Monday Morning Staff Meeting on Friday Morning

Good morning everyone. We've had a snowstorm here in northern Illinois, our first of the season. Driving was positively frightening last night. I'm getting too old for this!

This morning we will be having stale leftover Christmas cookies compliments of loyal reader Thirkellgirl. I'm sure they'll taste just fine after being dunked in some nice hot chocolate.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I want to thank everyone for their concern and inquiries as to our well being here "at home". We are all fine but there are lingering effects from the dual crises this fall. Both The Farmer and the Other Mother were hospitalized and the aftermath is that we were faced with some inevitable conclusions.

Conclusion #1 - None of us is as young as we used to be. (duh!)

Conclusion #2 - The Farmer and I have always been able to face the stresses and difficulties that have presented themselves in our lives. We've always said to each other, "Let's get through this and then we can go on." The truth is that it is becoming extremely difficult to muster the physical and psychic energies to face challenges without a backlash that equals the challenge in intensity. Stress and responsibility has become a vampire.

Conclusion #3 - Something's got to give. In this case it has been blogging.

It was made perfectly clear to me how all-consuming it is to be involved with the caregiving and coordinating in-home nurses, therapists, doctor's visits and more. It has taken it's toll.

The Other Mother is fully recovered and back to her nonsense. The other day I found her climbing a ladder and no amount of chiding or listing the dire consquences will get her to stop. I give up those efforts. My energies are best spent elsewhere.

The most troubling effect of the stress is that I've felt my enthusiasm and creativity drained away. I am hopeful that cutting back my commitments will result in a bubbling up of something more positive. I'm forever hopeful.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Our holiday was nice and peaceful. It was just ourselves, the Other Mother and our children for the Christmas weekend. We cooked, ate, opened gifts and watched movies together. It was what we needed.

We drank Bloody Mary's on Christmas morning and had spinach and mushroom filled crepes.


Larger than life Bloody Mary.

Later in the day we had mussels, filet mignon, baked potatoes and brandied carrots. Yes, you need to come to my house on Christmas!

All the cooking and eating left a nasty mess which was dealt with by the trusty dishwasher.



Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the chore of unloading the dishwasher?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Daughter borrowed my flash drive while visiting and forgot to leave it when she left. No matter, it gave me the excuse to buy a new one which caught my eye on a shopping trip to the office supply store.

It makes me smile.



Yes, that's a flash drive and it's only 1 1/2 inches long. So cute and enough memory for my needs.

I seem to be on a penguin streak because here's the baby hat I'm working on for a friend's grandchild.



I'm not sure if the eyes should be crossed or not? What do you think?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thanks again for all you concern about our well being. It means alot to me. I would love to hear what you've been doing and also your recipe for stress-busting. I'm all ears!

........off to shovel snow.

What was that?

When I posted the photos of the effects that are available on my camera. Did you wonder about this one?



What are these? Why, they're Inchies! Every trip to the library will find me prowling through the section of books on sewing, knitting, crocheting and crafts in general. This is a fairly small library and the selection is limited but I always seem to find something that I missed before. This time I found a Mary Englebreit Christmas book and something called "Inchies" by Peggy Donda-Kobert.



I love a book that sets forth a creative challenge, gives the basics and some examples which allows you to run with the idea.



An Inchie is a piece of artwork that is created using one square inch of fabric.

I guess it's the fiber form of Smith Magazine's Six Word Memoir. Now, there's a challenge.

For my first foray into the Inchie realm I chose cream colored felt. The edges won't fray and it has thickness and body. Some of my Inchies are more successful than others. I especially love this one featuring a bare tree. It was hand stitched with black all purpose thread and mirrored a design in the book.



Here's one using beads, spacers and sequins. I call it the UFO Inchie.



A hand-carved wooden leopard bead strolls across hand stitched grass. This one needs more work. I need to stitch the grass higher so that it's more visible.



Snowflake using small pearls and sequins.



Another free form snowflake using glass tubes and pearls.



It's a fun creative exercise and allows me to escape into the fog of concentrating on needle, thread and eye/hand coordination. The book shows the Inchies being used to create artistic pieces but I think they'd make cool little lapel pins.

So, there's the Inchie for you.

Picture This

Here's the view from the garret.



Yes, the precipitation from earlier this week has turned to snow. Not enough to fire up the snowblower, but just enough to cover everything lightly.

My new camera is a joy to use. That's not to say that the Fuji brothers didn't give me years of good service.


The Fuji Brothers

The one on the left was purchased over 6 years ago and I remember paying over $300 for it. After 5 years it finally died. I was so please with the Fuji that I searched out and found a used one on Ebay for about $60. Almost immediately the darn battery door latch broke (these cameras are famous for this) and I've been taping the door shut since then. It always looked as if it was covered with band aids.

I've also got some big guns in my photography stable including an expensive digital SLR and a film Mamiya medium format that weighs over 8 pounds! Those are for serious shooting sessions but for everyday shots I like something simpler to use.

The new Canon was featured on the front page of Target's weekly ad for $99. It stated that quantities were limited so I made sure to be at the store when the doors opened. I bought first (on a whim) and checked reviews and asked questions later. The most important thing to me was the 10x zoom. I am very pleased with this camera. It has a large viewing screen and I actually love the fact that you have to manually pop up the flash and it has a low light mode. Here are some other modes.

Standard mode.



Super vivid color.



Color accent, which allows you to choose one color to accent, leaving the rest of the image in black and white.



There's a mode called color swap which allows you to change one color to another. I don't have an example of that.

Here's the fisheye view.



This is something cool called miniature effect. This blurs the top and bottom.



This is a pair of vintage ceramic chickens shot in super vivid mode.



There are also modes for shooting winter scenes, fireworks, beach scenes, foliage, a face detect feature,

Thus far I'm very happy with the Canon. It's the SX130 IS model.

Do you love your camera, or is there a feature or another camera that you'd love to have?

Holiday Cookie Joy

Holiday cookie exchanges are the best idea. Just think about it, I had to bake 10 dozen cookies, all from the same recipe. No problem. Then the cookie exchange magic happens. I come home with 10 dozen cookies in 28 different varieties. It's magic!

Here's my batch before I bagged them up.



I prepared three batches of Martha Stewarts recipe for Cranberry Coins. There was no time this year for anything fancier than this. The are very good and have the texture of shortbread or the "sandy" cookies.

Here's the recipe, which is copied from Martha Stewarts Holiday Cookie magazine issue for 2010.

CRANBERRY COINS

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup confectioner's sugar, sifted
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour, sifted
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries

Beat butter, confectioner's sugar and vanilla with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add flour and salt; stir just till combined. Stir in dried cranberries. Divide dough into quarters.

On parchment, shape each portion into a log about 1-1/2 inches in diameter and 4 inches long. Wrap logs tightly in parchment or plastic wrap. Chill 30 minutes or up to 1 day. (Dough can be wrapped tightly in plastic and frozen for up to 1 month.)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. With a sharp knife, slice dough into 1/4 inch thick rounds. Rotate log as you cut to keep it from flattening. Place rounds on parchment lined baking sheets, 1 inch apart.

Bake, rotating sheets halfway through, until the edges begin to turn golden, 20-22 minutes. Let cookies cool on sheets or wire racks. Cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room termperature for up to 2 weeks.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

These are nice, simple cookies that taste pretty good. They're not cloyingly sweet. I'll have to admit that I'm a big fan of dried cranberries. I love to throw them on my salad and while waiting for a batch of cookies to bake I threw them into my favorite breakfast.



Steel cut oatmeal. This batch happens to be from Hodgson Mill but I've also tried Quaker and McCann's.

Add some dried cranberries.



Delicious.

Have a great day everyone.

Staying In and Baking

My hopes were high that I might get to seem some meteors on Tuesday night but alas, it had clouded up and started to drizzle. No meteors for me this time around.

This morning we were in full blown dreary mode. Here's the view from the garret window.



Actually, it looking out of my sewing room but garret sounds so much more interesting. Very Emily Dickenson. In order to take a photo from my attic I'd need to climb a ladder and enter through a small access panel in the hallway. Then I'd need to chop a hole in roof because there's no window up there. The sewing room "garret" will have to suffice.

It was so rainy and dreary that nothing seemed interesting except to go back to bed and sleep. Unfortunately cookies needed to be baked. Tonight is the Holiday Cookie Exchange. Sorry, there are no pictures of tutorials for the cookies. Y'all know how to bake cookies. You don't need any instruction from me. I made a Martha Stewart recipe called, Cranberry Coins. I'll post the recipe tomorrow. I thinks it's OK because the magazine it was published in is out of print.

Anyway, you don't want to see pictures of my kitchen when I'm cooking or baking. I agree with Paula Deen............


Paula Deen featured on January 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping.

My kitchen's a mess ya'll. There was flour and chopped cranberries bits everywhere. Not pretty. But Paula would be proud because I used lots of but-tah.

Are you a neat cook or a messy cook? I'm messy in most things I do. I like to start with a clean, neat slate but things deteriorate pretty quickly.

Tomorrow I'll show you some of the cool things my new camera can do. Today I wanted to share the rain and the cookie tales.

I'm My Own Santa Clause

A couple of years ago the Farmer started doing something at Christmas that just makes us all laugh. One year our son was handing out gifts and came upon one that had him puzzled. The gift tag said, "To the Farmer, From Santa".

The only problem was that it was written in the Farmer's handwriting! We all looked at him in amazement and said, "You bought YOURSELF a Christmas gift, wrapped it up and tagged it from Santa?"

Really?

We all had a good laugh at that one. It seems that there was something he really wanted but couldn't justify spending the money. So, hey..... Santa was happy to oblige.

It became a yearly joke. What's "Santa" going to bring the Farmer this year?

I never had any intentions of following in the Farmer's footsteps but this past Sunday I was browsing through the sales flyers and spotted a camera for sale at Target. It was a terrific price. But the sales ad stated, "limited quantities".

I knew that if I really wanted the camera I'd need to be through the doors pretty early. Did I really want/need the camera? I could probably limp along with my trusy Fuji. Actually, I loved the Fuji so much that when the first died a quick death, I bought an identical used one on Ebay. I loved my Fuji Finepix!


The trusty Fuji Finepix

The screen is teenie tiny though and every one of these cameras has the same flaw - the catch on the battery door breaks easily. For well over a year I've been taping the battery door closed, only to have to repeat the exercise every time I charge the batteries. It looked goofy too.

The new camera is a Canon. I've had a couple of the smaller point-and-click kind but was never happy with them. I like something a little heftier. The most important thing to me is a decent zoom. This has 12x optical zoom and 12 megapixels.


The Canon SX130 IS joins the stable of cameras.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I have a real weakness for cameras and sewing machines. I suppose there are worse things to be attached to.

The Canon has some cool effects. I show you one of them tomorrow.

So anyway, this was my Christmas gift to myself. And, no.... I'm not going to wrap it up and tag it from Santa.

Girls Night Out X 3

After months of hospital visits (both the Farmer and the Other Mother) and coordinating physical therapist and home health care nurse visits, I find myself able to get out this week. Not only once or twice but three, count 'em, THREE evenings.

Heck, I don't even know if I remember how to socialize. Remember when your children were little and you were known as "Katie's mom" or "Tommy's mom", as if you didn't actually have a name of your own?

It feels good to get out and be with friends. This week I've attended a holiday gathering with my co-workers. Did I mention this is also the season of grab bags? I never quite know what to get for a grab bag gift but I was very lucky being in the receving end of this holiday tradition. Here's the great serving plate and tall mug I received in the co-worker grab bag.



Aren't the just the cutest? They are from Kohl's department store, just in case you're wanting these for yourself.

Last night I attended the December Bunco gathering with my neighbors. Again, so good to mingle with friends. Neighbor Lynn and neighbor Betty have been so supportive of me during these last few months. I only hope I can be as good a friend to them.

Another grab bag. This time I scored something incredibly cute. It was tucked inside this bag.



The pattern on the bag is all red glitter and I love the polka dot tissue paper. I'm a tissue paper ironer. How about you?

Here's what was tucked inside.



Ceramic snowman measuring spoons. So cute. The tag says they are from Pier One. You might want a set for yourself.

I'm going to use these measuring spoons to prepare for outing #3, which is a Christmas Cookie Exchange at neighbor Jacki's house. On Thursday evening I'll come home with 10 dozen assorted cookies. TEN DOZEN!! Gotta love cookie exchanges.

Have a great day everyone.