money well spent

The circa 1980 stove in my kitchen was probably a low-to-mid-grade model in its day. Thirty years later it's still functional, but leaves a bit to be desired. Today I spent possibly the best $30 ever on new drip pans, greatly improving not only the look but also my morale.

Behold, the old drip pans:

In my defense, the drip pans weren't always this dirty. They have been on a slow but steady decline over the past year or so as I became busier and the stains more difficult to remove--even with heavy-duty cleaning products and lots of elbow grease. Once I got the brilliant idea to simply replace them I quit cleaning them altogether. Smart, eh?

One less scary thing around the house.

every mother crow

My mother used to say, "Every mother crow thinks her baby is blackest."

Well, I think I'm that mother crow now. After graduating from BYU last April, Charlotte spent the summer interning with LDS Church Magazines in Salt Lake City, working for The New Era (magazine for youth ages 12 - 18). Beginning this month with "A String of Good Examples," her articles will appear in the magazine through February or March of next year.

The internship was a great experience for her; she was able to implement some of her own ideas and was given real writing assignments--not just your typical intern-who-makes-the-copies stuff. I'm so proud of her and have become the overbearing mother who shows the magazine to any captive audience.

Look--her name is in the magazine's masthead!

Yes, I think my baby is blackest.

it's a wrap

This has been perhaps the busiest summer of my life, what with Charlotte's wedding plans, work (not to mention searching for new work), and Relief Society--and don't forget all of those pesky table cloths I still need to iron. Of all things, I never would have imagined that I could have found time to be part of a singing group--good grief, I don't even have time for Ward Choir!

But a couple of months ago my friends convinced me to join them in a small group made up of Wheat Ridge High School graduates. We were all--at one time or another--members of the show choir there. We've been practicing once a week, and last night we had our first "gig."

Mark asked why I stood on the "men's side." It's because I sing tenor.

I still wonder how I've found the time to do this, but I've identified that the whole experience has been like therapy for me. For those two or three hours that we rehearse each week I completely forget about everything else. It's like going to a really good movie where you don't think once about the overwhelming To-Do list waiting at home on the kitchen table.

Really, these are some of the nicest friends I have the pleasure of knowing. And it's a whole lot cheaper than professional therapy.

happy endings

At the end of a rather long and harried day I was surprised today with two delightful and completely unexpected gifts: The first, a daffodil yellow Cuisinart hand mixer from my mother, and the second, two boxes of Cadbury eggs--one caramel and one creme--from my dear and thoughtful friend Linda J. (who had read a comment I made on Charlotte's post about craving said eggs).

Wow! That's just about all I can say, Wow! Well that, and Thanks!

mini makeover

Five years ago we moved into our current home, inheriting a number of lovely "gifts with purchase," so to speak. Some things I simply could not abide and was driven to change immediately, and others--though I didn't like them--got pushed to the bottom of the to-do list until, sadly, I guess I became used to them and almost forget that I wanted to change them.

My bathroom shower curtain was one such item. Southwest-style prints have never been a favorite of mine, but I guess the fact that it was a pretty shade of red and I happened to have matching towels made it somehow tolerable, or at least not annoying enough to move up on the priority list.

I'm not sure what first inspired my desire for a black-and-white shower curtain, but I had a vision in my head of what I wanted. One day while reading a home improvement post by blogger friend Lee in Pennsylvania, I saw the shower curtain that was in my head! I posted a comment about the irony of it all, praising her for her good taste. She quickly emailed me to say that she had made hers from a table cloth she purchased at T J Maxx, and that she had an extra one I could buy from her for a mere $15! Woo hoo! One step closer to getting rid of Southwest kitsch.

Fast forward about four months. The table cloth had been sitting on my sewing table, waiting for me to find the time to transform it. One afternoon after work I decided that there's no time like the present, and I sat down and made myself a shower curtain!

The table cloth was not quite large enough on its own, so I added a weighted hem in solid black. I decided to tie grosgrain ribbon in single-looped bows at the top of each shower ring.

Remember my powder room re-do last March? I saved the rather scary hardware (towel bar and switch plate cover) and got out my favorite transformation tool: black spray paint.

I haven't hung the "new" towel bar yet, but you can see here the lovely one I'm replacing. Do you know of anyone with a log cabin who would like to decorate with a hunting motif? Perhaps the more pressing question is, "Why in the world didn't I replace this hideous thing sooner?!"

The finishing touches, and perhaps the final impetus that got this project in motion came as birthday presents last March. Susan gave me these cute ceramic canisters for Q-tips and cotton balls,

and Michelle brought me (among other things) one of the darling black-and-white boxes of Puffs I had coveted after seeing them on her blog. I have alerted each of my family members that I will NOT be throwing away this box, but re-filling it.

See the wonders of blogging? Table cloth from T J Maxx: $15. Black fabric on sale at Hancock's: $5. Twelve yards of black grosgrain ribbon: $12. Sending the Southwest to Goodwill: Priceless.

hellish hail

As if I wasn't having a hard enough time trying to keep my blog current, our power was out for 48 hours this week, throwing my week into chaos.

A little after 10 on Monday night I was enjoying a relaxing shower at the end of a very productive day when, about halfway through, I heard and felt a frightening sound--above the sounds of the streaming water and the radio. Fearing my furnace was about to explode (our hot water heater/furnace combo--an antiquated beast--resides in a closet in our bathroom and at times makes menacing thumping noises). "Oh NO!" I'm thinking. "The house is going to blow up and I'm going to be found naked and dead in the street! What an embarrassing way to go."

And then the lights went out.

It didn't take me too long to deduce that we were in the middle of a tremendous thunder and hail storm. Thankfully John, knowing I was in the shower, was quick to bring me his Nintendo DS, which when opened and sitting on the counter, provided adequate light by which to dry off and dress. Whew! I wasn't going to die naked after all.

I was impressed by the kids' quick response to an emergency situation. The storm hit so suddenly and with such severity; thanks to their quick response time and action (as I was otherwise occupied) windows and doors were expeditiously closed, allowing no water to enter the house.

The outside of the house, however, did not fare so well. We awoke the next morning (still no power) to find the back of house looking like this:

Some of the holes are three and four inches big! We were fortunate that no windows shattered, as many of our neighbors' did. However, the frames are broken, dented, and cracked--like this:

Our gutters and window frames look like someone with anger issues took a ball-peen hammer to them. The saddest part to me is my little garden in the front of the house. Remember reading about my efforts to beautify? Well, Monday afternoon I decided I would surprise Mark (who was out of town) for our upcoming anniversary and add some finishing touches to our joint gardening effort. I stopped at the nursery on my way home from work, dropped another $50 for some fill-in plants, and together with the kids planted everything for FHE Monday night. For at least three whole hours my garden looked really good.

On Tuesday morning my garden looked like this:

. . . and my potted basil looks like this:

Emily, Sarah, John, and his friend George helped me rake and clean the yard (remember I said that Mark was out of town?). After a few hours of work we had raked about 15 bags of leaves--just from the front lawn. Though the decimation of my little garden is disappointing, it was somewhat heartening to at least get the debris cleaned up, and it felt pretty neighborly, as everyone else on the block was out in their yards doing the same thing and we would occasionally walk over to a neighbor's house to exchange storm stories and damage estimates.

The good news? Our power came back on last night around 10 p.m., but not before I had to attend to some urgent Relief Society business by candlelight and flashlight.


The bright spot? My rose bush, a Mother's Day gift this year from Mark, came through the storm nearly unscathed--amazing, when you consider the state of everything else in the vicinity.

For another great account of our eventful week and more photo documentation, see Emily's post.

morale boost

After seeing the gorgeous gardens of blogger friends Shannon and Lee, this post seems a bit pathetic, but if you A) knew how little gardening skill and experience I have, and B) saw what we started with, you might just be impressed--or at the very least happy for me that my front yard no longer looks like something that belongs in a neglected trailer park.

When we first moved into our home nearly five years ago suffice it to say that the yard was not the thing that attracted us to the house. The main "garden spot" at the front walkway was a mass of over-grown fitzer bushes that may have been pretty at some time (the house was built in 1959), but had long-since lost their appeal and were nothing but a sprawling mass of spider-infested prickles.

With so much work to do on the inside of the house the outside landscaping lived on in continued neglect, brightened only by an occasional seasonal display on the front door. My attempt at gardening was confined to a pot on my porch which was home to a few lonely petunias and geraniums each summer.

Mark finally tired of my incessant complaining about the horrid bushes and pulled them out at the beginning of last summer. Ah--progress! It was like having a rotten tooth pulled. Finally, a clean slate--or so I thought. Oh. Roots. Lots of twisted, deep roots. Roots that must be dealt with before any planting could take place. Alas, another summer passed--this time with a lovely patch of root-filled dirt as our front-yard decoration--which was, believe it or not, better than the bushes.

Fast forward to Mother's Day 2009 (which of course I have not yet blogged about). Mark surprised me with this beautiful rose bush and a gift certificate to a nice local nursery. I know very little about growing rose bushes, but do know that my favorite color of rose is the one he bought:

We had so much fun going to O'Toole's nursery to select our plants. We chose these two bushes, which I liked for their bright green color, two flats of Vinca in shades of vibrant pink and white, and a flat of a cute creeping perennial with little white flowers. Looks like we'll need a few more gift certificates to complete the project.

Next, it was time to involve the whole family. We spent the rest of that day pulling up weeds and digging out the remaining root stumps. (Yes, we use latex dental gloves for gardening and cooking.)

My parents dropped by at one point and my darling almost-ninety-year-old father helped show John an effective method for manual stump/root removal.

(By the way, my dad still mows his own lawn--how great is that?!)

Ta-Dum! Behold--a root eventually wrangled out by Mark:

The next Saturday I went to buy compost and Mark did the honor of first breaking up the existing clay-filled soil, and then working in the compost. Oh, and did I mention the nasty 40+ year old plastic liner we had to dig out, as well?

Finally it was time for planting! Sarah helped me with this.

Mark dug the holes and planted the bushes, as I'm not so handy with a shovel.

I even re-potted a basil plant I bought for summer cooking.

While the finished product may not look like much yet from the street, and we've already started a list for our next trip to O'Toole's, it looks a heck of a lot better than it did before we started!

Best of all is the morale boost this project has given me. I'm no longer embarrassed to tell people which house is mine, or feel the need to make disclaimers about its outward appearance.

How can you not smile when you have rows of pink flowers outside your front door?

sure sign of spring

Beautiful is not the word I would ever use to describe my home's landscaping. Every spring, however, there are a few tenacious daffodils and hyacinths that manage to make a brief but cheerful appearance along my front walkway.


I noticed them for the first time last week. Welcome, Spring!