Randomly Random Life

I do random posts so much that I think my life is just a whole bunch of random. I guess that's how it is when you have kids.

First things first. This is the first tomato from our plants! I plucked it off the vine yesterday and ate that baby with nothing but salt. Oh. My. Goodness. That was a tasty tomato. This will mean more if you understand that I'm not a tomato lover. But lately I have been craving them. I had a BLT the other night for dinner and it was delicious. Just... Don't tell my grandmother. Anyways, we have 4 more tomatoes on the plants and I am looking forward to them.

We have a new addition to our family! Wednesday while at my mom-in-love's she told me that her sis-in-law's resident cat had popped out a litter of kittens, and that one of them was grey, just like my husband's former cat. Ben has told me repeatedly that we could only get a cat if it was grey. So when I heard this I sent him a text asking if I could bring him home. So that evening I traveled home with a small grey cat. We are trying on the name Stan, but really we just call him "Kitteh". The boys think he's hilarious, and he has really warmed up. He's still a little scared of noises and sudden movements, but at least he comes out of hiding to explore now. And he loves to be pet.

He's a dork.

We were SUPER busy this weekend. These are my jars of premade mixes. The boys usually ask for waffles or pancakes or muffins for breakfast, so I decided to just make my own mixes to quickly pull out of the pantry. Just add water! Well, and eggs and oil. ;) I just mixed the dry ingredients together, and then added the amount of dry milk I would need to substitute for "real" milk. Now all I have to do is add water and the other wet ingredients, plus any special "extras" I want. I use a pancake one this morning and it was awesome. So much less work and mess first thing in the morning.

I also made two loaves of whole wheat bread, and a batch of jalapeno jelly to use up the rest of the peppers mom-in-love gave me. And then, we did this.

Last weekend Ben bought lumber to build the shed, and got that floor down. And royally messed up his back doing it. A week of not doing anything and just resting and he was back to doing it again. Despite my hovering and "tsk"ing. The man just can't sit still. He has to work. So I made sure it was BOTH of us working on it, and tried to keep him from doing all the lifting by himself. Because we were both doing it, we slapped that puppy together real fast. All we have to do now is the roof and door. I'm so excited. Now we will have a place for all of our extra stuff that has been living in the garage and bedroom closet. It will be great. It's also the beginning to landscaping the backyard, which I am even more excited about.

I have been baking a lot lately. I must be stressed. It's especially odd if you consider that it's been triple digits here lately, or close to it, and all we have is a swamp cooler. This kitchen gets HOT. But I continue to bake, so I decided to create this "cheat sheet" of baked goods that I make most often. It's just the ingredients list, since I know how to put them all together. I have most of the recipes engraved in  my head, but every now and then I mix them up, or forget the measurement for just one ingredient. So now I can look at my list and double check. I might go back and add the oven temps and times too, since I get those mixed up sometimes as well.

And of course, I can't leave you without doing a knitting update. After my adorable child murderously ripped apart my shawl, I spent 5 hours ticking back 3 rows and then redoing them. I had tried to just drop down each stitch and fix with a crochet hook. But lace is very hard to fix that way, and since I was on the verge of tears and/or smashing a wall (I couldn't decide) I figured it was better to just take the easier, albeit longer, way. If it had been one row it would have been easy to do, but not 3 rows worth. I got it all fixed and redone and then I put it down. I haven't hardly touched it over the past few days. I have been working on a sock. And nice, boring, stockinette sock. I think I lost my lace mojo after the "incident".