7 Quick Takes (Vol 112)

Well another week has flown by and here in the Frozen Northeast Ohio the best I can say about the weather is that the snow is gone. I hope that wherever you are it has been better weather than here. But you aren’t here to read me griping about the weather. You are here to read my scintillating blather. So when you are done with mine please click on the pic above to be whisked, at the speed of the liquid precipitation that is falling here, over to Conversion Diary to see what everyone else has been doing.

Let the blathering begin!

1.
In my ongoing cleaning out efforts I happen to find this lovely piece of artwork in a drawer.

Somehow I do not believe that Cartoon Girl had encouragement on her mind when she drew this.

I could be wrong….

But I don’t think so.

2.
And still it rains here in the Frozen Northeast Ohio. Where it is no longer frozen just very soggy. And I cannot say that the rain is a surprise considering we never really have “Spring” around here. We just have a wet and gloomy transition from Winter to Summer.  LookLeap and I are itching to get out into the garden but it is just too darn wet. We do think that we will be able to get over there soon to lay out the garden plan.

And oh do we have a plan.

Lots of squares, we are doing square foot sort of gardening this year. And loads of different stuff. We have consulted our resident Master Gardener, Shannon, whose plots last year were an envious joy to behold. She really is a Master Gardener. I am hoping some of it rubs off on us since our plots are only about 20 feet apart.

But that is about all we are going to be able to do for the moment.

Darn rain. 

3.
Upstairs Downstairs! Who watched that? And if you did who didn’t love it. I was absolutely fascinated and I think I watched all the episodes.

Well guess what (jumping up and down gleefully), Masterpiece Theater is presenting another “installment”, set in 1936. And it starts on Sunday.

I am going right now to set the DVR.

And joy of joys I can get all the other seasons on Netflix. Oh Netflix how I love you.

4.
So, I have a recipe that you will need to try. I am not going to put it up here because I want you to go and get the recipe over at Taking On Magazines One Recipe at a Time, the hilarious blog written by my old friend The Mom Chef.

And when I say “old” I mean that we have known each other since we were wee babes. Not the fact that we might be in the 50 year old range.

The recipe is Key Lime Pound Cake and it will rock your world.

I made this ring of deliciousness last weekend for Sunday dinner. We had guests coming for the meal and I wanted something special so I made this. But the experience was not without it’s “mishaps”. But they had nothing to do with the recipe let me assure you.

- I couldn’t find my 10 inch tube pan anywhere. It is either packed in a box that I haven’t discovered yet or somehow it was donated by accident. But I did find my angel food cake pan so I used that….but some of the cake batter leaked out of a gap at the bottom, onto the heating element and burned making smoke and necessitating my removal of the barely baked cake to remove the charred stuff from the bottom of the oven. I wanted to bake the cake not smoke it. Put the cake back in, set the timer and walked away. But when the timer dinged and I went to take the cake out it was still practically raw. What the heck! And then I realized that somehow, when I had taken the cake out to clean out the mess at the bottom of the oven I had turned the oven off and hadn’t turned it back on……sigh…..so re-heated the oven and finally got the cake baked.

- and then the next day, the guests arrived 1.5 hours EARLY for dinner. Now THAT was a surprise.

5.
I might have mentioned in #4 that our Sunday dinner guests arrived 1.5 hours early. I was deep into food prep when we heard the doorbell ring at 11:30a.

I knew that wasn’t good. But thank goodness we had gone to the 8:45a service or we would have gotten home about the time they arrived.

And sure enough there they were, our new Pre-Marital Mentoring couple. So cute and earnest.

And early.

They were embarrassed but needn’t have been. We both misread emails and had different ideas about the time.

But things were fine. I already had the salad prepped and the chicken dish was ready to go in the oven. I just had to punt on the bread. I had started the dough rising for Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread from Joy the Bakers blog. But it is a bit of work to get it all together so I just made biscuits instead and then did the CSPAB later in the evening. And we had a good time.

And by the way. You HAVE to make the Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread. The angels will sing. It was amazing and HHBL and I ate the whole thing in the space of about 3 days. And I want to make it again as soon as possible.

6.
Did anyone watch “Extreme Couponing” this week and if you did what did you think of it?

I think there will be a longer post on this next week but my overwhelming thought was “Wow, even couponing can become an idol. Who knew.”

I love those kind of shows but this one in particular hit some hot buttons for me. I will vent next week so be prepared. But I would like to know others opinions if you did watch it.

7.
Sunday HHBL and I are going to see Les Mis and I am so excited!! Some sweet friends asked if we wanted to go with them. HHBL said, “What is Les Mis?”. I replied, “I will explain later just say yes.”

I have wanted to see this forever and just haven’t had the chance so thank you, in advance, to Bill and Vicky! And we are going out to dinner before hand.

I am sure that I will tell you all about it next week.

I lead a very unexciting life if it only takes this much to make my day.