WAKE UP...

It's the weekend!

(This is seriously what I woke up to this morning.)

And it's supposed to be perfection, so don't miss a minute of it!  See you on Monday :)

Seed Starters

This week has been gorgeous.  Positively what we needed!  Boo and I are sitting outside right now, in fact.  He's working on making some mud, while I'm trying to get some sun on my legs so that I don't blind anyone.  It's got to be close to 70 degrees.

Which means it's time to start on the garden!  Actually, if you were doing seeds inside, you could have started weeks ago.  I need to set some kind of alarm for next February to remind me to start the seeds early.  

Anyway, here's an easy (and relatively tidy) way to start some seeds on a sunny window sill in your house.  All you need are some cardboard egg cartons, seeds, tin foil, and either starter pods or some potting soil.  This is also a great way to preserve those sometimes pricey pods, as you'll be splitting them up.

Revamping & Retiling

Remember back when I first started?  I noted that the decision to rebuild our chimney and use the fireplace is what got us started... You know.  Doing all this.  Anyway, the fireplace kept our house pretty durn toasty last winter, but we still had to use the oil heater a few times.  This winter was a bear's ass, and our heater sweetly decided to go kaput on us.  After we had filled the tank up, of course.  

Hubs found a wood burning stove deeply discounted, and it was clearly meant to be.  The back room, for all intensive purposes, is our living room.  It's where Boo watches Blues Clues, where we play Xbox with friends, and where I further my growing addiction to Doctor Who.  But it is a very long, very skinny room, and up until recently it's ended up being mostly just a catch all for stuff and mess.  It was added on to the house in the '50s (used to have God awful orange and yellow shag carpet to prove it) and is not very well insulated.  So sticking the stove back there was a no brainer.  

Poose approves of the decision.  The burner room for the heater backs directly up to the wall the tv is mounted on.  Which means that there is also a chimney in said room.  So that just worked out perfectly.  Course, you can't put a wood burning stove in an alcove made of wood with a flatscreen roof.  That has bad juju written all over it.  

'Healthy' is not a four letter word...

Swimsuit season is not only inevitable, it's up on us.  Time to think about eating some cardboard and suffering the days away.  Well unless...

Unless you make your granola at home.  I have to say, granola has never been something that makes my mouth water.  But in my search for healthy things to put on the table, I tried making some myself.  It's high in fiber and protein, but low in sugar and bad fats, none more so than when it's homemade.  No unappetizing preservatives, colorings, or chemicals. 

And if that's not enough, you can control all of the ingredients so that it tastes exactly to your liking.  Hate raisins?  Ditch 'em.  Prefer walnuts to pecans?  You should totes magotes swap them out.  Many many options and alternatives.  

Freeze-n-bake Cookies

Hubs loves chocolate chip cookies more than anything.  Well besides, you know, his loving wife that makes them from scratch for him.  And his adorable son.  And Jumbo.  But that's it, he loves chocolate chip cookies more than anything other than us.  (Sorry Poose.)

Mmmm, minty...

I love cookies, but I do feel the need to change them up every once in a while.  The clearance rack at the grocery store had some mint and chocolate nibs for $0.84 a bag after Christmas, so I nabbed a crap ton of them.  And I thought they'd be good with chocolate cookies.  So we gave it a whirl.