Lines

I did this drawing tonight. Then I ran it through a photo editor to get the negative. Not sure which one I like better. I've been thinking about the idea of making linoleum stamps or woodcuts from one of my drawings, and the negative gives me a better idea of how they would turn out.

Scribbling

I've been working on making art a lot more lately. I'm going to publish a few pieces to my blog. This one was started during a girlfriend getaway at a cabin on a lake. The words are lyrics from a William Fitzsimmons song called Mend Your Heart.

Interlude

Hi.

I took a break from blogging/writing/creating.

It wasn't intentional, it was just life.  In the intervening years since my last blog post, I've been through a lot of life changes.  My babies are all in school now and chafe under the label of "babies." I work in a job (outside of the home) that I love. I turned 40. I've found myself squarely in the sandwich generation.  I don't necessarily have the time to find my thoughts AND put them to paper (so to speak).  But I'm working on it.  I'm trying.  I have had a few people in my life encourage me (implicitly or explicitly) to start writing again.

So.  Here I am.

The intervening years have changed me.  I'm not sure if this blog will be the same for you the reader as it was 3+ years ago.  But my writing remains the same - truthful and slightly humorous, observational, and resting at the intersection of the victories and disasters I encounter on a daily basis.

I hope you are well, reader.  Let's catch up soon.

Have Yourself an Imperfect Little Christmas...

I'm in a bit of a funk today.  It's only December 4th, and I feel like I've hit the pre-Christmas freak out already.  Not a good sign.  (As my family can vouch, the pre-Christmas freak out does not usually arrive until December 20th.) Too much to do, too little time, not enough money, too much stuff to buy. Ugh.  Stuff.  Gotta buy the stuff, wrap the stuff, hide the stuff, pack the stuff in the van and drive it 6 hours to the relatives' houses.  I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about it all.

And to be honest, I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about all the Christmas traditions that usually make me so happy.  We spent the past 2 nights decorating the house for Christmas, and it seems like each night it's ended up being the same peppermint-covered stressball we have to choke down with a glass of crappy eggnog: Kids spazz because they're SOOOOOO EXCITED and I stress because there's a lot of fragile stuff in the Christmas decoration boxes and I don't need another mess and puh-leeze don't get that out yet.  And then someone ends up getting on someone else's nerves and fighting breaks out, the baby Jesus goes flying though the air and the Phineas & Ferb ornament gets broken, and then I flip out and we all end up crying.

Merry Christmas.

I'm sure that anybody walking past our house and looking upon this scene through our large living room windows is less likely to think "Norman Rockwell holiday scene" are more likely to think "On the next episode of 'Cops'...").  And so I end up feeling guilty about tingeing the kids' holiday memories with freak-outs.  I should be the epitome of motherly calm, right?  I mean, it's the holidays.  And they're only young once.  I shouldn't be robbing them of this magic.

And then the cat decides to climb the tree and knock some of the ornaments off.  And I wonder if I should just take the tree down and forget about it for this year.  I look at one of my nativity sets.  Mary is always so calm and so serene.  I envy her.  Here she is, just having given birth among the cows and donkeys and lambs, entertaining magi and shepherd boys and angels, living in a barn for gosh-sakes, and she's just smiling.  She's so full of joy and peace.  But it's her serenity that I envy.  It's just absent from my life right now.

In place of serenity, I have stress.  I have the normal stress of daily living and meeting commitments, and then I have the holiday stress.  I have the "my teen doesn't want anything for Christmas that costs less than $200" stress.  I have the "my middle child hardly wants anything for Christmas, which you think would be great, but then how do you make Christmas morning fair?" stress.  I have the "my youngest child wants expensive and inexpensive gifts for Christmas and understands that Mommy and Daddy can't afford expensive gifts, but doesn't understand why Santa can't and so I need to work carefully at couching her expectations" stress.  And I haven't even begun to deal with extended family stress, or baking stress, or traveling stress. Oh gosh, I just remembered the "I gotta clean the van so we can pack the van so we can travel" stress.  I'm not even ready to deal with that stress yet.

So I sit here in my pajamas with my coffee cup and the couch and I try to avoid the stress, but I know it's out there and it won't get better with time.  I think about selling some plasma so that we have a bit more cash to spread around.  I look at the Nativity again and try to focus, focus, focus on the reason for the season.  

And then I unload my holiday funk onto my blog and unleash it all on the internet because I know that there are so many other moms out there feeling similarly (dads seem to be largely immune from the bulk of holiday stress for some reason, at least in my circle of friends).  I have mom friends who are doing this all as single parents.  Friends who are grappling with grief and the holidays.  Friends who are struggling with illness, or job loss, or money problems.  And I want to say to the people trying to get through the holidays with a big mountain of stress on their backs that you are not alone.  We're all just muddling through.  We look at the picture perfect Christmas cards our friends send and feel inferior because our kids couldn't smile and get along for the time it took to take one picture.  We see Facebook posts of sparkling trees that look like Martha Stewart flew in and decorated it personally while our trees are listing slightly and covered with clothespin reindeer and glittered-macaroni snowflakes.  We hear about the super-expensive or extravagant gifts someone is buying their child or spouse and feel guilty that we can't make our loved ones' Christmas dreams come entirely true.  We see pictures of happy family gatherings, and miss the people who aren't gathered at our table.

 It should come as no surprise that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorite Christmas songs, precisely because it's not about perfect Christmases, but about hoping to have family near and hoping that all the small problems of life fly away, while at the same time yearning for the golden Christmases of our past.  But if you think about it, were those Christmases perfect?  Or have we just gilded them with fondness and nostalgia so that they seem to be?  Do we forget the freak-outs eventually and just remember the family and the fun? I don't recall my mom ever stressing over holidays, and yet she must have, being a single parent and working full time as a nurse and always having to work on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, if not both.

So maybe for today I'll set aside the guilt.  I'm not a perfect mom on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-April, nor on a busy Thursday morning in early-October, so why should I expect myself to be a better version of myself simply because it's the holidays?  Santa stopped watching me years ago. And I'm going to try my hardest to let go of some of the expectations.  Maybe someone on my list doesn't need a perfect gift.  Maybe it's okay if they just know that I was thinking of them. (I just saw a commercial for a Chia Uncle Si.  Anyone interested?  Nothing says "I've given up on shopping for you" quite like a Chia Pet, but a Chia Uncle Si?  That's like saying "I remembered that you like Duck Dynasty while I was buying milk at CVS.")  Maybe the wrapping paper doesn't have to be perfect.  Maybe I won't adjust where the kids hung the ornaments and if the cat knocks the low-hanging ornaments off, I'll just hang them back up again and go about my day.  (Although if the cat knocks the tree down one more time, all bets are off and it is full-on Mommy vs. Cat War.  Seriously.)  I'll try to be more a bit more like Mary and try to capture more of her serenity.  And I'll try so very hard to keep my focus on her son.  Once I fish his manger out of the depths of the Christmas tree, that is.

Happy Bundt Day! (A story told in memes)

The celebration of Bundt Day has become something of a regular event around here.  (Past blog posts on the subject can be found here and here.)

A few weeks ago I started browsing Pinterest for Bundt recipes.  I was gonna knock it out of the park this year.  It was gonna be a full-fledged Bundtpalooza.  I found a recipe for a Samoa Bundt cake (recipe here).  Samoa cookies are my favorite Girl Scout cookie.  Making a Bundt form of my favorite once-a-year cookie seemed like a fantastic idea.

Fast forward to yesterday (I made my cake yesterday so I could tell you about it today).

Here's me heading out the door to the grocery store: Oooh.  Don't forget the recipe for the Samoa Bundt Cake.  Yes, that's a great idea.  But I don't have time.  I'll just check the recipe from my phone at the store.

Here's me driving to the store: Local radio stations stink. Katy Perry's "Roar" is not such a great song that it needs to be on 24-7, people.  Local drivers don't know how to navigate a 4 way stop.  YOU CALL THAT A STOP!?!

Here's me at the store: Let's check that recipe.  Hmm...note from the recipe creator that says "This cake took nearly all day to make."

Hold the phone.  A cake that takes ALL DAY to make?  And it's already noon?  And I still have a week's worth of groceries to buy, cart home, and put away before I can get my bake on?  

So here's me in the baking aisle, basically trying to figure out a Bundt recipe idea on the fly: I want it to be chocolate.  And caramel.  And nuts.  Ooooh...a turtle Bundt!  Great idea.  I know I have a chocolate cake mix at home.  I can make caramel from scratch.  I need some pecans and we'll be all set.  I can make this happen, recipe or no.

So I make it home.  I get to baking.  I decided to make my caramel first.  I used Pioneer Woman's Caramel Sauce recipe.  Say what you will about the Pioneer Woman, but girlfriend can cook.  I've never had a recipe of hers that I haven't liked.  Her caramel sauce recipe is basic, but it's easy, fast, and versatile.  It's great on ice cream.  If you cook it for a little less time, it's great for dipping apple slices for a snack.  If you cook it longer, it gets thicker, and that's the state I was going for in this Bundt.  A nice, thick, ropy caramel sauce.

Caramel sauce ingredients are in the pan, melting and getting nice and gooey.  I decide to start on the cake mix.  I've been buying up cake mixes lately when they're on sale for a dollar (don't judge - it's cheap, it's easy, and my family cannot tell the difference between "from scratch" and "from box").  I know I've got at least one chocolate cake mix in the pantry.  Possibly a devil's food cake too.  I just know I want a nice chocolate cake to be the base of this Bundt.   Go over to the pantry.  Guess what? No. Chocolate. Cake. Mix.

Wait!  There in the back!  What is it?  German Chocolate Cake mix.  Hmm.  Better than nothin'.

So I get the cake mix going.  My caramel sauce is bubbling away nicely.  I've got approximately 20 minutes before Middle and Youngest Child come home from school.  I'll be able to get the cake into the oven by then, and we can rake some leaves while the cake bakes.

Phone rings.  It's Middle Child.  "Um...Hello?  Mom?  I missed the bus. Can you come to school and get me?"

So I'm rapidly greasing a Bundt pan, and rushing everything else so that I can get the cake in the oven and rush off to school.  I turn off the heat on the caramel sauce before it's quite ready.  It's not as thick as I'd like and I don't have time to cool it, but you've all figured out by now that I'm a real mom and not a professional blogger (my cheap photography was probably your first clue; second clue is probably the fact that I only blog once in a blue moon because I have no time).  I have to get the kid, the cake can be rushed and less than perfect.

So, pour one half of the cake batter into the very well greased Bundt pan.   Then pour 1/2 of the less-than-thick, not-so-much-cooled caramel sauce on top of the batter.  Sprinkle with pecans.  (In my dream world where kids don't miss buses, this was going to be an amazing caramel-pecan tunnel in the middle of the Bundt.)  Top with remaining cake batter.  Pop into oven.  As you're popping it into the oven, hear the front door open.  Hey, it's Middle Child, who found a ride home with the neighbor girl.  Count to ten and take a deep breath.

So we wait for Youngest child to get home, then we go rake leaves with a timer stuck into my pocket so I can take the cake out in time.  Rake, rake, rake.  Realize that raking with kids is just about as effective as raking with puppies.  Timer goes off.  Back inside, test the cake for doneness.  Let it cool on the counter for a bit before taking out of the pan.  Finish raking.  Drag Youngest Child out of the leaf pile in the street.  Take Youngest Child in the house.  Attempt to release cake from Bundt pan.

Anybody who has ever made a Bundt will understand The Moment.  It's the moment of truth in Bundt cake baking.  When you unmold your cake, it will either come out in one smooth whoosh, or it won't. The Moment is the success/fail moment of the last hour.  You get a pretty, nicely molded Bundt, or you get a semi-nicely molded Bundt on the bottom with the rest stuck into the pan.  Guess which one I got?

Yeah.  Sigh.

Here's what I think happened.  The caramel was too thin, and too hot.  It very quickly meandered to the bottom of the pan, and took the pecans with it.  Once at the bottom of the pan, the caramel continued to cook until it became toffee.  (A nice, delicious, nutty toffee that I later scraped out of the pan with a spoon and consoled myself with as I looked at my sad, disfigured Bundt.)  Some of the cake stuck to the toffee and the rest released nicely.  Hence, Ugly-Not-Really-a-Turtle-Bundt.

But frosting!  Frosting fixes everything!  And I still have some leftover caramel sauce to use as a garnish on top.  I'm gonna frost and garnish the snot out of this cake! It's still salvageable!  Yes!

I microwaved some canned frosting to make it liquid-y.  (If I were a professional blogger, it would be ganache, but again, I'm a mom who is running out of time before supper prep needs to begin.)  Poured about 3/4 of it over the cake, letting it pool at the bottom.  Then I started drizzling the caramel sauce over the top.  Again, it was too thin and pretty much just rolled off the cake.  At this point, I really didn't even care and just laughed.  Threw some more pecans on top, and called it done.

Do you want to see what it looked like in the end?

Here you go:

A little lumpy, a little bumpy, and I'm not sure I'd serve it to company or take it to a pot luck, but it's okay.

Taste verdict?  It was good.  Caramel really suits German Chocolate cakes, so those flavors blended nicely.  But the caramel tended to pool away from the cake and frosting.   Overall, however, it was a perfectly good cake and everyone at the table gave it a thumbs up.

The final take-away?  It's cake.  Cake is good.  However you celebrate Bundt Day, enjoy - and may your Bundt not stick to the pan.

Apologies

I've been awful at blogging lately.  It's not for lack of ideas.  It's for lack of time.  Summer is a really hard time to find the time to blog, especially with kids underfoot.

I've also had numerous irons in the fire.  Our basement flooded in June, and the entire summer has been one slow slog to bring it back to normal.  Demolition, then reconstruction, drywall, paint, carpet.  The carpet is the last step; we're almost in the home stretch.

We spent a week in Wisconsin in August.  My husband and I ran a race together, we attended my (gulp) 20th class reunion, and we took the kids to a number of tourist destinations that we remembered fondly from our childhoods.

And last, but not least, I decided to train for my first half-marathon.  I'm following a 16-week plan and have 6 weeks left to go.  I run four days each week with my mileage going up gradually each week.  My long runs started at 3 miles.  Now I'm up to 9-10 miles.  I think training is going well, but I go back and forth on whether or not this will be my first and only half, or if I'll run another one after this.  I gotta say, I really like 5 and 10 K races.  We'll see how the first half marathon goes, but training really takes up a huge chunk of time.

I'll try to be better at blogging in the next few weeks.  I've got a few projects to share, a few recipes I want to blog about, and many, many thoughts going through my head.  Stay tuned.

Dresser Makeover

Greetings from the internet's least prolific blogger.

I've just been busy with mundane life stuff and not able to form thoughts into cohesive enough chunks to blog lately.  Plus I haven't done anything really interesting, haven't made anything really interesting, haven't gone anywhere interesting.  Or at least not interesting enough to blog about.  I mean, if you the blog-reading public want a post on cleaning litter boxes or brushing teeth, I'd be happy to oblige, but I just don't think there's a reading audience for it.  I may be wrong; feel free to correct me.

Anyhow, now that springtime has finally reached us here in Minnesota, I've been able to tackle a project I've been meaning to get done for a while, but I kinda needed to be outdoors to work on it.  What project is that?  Making over a small old dresser into a place to store our cold weather gear.  (Currently we use an old lidded basket that is overwhelmingly too small for a family of 5.  The cats enjoy using it to scratch their paws, so it's in fabulous shape, besides - if by fabulous you mean "falling apart at the seams.")

However, this thing

would make a great place to stash outerwear.  It's been sitting in our garage for the last two years.  Prior to that, it stored my husband's running gear in the basement of our old house.  Prior to that, one of the kids used it for a dresser.  I used it when I was a kid for a dresser, and when I asked my mom how old it was, she guessed that she got it in 1972, before I was even born.

Make no mistakes, this thing is old.  It's shabby (and not in a shabby-chic kind of way).  It's falling apart.  The hardware has oxidized.  And it wasn't even made out of high quality materials in the first place (particle board, staples, and glue for the most part).

But it was still useful, and rather than tossing it in the landfill, why not try to re-use it?

First I sanded down all the surfaces.

Removed the old, oxidized hardware.  Because the new hardware I was installing (more on that later) didn't fit the holes from the old hardware, I filled the holes with wood putty, let it dry, then sanded.

I put the dresser up on kitty litter buckets to make it easier to paint.  Speaking of making things easier to paint, if you're gonna do any spray painting, get yourself one of these:

That little trigger makes painting with spray paint so much easier.  It just snaps on to the top of your spray can and away you go.  It's reusable from can to can and only costs about $5.  

I didn't take any pictures of the painting process, but it was pretty straightforward.  Spray, let dry. Spray again, let dry. Done.

After the paint was dry, it was time to go to work on the new hardware.  At our old house, we had our kitchen cabinets resurfaced to make them more appealing for the sale.  We bought new fixtures, but never got around to installing them before we moved out.  Then they got lost in a box for a good 9 months before being rediscovered.  Unfortunately, that meant it was much too late to return them to the store.  I wanted to use them in our new house's kitchen, but because the drawer pulls don't line up, I'd have to redo the cabinets in this house too.  Just to install new hardware.  No thanks.  But now I've got a bag of hardware and no place to use it.  Lightbulb moment.

Here's the new stuff:

Kinda old-world and yet updated.

Like I said, the new hardware wouldn't work in the old hardware holes, so this wasn't a simple swap, but having a drill handy meant that it wasn't too difficult either.  In retrospect, I probably should have drilled the holes before I painted, but I was eager to paint.  I'm lucky that the drilling didn't wreck the paint, but again, we're talking about a cheap-o makeover here.  Buying another can of spray paint to fix an "oops" wouldn't have been a budget breaker.

So, dresser freshly painted, new hardware installed...we're done, right?  Not quite.  While digging for the drill, I found a can of chalkboard paint leftover from the previous owners.  It was unused, but since it had been sitting in the garage for 2 years or more, I tested it on some scrap wood first to see if it was still of good quality.  It was.  I decided that I would turn the side panels of the dresser (again, particle board with a very cheap veneer - we're not talking high quality wood here, folks) into chalkboards for the kids.

 
I covered the painted surfaces of the dresser with newspaper and taped off the edges, then spray painted away.  It took about 3 coats to get a nice, even finish.   (Helpful hint: when you create a chalkboard with chalkboard paint, wait until the paint is completely dry (usually 24 hours), then cover the entire surface with a smooth covering of chalk, then erase it all, before drawing on it for the first time.)

Wanna see the finished project:?
Voila:

Decorated with kid artwork, less than an hour later:

Side-by-side comparison:

At the end of the day, it's not perfect.  There's a few spots where I didn't apply paint evenly on the front, and there's a drawer pull that isn't level.  But overall, I'm happy with how it turned out.  It's plenty of well-hidden storage for our cold-weather gear, it's a nice surface just inside the door to on which to set things down, and it's added art space for the kids.