Last post until Sunday

This will be my last post until Sunday.  That is when I will do my YOP for the week post.  

Today has been a good day.  Things have been getting done off my to do list.  I don't know why I decided to wash ALL my bedding today.  Our comforter take forever to dry in my dryer.  It has no problem in the washer since that is new and REALLY big.  The dryer is a bit old and much smaller.  So right now it is laying on the guest bed with a fan on it.  My fingers are crossed that it will be dry by the time we retire for the evening.

We are being blessed with a sleepover tonight.  The teen is coming over after dinner and will be with us until dinner tomorrow night.  That is when we will be having a major family dinner at our son's home.  We are planning a family trip to Texas for late summer and want to make sure we all have the same flights and times of our arrivals and departures.

In other news, I had to contact customer service at Thriftbooks.  I received one of my orders today.  The books were to be in 'good' condition.  This is what my cookbook looked like.

I do not think the pages should be falling out of the cookbook.  This is the first time I have had a faulty book from them.  They are reordering the book for me, free of charge.  I also have an order that has been sitting at the local post office since the 3rd and still has not been delivered.  They are reordering those books for me also.  This is the second time I have had that issue.  I will say, their customer service is awesome.  It is one of the reasons I continue to order books from them.  Well, that and the cost of most of their books is so much better than Amazon or the used book store here in town.

Sounds like my new sheets are done drying.  Now to make our bed and then my to do list will be completed.  I managed to get my cardio in today, empty the dishwasher, do a little decluttering and completed the laundry I had planned on doing.  Sounds like it is time to knit a bit before the teen descends upon us.  Oh, I am going to throw a loaf of bread in the bread machine too.  The teen loves my homemade bread.

Until next time.....................happy crafting!

All Better

Today, I am all better.  Having vented yesterday was a good thing.  As soon as I posted the blog post, I ran into the kitchen, made my overnight oats, grabbed the completed laundry and put it away, emptied the dishwasher and still made it to the teen's school in time to pick her and her friend up.  

This morning I woke up at my normal time (between 5:30 and 6)  That gave me time to have a leisurely breakfast and catch up on my email and blogs.  Prayer Shawl group was this morning and I even got there a bit early.  So nice to have 2 hours of fellowship and knitting.  The lady who has been giving me cookbooks to peruse is going to bring me another one.  This one is on Mediterranean cooking.  She will bring it to Mass on Saturday.  

After prayer shawl I went and got our water jugs filled.  From there I went to a pet supply store.  The dogs needed a better toe nail clipper than the one I had.  While there I also got them new collars and name tags.  Enrique cracked me up.  As soon as I took his collar off he started to shake and cower.   He thought I was going to give him a bath.  Usually that is the only time the collars come off.   He has forgiven me and has been strutting around with his pretty new collar and tag.

We had our big meal at lunch today. (Chicken Fajitas)  Hubby and I both agreed we enjoy eating the bigger meal of the day earlier and eating light in the evening.  We are going to try and do this as often as we can.

We have adoration tonight.  Otherwise, I do not have anything else on my to do list for today.  WOOHOO!

I forgot to show you the treasures I got yesterday while shopping.

We bought a couple of basil plants.  It was so much cheaper to buy the plants then the little packets of leaves.  Hopefully these will continue to grow and produce for a while.  They sure do make my kitchen  smell nice.

Kroger had a bunch of baskets on sale for 50% off.  This one is 12 inches tall and 12 inches in diameter.  It sits by my chair and I can put several project bags in it.  It was marked at $19.99 so I figured $10 was not too bad for this size of a basket.  When we checked out it rang up as $4.54!  BONUS!  This is now my WIP basket.  If it gets full then I need to finish something.

Time to kick back and work on my Cabled Rosary Prayer Shawl.  Thursdays are the only day I work on it.  

Until next time...................happy crafting!

Senior Day

My to do list is shot to h**l.  There were so many good intentions.  There were 6 items on the list.  Out of those 6, only 3 items will be crossed off of it.  I even made sure the list was half the size of my regular list.  You see, today is 10% off groceries for seniors at our local Kroger store.  Menus for the next 10 days had been made and the grocery list was finalized.  I knew we would be going to the store today which is the reason I made the list lighter than normal.  

Let me tell you, shopping on Senior Discount Day is not for the faint of heart.  We were half way through our grocery list when I turned to my husband, grabbed his shirt and told him I would NEVER attend senior discount day again.  These senior citizens were NUTS!  Yes, I am a senior citizen but I do not leave my cart in the middle of the aisle while I walk up and down said aisle looking for 1 item.  Neither do I just blindly whip around corners without caring if anyone might be coming.  Nor, do I park my cart at the end of the aisle, blocking the aisle from anyone getting out or coming in, and then wander to somewhere unknown.  I had 12 items on my shopping list.  It took us over 1.5 hours to pick up those items.  This should have been a 30 minutes trip.  Senior discount day saved us an additional $7.  Was it worth it?  Hubby thinks so.  OK, then next month, I am going to get up at 5am and go to the store while everyone is still drinking their first cup of coffee.  

Another reason the list is shot is: My son called this morning asking if I would be willing to pick up the teen from high school today.  He has a conference call he can not miss.  Well, that just shot the rest of my day.  Since she goes with us to Trivia tonight, I saw no reason to pick her up, take her home, drive to my house, and then get her again for trivia 1.5 hours later.  

Confession time.  I did not get my laundry put away last night before bed.  It is folded and hung up but still sitting in the laundry room.  It was on my list today too.  

I better get moving and get my overnight oats made for the next few days.  Yes, that is on the to do list.  If I hurry and get that done, I might even have time to put the laundry away.  I have 45 minutes before I need to leave to go and get the teenager.

Until next time...................happy crafting!

(Not thinking there will be any knitting done today.  😠)

And Zoom, it is Tuesday

As most of you know, each evening I make out my to do list for the next day.  This is to help me stay on task and not get too distracted away from what 'needs' to be done as well as things I 'like' to do each day.  As I looked at my to do list this morning, I noticed there were several things carried over from yesterday.  What happened?

Reading happened.  I spent most of my day reading one of my 'new' used books.  Oh my.  It was such a good book.  I laughed but surprisingly, I also cried.  It takes quite a bit for me to cry but this book did it to me.

I am so glad I gave this author a try.  Most of all, I am very thankful I have 8 more of her books to read.  Goodness, they are so hard to put down.  I stayed up until after midnight just so I could finish the book. (I did put it down to go to BIble Study last night)  This morning, I almost pulled the next book off the shelf but talked myself out of that decision.  There were things to do around the house.  

There was a load of laundry to do today.  It has been done!  It still needs to be put away.  That will be done before bed tonight.............I promise.  I also did a load of laundry yesterday.  That one was put away though.  

On Monday and Tuesday, we have our big meal at lunch time.  Today we had tacos.  (Taco Tuesday)  That meant I needed to shred the lettuce, shred the cheese, cut the tomatoes and cut the green onions.  I like to get that done before I cook the meat and tortillas.  The tacos have been consumed and the kitchen is all cleaned up.  

There is still paperwork to be filled out for my new primary care doctor.  (I finally found one and got in touch with his office yesterday)  Some type of decluttering needs to happen. (Probably in my closet)  My LuLaRoe Carly dresses need to be looked at to see if I can redesign the back of the dress.

See how the back is so much longer than the front?  I want to try and bring the back hem up to almost even with the front.  Since most of my weight is on my backside, I will leave it a little longer than the front so it looks even when I wear it.  There are 15 of these dresses in my closet.  I love them, especially with the heat of our summers.  They are very comfy to wear and can be dressed up or down.  Once I figure out how to make this work, I will be buried at my sewing machine.  The plan is to get them done before the heat hits here.  We are already flirting with the high 80's this week.  It will not be too long before the 90's and then 100's will be coming to stay for several months (7-8).

There is still a walk that needs to be taken today as well as picking up my knitting and adding some more rows on my High Effects shawl.  Hubby also informed me there are 5 recorded episodes of my favorite shows I need to watch and delete.  

Hubby teaches tonight.  That sounds like the perfect time for me to watch a couple of my shows while I knit on my shawl.  When he gets home we will watch the shows we mutually like.  

Does is seem like the past couple of days have just flown by for you?

Until next time.................happy crafting!

WEEK 35 OF YEAR OF PROJECTS (YEAR 9)

It is early (6:30am) here in Arizona.  I have been up for an hour already and am enjoying the quiet that is surrounding me.  The weather people have promised a gorgeous day today.  This means I will be getting my 'stuff' done early so I can enjoy the 73F afternoon promised to us.  

There was knitting done this week, yet, I don't feel like I have a lot to show for it.  This could be because I have 3 shawls on the go, as well as a pair of socks and dishcloths.  Trying to divide my time between all of them makes for slow progress on all of them.  Let's see what they look like.

One dishcloth done and another about 1/4 of the way done for this week.  I only worked on these the 3 days I dog sat.  Well, actually, they only saw attention 2 days as day 3, I spent driving all over the Phoenix Metro area.

Cabled Rosary Prayer Shawl is my Thursday knitting project.  That is the day we have prayer shawl meetings.  It does get my attention the entire day though.  It is a pleasant enough knit and the yarn I am using is so soft.  It is Cascade Yarns "Cotton Club".  60% cotton 40% acrylic.   

High Effect Feather and Fan Shawl is moving along nicely.  This is the shawl I am showing the most amount of love to at this time.  I am hoping to have it completed by the time I go to the Dallas Fiber Fest the first weekend in April.  I wish I could find the ball band of this yarn.  All I remember is I bought it in Las Vegas at the Sin City Yarn Shop.  It said 'Girly Girl' for the color of it.  I think it might be from Zig Zag yarns.  Although they say their skein is only 500 yards and I do believe this one is over 1000 yards and I know it is only 1 skein as the yarn shop wound it up for me.

This is one huge cake of yarn.  See the left hand side of the cake.  That is where she had to wind by hand after the ball winder could no longer accommodate the amount of fiber being wound.  Can you see the texture of this yarn?

It has a nubby feel to it.  It makes for some great looking texture on the item being knitted.  I will say, it was hard to find a pattern with enough airyness (is that a word?) to allow said texture to show through.

The socks and the other shawl did not receive any love this week.  I am sure hubby would love to see the socks get finished.  He loves the hand knitted socks the best.

In other news........................................................

One of the prayer shawl ladies loaned a cookbook to me last week.

So many yummy recipes in this.  It uses 'super foods' in the recipes.  Each recipe will tell you why the super food is being used and what health benefits it will have for you.  The first 60 or so pages tell you all about the science behind each super food also.  I am going to order this cookbook, as well as:

this cookbook.  Same prayer shawl lady loaned this one to me also.  See the little green tabs on the side of this one?  Those are the recipes I have found so far that peaks my interest.  I am about halfway through this one.  Hubby and  are going to try and have 1 meatless meal each week. (Yes, even after Lent is over)  With over 700 recipes in this book, I think I will have plenty of items to choose from to make it happen.

There was an order placed with Thriftbooks last week and I received a few of the books yesterday.  

Since I make most of my daily bread in the bread machine, I am always on the look out for cookbooks to help me expand my bread flavors.  This little book has some very yummy sounding breads in it.  

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!  This book

is the grand daddy of all bread machine cookbooks.  There are 300, yes 300, bread recipes in here.  Most of them call for bread flour as well as gluten which kind of concerns me.  Bread flour already has a higher gluten content than all purpose flour.  I see no reason to add more gluten to it.  I am going to try a few of the recipes without added gluten and see how they go.  I was perusing this one last night and saw where she tells you how to substitute honey for refined sugar in your recipes.  That is a big plus for us.  

After I get this posted I am going to get my day started.  There is 1 load of laundry to do, a loaf of bread to make, 2 dogs needing baths, menus for the week, grocery list and of course knitting.  

Oh, before I forget, I also started reading a new to me author yesterday.  I do not remember who recommended her to me, but I am glad they did.

Another treasure from Thriftbooks.  Kristin Hannah books.  I just started this yesterday and already am in love with the way she writes.  It is a good thing too as I ordered 7 of her books.  They will be excellent for my bedtime reading.  Not too heavy and good character development.

OK, time to get that bread into the bread machine.  I already have a pork roast in the crockpot that will be made into carnitas for dinner tonight.  If time allows, I will make tortillas to go with it.  They are so much tastier than store bought.

Until Next Time.........................Happy Crafting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!