Recent Exploits

It's been a busy week! I've been doing some major cleaning and organizing and it's been great :) Hectic, but great.

Remember those kefir grains I bought the other day? Turns out I didn't need them since someone in my area had extra! Now I have a nice little packet as backup :) My first batch finished culturing yesterday morning, and it tastes wonderful! A little yeasty with a zippy tartness, and it tastes great blended with frozen black cherries and a bit of honey. Yummmm...

I also made some homemade sour cream that finished culturing last night. This is, hands down, the best sour cream I've ever tasted. I was dying for a baked potato last night!





All I did was pour 2 cups of heavy whipping cream, 1 cup of half&half, and 1/4 cup cultured buttermilk into a sterilized mason jar. Then I put a sterilized plastic lid on and shook it all together. Put it in a warm area and 24 hours later you'll have the yummiest sour cream ever!

I also worked on something I haven't done in years: embroidery! It was incredibly simple, but a lot of fun! A friend wanted me to add a little decal to a shirt for him. It measured out about 1/2" x 1&1/2":



Also, here are the hats I promised you:





I've got some more projects on the way, so more pics to come!

Careful, It's a Big'un

It's been quite a while since I updated this! Quite a few things have happened since then. Let the updating commence (in no particular order)!:

1) I had to re-home dear Neville :( He was starting to bite people and and refused to be groomed. I couldn't have that going on in the house. If he were an outdoor rabbit, I would have kept him, but being an indoor pet, he needed to be friendly. I miss that little guy :( I might try again with a new bunny, but we'll see. We didn't have much room for Neville when he was here, so unless we can find a better space for a different bunny, I'm guessing it's a no-go. Someday, I'll have angoras again. It just might be a while.

2) I am officially signed up to take art classes in the spring! :) I have it arranged where I can still work mostly full-time (35 hours a week) and take two classes: Color Theory and Human Anatomy and Design. Guys. I am so happy :D This current plan I'm on has me taking two classes per semester for 4-ish semesters, so I should be done by spring 2014, or fall 2013 if I move things around. We'll see what happens :)

3) I've also started a 365 Days of Art project where I draw something every day :) I've got it going over on deviantART and it's going rather well so far. Here's the link to my profile: http://jayropedawg.deviantart.com/. If you go to "Gallery," there should be a link to my "Scrapbook," and that's where most of the doodles will be. The better ones will be posted to my actual gallery on there, and I'll post some of the better ones on here, too.

4) I haven't been doing much baking with cakes and such, but I've been learning a lot about better eating habits and better food over at Nourished Kitchen. It's pretty interesting, and I'm hoping the techniques I'm learning will help me and the hubs eat and feel better :) I bought some kefir grains online for morning smoothies. I'm thinking about trying kombucha, but to be honest, it freaks me out a little. I might look around to see if someone around here makes it and would be willing to let me try it first, and maybe even share a SCOBY with me.

On top of that, I found an egg lady! Now I get to eat farm fresh eggs from pastured chickens like I did when I was little :) I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but when I took my first bite out of my eggs over easy made with those eggs, I cried. True story.

Anyway, back to cakes: most of my baking is going to be bread and such, but I'm still doing cakes for birthdays, etc :) I'm wanting to make some Christmas cookies soon, so keep an eye out for those!

5) I've also been striving to be more green. I grew up recycling and buying second-hand and conserving electricity, but that's because we were poor and not necessarily overly eco-conscious (though, to be honest, we were still rather concerned with the environment). Now that I'm all grown up and actually have money and am married to someone who has never had to experience being poor, it's harder to stay focused on being economical and environmentally friendly. I like impulse-buying. I like buying new things. I like buying expensive new things. I almost even jumped on the Keurig bandwagon because of my lust for good, easy coffee (and tea, and hot chocolate...this was hard to turn down, my friends!). But, I've slowly been taking steps to revert back to my simpler way of living, and it's been great :) I'm definitely not as dedicated as some (a pretty hard-core green blogger), but what I do helps, even if only a little, and that's good enough for me :)

6) I've done a few neat crochet projects. I can't believe I haven't posted those! :\ I did post them on Ravelry, though. I'll get right on posting those here, too.

This is slightly unrelated to crochet projects, but on the subject of posting to other websites, I think that's why I never post on here anymore. For day-to-day stuff, I've got Facebook. For art stuff, there's deviantART. For needlework, there's Ravelry. (Oh yeah, and I discovered Pinterest yesterday...this could get ugly.) I find it hard to balance it all on here sometimes because, frankly, nobody reads this blog. Lol, I actually post this to Facebook if I want people to read it! But, I guess that's the nice thing about the internet. It's all linked together.

7) Speaking of Pinterest, I found some neat Christmas decoration ideas on there, on top of the stuff I found using good ol' Google, so keep an eye out for posts of those too.

I can't really think of anything else, but that was a lot anyway! Hope you enjoyed it (Mom and whoever else reads this blog)! ;)

Dr. Who Swap!!

???

WTF happened to my dog house??



I think the texture pack changed...

I discovered something today...

...I am in love with the rainbow.

I want to dye my hair like this:

I am flabbergasted that this even exists, and I am in love:

And my phone background is, and has been since I got it whenever ago, this:

Fun at Work Day #2

Today, I left the house without earrings :( Soooooo, at work, I decided to make some to match my Harry Potter shirt! (I desperately need some HP jewelry...like, a Hedwig barrette would be totally ballin'.)

Materials, etc:

* White Note Card
* Small Paperclip
* Black Sharpie
* Yellow Colored Pencil
* Scissors

Fun at Work

When I'm done with my actual work and just waiting for the phones to ring, it's nice to have something to do. Here's what I did today :)



The patterns are on Ravelry!

Ice Cream Cuppycakes

My friend is unveiling an ice cream machine at his restaurant/bakery and he asked me to make something. I decided to make these adorable cupcakes that look like ice cream cones! Check them out!





I thought they were appropriate :) I hope he likes them.

Neville Update

I cleaned out his condo last night, gave him a half bath, and straight up glued the litter boxes to the floor. It's hot glue. so I can get it out with effort if I need to, but he can't, right? WRONG! The little brat had loosened one of them and had it in the middle of his house. Oh well, at least he hadn't flipped it yet. I re-glued it this morning, tidied up, and went on my merry way. I really hope this litter-training works. I want to be able to let him out for longer periods of time without him peeing or pooping all over the place. We'll see what happens!

Also: LOOK AT THE CUTENESS!

OMGWHATDOIDO????

Ok, so I finally got the stuff to make Neville his own little condo Saturday. It's so big, we had to clear out or biggest closet, take down the doors, and put it in the office. It's got a coroplast floor and a nifty little litter box with a plastic screen (which I SLAVED over) lifted about 3/4 and inch off the bottom of the box. There's a ledge and plenty of room for him to hop around and have fun. Well. It has been anything but amusing this past week. He sprayed the entire place with poop as soon as I put him in. NBD. He's probably just marking it as his own. EVERY DAY SINCE THEN it's been a disastrous, stinky mess. I had to break down and give him a bath yesterday. Today? He's got little stains on his cheeks from DRINKING HIS OWN PEE, and he actually flipped his litter box over, so there are shreds of wet paper and poop everywhere. I discovered this at lunch today. I have no idea what to do when I get home. His lovely baby coat is going to shreds, and I just want to cry.

Honestly, in a perfect world where I have lots of money and can control the climate, I'd rather have him outside in a big, spacious hutch, but it's too darn hot in Arkansas. I could put him back in his old house (spacious, wire-bottom cage) but the hubs doesn't want him back where he was in that house, which is the dining room, and I'd kind of like my closet back. I just needed to type it all out and figure out what the heck to do. I could:

1) Keep going with this condo/house-training thing, call his baby fur a loss (;_;), and hope that he "gets" it after a while. It hasn't even been a week yet...he might get it eventually.

2) Put his old house in one side of the closet, get half of my closet back, and screw the house-training. (On second thought, this probably wouldn't work because it would be mega hard to dump the trays every day and he would probably stain the carpet with the pee that slips through the space between cage bottom and tray top. No thanks.)

3) Insulate the shed and put in an small window unit AC. ($$$)

4) This was going to be the "sell him" option, but I just can't!!! That is my dead-end, he's-peeing-and-pooping-on-every-inch-of-the-house-with-magical-mega-pooping-powers-and-stealing-candy-from-babies option.

From the options listed...*sigh* I think I'm going to go with #1. God, help me.

Books! Books! Books!

The bathrooms in our new building are icky, so I walked over to the library to use the restroom and pick up my ILL. It's a book called Classified as Murder and it's about a small-town librarian and his Maine Coon cat. You guessed it. They solve MURDERS! Apparently, this is the second book in the series. I'm troubled by this...but I don't think I'll be able to find the first one, read it, and read this one before it's due back :( I guess I'll just have to read them out of order! Back to the library: Something went wrong while I was checking the book out, so while Ms. Eichman was checking for a solution, I had time to browse the discarded books they have for sale. They're usually uninteresting books about Southern CoC history or out-dated medical dictionaries, but I found a little gem of a novel called Mandarin. No, it's not about tiny oranges (though that's what I thought at first, too). It's a romance about 19th century China. Should be interesting. The one next to it looked dumb, but after I read the first sentence fragment on the back cover, I HAD to get it! "A family held together by tradition -- and torn apart by love!" Sounds like a winner ;D

I got my Browncoats shirt today!! Sigh...how I wish this show were still running.

Neville and His Herbs

Neville was hopping around the house and came out onto the back porch. He found the pots I grow his herbs in :) I think he's in love...

SWAP!!!!

ZOMG I GOT THE BEST SWAP PACKAGE TODAY!!!! :D I'm in a group on Ravelry called Geek Swap and our last swap was a Star Trek swap. I just got it today in the mail!!! Check it outz!