Real Men don't wear Mantyhose!

7:57 AM Posted In , , , Edit This 2 Comments »
I am serious! Be a man! Why do men want to look like women? Why do women want to look like men? I am just not getting it when I see men with eyeliner, and make-up, and hair products, and now...................Mantyhose! Change the name so it feels more masculine perhaps??? Cameron and I had a good, looooooong laugh about this and now, whenever any man in my house decides something is hard, I am going to ask them if they need some mantyhose! Man-up!
I especially like this pair, don't you?



And did you hear about the 140 year old lobster that nearly got cooked for dinner? The restaurant that was going to serve him decided to free him into the wild to live out the remainder of his days. I want to know how they know how old he is AND is the cost of lobster going to go up again because someone has to be paid to figure out the age of each lobster they catch???????? What is this world coming to?

I Tried Something New

6:18 AM Posted In , Edit This 1 Comment »
During the week between Christmas and the New Year, Cameron went to Utah to snowboard and Brandon went to California to hang out with his cousin, Alex. He loaded up the pocket bike and away we went. Tim and I had the whole week at home! We cleaned up the decorations and we cleaned the garages. We also enjoyed eating this:
Mmmm, California Pizza Kitchen. I had never eaten there. Worth it! I had the Thai chicken pizza, Tim had some kind of Canadian Bacon with pineapple on it. Delicious! We ate at Gecko Grill that week too! Don't tell the kids. We ate at all the places we like since we didn't have to pay for them! ha ha Is this what retirement will be like???

Christmas Day

5:01 PM Posted In , , , , Edit This 5 Comments »
Christmas day brought a few raindrops and a sleep in. I remember the days when I barely had the gifts wrapped the night before, dropped into bed, then before I knew it, three little boys were tromping into our room to see if they could go out and see if Santa had paid them a visit. They would climb into our bed and we would read the Christmas story from the scriptures and we would try to begin our day remembering the reason for our celebration. The excitement could barely contain them.
These days, they stay up much, much later than "Santa" and thus often have to be woken to begin the day. I awoke early, in spite of my late night, but allowed myself the luxury of just laying there. Eventually I got up and showered, even getting my hair dried and my makeup on before there were any creatures stirring. (Except Tim who had gotten up soon after I did). Brandon was next, crawling out of bed around 9 AM. He asked if we could wake Cameron. I asked him if he wanted a shower first. Brandon takes lots of showers. ( I am not complaining!) He opted to get his shower done and we finally got Cameron to come out of his room about 9:45.
With a chill in the air and overcast skies, we turned on our Christmas lights and gathered and read the Christmas story.
All of us commented on how different Christmas "feels" these days. I am quite sure some magic is gone when you mature and grow up. You start to realize that the holiday season is less about Santa and gifts and more about love and peace and family and friends. These are the things that bring true joy. As gifts are forgotten over the year, these memories live on.


Thus, it was with happiness, that after a very relaxing day, we were invited to the Gratil's house to share Christmas dinner with them and Susan's parents. It is great to have good friends around when we don't have family to celebrate with. We enjoyed entirely too much food again and learned a new silly card game to play with a large group of people.









All too soon we found ourselves watching the clock, waiting to for 6:45 to come so that we could receive our phone call from Chris from Kentucky. Since we knew he would call while we were at the Gratil's house, we planned for his call to come on Tim's cell phone and await we did. He said he would be calling at 8:45 his time. I have been waaaaay off with time zones these days and thought there was two hours difference and there was only one. So, we waited, and waited, for an entire hour and at 7:45 on the dot, Chris made his call home. The part of Kentucky he was in was only an hour's difference! We had all been sitting waiting and he was right on time! We passed the phone around and had lots of laughs as we listened to Chris' stories and his southern twang. He sounds just like his uncle Dave from Houston!

Thanks for the great family, friends, and food that made this holiday a special event in our lives!

Christmas Eve

10:25 AM Posted In , , Edit This 1 Comment »
On the Eve of Christmas we celebrated our time with a huge dinner, with way too much food and lots of good friends. The day was busy, and chilly, and feeling a lot like Christmas. There was the hustle and bustle of working and food preparation, and worrying that the roast would be overdone, or underdone, or how the gravy would turn out. But it all came together and we enjoyed the feast, and the desserts, and the great company. Thanks to the Wightmans and Helferstays for helping us celebrate and ring in Christmas! PREPARATIONS



CELEBRATIONS





Afterwards, as is traditional in our family, we share our gifts we have each thoughtfully planned for each other and enjoy guessing what is wrapped in each box. Cameron is the champ at guessing and has a pretty high guessing percentage! And finally everyone is old enough to keep quiet their surprise until that night. So we all enjoy the suspense and excitement that comes along.























But we laugh as each of us opens a gift from Brandon he announces the great bargains he got on his gifts by announcing what he paid! It was hilarious if you were there! And it was so like Brandon to feel the need to share with us his thriftiness. And yet, he managed to select a perfect gift for each of us! And, in case you were wondering what was in the packaged that was labeled To Mein Mutter: Aus Dein Son: here it is!

Food for thought

7:05 AM Posted In Edit This 2 Comments »
Last week I made butter toffee. I did not take a picture of it. How could I? It was gobbled down way too fast! It was delicious! I want to make more but it took one pound of butter!
One pound of butter and two cups of sugar!
One pound of butter, two cups of sugar, boiled to a hard crack, poured on a cookie sheet (one with sides) and then sprinkled with nuts and chocolate chips!
Holy cow! No wonder it was sooooo good! I want to make it again. But I am afraid I would be the one to eat it. At least this last time I had a place to take it and so many of us shared in the butter toffee. MMMMM it is sounding so good right now. I suppose I could make some more and share it with you, right?



Baking Cookies

6:49 AM Posted In Edit This 3 Comments »

When my sister and I were children, we often asked our mother if we could bake cookies. She always said yes and we would skim through the cookie cookbook she had dreaming about which delicacy we would create. But those creations called for unusual ingredients, not ones we normally had on hand, and since we were baking on impulse, we usually had to settle for snickerdoodles or chocolate chip cookies. That was everyone's favorite anyway so why break from a good thing?

I guess due to the cooler weather, I have been in the mood for baking. Also, I have been burning a Gold Canyon candle with the fragrance of sugar cookies. Those candles are so real that you might truly believe someone is baking sugar cookies. Let me tell you, I never knew a candle could create a craving so Gold Canyon candles can be dangerous to your diet! So, on Saturday, I baked my heart out making three different types of cookies and trying to plug them to any takers just to not have them in the house, where I am the greatest consumer! Yesterday at church we were reminded to teach our children to be producers, not consumers. Ha ha ha, I produced and am trying not to consume!

Now I will break into this post to tell you I just got a text from Brandon, who is on the school bus as I type, to tell me that he just saw a coyote run across the road (well populated area) and head for the entrance to our neighborhood! ha ha ha This was amusing to Brandon and I am glad he shares stuff like that with me. Aren't you proud I am such a tech savvy mom that I can text my kids?

So, back to the cookies.......What cookies? They are nearly gone. But I saved a few for you and I plan to bake more before the winter is over! Yikes, come help me eat them!

CANNING AGAIN!

9:46 AM Posted In Edit This 1 Comment »


I decided to give canning meat on my range another go. Here is the reason why it has been a BIG deal. The control panel for the oven is on the front of the range rather than against the back wall. As a result, there is a sensor in it that detects heat and when the front burners are used, this thermal sensor triggers a disconnection and the control panel no longer works. The manufacturer is aware of this overly sensitive sensor and has developed a new one that is not so sensitive. The first time it was triggered by some power surge that flipped our power off for a fraction of a second, not even enough to reset all our alarm clocks. The first time the repair people were out, they simply reconnected the thermal sensor but when it happened again, they replaced it with the newer and better one. This required an additional visit from the serviceman as the part had to be ordered, then installed. So, by this point we had had a repairman in our home three times over this range. We plugged away again but, because I have to use the front burner for my canning as it is the bigger burner, I tripped this sensor again. We called, said it was the same thing and please just order the part first! Well, according to the warranty, they have to come out and diagnose the problem. By this time, I felt I could do the diagnosing myself. Still, they came out and this time ordered the parts and had them mailed to our house. Now i was wondering when the parts arrived in the mail if they were expecting me to install them. Hmmmmm That had me worried as the entire range has to be taken apart from the back in order to access the front panel!!! Nice job engineer guy! Anyway, they did come back, installed the new sensor as well as some fan that they said should have been running but was not. I never noticed a fan before so I am guessing it has never worked since we bought this range two years ago. Thank goodness we decided to buy the extended warranty or all of these trips would have been about $125. At this point they have now been out 5 times! So, now the fan is working and that is super except that now this fan never shuts off, just runs constantly! We called the manufacturer and asked if this should be happening. They said no and so we had to once again get the warranty people to send a service person out. They are coming next Friday. I decided to save them an extra trip by heating up the front burner that seems to trip this sensor to see if using this burner would once again cause troubles. I figured if they were coming out anyway, they could order the part then! ha ha Sad, I know. So, as I set to work doing my canning, I had meat cooking on one burner and water boiling on another to add to the canner. I had another pot boiling to add to the meat once it was in the jar and the third small pot was set to boil for the seals to go in.If you do the math, you can see I needed all four burners, which I have never needed since the last repair job so it was then that I discovered that the knob on one of the rear burners, one I rarely use, does not even move! I am guessing this nifty fan they installed in the control panel is blocking the knob's ability to turn. It used to work! Holy Cow! Now they have another thing to fix when they are out here on Friday! Ahhhhhh!


So, now I have completed another 20 jars of extra lean ground beef and the thermal sensor has not been tripped. I guess that constantly running fan is doing the trick together with the inability to use the burner behind it. Big Sigh!

DINNER, ANYONE?

9:56 PM Posted In Edit This 5 Comments »





Wow, I was thinking about food storage today. I was thinking about how we should store food that we actually eat. I was thinking about how chicken and the extra lean ground beef have been on sale all summer long. And I was thinking how happy I am that I learned how to can it when it was on sale and when my stove did not decide that canning on it was much too big of a task for it. (Don't use this kind of range for canning, it doesn't like to be heated up and trips some sensor or another. I need an old electric coil range out on my back patio or something for canning.)





Then I remembered someone saying something about taking the rings off the jars after they seal. I remembered that I had not done that. I remembered that I did not feel like digging them all out of the pantry and doing that tedious job. Then I remembered all the hard work I put into canning and if leaving the rings on would in any way affect my jars, well then, I would do that tedious job!

So I dragged out the jars and took off the rings, and lined all my beautiful bottles up and guess what, I have 104 pints of meat! My original goal was one pint per day for three months. One pint equals a pound of meat and a good amount for our ever dwindling family size. I figured one meat a day (dinner) and I have three months of already cooked main ingredient for dinner!
Now I just need a month's worth of recipes to keep my family happy with chicken and ground beef. I canned a few jars of pork but I really don't like it all that much and when you see the fat that will need to be skimmed off that when opened, well, ewwww!


A few necessary pieces of equipment, like a pressure canner, some jars and some food AND a stove that won't give you grief, and voila! Canning is easy. And we tested out the food after a few days and we all lived to tell about it so I must have done it right. And it tasted good too!





Rings off!

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