Decorating... Slowly

It's been a year and a half since I bought the house and decorating is going ssssssssssssllllllllllooooooowwwwwwwwwwllllllyyyyy. Very slowly. I've been buying pieces of furniture here and there and little bits of art to put on the walls.

And of course there are all the wonderful ideas I get from pintrest! My first DIY home decoration was a push-pin board. I started out with a basic picture frame from Ikea:

I then spent entirely too long deciding on what type of fabric I wanted to use. I ended up at Joann's with my sis and mom for two hours searching through various fabrics and settled on a beautiful yellow and blue bird print. I also got two complementary fabrics which will go towards making a jewelry holder and something not yet decided.

I took the glass out of the frame and used the cardboard backing as a base. I wavered between using cork board, foam, or batting as the main material but then had a brilliant idea. I cut up my old yoga mat and used two layers of that.




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I then hot glued the pieces of yoga mat onto the card board. This was a pain because I was used a $3 glue gun. Note to self invest in a decent glue gun. I then made sure the doctored up cardboard would fit back into the frame and used my X-acto knife to smooth out some edges. I cut my fabric so that I had about an inch border on all sides and then stapled it on to the cardboard.




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Once I got it back in the frame I was able to hang it up and ta-da a homemade fabric covered push-pin board!! My next project will be to made funky matching push-pins and a matching jewelry holder.




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2011 Book Roll

It's probably wrong that I'm taking the time to write this post when I have yet to write Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hunger Games posts... But I've been waiting to do this all year.

I joined the Goodreads.com 2011 Reading Challenge with a goal of 50 books. I was then inspired by the lovely Nina Badzin to read a book a week. I had no life at the beginning of 2011 and was burning through books at a rate much faster than one a week so I decided to really challenge myself and upped the goal to 100 books. I was right on target until about October. Life got busy, book club books slowed me down, Game of Thrones really slowed me down and I burnt out. I think during the entire month of October I finished all of one book.

To offset that between December 26th and 30th I read 5 books, bringing my total for 2011 to 88 books. In addition to that I discovered books on tape... or more appropriately books on MP3. I listened to a total of 20 books. So you might say I exceeded my goal... Although I'm not convinced that listening to a book counts as "reading" a book.

So here you go the 88 books I read in 2011:

I keep getting asked which was my favorite and what I'd recommend and those are such hard questions to answer because there are so many good qualities to almost all of the books I've read. But I've tried to pick some category winners:

Least Favorite Adult: Follow the River or Tinkers.

Least Favorite Young Adult: the entire House of Night series

Best Adult Paranormal Series: Fever

Best Young Adult Paranormal Series: Mortal Instruments or Vampire Academy

If I had to choose an overall favorite: Hunger Games

Honorable Mentions: Divergent, The Graveyard Book, and The Giver

Honestly as I look over the book covers I loved so many of them and depending on your genre preferences I could recommend 95% of them to one person or another. It makes me sad that I can't include ALL of them on my favorites list.

I'm going to aim for a goal of 52 books in 2012. I don't think I'll have a problem reaching that goal but I do plan on reading at least 8 classics and 2 non-fiction. I'd love to hear about your 2011 reads and plans for 2012!

Happy New Year... or as Lanna says Have a New Year! 

I came, I pinned, I crafted

Hello friends. Today is a day for the history books. What could this momentous occasion be you ask? Why it's the day I get to see Part I of BREAKING DAWN! I know you're all very excited for me.

I have a lot of posts that need to be written but I'm just going to ignore those for now and amaze you with my craftiness. About 6 (or more) months ago my sister posted about this amazing website call pinterest. I wasn't very interested and even though I asked for a invite I ignored it. Well a few weeks ago my friend started bugging me, saying I just HAD to get on and sent me another invite. Which I promptly ignored again. Finally, a different friend asked if there was a way for me to get HER an invitation  So I resigned myself to signing up and inviting her. Well since then I haven't been able to STOP PINNING. For those of you who don't know what it is, pinterest.com is essential internet crack! It's like a giant bookmark page where you can save all your favorite websites and ideas AND steal other peoples. It's really quite wonderful and addictive. Here's the reality of it:

So what does this have to do with Breaking Dawn? Well normally I'm the type of person who would pin all these cool ideas and crafts and say "Wow, I'd love to make something like that," and then not do it. But ha ha I've fool you all and this time I followed through. I knew I wanted to make something Twilight related for my friends who were going to watch the movie with me and pinterest was the perfect place to find just the right craft! Since it's almost Christmas I decided on two Twilight themed Christmas ornaments. They were both surprisingly easy and fun to do.

The first was super simple, glass ornament, paint pens and feathers:






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The front is a quote from Breaking Dawn, "Why am I covered in feathers?" and the back has today's date so they always remember the awesomeness of when we first saw the movie.






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The second one was a little more work and a lot more pain. As a bookworm and a true nerd I treasure books and it made me physically ill to destroy one, even something like Twilight. But I took a  copy of the book tore it up (twitch) and mod podged it on to a plastic ornament. I let it dry, then picked some favorite quotes from the book and put those on along with a nice coat of glitter! The result was beautiful (although the glitter is coming off, next time I'll use a spray on type).






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My set of three: "So the lion fell in love with the lamb. What a stupid lamb. What a sick masochistic lion."






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One for my sis: "Let me get this straight - I'm the baby seal, right"






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And for my friend: "And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him."






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Happy Breaking Dawn Day everyone! Happy Pinning!

Book Club: The Book Theif and Normandie Cafe

I'm a little behind on my book club reviews so let's just do a quick synopsis before I get to today's:

The Room by Emma Donoghue at Village Inn. This was a solid 3 star book. An interesting yet unbelievable story of a woman who was kidnapped and kept in a shed (Room) for years. The story is told from the perspective of her son, who was born in the room conceived by her kidnapper. Worth reading but not worth bumping to the top of your list. Village Inn was well generic.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card at Training Table. Wonderful book one of my favorite in the Ender's series. I HATE sci-fi and yet I loved this book. Card does a wonderful job of moving the story line along while still developing the world around him in an understandable way. Worst book club meeting I've ever been too. Everyone bailed. Training Table was blah - completely overrated I probably wont ever eat there again.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson at Chicago Pizza. When I first finished the book I HATED it. HATED.IT. It was slow and boring; it could have been so exciting but it just wasn't. However after the meeting and the awesome discussions I bumped my rating from a 2 to a 3.5. It's definitely not my cup of tea but I had to admit that there was a lot of very interesting history embedded into the story. The fact that it's a non-fiction makes it great but also leads to the boringness. If you enjoy American history or like architecture it's must read. Chicago Pizza was surprisingly tasty. A little over priced - but then again I think most pizza places are. I went simple and shared a thin crust prosciutto pizza and the house salad and was quite satisfied.

Today's book was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This was one of the first books that I listened to on MP3. It was amazing. I honestly loved it. A non-Nazi family in Nazi Germany. The story its told from the perspective of Death. Really a brilliant tale; it made me laugh out loud and then sob. I really think everyone should read this book and I would love to see it in school curriculum. The discussions about the book were good, we did get off on some tangents but over all it was interesting. A lot of people there were history buff which I am not so it was interesting to listen to their additional knowledge. The restaurant we ate at was Normandie in Holladay. My review? Meh. The food was fine but way over priced for the portion size and quality. Teardra got a mac-n-cheese that she deemed the best she's ever had. I got a steak sandwich and caesar salad and it was fine.

There are a ton of meetings coming up that I'm really looking forward to including The Giver, Tinkers, and The Reader (the last two I haven't read yet but look):

If by chance you are a historical romance or period piece person pick up The Gentleman Poet by Kathryn Johnson. I picked it up on the whim at the library and I was pretty sure I'd hate it and not finish it but I LOVE it. 

Happy Reading

A Story of Stupidity and Something to Make it Better

After running errands today we decided to give ourselves a little treat. My mom and I were craving some delicious (half priced) cherry limeade from Sonics. I appreciate the sock hops at Sonics because they have to figure out your change all by their lonesome selves. They roller skate out to your car give you your food and then make change for you all without the aide of a calculator or cash register. You'd be surprised at how many people can't do that.

We then drove down the street to get the naughties some ice cream from Burger King. I was delighted to see that they offered their soft serve in either a "cone or a cup". It said so right on the board. And as all mommies know cones and young children equal a big fat mess. So I pulled up and said "I'd like two soft serve ice creams in a cup." And so begins my story of stupidity:

BK Girl: You mean a cone.

Me: Ummm no I mean a cup.

BK Girl: You want a sundae? 

Me: No it says right here "soft serve ice cream in a cone or a cup" and I want mine in a cup.

BK Girl: (silence) So what if I put it in the cone and then put it into a cup."

Pause...

Double pause...

My brain doesn't process stupidity too well and so I was a bit perplexed and well dumbfounded at her response so I said sure and drove up to the window. And sure enough I watched as she filled two cones with ice cream then turn the cones upside down in to cups to hand to me. I really REALLY wanted to take the cones off and hand them back to her but my mom taught me not to be rude and so I didn't. But WOW... Wouldn't you just put the ice cream into the cup and skip the whole cone business all together?

Now that you're mind has been numbed by that story I'll give you some happier news. My garden. We harvested the plants two days ago and got this:

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That's only a portion of the tomatoes. We've been picking them regularly and we still have a ton that aren't red yet. We pulled up the onions a while ago but I can't find a picture. As for the zucchini? Their still growing strong. In fact we have a weird new type that just randomly showed up:

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My mom and I both shredded up different batches of zucchini and squash to store in my new deep freezer (yeah!!!).

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We also peeled and pack up the tomatoes for future use in tomato sauces and salsas! No more canned tomatoes for us:

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I made up a big batch of almond pesto! I can't WAIT to throw that on some pizza dough with some fresh tomato slices and mozzarella! Yum!

But really what I wanted to share with you is my new FAVORITE way to eat zucchini.... Deep fried zucchini strings! So simple. Just shred the zucchini going along the whole length of the zuc. Then chop up thin rings of onions. Throw everything in some buttermilk and let it sit, turning it occasionally to make sure every piece gets it's buttermilk bath. Mix some salt, pepper and garlic powder into some flour. Shake off the excess buttermilk, coat with the flour mixture, then fry until golden. I promise you it's heavenly!

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