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These are so easy to make. Just go get your favorite sugar cookie recipe & make it. (mine is from Joy of Cooking & includes cream cheese which makes a wonderful texture with these)   Then divide it into 4 sections. My cookie dough recipe makes 48 cookies so I divided it into 8 batches. This was a tad excessive. 4 or 5 would have been fine. Get your hands on some gel food coloring. It has to be gel if you want the vibrant colors. The drop kind of food coloring is pretty much useless for this. The colors are pale & it changes the texture slightly. How much gel? Just this much. Dip the toothpick into the container, swirl it around, pull it out, stick it in one of the dough batches, swirl it around and then stir the dough until the color is spread through out. Chill the doughs in plastic wrap in the fridge for a couple hours. Then divide it into small sections with a butter knife Take 3-4 different colors & put them together. You want a lump abou

Havoc has been sick. Wednesday last week he complained of a headache & vague muscle pain so we gave him some Tylenol. Problem solved! Temporarily anyway. Thursday the school calls around 10:30a to report Havoc has a fever of 101.9 & a cough & needs to come home. DH was in the vicinity so he picked him up, which was good because I received neither of the two calls the school made to my phones nor the follow up call DH made informing me he was picking Havoc up. Have I mentioned technology, especially telecommunications, hates me? School policy is no one can come to school within 24 hours of having a fever & since they discovered the fever, they know he’s not supposed to be back Friday. I would have totally sent him as he had no fever the rest of the day, nor that night, nor in the morning Friday. Friday night he did spike an impressive 102.6 fever that the Tylenol totally took out. Saturday he was fine. He was his high energy self. We went to the Air &am

I have a lot of cookbooks Plus two shelves in the living room, and a second stack of magazines on the other side of the island. That is a lot of meal ideas, and honestly they are pretty much useless to me shut up in those books where I cannot easily flip through the ones I like when I am doing my meal planning. So I have been slowly but surely (since 2004) moving the recipes I do like to my card catalog to save me time. My goal is to have all the books & Cook’s Illustrated in the card catalog and all the other magazine recipes torn out & put in a binder First I mark up the cookbooks Then I go through and copy the basic details to a card And I make notes on the card when I make the recipe. (I grew up with library books. You are absolutely not allowed to write in those & to this day I am afraid to make notes in books I own) Now I have to go through that stack of Cook’s Illustrated magazines (4 years worth) from the second photo & do the same thin

The boys’ Cub Scout pack did a day trip over to the Air & Space Museum in Dulles, VA. (4 hours in a car total. I deserve a badge myself) It’s an extension of the one on the Mall in DC. It’s not as big but stuffed full of planes. This Is a Benoist-Korn Type XII. It was built in May 1912. It is a two place biplane. This is a WWII bomber. I failed to note the specs of it – like the model name. This is a B29 Super fortress. Specifically, this is the Enola Gay. My MIL riveted the mid sections of B29s at a factory in Maryland or possibly NJ in WWII. (MIL worked in three different aircraft factories during the war) and this is the Space Shuttle Enterprise, so ringed around with other, earlier space craft that I could not get the angle I wanted for a photo of it. And Mayhem got a chance to work the controls of a Cessna. For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom . Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve not been feeling the scrapping mojo much this month but I did manage to get these two done this week from prompts for shimelle’s Blogging for Scrapbookers class. The little tags read “$60 spent for domain name” ($10 a year) and “including Iran, Egypt & Nigeria” (they were the countries that made me go “really?”) The journaling is about how I am struggling with not taking photos everyday & considering restarting it for my birthday

A list. I generally refer to them as the Voices in My Head. You probably have Voices too, you just may call them by different names, maybe you hear your mom’s voice in your head every time you look at new shoes. “And where will you be wearing THOSE?” or maybe you simply do not acknowledge them at all, but they are there. You may only notice them after the fact, like when you are cleaning your closet and find a pair of really cute but really impractical sandals with 3 inch heels and beading and you wonder “What was I thinking when I bought these? They go with nothing in my wardrobe or in my life actually?” In my case *I* was not thinking anything. Vanity was thinking how great I’d look in them & a sundress (that I don’t own) at a pool party (that never happened). Or maybe you come home from grocery shopping & as you put your purchases away you find a tube of Sun Dried Tomato Paste and you wonder “How the heck did that get in there?” with  sudden flash of  memory of yo

Look what finally arrived yesterday! And by finally I mean it was pre-ordered on July 20, 2010 with a late Nov release date. Which made it perfect for Mayhem’s Xmas present. Then I was sent notice that the release date would be late Dec. Ok, could still make it for Xmas and if not, well, it can be a birthday present. The nice thing about Mayhem’s January birthday is that delayed Xmas presents can easily become birthday presents. Then I was sent a notice of the release being moved to late Jan. Fine! So it might be a day or so late as a birthday present, still it’s fine. Then I was sent notice of a late March release date. Really LucasArts? Late March? Really?  For something expected out 5 months earlier? How poorly planned was this game release anyway? But at long last the Big Brown Truck of Joy arrived with the game & within minutes the little gamers we absorbed in it. They are actually playing together, which is unusual. Mayhem is the gamer & he’s

Time for the annual doctor & dentist visits! Obviously our tax return money has been received! Some people buy appliances or go on vacation with their tax return. We get our teeth cleaned. The boys each get their annual exams & any vaxes we are still behind on. I’m not longer sure where we are with either of them on that count because we’ve hit booster shot ages and the original shots were so staggered that probably some of those boosters are unnecessary right now but will be needed in 3 more years. The vax plan I was loosely following stopped before the school aged boosters & does not mention how to deal with that. But I’d think if they only had a shot 2 years ago that they were supposed to have had 4 years ago probably the booster isn’t needed just yet. Or maybe not. And the doc I set all this up with left the practice 2 years ago & we’ve been randomly visiting other docs so no one has the core plan knowledge anymore. Plus there will be an updating of

DH went camping this weekend. This usually leads to Plans to Make Stacey Happy Sleeping in the Woods. But Stacey has ISSUES with that whole Sleeping in the Woods thing. And while not actually liking that I am so high maintenance about my sleeping arrangements, I generally cannot overcome my ISSUES, no matter the suggestions. (honest to God it drives me freaking nuts that I can’t just lay down in a tent and sleep like normal people can. It drives me freaking nuts that very often I can’t lay down in my own damn bed and sleep like normal people either) But this time he had a gem of an idea involving the mini van and an old queen sized futon we own. It has possibilities worth exploring. The man thinks he can get me actual internet signal as part of it. More on that as the situation develops. While he was camping, the boys and I visited with some friends up in WV as well. We spent the day hanging out there along with another friend & her kids. (These are the normal peopl

It was beautiful this week Time to make dino swamp again Get everything arranged The carnivores are delighted The herbivores are pleased as well And then later we made rainbow cookies (sugar cookie dough we colored in batches) For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom Thanks for stopping by

St Patrick’s Day. I’ve never liked it. And I’m at least one quarter Irish. (possibly more, we’re not sure of the exact country mix on my dad’s side) All the 25 cent draft green beer in the world cannot save this holiday for me. Why? Two words. Cooked cabbage. This is the part were all the better blogging books say I should illustrate my statement with a photo of said cooked cabbage. But I can’t. I  loathe cooked cabbage so much the very sight of it makes me slightly queasy. The smell of it makes me seriously nauseous and if you put me within 500 yards of cooked sauerkraut I will throw up from the smell. Always something of a problem when you grow up in a family that is Irish and German. Hate cabbage? How can you hate food? “Easily”, I moan from my Gran’s back porch, where I am laying in the hopes the wind will blow the offensive smell away & my head will finally clear. “Stop your overacting and get in here and eat your dinner” would come the voice of

From the bin of long forgotten projects. Project started April  3, 2002 Photo taken April 30, 2006. Progress made in nearly 5 years since then? 0%

Ok, back from the BookWorld at last. About a week or so ago I mentioned vaguely some family problems. Here’s the detail I left out then. DH’s older brother went to the ER with what he thought was a gall bladder attack and about two hours later was having open heart surgery to replace a faulty valve. He’s much better now, but those first few days were very hard on the family because he had some serious memory & motor function issues & there were concerns they might be permanent. A 4 hour operation took almost 8 & he almost died twice because he has thin ‘skin’ on his heart. I know there is a term for it, I’ve even been told it but scary things tend to vanish from my mind until critically needed. What happened was every time they tried to stich him closed his heart tore a little more. They didn’t know his heart was like that when they started.  My MIL died from the same complication during the same surgery on Dec 24, 2001. My FIL died 16 years earlier of congestive

And I finally found time to read it. I’m at the part where Goliath Corp has taken over Spec Ops and hauled the fictional Thursday in on spurious charges of crimes against humanity, while she was in the middle being arrested along with an important cheese smuggler, not realizing she isn’t the real Thursday & there will be no actual blog post today. Obviously. It’s killing me being away from the narrative just to type this up. If you have never read any of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books you have no clue what the hell I am babbling about. If you have read them but not this one yet you are thinking “Goliath took over SpecOps? How in the hell did that happen?” And I’m right there with you, so I’m getting back to the book to find out, though I suspect there will be no adequate backstory to this plot twist. Book World backstories are abundant but real world backstory is seriously lacking this time around. Not a criticism. Just an observation. If you haven’t read Ffo

Twice. Power outages are no fun. Generally though, you can see them coming 24 hours in advance from the weather forecast. More than 6-8 inches of snow? Find the flashlights. 30mph winds? Break out the candles. A series of 100+ degree days? Go buy some hand fans. But if it is a nice 50 degree day? If there are cloudless blue skies? Power outages are not on your radar then. And so it was the other day. A lovely, warmish, no wind day. The sort of day that makes you think “I ought to do some yard work this morning. It is so nice out; not too hot for forsythia bush trimming & the weeds I am allergic to are in their infancy.” So that’s what I did. A couple hours later I was done & went inside to take a shower to wash all the potential allergens off of me. (my actual shower. There are more bottles & things on the shelf & the hanging basket behind that curtain) Like most bathrooms, mine has no window. The only light comes from bulbs. Also, we have a well,

I had to go get my oil changed yesterday No one nearly died this time. Go me! Seriously. One bad experience makes you dread the next time. I was 6000 miles overdue for that oil change. I tend to put off things at places where I have been traumatized in some way. Lets not discuss how long I go between dental visits. I also had them look at – guess what? The engine light! Which is still coming on at random just like last time. And just like last time it was the gas cap. Only here is the odd (and no doubt expensive) twist. The engine light? It doesn’t come on right after I replace the gas cap, or even later that day, but up to 4 DAYS later. I haven’t touched the gas cap in that time. Probably my neighbors are not sneaking over after midnight & syphoning my gas on a regular basis (though considering the price of gas ‘probably’ is as certain as I can get) It comes on while I am driving on perfectly flat paved roads. It comes on when I am driving on bumpy dirt

Ever since Havoc was a toddler we have been doing various things to combat fear of the dark, fear of monsters, and bad dreams at bedtime. The monsters thing was fairly easy. Monsters are afraid of cats you see. And we have plenty of cats. Including Nefertiti. Nefertiti is anti social. She hisses at everything. She doesn’t like people or dogs or other cats. She HATES monsters. The boys were scared of Nefer so it’s easy for them to believe monsters are as well. Now they are dubious about the existence of monsters. The problem with the dark was solved by a short string of holiday lights hung along the ceiling. Replaced ever 4 months as the bulbs burn out. Sometimes you can find me in Wal Mart in June lamenting the lack of availability of holiday lights. The bad dreams though, they took some work. We tried a number of things I can no longer recall before settling on “Good Dreams Spray”. Someone had suggested Monster Spray when we were first having monster problems but t

Well, they did it. They defied all the omens & portents . All the clear, clear signs of Divine displeasure. They took my tower Thursday. (hangs head in grief) They came in a white van, early in the morning, before I’d had enough coffee to mount a coherent protest to their actions. The tower didn’t stand a chance Can I get a moment of silence? *silence* Ok, so, I deal with negative situations by finding the funny. Know what is funny about a tower being replaced by a pole? That’s right! Jokes & innuendos about poles and guys trying to erect their poles! Towers just don’t lend themselves to innuendo quite like poles do. I disparaged the pole the man was trying to get up, finding it inadequate to the task. I need a big long pole, not the piddly short little thing he was showing me. He extoled the benefits and perks of his shorter pole to distract me from the loss of my Big Man, but I wasn’t buying it. I need length to satisfy my needs! A

Some from my 2011 photo project this week This guy brought me a rose I did some blackwork I made some cookies (they are not burnt, that is cocoa powder) And this is Smoke, taking a nap For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve really been lacking scrapping mojo the past month or so. I’ve got a teeny bit obsessed with Jewel Quest Heritage, a match 3 game & it’s taken over my brain. Like I can’t put 3 identical cans of soup next to one another on a shelf for fear they will disappear as soon as they meet. I sit in traffic thinking “If that mini van ill just get over into that lane & then that truck slide back one it will match 6 cars and they will vanish& I’ll move up in the traffic. I’m always slightly disappointed when the cars move that way & then don’t disappear. I’ve managed about 3 layouts in the past month & they are not my best work I think. This one the title didn’t quite work out. It’s ok, but not quite the look I was going for. Same with this one. It is close to what I had in mind when I started but is not exactly it And this one I did yesterday. Again, 95% is what I was trying to do but that last 5% I just couldn’t quite pull off I think I need to go back t

I’ve mentioned before that I am on pinterest, where I often have hours and hours of my day sucked away by browsing the wonderful stuff. I pin crafty things & geeky things & food things & also wordy things & I feel the need to share today (ok, I admit, I am phoning this post in really but they are funny) and finally We’ve got some family stuff going on & my mind isn’t on blogging much at the moment, I can’t give too many details right now but if you all could keep DH’s brother & his family in your thoughts & prayers I’d really appreciate it.