Vinyl Is Very Fun

On Make-it Monday, I spent the day cutting vinyl words with my Silhouette. My Shelf Reliance can-rotater came with magnets that say different things for you to organize with, but they were always falling off because the magnet wasn't strong enough to stay stuck.  

You can't really see what I'm trying to show you from this photo, so let's get a close-up. 

There. See that? The white words. Awesome, huh? 

Then I labeled my shelving units as well. 

And the storage stuff on top of the shelving units got labeled too. 

You know, once I get started on something, it's hard to stop. 

Now I have all these useless magnets. Can anyone use them? 

But for the next three days after I did all this, my legs were toast from all the up-down-squat-stand-climb-repeat times a million. It was worth it.

A Practice Run

My cousin needed a favor. She asked me to make some treats for her daughter's missionary homecoming.

All I was told was that her daughter liked chocolate and M&M's. 

But sometimes there are people that don't like chocolate so much, so I thought I'd better cover that base as well. I made these lemon strawberry cupcakes.

She said she'd pay me, but I didn't want to charge her for my time. Karen was "worried" they might not taste super excellent, so she volunteered to taste test them before I sent them out. How kind of her to volunteer to be my scrutineer, right? They passed her inspection, no problem.
Then I realized as the day progressed and I hadn't heard from my cousin that perhaps there was a problem. I checked the FB message again and there was no actual date on the message, it just said Wednesday. When I looked on her home page, it said she'd be finished as a missionary mom in 16 more days. That was on April 2. Guess I'm a week early with all these treats and will have to do it all again next Wednesday. Now I need to find someone to eat these treats.

Strawberry Frosting
8 oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup salted butter, softened
1/2 cup strawberry jam
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 tsp raspberry extract, if desired
Beat cream cheese and butter in stand mixer for five minutes. Add jam and blend until combined. Add powdered sugar one cup at a time until desired consistency is reached.

Happy Easter

We've had a wonderful day. I hope you have as well. Good meetings at church, good food at home with good friends and family. 

Because of a few things, my blogging days are going to become more rare. I'm okay with that, so I hope you are too. 

Hugs! 

Berry Good Trifle

I've had serious issues with Blogger the last three days and this was originally published with only half of the directions. Sorry. It's fixed now.

Last night we played games and ate this. The game was brand new for us and I had a hard time learning it because I just wasn't focused. It turned out to be a really fun game and our friends left it with us so we could play it again.

I got the recipe for this from Allrecipes, but I changed it up a little. Here's my version.

Berry Trifle

1 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 pkg (8 oz) cream cheese

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/3 cup sugar

1 pre-made pound cake (I used one from the three-pack you get at Costco)

16 oz. frozen berries (I used raspberries, blueberries and blackberries)

2 T. cocoa powder

strawberry freezer jam

Whip heavy cream and 1/4 cup sugar until stiff peaks form. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract to whipped cream and whip a few more seconds to blend together. Remove the whipped cream to another bowl so you can use your mixing bowl again. This time, start with the cream cheese and beat it for a couple minutes until it's smooth. Add the lemon juice, extract and sugar. Beat until nicely incorporated. Now fold the whipping cream into the cream cheese mixture.

Cut pound cake into small squares. Line the bottom of your trifle dish with the cake (I used individual serving-sized trifle dishes...cuter that way). Cover the cake with spoonfuls of strawberry jam, followed by the cream cheese mixture, then the berries and a dusting of cocoa powder, then repeat the layers a second time. 

It was really nice of our game guests to lose at their own game, but from the mmm's that I heard coming from their direction after eating this, maybe they didn't lose altogether after all. 

Structure

I felt like I needed a little more structure to my life, now that I'm retired. Doing what you want to do everyday instead of doing what needs to be done leads to never getting done what you occasionally have to do whether you want to do it or not. Like cleaning bathrooms. 

Karen helped me come up with re-labeling the days of the week. Here they are:

Sweet Sunday

Make it Monday

Tidy up Tuesday

Workout Wednesday which can also be Washing Wednesday

Throw away Thursday

Finish up Friday

Shopping Saturday

Most of that is self explanatory, but here's some details. 

Sweet Sunday means baking something but then most likely giving it away so we don't have to work so hard on Wednesday to make up for eating the sweets. 

Make it Monday means being creative, like doing the cards for my card group (nearly three months ahead now, thanks to watching General Conference), or quilting or, or, or. 

Tidy up Tuesday means at least three hours of housework. I used to have a book called Sidetracked Home Executives which led to my job box. I had every job necessary to keep my house clean written on a 3x5 card which rotated through the box. It's a pretty good system, but I don't think I need that anymore. I just need to know that at least one day a week, my house is going to get some attention, like mopped floors and washed windows. 

Workout Wednesday means a really good workout! It also means I get all the laundry done on Wednesday. 

Throw away Thursday is my organizing day. 

Finish up Friday means I can get everything done that was started earlier in the week that didn't get completely finished. This will usually pertain to crafting, but may include other things as well. 

Saturday's shopping doesn't mean grocery shopping, it means hang out with my daughter and do stuff she wants to do, like shopping or movies or, or, or. 

So there you have my days of the week. 

Lazy Bones

Because I've been so negligent with this blog lately, and because I don't really care that I've been negligent, I thought I would continue in my laziness by just posting this website. You can get really easy recipes there, just in case you're feeling as lazy as I am. 

On the other hand, I am two months ahead on my card-making. I've been called a bragger and an over-achiever. I'm just sticking with the lazy label though.