Category - Home Sweet Home

B is for…

Bookshelves!

My photography isn’t getting any better yet. Though this picture was taken on one of my camera’s manual settings, instead of automatic, so at least I’m learning. And today was an overcast day so the lighting was bad.

We had these bookshelves built in our music room over the summer. They are a cluttered, jumbled mess right now for two reasons. First, because I really need some good bookends that will hold up a big line of heavy books. And second, they are holding refugee knickknacks from two other bookshelves that got moved from the living room into our master bedroom. Once I get those two situations remedied, they’ll be neat and tidy.

But aren’t they nice anyway? (click on the picture to see it larger – it’s much better that way) The music room is the first room you can see when you enter our house, so I wanted something with a lot of impact. They are nice and deep – I showed the builder my ginormous Sonlight binder and told him I needed shelves deep enough to fit it. The shelves are also really tall – 8 feet, if I remember correctly. Which is particularly funny when you know I’m only 5 feet tall. And I can reach, what do you think – about another foot over my head? So that leaves a good 2 feet of shelves I can’t reach. Gonna have to get a taller stool. Or a library ladder.

If you have a “B” photo, leave me a comment in this post with a link to your picture. Flikr, Photobucket, another photosharing site or your own blog…whatever you’ve got. If you missed the last letter, just jump right in anyway!

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

This is Halloween

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere

When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—

…the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze

Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days

Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

from When the Frost is on the Punkin by James Whitcomb Riley

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Updates

Remember when Pumpkin Girl was cast in the Marzipan Dance in Nutcracker, but it was her very least favorite variation? She said it was because she didn’t understand how they wanted her to hold her arms during the audition. After the first rehearsal she told me that she was put in Marzipan because they liked the way she held her arms. I laughed so hard when she said that! Even she got the irony and laughed, too. She’s been enjoying the rehearsals and is over the disappointment.

We figured out our heater right as we headed to bed last night. The temperature in the house was close to 60 and getting colder, so I was glad to hear the fan start up and catch a whiff of that familiar scent of hot lint.

Turns out our deck did have a final inspection, it just failed. Then was repaired, then the permit ran out, then the company went out of business. The contractor can’t (or won’t, I’m not sure which) just repair it, since it never passed. The whole thing has to come down. I guess it is for the best in the long run, since the material is not the right type for the weather here. I liked the contractor who came to do the estimate. He said all the right things before we even asked, he was up front about the need for permits, he had copies of his liability and workers comp insurance. He had references and even recommended that we go to a current work site to see a deck in progress. (Alas, he was not Mike Holmes.)

On the up side with the deck, we’ll be getting a composite material that does well with the temps here. We’ll get to add some decorative elements of our choosing, including stair and post lighting. And we found out that we can use a movable fire pit as long as we stick something called dura-stone under it.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Bounty

My friend Nikki and her family were here last week for her husband’s 20 yr college reunion. They are some of our closest friends from our time at Bolling AFB, and we’ve been missing them this whole year. It’s funny how once we got a bigger house, all our friends are showing up for a visit. We love it!

(Well, not all our friends have visited. I’m looking at YOU, JennG!)

Anyway…Nikki brought us a whole bunch of apples from their apple trees, plus some canned applesauce and what they call “plumbleberry jam.” It’s like she knew how much my children love homemade applesauce!

Looking at all those apples I thought about making a pie. Or more applesauce. Or maybe…apple butter! I’ve never made apple butter, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Look at all these beautiful apples, all washed and ready to go!

I started by making unsweetened applesauce. I used our family’s go-to recipe, minus the sugar (recipe to follow in a different post).

The next day I used the crock-pot all day to cook down the applesauce into apple butter. My house smelled divine! I consulted a couple of different recipes for the ratio of spices and varying cooking times, but they all pretty much came down to applesauce, spices, and slow cooking all day in various stages of covered or uncovered.

In the end, it didn’t really look like butter in consistency, more like jam or jelly. But mmmmm! does it taste wonderful! I’ve been slathering it on toast and biscuits and I’m hoping to heat it up and pour it over vanilla ice cream.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Heat, Holmes and Hats

The hotter it gets, the less I blog.  The less I blog, the more  I knit.  Feet propped up, cold water within reach, watching HGTV and knitting.  Could be worse.  I’m kind of addicted to “Holmes on Homes.”  (What’s up with all the shady Canadian contractors, eh?)

Philip may be getting annoyed with Mike Holmes and his proper way of doing things because it’s costing him time and money.  We’re having built-in bookshelves put in our music room.  Nine foot beauties that run from one wall to another.  The thing is, they will permanently and forever cover up a heating vent on the floor and will cause an electronic thing to be removed from a corner of the room.

After countless episodes of Mike telling me how things should be done, I was insistent on finding out if we could just close the vent or if it needed to be rerouted or something.  So I made Phil leave messages for our HVAC guy to find out the deal.

Do you have “guys”?  Now that we own a home, we have guys.  HVAC guys, landscape guys, hardscape guys, a wood guy, a drywall guy and now a cabinet guy.  I’m planning on sticking their business cards in a binder labeled “Guys”.

Reminds me of when Bip was a baby and we had this shadow box thing of mini Korean theater masks hanging in the hallway.  We passed by it every time we went into the bedroom.  He liked them a lot and when he started talking, he’d point at them and say, “Heh!  Guys!”

What was I saying?  Oh yeah, the HVAC guy.

So Kevin, the HVAC guy informed us that the easiest and cheapest solution to the soon to be unusable floor vent was to have the cabinet guy just cover it with a piece of sheet metal.  This would be fine and not cause the shelves to heat up and burst into flame, or need to be torn down at a time in the not too distant future to get at the vent and close it off properly.

Then there’s this electronic thingy mounted into the corner of the room.  The corner which will soon be covered by the bookshelves, of course.  Phil has dismantled it so now it is just a couple of wires hanging down, attached to a tiny little computer looking panel. He says he can just cut the wires, tape the ends, shove them into the hole in the wall and call it a day.  And you know, it’s not that I don’t trust him, but yeah, I don’t trust him.  Why does the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House” keep running through my head?

So I’m making him at the very least, call a handyman and have him come over and advise.

He’ll probably cut the wires, tape the ends and shove them back into the hole.

So, my whole entire point of this blog post is that it’s been rather hot, so I’ve been propping up my feet, watching HGTV, filling my head with construction horror stories and knitting.  Knitting funny hats for our new baby, to be exact.

Did I tell you we’re having a boy?

Well, arriving as he will, at the end of October, he’ll need a pumpkin hat.  I’ve actually made 2 of them this summer, a newborn size and a toddler size for our friend Sam in DC.  Here they both are, with Bip’s big-boy pumpkin hat for scale.

And since we live in Colorado, he’ll need some sort of hat for the first 8 months of his life, so I made him a Sweet Pea hat.

And a funny stocking cap for Christmas time, so he’ll look like a right jolly ol’ elf.  My model here is Amy, our Bitty Baby.  The hat still needs a ginormous pompom at the end to pull off the look.

So, in review: heat, Holmes, guys!, hats. Questions?

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

About the Bear

He was a hairy bear, he was a scary bear.

(Ha! Did you see what I just did?  I described him with adjectives!)

The children and I had been at the park across the street and on our way home I saw that bear investigating our neighbor’s tree.  He was three houses from ours, so he wasn’t exactly between us and safety. Still, he was cause for concern.

We stayed on the park side of the street and as we came directly across from him, I waved and said, “Hi!”.  I was hoping to install a “friends, not food” attitude in him.  Well, he took one look at us and took off behind the house.  Before we reached home, we saw him re-emerge from behind another house about two doors down from ours on the other side.  He crossed the street and disappeared behind those houses.

Once  home, I did a little bear safety research.  Turns out that I did the exact right thing in waving my arms and making noise.  That’s when I found out that bears can open lever-handled doors and get in windows.  But generally, they’ll only do that if they smell food, but not humans.

Tami Nomad asked me what to do if a hairy, scary bear is lurking around your door. Beats me!  There are lots of things to do to make your home less inviting to bears, mainly keeping your garbage out of reach, keeping pet food inside, and cleaning your grill clean.  If they don’t smell it, they won’t bother you.

At least in theory.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Mountain Lions, Coyotes and Bears…

We’ve been living in Colorado for one year now, can you believe it?  It’s a little different, living  in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, especially for someone who grew up near the ocean.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned this year:

1.  Do not leave your trash cans out on the curb the night before pick-up or bears will get into them.

2.  Only mountain newbies forget to drag the trashcans back to the house after trash pick-up and leave them out over night.  Bears will check to make sure they are really empty.

3.  Don’t forget to close your garage door at night, especially if you have a chest freezer full of deer meat.  Bears will get at your freezer and steal your meat.  This happened to a neighbor.

4.  The police are very reluctant to come and assist with the removal of a bear eating deer meat in your tree.

5.  That lovely rubbed-oil lever-handled door knob you just installed in your back door?  Bears can open it to get at the kitty treats inside.  And by kitty treats, I mean the actual cats.  Keep yer backdoor locked, ya flatlander!

6.  The dry creek behind the house is not actually dry and is a great attractor of wildlife.  Like a spotted fawn and it’s mother…

and a raccoon out late at dawn and needing a nap.

7.  Where there are deer, there are mountain lions.

8.  Did I mention the bears? Here’s one at our neighbor’s house a couple of months ago.

9.  The dogs we hear howling at night sometimes are not dogs.  They are coyotes.  They live in the bluff across the street.  This one:

All these wildlife spottings have sparked this daily conversation in our house:

Boo: I’m going to get the mail.

Pumpkin Girl and Bip, without hint of irony, sarcasm or emotion: Don’t get eaten by bears!

That’s love, right there.

—–

This post was brought to you by Mittens the Cat, who wants to remind you to keep your lever-handled doors locked.

Cats are friends, not food.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Butter Bell

KC over at The Cabbage Patch asked me about my butter bell.  I got mine at a kitchen store, but I’ve seen them in kitchen goods catalogs all the time.  The website for the company is The Official Butter Bell Store.

Here’s the lid and the base, sitting next to each other.
rsz_dsc02523The lid, on the left, holds the butter.  That’s the part I usually put on the table at dinner time.  The base, on the right, has just a little bit of cold water in it.  You change out the water every 2-3 days and the butter stays fresh, yet soft.

I have 2 pieces of advice – First, let the stick of butter warm up a bit before stuffing it into the lid.  And Second, wash the lid before adding a new stick of butter.  Otherwise it develops pink spots and a not so pleasant smell.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Things I Love: Kitchen

rsz_dsc02459I recently got one of these Butter Bell things. You load the lid with butter and put a little cold water in the base and the butter stays fresh, soft and spreadable. Change the water every couple of days and all is well. Mmms, soft butter on homemade bread.  Bliss!
rsz_dsc02462I got this idea from my friend Tami.  She puts her dishwashing liquid in an oil carafe thing.  The name completely escapes me at the moment.  Anyway, it looks so much better sitting near the kitchen sink than that bottle of soap.  I happen to have a window behind my sink so the light shines through and makes it even prettier.  Tami has good taste and I copy her as often as I can.

rsz_dsc02463

Ok, so this isn’t in my kitchen, it’s on my front porch.  But what  you find inside it does end up in the kitchen.

rsz_dsc02464See?  This is the best milk ever, at least according to my children.  The first day they tried it, they declared they like it better than our regular stuff.  It’s hormone and antibiotic free, not raw but not ultra-pasteurized either AND it’s cheaper than the milk at the commissary. Bonus points because the empty bottles go back in the box to be sterilized and reused.  (Does that make it green milk? Ha, Ha!  I crack myself up!) Plus, it is so much fun having a milk man, even if his truck does sometimes wake me up by idling in front of my house at 4 am.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Wishful Thinking

You know what I’d like?

A Day to Do Nothing.  A day not to have to worry about anyone or anything, no cooking, no cleaning, no teaching.  A day with no agenda.  I’d like a whole day to just do what I want to do, without feeling like I need to get something accomplished with my free time.  I’d like a day without “I really should…” going through my head.  Not the kind of day when you look back and are frustrated because nothing got done, but a day with no guilt.

And you know what else I’d like?

Right after my Do Nothing Day, I’d like a Highly Efficient Day.  Again without the cooking or teaching, but I’d have a long list of to-do’s that I’d accomplish.  All those little things that pile up because other, more important things get in the way.  I’d like to unpack those last two boxes and tidy up the office, move some furniture around, tackle the linen closet and…

Alas, it’s all wishful thinking.

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Friendly

Copyright The Mac and Cheese Chronicles 2020.  All rights reserved. Images and content may not be used without express permission.