remember

As we enjoy our hot dogs, macaroni salad and apple pie. . .

Let us remember the men and women who have died in the safekeeping of our country.  Thank you for your sacrifice.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day!

weekend blahs

My crazy, ridiculous to do list.

Green highlighting means very important, needs to be done this week. Red box means that it really needs to be done this week. Red line drawn through the task means "done".

Apparently I haven't been very productive this week. Luckily I have another couple days to get some of these done. Or not!

birthday wishes

Happy 1st Birthday to my sweet niece, Miss H!

The small square was actually a make & take by my friend Rocio from a couple years ago. I've been holding on to it and the matching pattern paper I bought separately, just waiting for the perfect picture. And for once my hoarding paid off.

Looking forward to the three-day weekend! (doing the happy dance) So much to do, so much to do!  Hope you have a great weekend!

flour + water

I love to bake and for almost a year now I've been wanting to make homemade cupcakes. Time, however, has been my saboteur. Over the weekend I finally carved out some time, sacrificing some cleaning that could wait until next weekend, and baked a batch of the Grand Dame of cupcakes, Red Velvet.

As you can see I skipped the food coloring, though the recipe also suggests using beet juice to give the cupcake it's red color. I suppose they can't really be called "Red Velvet" then. Still, very decadent and dangerous even without the deadly cream cheese frosting. I'll definitely be

Tomorrow is Friday! And if everything goes right (early office closing for the three-day weekend-love those three little words),  I have a date with some butter flour, sugar, and some nuts! I'm baking Russian Tea Cookies for Ms. H's 1st Birthday Part on Sunday. I'll be putting my nose to the grindstone to get everything done by that magic hour! 

Happy Thursday folks! xoxo

for the love of salsa

If you couldn't tell from my last post, J and I have a serious obsession with chips and salsa. In particular, we have an extreme fondness for fresh homemade salsa. Not the kind in a jar, full of preservatives that you can buy from the store, but the kind that you can actually smell the tomato, cilantro, onion, garlic. . .

Oh, sorry, kind of got lost in the thought there.

To enable said obsession, we added to our garden repertoire, tomatoes, cilantro and pesto (not for salsa, but for another soon-to-be addiction: pesto or bruschetta depending on how I feel).

The tomatoes are thriving, but the poor basil, not so much. If this keeps up any longer, I may have to go to "Plan B", which involves buying a new plant and giving him his own home (though this could mean more tomatoes). And unfortunately the cilantro is already starting to bolt.  The good news for the cilantro is that it is flowering so that means more seeds to plant!

The week seems to be going faster than usual, very unusual for a week leading into a three-day weekend! Oh, do I love the sound of that: three-day weekend. Can't wait! But I shouldn't get to ahead of myself, there's still three days of work to go. Happy Wednesday! xoxo

chips + salsa

Lazy Sunday afternoon.

Well, not really.  You'd never know by the looks of it, but there's always quite a bit of activity in this house of two. 

Best way to end another busy weekend!  I hope to share some of that fun stuff later this week so check back.  Is it bad that I'm already looking forward to the 3-day weekend coming up? 

hello, is anybody listening. . .

I can't believe I let all of April go by without at least one post, not that there anything fun and exciting, except for the awesome snowboarding J and I got in before the end of the season.  And what a great season it was! Sad to see it end, but I am actually looking forward to some warm weather activities, including, but not limited to biking and maybe tennis.

I put on my crafty cap on this weekend (miracle) and cranked out a couple pretty cute tags, if I do say so myselft, for my niece's first birthday coming up at the end of the month. Loved playing with Marshmallow Tattered Angels.  You can't quite see it in the pictures, but both butterflies are quite sparkly.

This weekend was my belated National Scrapbooking Day since last weekend was filled with pre- and post-Mother's Day doings (like cleaning the house the day before). The tags were the extent of my crafty endeavors, but I very pleased to be ahead of schedule for once (two weeks ahead!). The hard part comes in  when I have to bake Russian Tea Cookies to fill the bags to which these lovely tags will be attached.

Hope you have a great week!