Thursday Musings

This post, like many of my stories, has no real point. Readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions.

* Morel mushrooms are a delicacy to be savored. As a kid, I hunted for mushrooms every spring. Nowadays, I am occasionally lucky enough to get a bag from someone who hunts them. This year, for the first time, I actually purchased some at the grocery store. They are ridiculously expensive to buy but worth every penny.

* Lily should not be taken loose in the car unless she has just used her litter box. Have you seen the commercials about female incontinence? Let's just say that a certain four-legged female experienced incontinence on my shorts while driving in my vehicle.

* I have one piece of fruitcake left. This must last me until next Christmas season.

* I found a Starbucks card in a stash of stuff tonight. There was enough left on it to purchase one grande caramel latte with whip and drizzle, with 28 cents to spare.

* The above-mentioned beverage is helping me get through this, my second consecutive day without Diet Coke.

* I'm finally coming out of the fog I've been in for the past couple of weeks.

* This American Life is quite possibly my favorite program on NPR right now.

* It feels good to walk really long distances.

* I'm stronger than I thought I was.

* It takes just a few nights locked in the basement for Lily to dig a hole in the drywall.

* I have recently learned how to spackle holes in drywall.

* One day soon, I'm actually going to do some scrapbooking.

What Janet (that's me) Needs

I got the idea for this post on Celeste’s blog: I Googled “Janet needs” and here are some of the results, including this delightful photo. I have to admit I got a bit carried away with this activity. Because I'm easily amused, it made for some light entertainment. Review and discuss the results listed below:

Janet needs 500 more tiles for her international path (not sure what that is, but I think I need such a path)

Janet needs our help (this one is related to decorating and is accurate, I think)

Janet needs help (yet another plea)

Janet needs to be terminated

Janet needs to stop being so proud (FINE!)

Janet needs to use her negotiating skills

Janet needs to be clear if there are capacity issues

Janet needs to take longer to research and edit the books

Janet needs that from you

Janet needs to find a way to work with other people (I'm such a tyrant)

Janet needs to raise the bar

Janet needs a date to impress a new rich man she met and ask Jack to escort to her the ball which is held on a private island

Janet needs to start writing a book tonight called Paranoia is a Parent's Best Friend

Janet needs to take her car to the shop for an oil change (pretty accurate here)

Janet needs some meat on her (but accuracy starts to take a nose dive here)

Janet needs to change something

Janet needs another cat (I could handle that)

Janet needs to re-invent herself (very good idea)

Janet needs to make a living and support her family (also a good idea)

Janet needs a reality check to bring her over-inflated view of herself in check (I'll get right on that)

Janet needs to pray more (I'm working on this one)

I think she looks HOT, but then again, Janet needs to come up with some more innovative concepts (this could be the subject of some debate)

Janet needs your votes

Janet needs to tell Oprah that she wants her body back and the swap is over (huh?)

Janet needs to talk to her husband and come up with a plan to go through the boxes one by one

Janet needs the other white meat

Janet needs immediate psychotic help (comments?)

Janet needs to stop

Janet needs preparation time to cook to order (how true)

Janet needs to decide whether or not she can handle dating a guy like Eddie

Janet needs to stop acting like she is a teenager and mature as an artist (absolutely)

Janet needs to get over her deep-seated issues (working on this one, too)

Janet needs a new leather overbust corset (definitely)

Janet needs to get out of the house to be stimulated

Janet needs to give life another shot

Janet needs to attend Jeannine’s Stash Buster Afternoon (this is from the “Living with Yarn” website)

Janet needs to take a chill pill

Janet needs to get a life

Janet needs at least one comment

Please?

Feline Friday: Feed Me...I'm Yours!

Lily spends a good part of each day trying to open the two Tupperware containers which hold the day's quantity of weight control cat food for her and Tinsel. Lily gets 1/3 cup each day, as she is on the "weight loss" program, and Tinsel enjoys 1/2 cup, since she is on the "weight maintenance" program.

In reality, Lily probably eats considerably more than her daily allotment, when you count all the food she swipes from Tinsel's plate and all the times she begs for (and manages to get) a few additional morsels. And I guess we have to count the snacks, too...turkey, corn, mandarin oranges, an occasional Cheeto...

I mean, really. Who could resist this little face?

Homework Never Tasted This Good

On Sunday, DD and a girlfriend spent all afternoon in the kitchen cooking three dishes from Spain as extra credit for Spanish class. They prepared Chicken with Lemon and Garlic, potatoes with paprika and cumin, and some type of deep fried Parmesan cheese blobs with Fiery Salsa. With all the olive oil, garlic and onion, our house smelled like a restaurant. In fact, you could even smell it outside of our house!

Part of the assignment was to have various people taste the dishes and provide feedback. The chicken was excellent but perhaps the juice of two entire lemons was a little much. (Interestingly, the chicken wasn't nearly as "lemony" the next day, as the flavors mellowed considerably.) The potatoes were also good but quite pungent after they were coated with paprika and cumin. Sour cream made them a little less spicy. The cheese blobs were perfectly crisp on the outside, but occasionally the insides were a little mushy. The salsa was quite spicy and a good complement to them.

All in all, it was a fun and interesting way for the girls to spend an afternoon. Definitely more exciting than geometry homework and much tastier, too.

Coaster Album

Busy week. Stressful week. The long and short of it is that I haven't blogged all week and even missed Feline Friday. YIKES! We'll try not to let that happen again.

In the midst of this week, I finally finished this class project using the "Project Essentials" coasters, paper, and coordinated cardstock stickers by Imagination Project. I used cream and pink coasters, which come in graduated sizes, and mixed them together to create this little "By the Numbers" album. (Thanks for that theme suggestion, Darci!)
I picked 10 random photos and associated a number with each, like this one, which points out that precisely 36 foam rollers are needed to achieve the show choir look. The idea is that the numbers associated with the random photos help you "count" the blessings in your life, right now.

Cheesy? Yep. Just what I needed this week? Definitely.

Feline Friday: A New Tactic

At the risk of sounding like I'm a proud cat mom, I have to say that Lily is one smart kitty. She learns from experience (good and bad), then adapts her behavior, sometimes quite creatively.

Let me give you an example of this. Around our house, one of the most exciting activities for Lily and Tinsel is meal time. Tinsel eats at a leisurely pace, while Lily gulps down her food without chewing then attempts to eat Tinsel's morsels, too. Until recently, Lily would walk up to Tinsel while she was dining, slap her on the head, then begin eating her food.

After being scolded for this behavior, Lily developed a new plan. Now she casually lies down on the floor near Tinsel's plate. Tinsel (not pictured here) continues to eat, oblivious to Lily. Lily very slyly extends her arm and pulls one morsel off the plate, sliding it across the floor to her mouth. Then the arm quietly goes out again, the little paw retrieves another morsel and slides it to her mouth. Tinsel continues eating, seemingly clueless to this little operation. Soon Lily has finished off all of the food on Tinsel's plate without a single spat.

And I've got to hand it to Lily: Her new tactic works every time. Sometimes a girl just has to get creative to get what she wants.

A Lily Limerick

There once was a tabby named Lily,
So naughty and not at all frilly.
“I’m not a priss!
You see, it’s like this:
Why sleep when you can be silly?”

Easter 2007, photo by DD

Is This a Ghost?

Yes, indeed it is: The Ghost of Ghastly 1991 Wallpaper. He's a very scary ghost, as you can see.

Friends, this is the wallpaper that is in our half-bathroom next to the kitchen. Imagine closing yourself up in a small room, surrounded by this pink and blue print. I assure you, if you were well when you entered the bathroom, you will be ill when you leave it. The print is dizzying.

This weekend, we officially launched the long-overdue but now urgent "Let's Make Our House Less Embarrassing for the Teenage Daughter" project. Gee, what's involved with this? Here are the major steps:

* Replace unbelievably ugly white laminate kitchen countertops with solid surface black quartz.
* Pay professionals a lot of money to remove all of the wallpaper (some of it is even worse than this) on the first floor and paint the rooms with solid colors of olive green, taupe, and gold. After uncovering the "ghost" pictured here over the weekend, I've come to realize that removing wallpaper is just too big and tedious a job for us. Plus, our picking away at it is really making DH nervous. Better for the marriage to pay the big bucks and git-r-done quickly.
* Swear never to put up wallpaper again.

When this project is done, I hope there will be no traces of the ghost on the first floor. I won't even tell you about the second floor. That's where all of his buddies live.

Feline Friday: Too Darn Cold

You know it's cold when the cat burrows completely under a fleece blanket, tail strategically extended for temperature control.

Happy 1st Birthday, Lily

In one short year, you have...

purred constantly
eaten continuously
meowed piteously
napped spontaneously
loved unconditionally

Of Neuroses and Chocolate Bunnies

Every spring when chocolate bunnies start appearing in stores, I think of the phone call I received several years ago from my mom, who was cleaning out the deep freeze in the basement storage room. Tucked far back in the corners, underneath the side of beef and baggies of frozen corn, were several chocolate Easter bunnies, still in their pastel-colored boxes. No doubt she smiled when she found them, rock-solid evidence of one of my many neuroses.

The truth is, as much as I love chocolate, I cannot eat a chocolate bunny. In fact, I cannot bring myself to eat anything with a face. As a child, I often received a chocolate bunny in my Easter basket, along with jelly beans and marshmallow creme eggs. When no one was looking, I would run down the stairs to the basement and gently tuck the chocolate bunny away in the deep freeze, where he would live out the remainder of his years, ears upright and frozen in time. Year after year, the bunnies accumulated, undiscovered and safely intact. That is, until my parents decided to get a new freezer.

The unfortunate thing about my assorted neuroses is that most of them have followed me to adulthood. A couple of years ago, we had some friends over for dinner. I was standing in the kitchen chatting with a guy we've known for years and reached into our refrigerator freezer to fetch some ice for his drink. The freezer door swung open, heavy with the weight of several pastel-colored boxes of frozen chocolate bunnies. As I fumbled past the bunny boxes to reach the ice cube trays, I realized that this particular neurosis was now fully exposed. When my friend finally stopped laughing and begged for an explanation, I told him that I can't eat chocolate bunnies because of their faces. I confessed how I had hidden them in the deep freeze as a child, and now, pathetically, had taken to freezing the chocolate bunnies from my young daughter's Easter baskets.

I've long since quit trying to rid myself of my various quirks and neuroses. While they certainly do affect the way I view the world, they really don't limit my ability to function in society. On my better days, I like to think that they add a bit of flavor to my personality. The one thing that I do hope, however, is that I haven't passed on too many of my neuroses to my daughter.

I thought I was doing pretty well on that front until recently, when I ran across a Peter Rabbit sucker, complete with a powder blue, sugar-coated jacket, which she had secretly squirreled away in the back of the refrigerator.

Two Peas Challenge

Today's blogging challenge on Two Peas: What scrapbooking projects are you working on right now?

Current projects:
* Class project: Coaster album using new GinX Imagination Project "Office Supplied" line (waiting on some product to come in!)
* Starbucks coffee sleeve album: I'm making this (all in fun!) to show my friend, Darci, because #1, she's not a Starbucks person and #2, she doesn't know why I would want to make an album out of coffee sleeves!
* Ongoing pages in our family albums: I'm working on 2005 pages right now. That does not mean that I've scrapbooked everything up to that year. It's actually quite the opposite. I just chose 2005 because I thought I could work through that year fairly rapidly. Ha! Since I actually work at a snail's pace, I'm starting to feel a *little* bit of pressure since DD will be graduating high school in three short years and I'd really like to have the scrapbooks ready for her open house. It would be most embarrassing if I didn't have them done, since I teach scrapbooking classes! You know the saying..."the cobbler's children have no shoes"? Yikes...that would be me!
* Ali Edwards' class projects: Almost a year ago, some of us attended three of Ali's classes. Of course, they were amazing and of course, I've yet to finish two of the projects, even though I have everything ready to go. They are great rainy day projects and will be fairly easy to complete.
* Book club projects: I attend Darci's monthly book club meetings at the store where I teach. This quarter, we're using Elsie's book, 52 Scrapbooking Challenges, as our inspiration. Each month, we receive a set of products and are challenged to make something using the products and ideas from the book. I haven't been able to attend the last two meetings and have yet to make anything with the wonderful products we received. I am on the verge of failing book club!!

Projects that need to be started:
* Album of my dad's collection of restored antique tractors
* Album of my daughter's 2005 class trip to Washington, DC
* Album of our 2006 family vacation to Washington, DC
* Album of our 2005 family vacation to Seattle and British Columbia
* Album of our most recent trip to Disneyworld (2004?)
* Portrait album with DD's 8x10 photos

I look at this list and know that there are even more projects that are lurking and have yet to hit my radar screen. I probably should feel overwhelmed by the list, but in reality, it's sort of fun to look at it and see that I have plenty of great subjects to scrapbook for years to come.