out, and with leftovers, I should have enough for 20-30 meals, maybe more, depending on whether I make rice or pasta or potatoes to go along with the main dish.  So I'm thinking it'll work out well.

Even following the recipes, though, I ended up with some extra food, mostly because of the way it was packaged.  So last night, I made up alfredo noodles with grilled chicken and grilled orange peppers, and tonight was meatballs and bowtie pasta with tomato sauce.  I've got to say, I'm looking forward to just microwaving or slow-cooking my meals for a few weeks...

Also, it took three showers, a gajillion hand washings, and multiple scrubbings with my stainless-steel smell-remover thingy to get the scent of 9 chopped onions out of my hands.  Just saying.

Anyways, my point here is, I'm going to try all these recipes now, and the ones that I really like, I'll be repeating at the end of October, so that when NaNo rolls around, I don't have to worry about cooking.  I can just use my time to write.  Yay!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

There's nothing like a crush...

...to make you feel like a schoolgirl again.

Yeesh.

You'd think, that by 32, I'd be past this whole crush thing.  Nope.  But you know what?  I'm going to just go with it.  Because he's smart, he's attractive, and he does nice things for me.  I don't know if he's actually interested in me or not, but that's okay.  I'm going to enjoy looking at him, and chatting with him, and I'm not going to let myself over-analyze every little move he makes.

But getting a mix cd is a good sign, right?  Even if it was more than a year ago?  And flowers from his garden two years ago?

No! Stop!  No analyzing!