Production Zone

First,  I want to thank all who have been commenting on my daily blogs.  I don't feel so isolated when I know someone is reading.   

Today started a bit late for me.  Normally, I am up by 6 in the morning.  For some reason, I slept until almost 8!  Hubby didn't wake up earlier either.  We must have needed the extra sleep.  That just meant I didn't spend as much time on my computer this morning before I got busy with chores.  

I transferred my sourdough starter into a clean jar today.  After that, I fed it and gave it a vigorous stir.  I went to check on it about an hour ago and bubbles are still happening.  Yippee!  

The crockpot is busy cooking our dinner for tonight.  Tinga Chicken!  One of my favorites.  We will make it into tacos.  I can already smell it too.  

This is the sauce it is cooking in.  I have not tried this one before but the other one we used by this company was awesome.  I will let you know tomorrow.

I just took a break from this:

 I am back in mask production.  My daughter in law asked me to make some for one of her employees.  Since they work in a Doctor's office, I just could not say no.  There will be 6 total completed.  So far I have completed 1.  They are not hard to do.  Just a bit time consuming.  I would rather be knitting or crocheting or stitching.  Oh well, if I can knock them out today, I will deliver them to my daughter in law and she can take them to the employee tomorrow.  

Hubby vacuumed and mopped the family room and the front room today.

Enrique is not thrilled with either of those activities.  Here is a little tidbit for you.  The blankets he is laying on are on top of my blocking mats.  He thinks it is just about the best bed ever.  

I better get back to the mask assembly line.

Until next time..................happy crafting & stay well!

Wednesday

Well, hello again.  Welcome back.  Anything new with you today?

Last night I got super lazy.  I had no desire to cook anything for dinner.  That means we needed to support one of our local restaurants.

Our favorite Mexican restaurant.  It is so easy.  You just call in your order, they give you the time to show up and then they bring your order to your car.  

I know I said I was going to make out menus last night after dinner.  Well, that didn't happen.  I decided to work on a bit of stitchery instead.

I am really enjoying working counted cross stitch again.  Don't worry, I am still knitting and crocheting each day too.

That meant, menus needed to be done this morning.

They are done.  I even made out the grocery list.  Today was grocery day for me.  Hubby and I each chose a store to go to so we only had to go to one each.  I have completed my shopping for the week.  Hubby is just now getting ready to go on his journey.  One of our stores had boneless skinless chicken breast on sale this week.  I grab a BUNCH of them.  That was the only meat we were low on.  Since we eat chicken 3-4 times a week, it goes pretty fast.

Hopefully having this menu made out and being approved by hubby, it will keep us from wanting to get dinner from a restaurant.  Not that I don't want to help out small businesses, I do.  I just like having control over what goes into my food and then into my body.

Before I went to the grocery store, I stopped off at my son's house to pick up some material from him.  One of his wife's employees asked if I would be so kind as to make some face masks for her.  She offered to pay for my services but I just can not accept money from someone for something that doesn't take that long to make.  So, I will be making 3-4 masks for her this week/weekend.  Silly me, I thought I was done with those LOL.

While on the trip to my son's, I saw the most beautiful tree.

This is the palo verde tree.  It is our state tree.  If you don't speak Spanish, Palo Verde means "green stick".   Here is the reason it got its name.

Can you see the green color of the trunk?  Compare it to the trunk behind it.  The only issue with them is.............when the flowers fall off.  Yellow stuff everywhere.  

I bought a watermelon today.  It is time to go and cut it up.  Hopefully it is good.  It is a little early for them to be in season.  Fingers crossed it will be sweet and yummy.  I also need to get the chicken packaged up.  Some of it will be frozen and some of it will go into a crockpot and then shredded for use in recipes later on.   Also, my sourdough is plugging along.  I actually think it might make it this time.  So, off to the kitchen I go.

Until next time.................happy crafting & stay well!

PS:  Our Governor will be addressing us in a couple of hours to let us know what he is going to do about the"stay home, stay safe" orders that expire tomorrow.

Thermostat Part Deux

Disclaimer:  The above photo is not our thermostat, it looks like it but is not the one hanging on our wall.

Guess who got a phone call from me today?  Yup, our thermostat company.  It was still not working according to the way we have it set.  The representative, once again, walked me through steps to get it to behave properly.  What we do not understand is the fact, we have had this thermostat for 3 years and this is the first year we have had any issues.  Hopefully, this will be my last phone call to them.

Other than messing with that, I laundered all the bed linens today.  That makes me look forward to going to bed tonight.  I love freshly washed sheets.  The mattress pad even got washed today.  

My sourdough starter had doubled by this morning.  Today was the first day to feed it.  Fingers crossed, Trey will like the feeding it got and will double once again tonight.  It is pretty fun to watch.  I peek at it a few times a day just to make sure it is being active.  Today, it has not shown any activity since I fed it this morning.  Come on Trey.............bubble for mommy!

Tonight, while watching TV, I will be doing my menu planning.  With the heat, it is time to change up the type of foods we have for dinner.  There will be quite a few salad type meals as well as lots of food on the grill.  Hubby is an awesome griller. I love it when he makes the main part of the meal and I do the sides.

Until next time.............................happy crafting & stay well! 

Chores Done

I love getting all my daily chores completed by lunch time.  That way, I have the afternoon to do 'fun' things.  There wasn't much for me to do, chore wise, today.  I did a load of laundry, stirred my sourdough starter, put laundry away and worked with our programmable thermostat AGAIN!  That thing is giving me fits.

Last week I discovered the thermostat was set to daylight savings time.  We don't go on DST.  In order for me to change it, I had to call the company and have them walk me through the steps.  Then I noticed the time on it was still off by 4 minutes.  That makes a big difference when you are on the program we are for our electric bill.  Today I called them again to change that only to find out, sometime over the weekend, it had reset itself to the correct time.  Then, it decided to kick on an hour earlier than scheduled for our BIG cool down for the day!  Once again, I went into the main center on the computer and made sure the schedule had all the correct times.  It does!  UGH!  I give up.  If it happens again tomorrow, I will be calling the company again!  We might be on a first name basis by the time I get everything straightened out LOL.

This afternoon, I am going to work on a few of my WIP's.  I picked up the Victorian Lace Squares again (thanks Sam) and did a couple of those yesterday.  Maybe I will lay it out on my bed to see where I am with it.  I am getting low on left over Caron Simply Soft yarn.  Once it is gone, I will have to stop as I refuse to buy anymore just for this blanket.  If I am lucky, I might be able to make it into two lapghans for the prayer shawl ministry.

Did you notice I mentioned a sourdough starter in the first paragraph?  Yup, fingers crossed this one will actually work.  This is day two and it looked and smelled pretty good today when I stirred it.  I have named this starter.  The others never got names and maybe that was the issue.  So, the name for this one is Trey.  Because it is the third time I have tried to make a starter.

Time to go and make a light lunch.  It is too warm to eat anything too heavy.  Hubby checked the pool for me this morning and it is up to 82F.  I should be able to get into it by the end of the week if this continues.  

Until next time.................happy crafting & stay well!

WEEK 43 OF YOP 9

After going back through my YOP blog posts, I discovered I went from week 38 to week 40.  Yet, I have never missed a week of posting.  Therefore, it has been determined, I am not to be allowed to be the official week keeper for the YOP group.  LOL  At the beginning of each YOP year, I make and label 52 folders for my photos.  Unfortunately, I put quite a few non YOP photos in week 39,  Hence, making me believe that week had past.  Since that time, I have labeled another photo folder NON-YOP so I no longer will get confused.  Dang, this blogging business can get quite complicated.

Anyway, let's see what I did this week, shall we?

I worked like crazy on my Bonset Shawl.  The lace bottom got completed, then the left sided short rows, also the right sided short rows and then on to the middle short rows.  KABOOM!  My count was waaaaay off at the end of the middle short rows.  Like by 100 stitches.  (Note to self: do not watch a LOL comedy movie when counting)  I double checked that count 3 times.  There was supposed to be 5 stitches on one side and 6 on the other.  I had 6 on one side and over 100 on the other.  Where had I gone so wrong.  It all started back to the first row of the middle short rows.  No problem, I will just tink back and start from there again.  Well, that was a grand plan until I realized I had 32 wrap and turn stitches that had been knitting during that time.  Having never done W&T before, I discovered I had a lot to learn about tinking those back to their original status.  But I persevered and here is where I am now:

It is in time out for a while.  What a mess of yarn barf I had when tinking back.  There was yarn unraveling from three different areas at once.  Oh my.  It might be time to find another pattern for this yarn.  It doesn't seem to want to play nice with Bonset.

That happened on Thursday.  Naturally I had to cast something else on to make up for the lost WIP.  What to make?  How about something very useful and also something that will help reduce some of my stash?

Hot off the needles (as of last night) is my kitchen towel.  I have attached this to the door of my stove.  I love draping a towel there but it always seems to end up on the floor.  The door handle is very smooth and my terry towels love to slip right off.  This will be perfect.  I wish I had made the tab a bit longer.  This is quite a tight fit and it has not been washed and dried yet.  Since I used Peaches and Cream, I know it is going to shrink a bit and I am worried it will not go back on the handle.  I may decided to take the bind off out and make that tab a bit longer yet today.  Now I will have someplace to wipe my hands other than my shirt when cooking on the stove.

The other WIP that saw love this week were hubby's socks.

The markers show where I was last week.  I am a bit over half way to the heel.  I will once again use the FKL heels on these.  Hubby seems to prefer it for the fit.  Fine with me, since it is one of the easiest heels I have ever done.  No gusset stitches to pick up and no holes!

I tried my hand at another craft this week.  Thanks to my daughter, I was gifted with several projects to try my hand at..............again.  I used to do this craft all the time until my RA decided to take over my left hand and caused quite a bit of pain for me.  Now that my hand has been reshaped (thank you RA) I decided to see if I could pick up this craft again and still do it.

My lovely daughter brought over 4 cross stitch projects and a Jim Shore sewing project for me to work on.  What?  You only see 3 cross stitch projects and the Jim Shore kit?  Oh, my bad.

That is because I already completed one of the cross stitch projects!  I am so happy.  Once again I can pick up a needle and thread and make some prettys.  Can you guess which one I started next?

The humming birds, of course.  It has been almost 20 years since I have done any counted cross stitch.  In fact, I gave all my supplies to my mom and then when she passed away, I sold them at her estate sale.  

There is another cross stitch my daughter has that I want soooo bad.  It is one I bought years ago and gave to a friend to make for me.  She asked me to make her a Jane Austin shawl in exchange for her doing the cross stitch.  I made the shawl and sent it to her.  She never made the cross stitch and sent it to my daughter to do for me.  Needless to say, daughter has not touched it either.  Now she is in the process of looking for said cross stitch so I can finally work on it and get it framed and hung in my craft room.  It is a cross stitch of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus.  It is quite unique as Mary is in a red dress.  Not something you see everyday.  Hopefully she will find it soon.

That completes the craftiness for this week.  In other news:  The weather here has gone crazy.  We are running 20 degrees above normal!  I already have my A/C running.  Normally we can almost go until the first of June before that happens.  We are supposed to hit 102F today and continue to climb all week!  Last year we hit 100 on this day and then dropped back into the 70's and 80's for the next 3 weeks.  THAT is normal for us.  Hopefully the pool will be warm enough by the end of the week for me to hop in and do some water aerobics.  The water temp says 79, but it sure does feel colder than that.  Hopefully the thermometer is correct.  Might buy a new one to double check.  They do eventually wear out.

Getting ready to watch church on TV and then have a nice relaxing day planned......NOT!  I plan on doing 2 loads of laundry, trying my hand at a sourdough starter again, making some jar salads for lunches and working on my knitting and cross stitching.

What do you have planned for today?

Until Next Time................Happy Crafting & Stay Well!

PS:  Is everyone still under a stay at home order?  Have there been any restrictions lifted in your area?  Our stay at home order expires on April 30.  Will be interesting to see if it is extended or lifted with certain restrictions.

It's Hot

I think summer is here.  We are sitting at 95F (35C) and by tomorrow we will be 100F (38C) and it goes up from there.   Yesterday, I finally turned on our A/C.  Ceiling fans were turned on today.  It will be like this until sometime late October or early November.  Now, I wait for the pool to get warm enough to get this body in it.  That normally happens the end of May first part of June.  Until then, I will be a house plant.  

Hubby cleaned the last half of the house today.  While he was doing that, I moved furniture for him, did a load of laundry, baked a loaf of bread, watered the indoor plants, wound the mantle clock, put items back in the craft room that were not being worked on and ran to Subway to grab us a little lunch.  After lunch, I got our dinner ready to go into the oven tonight.

Cheesy Mostaccioli.............yummy.  I have a Breville Smart oven that I cook in during the heat of summer.

It even has a convection setting on it that makes cooking go even a bit faster.  I am able to put a 13X9 pan in it.  Love this thing.  We have had for about 3-4 years now.  My actual oven seldom gets used anymore.  When I bake cookies, is about the only time I use it now a days.

I still need to make my overnight oats for my breakfast over the next 4 days.  After reading Sam's blog today, I realized, it is time to start making jar salads for lunch again too.  YUM!

It is now time for me to sit back for a few hours and do some knitting or some other sort of crafting.  

Until next time................happy crafting & stay well!