Girls Day Out

Photos of the wonderful shops my dear forever friend and I visited are locked in my cell phone. Yes, I know, I should have read the book or carried my camera...WHY didn't I carry my camera?


With or without a camera we had a wonderful day in McKinney, Texas!
We went here first, It's called Design Collection, located on the North East side of the square.
Beauty was everywhere in this shop, a little bit of something for everyone. My dear friend located the perfect cell phone carrier for me and I got some fabulous lotion! It's lavender and mint scented...yum!


She picked up an earthy toned sage pillar candle, it smelled HEAVENLY!

We moved to the other side of the square to a shop that was brimming with one piece of eye candy after another. I managed to escape with my debit card unused but my friend located the sweetest little birds and a nest.

After the birds were safely tucked in a sweet pink bag we toward the quilt shop we passed a beautiful Hearts topiary that was 10 feet tall and had the most amazing cyclamen growing around the base.

While admiring the cyclamen the sparkles from the window display at SHARLA'S caught our eye.

There were shelf liners promising a tea rose sent and rose petal soaps that had me nose to glass when the door flew open and we were lead inside by a sweet angelic pied piper.

Inside there were wonderful smells and bottles but we were captivated by the sparkly things. What we came out of there with were purse hangers.

Glitzy, shimmering, delightful, butterfly encrusted purse holders. We got a matching set that has a burgundy ground (not red like the photo) and they wrapped them in the sweetest burgundy organza bags to carry the purse hangers in our purse without them getting scratched. We LOVE them!

We made it to the quilt store and then headed off to our favorite restaurant for lunch where we had Tortilla soup, guacamole salad, and a hot chocolate éclair.

AND, I got to bring home all the shopping bags! She volunteered, what could I say?

And the next day....

Godfriend,


Thanks for your sweet comment! I could hear you say each word...made me smile. You are such an encourager.

You had asked when he came down with the flu and I couldn't remember exactly. Rereading 'As Monday's Go' reminded me.
Hubs came home shivering like a fearful chihuahua that following Wednesday night. Flu got him.

Then, a few days later, Son #1 the tummy version a couple more days Son Two had only the head/chest part...a viral cold or some such, the faux doc said.

January was a wash, we finally celebrated Hubs' B-Day with the Grands Feb 2.


Hugs,
Melissa

As Monday's Go...

...yesterday was a text book case!

Hubby took my son's car to work. I took a quiet moment to catch up on some blog reading when the phone rang. Hubby was stalled on the road. I grab son and phone and insurance and coffee and hit the road. Hubs calls, he got it started and it's now parked in the lot. Call tow truck, he'll see me later. So I got to thinking...this is the perfect time for the car to need work being next Monday my son will be returning to the University.

I have a very good outlook. All things work together for the good and I could definitely see that, so I puttered along, I didn't even know it only had one bar on the phone. So, we pull up to the car. Son gets his stuff out, I call the insurance to confirm towing, yep, got that. Then I notice the bar and my older son called, where's breakfast? (hello, it's 12:30pm!) Ok, that wiped out the phone.

So we are back on the road and the low fuel light comes on. No biggie, all is well, got home, plugged in phone, borrowed other son's phone, called repair shop, called tow truck and gave the address to a distracted dispatcher. That's Norizon not Verizon, they are on the same road of mega-chain office concrete and glass....so please take this address. And, when do I need to be back at the car? Leave key under mat and that's it? Cool!

I drove back to Hubby's work, son put key under mat, double checked the car wasn't locked, grabbed umbrella under the seat, we are good. Pulling out of office park. Back on road, blood pressure normal.

The Tow Guy called to say he was at Verizon and couldn't find the car. Ok, he'd misunderstood the Dispatcher...and he can now see the address AND the car. Great, I say, let me know if you need anything else. Only an hour and half to take care of all that...so far so good! Pulled into driveway, noticed electric meter spinning, moaned at the thought of running the air conditioner in January. Yep, muggy, upper 70s, AC on. Ugh!

Freshened up, got lunch, chatted with sons and laughed and enjoyed having them both home for Christmas break. They rolled around on the ground for a while like 9 year olds playing Brazilian Jujitzu. Lots of name calling, poking fun and brotherly love.

Younger son wants to get his phone while we are running up and down the road, since he lost his over Christmas.

Ok, called to check on the car first. What car,we don't have it. WHAT? Its been 3 hours! Not to worry, he'll check with the Tow Guys and call me right back. After half an hour with no call I decide proactive is better than reactive and since my blood pressure is already elevated, I call the Tow Guys. And held and held and held. Breathing deeply, maintaining sanity and calm. After they checked back with me the 4th time to tell me to keep holding I suggested they just call me when they find my car. I was still smiling. I knew they wouldn't want the thing.

2 hours later the car repair guy called. Seems Tow Guys had taken it to another car repair place, not to worry, he'd call me when they brought it back. 1 hour after that, Tow-Guy calls and says boss wanted him to call and see what I wanted. WHAT! Do you know I have Hot Flashes? At least he wasn't chewing chips in my ear though I did have the impression a crack would show should he bend over and truthfully, I was thankful to have missed that by being on the phone with him rather than in person. "Nothing, thank you...I'm sure it's all fine now." I really wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, scream or laugh.

On to the phone. Drove to the Meg-Mall Spread. Pretty little brunette let me know that 2 of the phones were still under contract even though the other two phones weren't. And it would be 5 months before I could get new phones, for free. AND, I couldn't be the one to make a decision because the contract is in Hubs name.

I felt Horror Woman wanting to sneak out and 'correct' the situation, to set the young woman straight and demand my free phone! I smiled and said: Let me talk to my husband, since it IS his phone account and I might choose to pay for a MUCH more expensive phone than what he would like me to pay for. My son gave me that look. You know that look. Ok, I'll just see how much that Pink Razor is...$49 with a new 2 year contract. Ok, truthfully, I am thinking a bit of Chocolate will bring clarity and quieten Horror Woman.

Sonic or Starbucks? I ask Son when we are back in the car...he is already silent which means I didn't do 'it' right. Sonic...ok...get T-Mobile on the line while I pull in and you can order me a chocolate cherry limeade.

It's Monday. And, dusk is claiming the day. Horror Woman has agreed to be nice since chocolate is on the way and after explaining to the CS rep TWICE that all I need is a phone for my kid because school starts on Monday I am asked by said T-Mobile CS sweetie if I have had a nice weekend so far. Now how do you answer a question like that?

"Well, it seems to have ended a bit soon. I think I'll just hook up with who ever has the best deal on a new phone and pay out my last 5 months here at T-Mobile so I can get a phone for my son before Monday." Oh, ok, apparently I need a Contract Specialist. I've decided to smile so good chemicals will flow, after all, chocolate has arrived and Son is looking at me as if to say, PLEASE don't mess this up for me! I need good chemicals.

And I just don't want the lecture that will happen all the way home if I cut the call short and decide to take a bubble bath and table the this phone thing till tomorrow! He learned from his mother his long winded 'let me help you understand how things work' approach to child rearing (or mother rearing in this case). And I have a DEEP and abiding need to just get throughthiswholething!!!

Perky Adorable is now on the phone to help me. "I just want this to be EASY, that's all, EASY, I have one lost car that will break my tiny savings account getting repaired should it be found, a kid who will lecture me all the way home if I mess this up and I ONLY want to get a phone!...No TWO phones, it's MY turn!" "...and what kind of phone would you like Melissa??" "I want that pink razor!"

Perky Adorable says: "Excellent choice! and what does your son want?" Me: "Well that flip phone thing like his last one." Her: "in Red or Brown?" Me: "He said Red, please" Her: "Great! and he will need a new Sim card too, got that" Me: silent...I'm getting my razor? Her again: "That will be $1.65 due to tax, sorry about that." Me: Smiling for real, neener-neener, Hubs said I'd have to wait on that razor...lol! "Thanks!"

It's 9 pm, I still haven't heard from the repair place, I'm not calling to see if the car got there, enough is enough for this Monday. I wheel in to pick up Hubs. "How was my day? You want the long or the short version?" "Short? Ok, they'll call about the car later, Son's phone is in the mail and you have chicken teriyaki for dinner." :)

Well, it's back on the wagon for me!

Two posts in one day, amazing...lol!

Honestly, is there anyone who doesn't think they are fat? And with it being Monday, the true diet starter day, I crawled back on the wagon with the same efforts that were VERY successful for me last week. I was 'focused' (my new word for 'good') all last week but the weekend was a challenge...I know to be prepared next weekend.

Pizza Friday night, Mexican food with a dear friend on Saturday, Apple Crisp on Sunday. Ugh! One of the things I realized while scarfing down that pizza Friday night was that MY Crustless Skillet Pizza was SO much better than Pizza Hit Delivery!

So I made one today...sliced it and bagged it in meal size portions and popped it into the fridge.



I am Low-Carbing but not being crazy about it. I think we all have to find that happy medium of what really works for us so we CAN maintain our 'focus'. Here is the recipe from my personal cook book...

In a skillet over medium heat add...
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1/2 large onion chopped, simmer till tender
1/2 can (15 oz) black olives chopped or sliced...added to onions once they are soft.
1/2 can 8oz. Tomato Sauce (OR you could use any NON sugar based pizza/spag sauce)
Add to Tomato Sauce:
1 packet Nutrasweet or equivalent
1/4 teaspoon Italian mix herbs
1/8 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
Pour Tomato Sauce mix over above ingredients then add..
Pepperoni, as much or little as you like, I pile it on.
Top with:
Mozzarella cheese and Mexican mix cheese...it melts so smoothly and not as greasy as cheddar, but I used cheddar today.

As this is melting, beat
8 eggs

Then take your spatula and pat down to make everything level, use a fork to make 8 or so small holes in the skillet mixture so the eggs can find their way to the bottom.

Now pour the eggs over the skillet mixture taking care to fill in the little holes...if this doesn't happen as nicely as you want it too, then lean the pan and let the eggs run under the skillet mixture while lifting the edges with a spatula.

Let it simmer for a few minutes. Some of the cheese will be melted and bubbbling. When the edges look like an omlette and most of the cheese is melting, then turn the broiler on low and slip the skillet inside the oven. Keep a watch until the top of the Pizza is browned to your liking.

I may put a protector over my skillet handle depending on which skillet I use, so think if your handle needs a cover.

Remove from the broiler, take a photo, slice into 4 or 6 pieces, depending on how much you want, place on your Royal Winton Pastelware trimmed in gold, grab your gold flatware, take another photo, then enjoy! Truthfully, when no one is looking I throw it on a paper plate and eat with a plastic fork...lol!



There are quality Carbs in this, about 30 carbs in the whole thing. So, 7.5 per serving. 4 servings.

I hope you enjoy this like I do.

Happy day,
Melissa

Yummy! ....and about sharing that poetry... And LOOSING

Last week I strolled over to Daisy Cottage where she never fails to delight readers with photos of her lovely cottage and decorating and recipes. And indeed that day she had posted a recipe for an Apple Crisp that seemed like the Perfect way to get the Scent of Fall into my home.

So it was that on Sunday morning after Mr. Rose had taken me to breakfast and a trip to the grocery store, I pulled out my old Corning ware casserole and made that very Apple Crisp. I first put down the canned Comstock apples, then sprinkled heavily with cinnamon, then the sugar, and because I couldn't find the Jiffy cake mix, I used half a Betty Crocker (pudding in the mix) yellow cake mix, then lavished it all with butter. baked for 50 minutes, because my younger males don't eat nuts. It smelled heavenly cooking!



Served up on my Fallish snack set with Roses and my gold flatware, with half-n-half in my coffee, it was Total Indulgence! And Delicious! I told Mr. Rose if he found me passed out in a Diabetic comma it is because I just needed more Apple Crisp...lol!



It was SO YUMMY!! Thanks Kim!

*****
I also wanted to say thank you for your sweet comments on my blog. It is so fun to visit with each of you! I feel like you dropped by my house for a quick 'hello'. As to sharing my poetry in the last blog...

I can't share any of my poetry. As a teen in high school is was like bearing my soul! I would only share with those who wrote poetry. They were literary friends, I suppose. And I kept it all in a red pocket paper folder buried in a drawer in my desk. It was safe there. When I transfered universities I took that folder, bulging and in need of tidying up, to my new place. That semester I took First Aid...I think it was the only class available and I had to have it for some strange reason. Anyway, after the semester was over I did the 'trash-thing'...threw away my boyfriend (should have left him in the trash but that damn telephone did me in), threw away all my papers and syllabi, all the old notebooks, and my First Aid folder that happened to be in a Red paper pocket folder.

My poetry folder went back in my desk at home, not to be reviewed for 18 months.

Then, in my new apartment with my first job and a new desk to arrange in a second bedroom I retrieved the poetry folder and sat in my bean bag chair in a little corner perfectly laid out for reading and opened the folder to find it was my First Aid folder, not my poetry folder. I was devastated! I tore through everything and the reality was simple. All my poetry and the poetry of friends was in a trash pile somewhere along with my papers and syllabi. I haven't written poetry since. It was a sudden stop at the end of a very fast ride.

Now let me tell you one other little story. YEARS ago my aunt realized she would never have a certain topaz placed in a setting. It had been given to her by her X husband and she was married now to my uncle. On my 16th birthday, she gave me that stone. It was huge and clear and was my birthstone and one day....I could have it set in a beautiful mounting.

NOT!

One day I would have an old box from my old days with stuff I never went through. That day I would be moving. The men had packed up our house and were pulling out and the new owners of our house had arrived to take possession. I watched my husband drag that box to the street where a small pile of trash would be picked up the next morning. Of course you know what was in that box.

If I had the choice of having one of the two back I would go with the poetry.

Oh well, staying detached is best. We all loose small pieces of ourselves in this life. Wouldn't it be grand if we could loose weight as carelessly as I tossed those items in the trash? LOL!

Hugs to each of you,
Melissa

The Book Nook

That's what I'd call it if I had a bookstore. It would look like that store featured in "You've Got Mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks...well, that is what the front would look like, all quaint and peaceful. In back, it would be the size of Amazon with escalators and room upon room where hundreds upon hundreds of holograms would play like movies and you could jump in and BE Princess Leia if you wanted to, or watch The Velveteen Rabbit exactly as you imagined it to be...or dig in the garden or make that mad plunge down the water fall slide on the cover of the Travel Magazine.

I had a similar experience at school one semester. No, not a holographic interactive room at The Book Nook but a job where I worked a few hours a week for the library. It was quite a boring tedious job that I was totally unsuited for.



Eight years before my arrival, this university had built a huge new library of limestone and glass (it has since been added and added onto) and Hundreds and Hundreds of boxes were still stored up in the attic. Books needed to be accounted for and properly shelved.

My job was to take a LONG list of books up to the attic and search for them in the hundreds of boxes that literally WERE the floor of the attic...This was my first experience at finding a needle in a haystack.

There was no AC up there, so it was hot and dusty and I hardly knew where to begin. I opened and pulled books from one box then another and another hoping to find just ONE book on the list. I stumbled across MANY interesting looking old books. Not at all like the books we have marketed to us today.




These books were OLD in caparison.



In high school I wrote poetry and shared it with friends and read their poetry. I kept a folder with all the aquired poetry in a drawer in my white French provincial desk which sat on my pink carpet beside my white bean bag chair. I would spend hours sifting through the writings of myself and others. So when I pulled an old book of poetry from one of those dusty boxes up in that huge attic I couldn't resist the urge to carefully sift through the fragile pages.

The Copyrights were OLD


The pages looked to have been individually cut and were not uniform at all. There were additions to the book, what look like magazine articles clipped and glued in.


There are handwritten details in pencil and another 'tip in'...I believe that is what it's called.

This tip in was added from a change Ms. Teasdale made in '31 and lays over the original printed page.



I do not know if the book dates to the 1920 printing of the 1907 copyright or if the book was printed in the 1930s after the publisher added the above tip in dated Sept 23 '31 in what appears to be a handwritten update by Ms. Teasdale. Perhaps someone reading this can tell me. Perhaps the tip in was added by the consumer.

Ms. Teasdale was Victorian in her roots, married at the age of 30, divorced at the age of 45. In 1918, she received the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for her volume, Love Songs. And she quietly ended her life in 1933 one January day by ingesting an over dose and taking to her bathtub for a long soak. She was 48. (Wikpedia.com) There are more details of her life and social experiences available online.

It has been a long time since I crawled around in that attic looking for books and sneezing from the dust. I still love looking at the pages of these old Teasdale poetry books, reading her spirited, at times biting, poetry and thinking of the life lead by Ms. Teasdale. I had promised a confession in this blog but I am refraining. Perhaps you can fill that in for me. :)

Thank you for visiting my blog today.

I am off to the Thrift Store to see what I need that I don't know yet...lol!

Have a marvelous weekend!

Cottage blessings,
Melissa

The Anticipated Freshness of Fall

Although temps are still in the 90s, I have started decorating for Fall. I am taking a departure from my usual pale tones and decorating with rich Fall tones of cream, brown, pumpkin, and burgundy. These colors add so much punch and a crispness that says Fall to me.

One of the nicest people gave me an antique Armoire from England. It has amazing carved wood, small grooves, is narrow and perfect for my Dining Area. I painted it a palest green, but it looks white giving a variety of whites to my Gathering Areas.



The table beside the armoire is a curbside find. It has pretty lines and is so chippy! You can see a pink layer of paint under the white layer. I just love it because I can put a plate stand on it with pies for the holidays and use it for serving. Most of the time I have a mirror on top with a crystal service on top to magnify the reflection and with this arrangement I have a crystal pedestal cake plate holding a large cherry flavored candle and the Fall arrangement under the cake plate was .50 at the Thrift store...I LOVE the Thrift Store!



On top of the armoire is a cherished piece of Stained Glass from an old building in Decatur, TX. The flash of the camera really brings out the texture of the glass, It seemed the perfect backdrop for the candles and Fall arrangement...another Thrifts Store find for about $4.



The candlesticks are from my Thrift Shopping Mom, she can find amazing things and knows where all the haunts in Dallas are. She gave me the bobeches draped with prisms for my anniversary one year.



This is a metal Tussie Mussie a friend gave me years ago, it had a beautiful sweet fresh flower bouquet. I love the Babbles and Beads that dangle at the bottom and have added a small fall floral. You can also see more of the texture of this armoire.

I left all the original knobs and details because I just love old things and the way they were crafted. You can see in this photo the details of the hammered metal ring to open the door and the little piece of wood to secure it's closure...I love these details.



On the inside there is a shelf and 5 hooks for hanging clothing. Right now it is full of my cookbooks and extra paper towels. One day soon...there will be jackets and umbrellas hanging on the hooks.

Thanks for sharing a piece of my home and my delight for the upcoming Fall!

Cottage blessings,
Melissa