Day 22 of 365

Today appeared to be the perfect storm. Either the stars were in direct alignment, or the supermoon from this weekend carried over to the week, or maybe it was just plain luck.

My hubby is on Spring Break this week and our daughter had a couple days off, so we'd been looking to get away for a couple days. Since he's working on his book, he wanted to take his materials with him and seclude himself in a hotel room for a couple days. We were wanting to head to the mountains, but the snow just keeps coming and I'm not the most confident snowy road driver, so that plan was nixed.

Our second choice was the nearest gambling town, Jackpot, Nevada. We had received an offer earlier this month for comped rooms, some comped food, and some free gambling money from one of the hotels there. We're not big gamblers. In fact, I was in my mid-30s before I ever stepped into a casino. So a secluded room, time for writing, and a little time for some penny slots seemed like a grand idea. We even took a couple hundred dollars, just in case. We figured that amount would be adequate in case we wanted to gamble more or stop somewhere else along the way.

Adequate. Actually, it wound up being more than enough. Much more. Even with time set aside for writing my husband and I both hit several jackpots on penny slot machines. We kept cashing out and tucking the money away. When we got to the room and counted the money - all $1,500 of it. On penny slots. In one day. Staying in a free room, ate free food, and used their free cash. $1,500!

The clouds rolling in during our drive must have been a sign of the perfect storm we were about to enjoy. A gambling perfect storm of sorts.

Day 21 of 365

My husband is writing a book. Well, more like composing ideas and stories for a book. He's a high school teacher and has years worth of stories of what really goes on in a high school. By the time he retires in a few years, I'm sure he'll have many more. He's had the book idea in mind for a long time, but only recently has starting putting ideas down on paper.

He could easily write an autobiography of his life. Although he was born with Cerebral Palsy, he isn't confined to a wheelchair. He does walk with a limp and doesn't have use of the right side of his body. If you were to see him, you would think he'd had a stroke. (He gets that assumption from people a lot.) Despite his disability, he was very active in athletics as a kid. Played baseball, basketball, and football, and when he physically couldn't maintain the level of performance needed to play on a high school team, he still remained in athletics. He became basketball manager and was voted "Most Inspirational". He was also "Handicapped Student of the Year" for the State of Idaho.

He went on to college and continued being involved in athletics. He was involved with the athletic training department for Boise State University's football program and was the Equipment Manager for the basketball team. Graduated from college and got a teaching job.

That was almost 25 years ago. Since then he's been teaching at the same high school, has been named Teacher of the Year, has had a fellowship with our state senator back in Washington DC, served with the National Council of Social Studies, and has been on our city's Planning and Zoning Committee and our City Council.

While there are many people who have fought adversity, his life story is unique in that it is his. And maybe someday he'll write it. But right now he's working on his career life story. But he's not a writer. To use education-eze, his oral language proficiency exceeds his written language proficiency.

So it looks like I'll be the editor-in-chief as he pursues his latest adventure. To ease the burden of having a one-handed person typing hundreds of pages of text, (and me having to re-edit all of it) I bought him some micro cassettes. He now has hours of tape to tell his story.

Make a Tote Bag from an Upcycled T-Shirt - Day 20 of 365, Tutorial Tuesday

I had to stop and get some groceries today. Not too much, just some staples - fruit and veggies, yogurt, bread, eggs and some milk. I usually shop at the same few stores every time I make a trip to town. Fred Meyer, Target, and Walgreens.

But all along the way I seem to pick up too many plastic bags. A bag for the bread. A separate bag for the eggs. Yogurt gets its own. The prescription gets its own. Film to be developed? Another bag. We have a system for re-using the bags, but it seems lately they don't last like they used to. My husband uses them to take his lunch to work (then of course throws it away) and we double bag the kitty litter with them. Sometimes we use them for the garbage we create when cooking dinner or something, but otherwise they just sit there being stored. And for some reason we never seem to remember to take them back to the store to be recycled.

I see folks using cloth bags more and more these days, but then I read about how they harbor germs and that people don't wash them enough. I'm not a "green" person at all, but I've been wondering how to reduce our output of trash - including those plastic, not-so-strong bags.

Being the sewer that I'm becoming, I started looking up how to make the bags. Since we've traveled a lot, we have a lot of t-shirts. And being the big gal that I am, I don't always fit into the shirts we've bought. To solve the plastic bag problem and the "I can't fit into this shirt but don't want to get rid of it" problem, I turned several t-shirts into grocery sacks.

Hem the bottom, cut out the collar, cut away the sleeves, and you've got yourself a grocery sack.

I don't know how long they'll last, by I'm anxious to find out.

Need a tutorial to show you how to make your own t-shirt grocery bag? Got it!

Day 19 of 365

My newly planted strawberries are getting the spring rains they were hoping for. Today is just a cloudy, cool, drizzly kind of day. One of those days you don't want to go outside. One of those days when you just want to sit somewhere warm with a nice fuzzy blanket and a good book. Or one of those days when you want to do some baking.

Blueberry muffins have been one of our favorite morning treats for Christmas. Part of our Christmas tradition is that we always have muffins and juice for Christmas morning breakfast. We usually have three or four different types of muffins. Some years it's poppy seed or lemon or apple or bran or banana muffins, but blueberry muffins are always in the mix.  I used to buy them from the store's bakery but was always dissatisfied with their texture and flavor. Then I went to boxed mixes in order to try and find the best. One year we even went so far as to buy every flavor of every brand and did a "taste test" before Christmas so we could choose just the right muffin.

Skip ahead 20 years and I finally got it figured out. Homemade all the way! Make up batches a couple days before Christmas, freeze them, and warm them Christmas morning. A while back I found a perfect - absolutely perfect, to-die-for blueberry muffin recipe and now there's no looking back. I found it on allrecipes.com and it's called, "To Die For Blueberry Muffins". I follow the recipe exactly except I use frozen blueberries instead of fresh.

So on days like today when it's cool and raining and I feel like keeping warm, I turn to baking muffins and breads. Today blueberry muffins sounded like a good choice, so I mixed some up. I couldn't wait for them to cool all the way - I had to dig right in!

Day 18 of 365

I was watching Guy Fieri on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network late last night. He was visiting a place in Baltimore, Maryland that made Coney Island dogs with homemade Coney Island sauce. Now, I've been to New York, and even New York City, but never to Coney Island. But watching that episode made me want Coney Island dogs. AKA chili dogs for us Westerners.

I'm not a big hot dog fan. If we do have hot dogs, they have to be all beef and grilled until they're charred. (Must be remembrances of camping long ago.) These Coney dogs on TV were not grilled, not charred, but smothered in sauce and onions and mustard. Yum? Yep, yum.

So after today's NASCAR race (my chosen car won!), I attempted to make Coney Island dogs. I looked up several recipes online, but couldn't find any 5 star ones. I did find a few that had some ingredients in common - ground beef, chili powder, Worcestershire sauce, chopped onions, tomato paste/sauce, celery salt. I decided to make my own concoction using those ingredients. Being that I'm typically one who always follows the exact measurements in a recipe, I was heading into uncharted territory. I threw in a bit of this, a bit of that, a lot of that, and?

Less than half an hour later we had yummy Coney Island dogs.

Day 17 of 365

Didn't have to dig in the dirt, didn't have to bend over, didn't have to go out in the cold wind or get pounded by graupel. (Graupel is like snow hail. It's not hard like hail, but is more like a snow pellet consistency.) I got to sit in my warm sewing room with the TV in the background and sew away. A perfect day.

Pillowcases for Quilts of Valor was my day's project.

The pillow cases for Quilts of Valor are for wounded soldiers. The cases are used to hold the soldiers quilt and are often used to transport medical and personal items as they are transferred to another hospital or home. I came across someone on quiltingboard. com that is collecting them so I decided to make some. I used the "sausage" pillowcase method that I watched here on YouTube. They go together quite fast and are easy to make. Doesn't take a lot of brainpower, just foot power!

I'll send them out on Monday and figure out a new project for tomorrow.

Day 16 of 365

"The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!" says an excited Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk. If you haven't seen that scene before, it can be found on YouTube here.

I wanted to jump for joy today while saying, "The new strawberries are here, the new strawberries are here!", but I didn't (jump that is.) And we finally had a break in the weather today. It's looking like it might rain again this afternoon, but I (we) were able to get some planting done ahead of the storm.

Thank goodness for husbands sometimes! Even though he dug all the holes and helped me plant fifty (that's 50) strawberry plants, I sit here at the computer now barely able to move. My back is shot. I took loads of breaks, made sure I was careful while leaning over the strawberry beds, but it appears it still was not enough.

But in a few months I should be able to eat my favorite fruit. Delicious, sweet, bursting with flavor strawberries. As for now, it looks like a bed of dirt. But my back can attest that there are 50 bareroot strawberry plants waiting for the spring rain.