Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Martha #2

I made homemade laundry detergent this weekend! After roaming around Pinterest (which I'm digging!) for a while one day, I saw a link to homemade laundry detergent on Yellow Brick Home; a blog I hadn't heard of before, but now enjoy and they're from Chicago and that makes them even cooler! **deepbreath**

So, I read the blog and then a whole bunch of the comments and then thought about it for a while and decided to go for it! In the long run it's cheaper than buying *insert name of commercial laundry detergent I used to use here* and everything I read said it worked really well. I figure I can always go back to non-said detergent if I had to and instead of searching for the Fels Naptha soap somewhere here in the south, I went with user comments and grated up some Ivory instead!

Non-skin-irritating, non-scented, clean. I'll be trying it out with my next load of laundry since I finished using my other laundry detergent with my last load of laundry last night... I'll let you know how it goes!

Just Call Me Martha

A good friend of mine called me Martha Stewart after I posted a photo of my first ever made-from-scratch marble cake… well really… my first ever marble cake! It was surprisingly easy and pretty moist! You just make the batter and split it in half adding melted chocolate into one half of it! I think if I do make this recipe again, I would add a little bit more melted chocolate to the chocolate cake half so the cake would look a little darker and taste a little more chocolatey. Maybe 4 oz of chocolate instead of 3. Or maybe bittersweet instead of semi-sweet? I’ll have to play around with it sometime. The recipe I used is from here. I also made 2- 9 inch (8 inch? I can’t remember my pan sizes! Oops!) cakes in order to make a layered cake, but that was my own edit since the recipe showed 1- 10 inch round, 3 inch tall cake… It was PLENTY of batter for both or my pans!

After they were cooked and cooled and ready, I wanted to decorate the cake to match the plates/napkins/cups that we were using for my coworker’s baby shower… 

(aren’t they cute!) So that meant looking for a great chocolate frosting recipe. Also something I never attempted before! My friend PC was out of town and I didn’t want to bother her for her recipe, so after a little bit of Googling, I found out that William-Sonoma had some frosting (and other) recipe’s on their website! I figured since I was going to use their chocolate butter cream, I would use their regular butter cream as well, for colored polka dots =o)

Melting chocolate for two separate parts of this cake made me dream of having a real double boiler instead of my make-do makeshift metal bowl on top of a pot faux double boiler, but it worked… and the frosting turned out well...

 as did the cake!

A coworker told me I was the Queen of Cake… I guess that makes me:

Martha Stewart, Queen of Cake

Come back sometime tomorrow to see my other weekend Martha moment ;o)

I Was...

At work already.

I was thinking about the day.

I was unaware.

It was about 8am (central time). I'd been at work for 1 hour and 15 minutes

A gentleman who was on our board of directors asked me if I had a radio. It didn't matter what station, I just needed to turn it on.

I did. Just in time to hear the words, "The second tower has been hit, both of the world trade center towers have been hit."

It was surreal.

I don't think I really grasped it. There was so much confusion. People didn't know what was going on. Was it real? Was it a terrorist attack? What was going on?

I wasn't until I heard that the Pentagon... the place I always thought was impenetrable... was hit too.

That's when I got scared.













It was the hardest day I've ever had to suffer through work.

If This...

was all I had to move, life would have been easier!

As it is, there was LOTS more and I'm still trying to get settled in and unpack as well as spending some time reading and doing... well... nothing =o) Hopefully soon I'll be back around with updates of life and photos of my new place and such, but until then? Please pardon my absence!



Wordless Wednesday

Flashback Friday

Wait What?

Here I go, telling you I was going to go back to Wordless Wednesday's and I already failed you 3 weeks in! I'm sorry. I totally failed you. But there are reasons, I promise! The biggest of which is that I'm moving into a new apartment. The decision was made and will be executed in right at a weeks time, so you can understand that I've been busy trying to get other things done. But tonight I gave myself the night off! So you got a post about the Bears game and now this... And tomorrow, to make up for my lack of Wordless Wednesday, I'll give you a...hmmmmm... Flashback Friday. Enjoy a photo from a few years back (probably taken with a cell phone or a film camera!)

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend friends!

#40. Go to a Bears Game.

(clockwise)

1. PC & JP came with me!

2. Me in my cute new Bears shirt

3. View from my seat

4. The cup holders have cell phone holders! it was nice!!!

5. A random game shot

6. Da Bears taking a knee and saying a prayer pre-game

7. (center) Practicing