Happy 4th of July!

From our home to yours....wishing you a wonderful holiday celebrating our nation's independence!

For us, it's a day at the pool and a family BBQ.

On the menu - Pulled Pork Sandwiches, Hot Dogs, Corn on the Cob, Cole Slaw, Cheesy Potato Casserole, Bacon/Crab Dip, Crudites and Watermelon.

The Bacon Crab Dip is fabulous!  It's a Paula Deen recipe that I've never had and I made it the other day for a neighbor's party and it was great, so I'm making it again for the family BBQ.

I cheated a bit and used imitation crab and already cooked bacon, but the taste of the dip is still great.  Here's a link to the recipe - Paula Deen's Bacon Crab Dip

Enjoy the day with your family and friends!

A Birthday Dinner

Instead of going out for dinner this year, Fred requested that I make my homemade Chicken Enchiladas for him. I had the foresight to order his favorite Key Lime Pie from Village Inn online and picked it up at lunch time.

I roasted a couple of chicken breasts and shredded the meat in a large bowl. I mixed in a small can of green chiles and chopped black olive. In a skillet, I added a little bit of olive oil, onions and red pepper and cooked them until the onion was caramelized and the pepper was roasted and soft. I added the onion and peppers to the chicken mixture, and topped them with a bit of shredded cheese. I assembled the enchiladas in a baking dish.

Beside the pan of enchiladas I made, I also roasted some bacon wrapped, crab stuffed anaheim peppers and spanish rice with olives.

and for dessert.......key lime pie.

Fred loved everything and had a very good birthday!

Card Making

I've been trying to get in the habit of whipping out some cards with the scraps that I have leftover from when I do a scrapbook page. Here's a few that I've done recently.

This is the card I made for my Mother In Law for Mother's Day

These I just put in my overflowing card basket so I can grab one when I need it.

Garden Diary - My Experimental Triangle Garden

A few years after we moved in, I dug up and created this garden in a corner of our back yard. It's been a work in progress to say the least. Somethings have worked there, others have not. Currently, I have a flowering almond that doing well, some peonies that are FINALLY going to bloom, some gorgeous lupine and foxglove that comes up every year and a couple of knock out roses. Everything else is a crap shoot. So, each year, I usually throw some perennials in to see what's going to take and then fill in with zinnia and cosmos seeds.

Last Monday on my day off, I spent a couple of hours raking out most of the old mulch, planting a couple of new perennials and sowing the flower seeds. Then I covered it all in new cedar mulch.

Here's what the poor garden looked like without any attention. :(

Here's that gorgeous flowering almond. This is another plant along with Hydrangea and Rose of Sharon that I will ALWAYS have in my yards.

I also have some pieces of garden art in this bed.  I bought the large obelisk at our local farmer's market from a local craftsman and the large flower  and cat with wings are from a metal artist from southern Iowa that I bought at a local arts festival.

After a couple hours of attention, the garden looked much better and as the seasons progress, the garden will change and evolve too.

Thanks for letting me share one of my passions.

Garden Diary - Spring

Since we really can't plant much here in Iowa until Mother's Day, early spring is spent cleaning up after winter.  I've been wanting to replace the old landscape timbers we had fencing the vegie garden because they were starting to rot out, so last weekend we spent time replacing them with cedar fencing.

Here's our garden after tearing out the landscape timbers.

Here's the garden after fencing it in cedar.  The top left corner of the garden is where I planted the asparagus.

I also planted some early vegetable last weekend too.  I got both red onions and shallots planted and I also did 4 rows of red radishes and white icicle radishes.

This weekend, I got the rest of my vegetable planted.  I planted cucumbers, red peppers, orange peppers, yellow peppers, eggplant and zucchini and a few plants of buttercrunch lettuce.  I'm still waiting on my tomato shipment from Burpee's.  I sure hope they get here this week.  I've got Brandywine and Yellow Pear tomatoes on their way.

I'll get you updated on the garden's progress every few weeks or so.

I've got to start working on flowers next!

National Scrapbook Day

Yesterday was National Scrapbook Day and I've celebrated every year for the last 15 years!  I can't believe I've been doing this hobby for that long.

In celebration, I thought I would share some of the pages that I've done this calendar year.  Some you may have seen and some you may not have.  I'm definitely catching up with my pages because most of these are things that happened in either late 2009 or 2010.

Thanks for letting me share them!

(You can click on the image to make it bigger)

 Here's a page I did of Connor's 14th.......he's already celebrated his 15th...lol

This is from last summer when I took Connor and Chloe to Adventure Bay after the water park expansion opened.

Chloe and I at Adventureland.

This photo was taken by Connor after Fred and I got home from my 35th class reunion.  We both had a bit of a buzz.  :)

 Anniversary Flowers or Mother's Day?  I couldn't remember when I did this page...lol

Another page from a photo the day of my 35th class reunion.  This was before we left for the party.
 

I finally got the photos I took when we were in Georgia after Fred's sister passed away.  I really liked that photo of Fred and his mother.

Another photo from our visit to Georgia.  Connor and his Grandmother Ginna.

More photos of Fred's family....his mother, his step father and his sister.

Picture of Connor and the parrot Brianna at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville at Universal Studios CityWalk.  It was my birthday and we had lunch there.

Gunner at age 8.  Yea, I'm behind....Gunner just turned 9 last month.  

Last fall, we made a trek downtown to see the Pappajohn Sculpture Park.  There is just the coolest art there.

Connor's Bucket List.  Why one would have a bucket list at 14 is anyone's guess, but hey, he's got goals..lol

Loved, loved, LOVED, these family photos especially the one with the "Connor face".   It's priceless.
 

It took 5 years living here before I finally got a garden shed.  We had the concrete pad poured for it a couple of years after moving in, but it took another 3 years to finally decide what I wanted.  I love it.

This is one of the city parks that I walk, bike or drive by regularly.  They've added more and more pieces of garden art over the years.  The master gardeners do a really nice job with the gardens.

Hope you enjoyed my pages!

Cat Hurdle

Not only is our staircase a good way to get daily cardio in, but once in a while you have the added challenge of a cat hurdle.

Here is Mr. Gizmo sunning himself on the stairs and never moves a muscle when either Fred, Connor or myself hurdle ourselves over him.

An Easter Project

I got the instructions to this basket at my local scrapbook store Memory Bound. It was really fun and easy to do. Most of the materials are Doodlebug Designs and I just picked out a bunch of ribbon scraps to tie around the book ring at the top.

I'm using it to hold the Easter eggs I dyed all by myself. Notice I said, "all by myself". Our 15 year old son had no desire to dye Easter eggs with me anymore. That little shit. lol :)

A couple of favorite things lately........

THIS -

I didn't think I would love it so much, but I do........love borrowing from the library.

AND THIS -

It was in my stocking at Christmas and I just finished up the other scrub I had, so I've just recently started using it. Heaven.

More Scrapbook Retreat Fun!

I wanted to share some more of the pages I finished at the retreat last month.

I also wanted to share a photo of what greeted us on our beds when we checked into the retreat place. The gals that organized it had some goodies awaiting us.

Such a great gesture!

Here's more pages, sorry for the blurriness in some of them and you might not be able to read the journaling.

Scrapbook Retreat Weekend

The first weekend of February I had the pleasure of attending the annual Nightowls Scrapbook Retreat. This is a retreat that I've been attending for at least 5 years if not longer and I always have such a good time. This year was no exception. I've been wanting to talk about it and share some of the pages I did while there, but time and life has gotten in the way.

This year the retreat was at Walnut Retreat Place and it was perfect for us! We had the place to ourselves from Friday at 11:00am through Sunday til noon!

I met a my friends Gina and Joan at Memory Bound Scrapbook Store Friday morning, but believe it or not, I only spent about $10 bucks. Since we could "check in" at 11:00, we headed that way after shopping so we could get our cars unpacked and get settled and then head to lunch.

Once we had our workplaces and sleeping arrangements all settled, a few of us headed up to the street to Taqueria Sonora for lunch. The food was great! I thought it was a bit pricey for the menu, but I can't fault the fish tacos that I had.

Kathy, Lori, Judy and Brenda do such a great job organizing and putting on this retreat every year. Friday night, they had two different soups and a big salad for us for dinner and we had tons of snacks too! I brought some pumpkin muffins, a Tuscan cheese dip and some tortilla vegie roll ups.

I stayed up until about 1:30 Friday night/Saturday morning before falling into bed....I was on a roll and I didn't want to quit...lol We had the alarm system go off on us Friday night and the owner of the facility had to come by and get it turned off. It was quite annoying for a while, but we all just took it in stride.

I was the first one up Saturday morning and I probably had two pages done before anyone else was up. The rest of the day was spent scrapbooking, eating and even a bit of shopping for me. I took a break and headed to Valley West Mall to use some Christmas gift certificates. Once back, the gals had all the fixing for walking tacos for lunch. We were going to call out for pizza Saturday night, but everyone was so full from just snacking that it was decided to nix it. I stayed up again until about 1:30 so that I could finish up the pages I was in the middle of working on. I felt good about how much I had accomplished, so I told myself to sleep in...

Which I did! Slept until about 9:00, came down, had a cup of coffee and some eggs for breakfast and then started to pack up my scrapbooking supplies. Normally I would have sat down and worked on more pages, but I finished everything that I had brought with me. Besides, it was Super Bowl Sunday and we were invited to a party that I needed to bring a dish with us, so the early I could get home, the more time I'd have to unpack the car, put things away before having to head to the party.

Here's some of the pages I completed during the retreat -

Later......