Diamond

I've been thinking a lot about children lately - we have so many friends having children and I've been reading more family-related blogs that talk a lot about children. One topic that comes up over and over again is education. I recently read a post about homework for children in preschool and elementary school. Some of the cited information indicated that homework during these ages could actually be detrimental, undermining the child's natural problem-solving and creativity.

But this builds on other concerns - as a person who believes strongly in education, with a father who is an educator, with friends who are educators, with children whom I love going to school now and in the future - the continuing problems in our education system more than concern me.

Then I saw this: http://www.racetonowhere.com/home and the trailer for the movie.

Hope.
 

*Note: this is not a political statement

Busy

That's my mind lately. I go through periods of a busy mind every once in awhile - usually it has more to do with what's on my heart - so I'm working on figuring that out right now. Busy minds and hearts don't lend to blog writing but I'll update you on random stuff that's going on here.

I started playing softball last week - double headers every Monday. I haven't played in awhile and I was sore for 4 days after the games last week. But this week I'm not nearly as sore! Although I do think in my effort to catch a crazy fly ball last night, I strained a muscle in my rear! :) Haha!

I've been loving Adele lately - its great music. NPR has a music player where you can add all kinds of songs from their site to a playlist and listen away for nothing - which I do at work. Hopefully funding for NPR isn't eliminated in the budget madness.



Oh - being on the softball team has added 11 to the number of people I know in Houston! :) And the team coach is a taxidermist.

I heard this song on Pandora last night - it makes me happy too. My music selection of late seems to echo the mind and heart stirrings.




We might actually finish some projects this weekend so there should be some decent updates on the blog next week.

I hope you have a beautiful week! :)

It’s in my blood

Gardening, that is. (so hopefully I end up at least decent at it) One of the clearest and fondest memories I have from my childhood home is the garden. Just the other day I told the husband I would love to see it again because in my memory it is HUGE. We had strawberries and tons of other stuff (I can’t remember all that detail 400 years later). In addition to the garden, we had blueberry bushes and a peach tree. I fondly remember my parents canning yummy jams, etc and making homemade peach ice cream. And my grandmother is still quite the avid gardener, sharing many of her tools of the trade whenever I need some help!

Naturally, one of the most exciting things to me about owning a home was the opportunity to have a garden. And you saw pictures of the garden. We also have a container area with a few more plants too.

But, you might (or might not) be wondering what we put in our big ole garden. For those of you who might be wondering – I’ve provided the list below. Major deciding factors on what went into our garden were things we eat (duh), things that can easily be canned (mainly tomatoes), days to harvest, and space.

Garden plants

3 cherry tomato (early harvest)

7 Early girl tomato (early harvest)

6 Better boy tomato (extra large, later harvest)

3 tomatillo

1 poblano pepper

3 jalapeno

3 red pepper

2 zucchini

1 yellow squash

Green onions – sprinkled about (earliest harvest)

Container plants

Herbs: thyme, basil, parsley, spearmint (bought the wrong kind of mint but it sure smells good!)

2 habenero

1 red chile

1 cucumber

2 jalapenos

Some other pictures from our backyard.

Gift giving

I'm kind of a weirdo when it comes to gift giving. I spend WAY too much time worrying over good gifts and trying to be creative about it. I used to do a lot more in the way of creative gifts but that will have to wait until I'm unsaddled (from school that is). One aspect of gift giving is the card and I love me some fancy (Papyrus, Paper Source, etc) cards. Truly I could spend my entire paycheck on stuff from these stores.

Pic from here.

The reason I bring this up? As I've mentioned before, babies babies everywhere!!! We've spent the last 7 years or so going to weddings and we're shifting from the period of weddings to the period of babies.

A baby (me)

So of course I need some cards to send. But Target's baby card selection is umm, sad (to me). And I hate feeling like I'm settling for a card that I find not-so-exciting.

Then it hit me! My aunt makes some awesome, extremely creative stuff - beautiful cards, scrapbooks, and more.

So I happily commissioned her to make some cards for me that I know I'll love and at the same time I'm supporting individual creativity over chainstore-blah. You can check out her etsy store here. And I've included some photos of beautiful creations she's made me.

A wedding album for us to fill: the glowing circle is not a part of the original creation.

My birthday card this past year - it folded in all kinds of very cool ways to reveal different messages.

Notecards

Notecards

 P.S. This is not a plug to get you to buy stuff from her - although that would be nice - rather just my solution to a silly little problem.

Anniversaries

We've been married less than a year but the husband and I have been together 8 years this week. Whoa. We decided to celebrate by going to see a concert tonight, which happens to be at the rodeo, which happens to be tons of fun. I'm excited!

For fun, here are some pictures of us over the last 8 years! :)

 

Powerful video on texting

It's a single video on texting. You may cry, it is sad but makes a powerful statement.

Challenging

Ok, so this diamond thing is challenging. This week (and yes, its only Tuesday) I've seen already three things I'd love to share. I'm going to focus on one (sort of) and I'll share the others later in the week! :)

I'm a big fan of TED videos. The TED logo is "ideas worth spreading" and on their website you can find incredible talks on pretty much any subject. I've watched a few and all were terrific - although I'm not currently teaching, for some reason education is always on my mind and the TED videos are a great way to educate yourself or would be great learning tools to integrate into education. I would recommend these: Sheryl Sandberg (COO Facebook), Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders; Chimamanda Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story; a TED best of the web, Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns "it gets better" (truly amazing testimonial);  Brene Brown's The Power of Vulnerability. If these aren't for you, you can find ANY topic on the TED site - these happen to be some of the ones I've been drawn to.

Weekend projects 2

I had intended on posting the previous post and this one staggered through the week but forgot to upload the pictures so you're getting two in one day!! Enjoy!

The other thing I usually do on the weekend is cook and bake. The last two weekends have included a good bit of both! Here's a recap (sorry, not many photos).

Weekend 1:

We were low on bread so I made four loaves, trying two new recipes - oatmeal bread and fig and fennel bread. Improvements could be made but they turned out pretty well for the first time.The fig and fennel bread is odd but was a nice change. Not sure I would make it again.

The great thing about bread making is that it gives you plenty of time in between to get other things done. But it also takes up time that can be used on cooking meals. So the week following we did not have two big meals with lots of leftovers like we usually do. Instead, we had a few leftovers from dinner on Sunday - hoisin chicken and green onion pancakes, and lots of vegetables to add to couscous, pasta, pizza, or quesadillas depending on what we felt like each night.

Weekend 2:

I had a lot of wild hairs for this weekend. I recently found the blog whiteonricecouple and found tons of recipes I wanted to try. I picked a few for the weekend: ginger peach muffins (more savory than you think, different but quite tasty), crispy shrimp tacos (yummy, but of course anything from Rick Bayless is yummy), spicy kale chips (odd but decent and relatively healthy), and turkey sloppy joes with homemade Asian ketchup (one word - AMAZING).

Ginger peach muffin

My baking wild hair was the fault of Pioneer Woman and this post. So I made the dulche de leche cupcakes. Tasty.

And here's some proof that we work together in the kitchen (I'm grateful the husband deals with my cooking whims, likes to cook, and is good at it). This is an action shot of rolling and frying the crunchy tacos.

Weekend projects

We've had one big project distributed over the past two weekends - the garden!

Weekend 1 - We transformed an empty space in our backyard into a garden area. On Saturday, I cleaned up the area, measured and marked the location, and filled in holes (thanks dogs) while the husband went to help some friends and get the wood. Then we constructed the bed and put it in the ground. We had dirt delivered Sunday and the husband wheeled it to the bed while I went to the gym. When I came back, I spread the dirt out. Nice teamwork.

The before (and proof that grass won't grow in Texas where the sprinklers will not reach):

  And now the after with just the bed:

Weekend 2 - Friday we bought lots of vegetable and herbs. I potted all of the herbs Friday afternoon. No work on the garden on Saturday but the husband and a friend finished putting up all of the boards on the screen porch and I did a lot of cooking, etc.

Screen porch with updated pressure-treated wood

Some of the plants, waiting to go into the garden!

Sunday after cleaning I tackled planting the garden - whoa, what a job. I first mixed in some manure into the whole bed. Then, based on a tip from my grandmother (Honey), I dug each hole a lot larger than required and filled each with manure, put the plant in, put more manure in, and then finally covered the hole with the other dirt. It was a process. I got about two-thirds of the way done before the husband joined and helped finish the rest.

Here is the planted garden with dog deterrent fencing! (The lighting was bad so the pictures aren't great)

Yay for a garden.

And last but not least, a picture of one of our MANY outdoor helpers (he even turned around for the camera):

I'll keep you updated on the craziness of the garden as it goes!

A diamond

Blogs seem to fall into several categories. You've got your blogs like this one, little ramblings about life. You've got your design and style blogs that focus on, well, design and style. You've got your famous blogs, you're multitasking blogs, your blogs that focus on one thing like cooking or politics or whatever. Although these blogs differ tremendously (well, if you follow enough design or style ones you know that they tend to blog about a lot of the same things). But MOST are written by people who are ok with sharing some bit about themselves - it might be their name, or their city, or whatever - the point is most blogs are not truly anonymous. Except the diamond today. Apparently anonymity opens up ALL kinds of potential blogging topics - you know, those things you would NEVER blog about in case your coworker or your great aunt read it.

Check out The Year of Blogging Dangerously for some extremely honest commentary on life (read: be prepared for discussions about more private topics). This weeks' posts have been particularly funny in regards to her children. Stories about children are the best and I'm lucky that in addition to the mostly hilarious (b/c I wasn't present to witness the mass chaos) stories I hear from my BFF, I'm sure I'll be hearing lots more as so many of our friends are having babies!! Anyways, back to the blog - she did an introduction of sorts post regarding herself here. She is hilariously refreshing in her commentary on all aspects of life. Enjoy!

Dinner tradition

I'm late getting around to this post - oh well. For last weekend's dinner tradition we decided on a simple dinner with dessert: stuffed jalapenos as an appetizer, hoisin chicken with green onion pancakes, and creme brulee. I've wanted to try out the torch my mom gave me as a Christmas present for awhile now!

The stuffed jalapenos are so yummy. We've made them once before but this time we did both versions. Find the recipes here: Baked Stuffed Jalapenos. The bacon version is of course the husband's favorite. I like both but would add more onion to the cream cheese version to give it more texture.

Before cooking

And they're ready!

After making (and eating) lots of jalapenos, we opted out of the chicken and made only the pancakes. The recipe is from Donna Hay's Flavors cookbook (one of my favorites). We each ate one of the pancakes with a little bit of the hoisin sauce. The pancakes were a little bit like a crepe and would be quite tasty with any number of additions (I may make a quesadilla with spinach and goat cheese using these later this week).

Green onion pancake

Then we made the creme brulee - it was surprisingly simple and quite tasty but we're still trying to master the art of browning the sugar with the torch!

A diamond!!!

Yes, it's a diamond but not what you're thinking (or maybe). This is the first in a new series I've decided to begin here in the world of messes. I am continuously moved by the great things I read on others' blogs and I want you to know about them too. So I'm starting a Diamond (in the rough) weekly post. I am not at all trying to say that the tons of blog posts out there each week are 'the rough' but just trying to highlight what I thought was a particularly shiny moment. And to give you some perspective, I currently follow 132 blogs. Um, did I mention I cleaned out my little google reader earlier in the week so that's a lower number for me? Scary. But I don't read everything all the time and I surely don't read them all each week. Anywho - if you judge me, its alright. At least you're reading the blog! :)

My first diamond comes straight from Attack of the Redneck Mommy, a blog I only recently began following. Sassy and fabulous, oh and did I mention Canadian??? But that's a story for another day.

Anywho, the blog touched me because it's about something that my husband shared with me many years ago when he did the Push America's Journey of Hope. The post, find it here, details her honest thoughts about the word "retard." She also has a mantra of which I'm a big fan - AIM HIGHER. Fitting.

A related post is also quite striking: Love That Max, If you ask people to not use the word "retard"

And if you want to learn more, check out R-word.

Thanks for stopping by!

One man's take on cooking

In four minutes he makes an interesting argument. I love the passion, the excitement, the devotion. Watch it if you want! :)



Had Something to Say - Cooking from michael ruhlman on Vimeo.