5 Minute Doodle: Little Treasures

The topic over at The Five Minute Doodle this week is "Little Treasures". It didn't take me long to decide what to doodle. There is a Robin nesting under our deck. Every day I tip toe quietly out there, get on my hands and knees and squish my face between the wooden slats of our deck's floor to check on the eggs. There are two, perfect little blue eggs in her nest. A few years back another Robin nested in the same place. One afternoon I heard a huge bird-ruckus. I flew to the window to see a Crow destroying the eggs on our driveway. It was heartbreaking. Worse yet, the sweet Robin sat there all day chirping a sad, mournful song. I get that it's all part of natural selection and all, but there is a part of me that wishes I could give this year's Robin a comfy Robin-condo with a nice, solid, locking door.

Weeklies#5: Back Burner Burnout

Hi there. This month has been crazy and if anyone has visited here in the past few weeks, you've noticed my lack of posting. Sorry folks. I'm knee deep in project-ville, which is a good thing but I'm going non-stop. I hope to get back to regular posting again soon, and to get this blog off the back burner! Soon I can do a little show and tell, but until then it is nose to the grindstone time.

On my plate...In the past few weeks, I made Bakers One Bowl Brownies. I love to bake, but when it comes to brownies somehow I always make them from a box mix. Back in 8th grade my dad and I decided to taste-test every brownie mix on the market. We did our 'research' over a few weekends, and were surprised that the Krusteze brand was the best. Anyhow, that's why I'm probably into to box mix brownies. I mean, why throw away all that painstaking, highly scientific research? But this recipe could change my mind. They were really good, and easy. I left out the nuts and added mini chocolate chips instead. Part of the recipe reads "Bake 30-35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out with fudgy crumbs." The phrase "fudgy crumbs" has been stuck in my head ever since.

I also made the Martha Stewart Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies. A.K.A the "cover cookie" from her new cookie book (thanks mom!). In true Martha style there were a few too many steps for my taste (chilling the dough twice for example). I also took some shortcuts like substituting mini chocolate chips for the hand chopped chocolate "cut into 1/4 inch chunks"( yeah whatever Martha) and powdered ginger for fresh. The cookies were tasty. I made a double batch, because after all that work you really should have more than 24 cookies to show for your efforts. This made for some very happy neighbors, and friends.

In my bookmarks...

My friend Gwen turned me on to these awesome print and assemble pinhole cameras. So cool!

In my ears...

I'm in love with these five songs. I heard the M83 song on the radio and my first impression was that it was some kind of awesome electronic movie score. Listening to it makes me want to run along the beach all Chariots of Fire style or something. The Bjork song, "Bachelorette" isn't new to me but I just love the melody and the words, and her voice. Bjork rocks, so dramatic! Iron and Wine blows me away. I could listen to them over and over. This song is no exception, there is something reminiscent of Crosby, Stills Nash and Young in this one. Love it. And yes, there's more electronic loveliness in "What Else is There?". Love the melody here too. If I were an aerobics instructor this would be my nifty "cool down" song. Feel the burn, ladies! "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses is a catchy, sweet song about loving someone though hard times. Love these lyrics: We're reeling through an endless fall / We are the ever-living ghost of what once was / But no one is ever gonna love you more than I do/ No one's gonna love you more than I do.

Weeklies #4: Rainy Days and Mondays

Ok, people. The weather in my part of the world is playing some serious tricks on us this week. On the weekend we had record highs in my town. We are talking wearing tank tops at 7pm on your deck warm. It rocked. And today? Dreary, gray, soggy, cold, Mossytown once more. Seriously. I'm sure you've heard that they are going to try and control the weather during the Summer Olympics in China? Freaky, yes. But if they want to test that out, I'd invite theme over here to Rainytown in a heartbeat to blow some of these rain clouds far, far away.

Seen on the internet: This awesome Walking Bike. Click here to see a video of it in motion!

Lesson learned: Don't wear a black boucle sweater out to a cafe and feed your 10 month old a banana while holding her. Boucle and banana don't mix, y'all.

Music: Here's 5 songs that have me tapping my toes this week. "Foux Du Fafa" is just so fun and funny, and in French. I love the part that goes "Camembert...Jacque Cousteau... baguette!". I don't speak French, but I understand that much at least. "We Used to be Friends" is catchy, and had me dancing about the house in kind of a cheerleader-y fashion. "When Water Comes to Life" has some crazy violin and strings in the beginning, so pretty! "Clover Over Dover" is just plain groovy, although I don't think I'd let anyone "push me over the white Cliffs of Dover". Although it rhymes, it still doesn't sound like a good idea. The cover of "Harvest Moon" by Cassandra Wilson is one I hadn't listened to in years, it is really pretty. Enjoy. (Player has been moved to most recent Weeklies installment).


Ok, and just in case you were needing a visual for the title of this post, a little Carpenter's love for you. Come on, you know you want it!

Sunday Scribblings: Fearless

The prompt for this week's Sunday Scribblings is "Fearless". As I was reading other people's two cents on the topic I happened across a post by the Greenish Lady over in Ireland. She quoted a friend who once said to her "fear is in the future". Meaning that if you live in the present, there is really no fear. I remembered that my pal A had said nearly the same thing to me a few weeks ago.

All of a sudden it gelled for me. Lately, I've been having this vision that inside of me lives a very powerful version of myself. A superhero if you will. I think of her as "Super-Me". She is unafraid to try new things, wears great shoes, eats chocolate for breakfast, has a wild sense of adventure, and is never tired (I said she was a superhero, right)? Anyhow, I really don't think this vision is unique to me. I think everyone has that same person inside themselves, some people just let theirs out to play a little more often.

I remembered an exercise I did a few years back when I did The Artist's Way (an awesome experience I'd highly recommend). It asks you to make a list of things you would do or try if you weren't afraid. Not necessarily horror-movie style afraid; but afraid of failure, success, or judgement from yourself or others. It is a really powerful way of thinking. What would you try if fear were removed from the equation?

Illustration Friday: Save

My hubby is a literal penny saver. He has a huge jar of pennies he's been adding to since he was little. One year, while he was away at college, his mom (a grade school teacher) dipped into his stash to have some coins to teach her kids a unit on counting money . When he returned home on break his mom mentioned casually that she'd taken some coins out of the jar. Hubby's face went pale. "How MANY pennies did you take?" he asked. "Oh, a handful", she replied. He went downstairs and came back with a long sheet of paper made of a patchwork of little pieces taped, glued and stapled together over the years. A tally. He'd been counting those pennies since he was a little kid! His mom felt terrible. He considered recounting them all, but it has seemed like too daunting of a task. Instead, he's stared a new jar at our house. And this time, no one's counting.

Sunday Scribblings: Photograph

This week at Sunday Scribblings we are asked to share a photo and write a little something about it. I've got loads of photos, and so many of them are special to me, it was hard to chose!

This photo was snapped by my dad when I was 15, the summer before I started high school. That's me on the right, with my $90 JCPenny spiral perm blowing in the breeze and my best pal S with the white Ray Ban knock offs on the left. When I look closely I can see a blurry image of my dad in his old varsity jacket reflected in S's glasses.

My dad had just taken us on a weekend camping trip at the end of a hot, perfect summer. We loaded up his speed boat and drove across a deep blue alpine lake to camp at a remote waterfront campground. We ate beans and hot dogs that we heated over the fire, put up a hammock between two trees, and S and I spent a lot of time swimming and washing our hair in the lake, while my dad read and hung out at the campsite. S and I weren't much into roughing it, and I wouldn't doubt if we both wore full makeup on that weekend excursion. At night S and I stayed up late laying on the cool rocks and looking up at the stars, laughing hard and talking until we got too cold to stay outside any longer.

In this photo I am driving my dad's boat across the lake at the end of the trip. It was getting stormy and the water was really rough. To avoid bouncing violently home I had to drive the low slung boat really fast and at a right angle to the waves. Logs were floating everywhere and I had to navigate around them lest we hit one and gouge a big hole in dad's boat. Instead of being scared, I remember laughing all the way home as we bounced and bobbed along, hoping not to lose our camping gear or worse yet, our makeup bags.

This photo captures such a fleeting, perfect moment in time. So much was about to change for me and S, and we had no idea what lay ahead. Much like driving dad's boat across that uncertain and choppy water, the only way to get through it was to go fast, and hit the waves head on.

Weeklies#3: Zippidee-Doo-Dah

This week has zipped by! I'm having a hard time believing that it is time for The Weeklies again. Here's what's been going on around these parts.

Made this week:

Well, I made a few things this week. Again, both food. I promise someday I'll actually finish a craft and post it here, but until then a girl (and her family) gotta eat. Recently I've rediscovered my love for the crock pot. I mean, what could be better? You dump a bunch of stuff in, crank it on, and get to enjoy wafts of cooking food all day long while you happily go about doing other things. This week I made this Chicken Chili. It is hearty, spicy and filling. I love the addition of beer to the recipe. I always feel kinda deviant cracking open a Fat Tire Ale at 9 am. So naughty!


The next neat-o thing I made was something I can now scratch off my list of "Things I want to bake in 2008". My friend just earned her Ph.D, and moved back here to work, so we had a little celebration to welcome her back. This girl loves ice cream cake, and I've been dying to make one so I had the perfect reason. It was really quite simple. I baked my favorite chocolate cake recipe in a springform pan. After it cooled I lined the edges with waxed paper, melted a gallon of ice cream until it was soft-serve consistency, and spread it in the pan. I let that freeze overnight then "frosted" the entire thing with softened Haagen Dazs chocolate ice cream. It rocked. I'll be making more ice cream cakes in the future for sure! Yum.


Seen on the internet:

One of my favorite mom-artist-designer-neat-lady bloggers is back! Her blog, Loobylu is one of the first blogs I ever read. I read it daily until she signed off for a much needed blogging break last year. I still checked in with her url from time to time hoping she'd come back, and what do you know? She did! Check her out.

Also, this clip via Uncle B over at The Bedlam of Beefy. This was cracking me up all week. I give you "Hugo The Cat of a Thousand Faces":



Can't live without:

Lunch, and I've been skipping it way too often this week. My sunglasses, which I still need to replace, and my watch which I seem to always forget to wear or look at (I've been running late everywhere). Ugh.

Music:

Oooh, 5 new songs! Ok, some are just fresh to my ears, as they've been around awhile. Lysergic Bliss has something do with acid I'd guess. It's a happy song nevertheless, and you won't go to jail for listening to it, and it has a neat flute solo. Soldier is a great new song from Erykah Badu. I've always liked her stuff, and the stories she tells in her songs. Cheap and Cheerful is catchy, but that cough in the beginning is a little too much. Yuck. That said, any song that mentions living on ice cream is a friend of mine. I like the sound of Abandon. And Sunrise has great clapping and drums, so you can't go wrong. Player has been moved to most recent Weeklies entry.