Pantry Makeover

This year for the holidays Superman and I requested that family give us gift cards instead of actual items. The main reason for this, is our desire to get things done around the house! That is one of the best gifts anyone can give us! So first thing we decided to do was fix our pantry shelves!

When Superman and I first moved into our house we were in a rush to get things set up so we could start making it our home. Also, to be truthful, we just closed on the house, we were broke. So we bought the cheapo $10 plastic shelves at the local home improvement store to serve as our pantry shelves. While they worked, it irritated my CDO (it's OCD but with the letters in alphabetical order, like they should be) to no end that I COULD NOT ORGANIZE IT because the shelves were too far apart to really do it right. So one of the first things we KNEW we had to do was fix the shelves. So we went to Home Depot ( we LOVE Home Depot) and got the metal shelves, I think they are associated with ClosetMaid but I'm not 100% sure on that.

So now Superman and I have wonderful metal shelves in our pantry that allows me to organize the pantry. It also means things don't fall off the shelves every time I try to get something out so I can cook.

So yay! That was our main project for today. Although, we (and by we, I mean Superman) also replaced the spray nozzle on our kitchen sink, and made the first change in our bathroom makeover by installing a new shower head. Next up is painting!



~)O(~ Elfie ~)O(~ 

The War to Clear the Backyard: The Battle of Oak and Pine

I've decided that the backyard fight isn't a battle.. it's a war because it's going to be fought in parts. So the second battle happened yesterday and on our side it was myself and my Dad against the backyard. The focus was clearing the stack of fallen wood that Superman and I had accumulated next to the house. I also wanted to start clearing some of the smaller trees, pulling them up from the roots if possible so they wouldn't grow back. However, some of them, mostly the oaklings (baby oak trees) I ended up just having to cut because they were growing from the roots of the big oaks. So while looking out the back window it might not looks like a lot was done, in fact a lot was, so I'm going to go ahead and declare the Battle of Oak and Pine ( so named because we have mostly oak and pine trees) a victory.

We filled up Mom and Dad's van about half full of wood- all cut down so it will fit- this picture is from the side

And the van from the back. Now if you're looking at this picture and saying to yourself "well the wood on top looks a little wet" that's cuz it was. It started raining on us about an hour before we were done. It had been sprinkling off and on but no, it started RAINING. But did we stop? No! Because we're stubborn...and maybe a little insane. 

While Dad was sawing away to cut down the pile of wood, I was pulling up some of the baby pine trees that were taking over our yard. This made me pretty sad cuz I LOVE PINE TREES but it needed to be done. I left two nicely sized (but still baby) pines. If they will remain but the time we're done...I'm not sure, but for now they will. One plus side from doing this was that my work gloves smelled AMAZING for a while.

This was before the Battle of Oak and Pine (you can't see the wood pile here)

After the Battle of Oak and pine, you can see one of the pines that I'd like to leave for a bit there on the left, but you can also notice a lack of little pine trees all through the middle, also a lack of the oaklings around that middle-ish tree (ok the left most middle-ish tree)

So there you have it, photographic evidence of the victory that was the Battle of Oak and Pine.

Battle of the Backyard...

On December 1st I decided that it was time to start attacking the backyard so that when spring comes around it might be usable... I'm thinking that a hammock at least would be nice, especially so that I could go outside to read :-)

When we started the backyard looked like this :

Only less green and more leaves EVERYWHERE.. and I do mean everywhere. I'm pretty sure there are more fledgling trees growing as well.

Now....after this many bags of leaves, that didn't really make a dent....

And filling this hole left from a fallen tree trunk with leaves (not that you can tell from this picture that it is a hole).....

Now the backyard looks closer to this:

Since I'm pretty sure the only reason the pictures look any different is because this one doesn't have all the baby trees in bloom I've decided that for this first Backyard Battle... the backyard won. 

However, we do have a nice stack of wood piled up in the back for my parents to use in their fireplace. Right now though, it attracts squirrels and that entertains the cat.

~)O(~ Elfie~)O(~

Holidays in our house!

The time has come! It is now officially the Holiday season (although for me, the Holiday season starts the middle of September with the Autumn Equinox, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years providing the holidays of that Holiday season) ! Specifically, it is time for Yuletide decorations and this is a more exciting holiday season than normal for Superman and I, since it is the first we are celebrating in our house! Before I actually started decorating I had talked to my Mom about going through any of the decorations she and my Dad decide they don't want to keep so that we can raid them for any decorations we can use! (We are very happy about being mostly furnished by early relative, free stuff from friends, and free stuff from previous places of work and have no problem extending that furnishing to decorations as well). However, as I started decorating for Christmas I realized we have SO MANY decorations already. Now, don't get me wrong, I fully intend on going through my parents discarded decorations, but right now we have far more than I thought we did. I'm sure once we finish the basement and have both an entertainment room AND a dining room, the amount won't seem quite as great, but as of right now, we have a lot, and I LOVE IT! Now.. for the pictures...  

I got the ceramic tree from my Mom

It isn't the Winter season until the penguin tree
goes up :-) 

Decorations on the piano!

There are only two of us, well, four if you count the dog and cat,
but I collect stockings apparently.

We have a Morvian start in the half moon
and awesome window clings from Target
around the door :-) 

That's it for now! Holiday Blessings to all!
~)O(~ Elphie ~)O(~

Hurricane Sandy = Baking

I don't know what it is about storms, but they make me bake. During Snowmageddon I baked cookies pretty much non-stop. To the point that my husband and I walked through 2 feet of snow in order to get more butter. This time, it's been trying out two recipes included in a new mystery series I've fallen in love with  by Bailey Cates (she has an awesome blog written by the main character of the series here). The first book is called Brownies and Broomsticks  and is definitely loads of fun! I suggest you check them out if you like the cozy mystery genre! Anyway! Since this series is the Magical Bakery mysteries, at the end of Brownies and Broomsticks Ms. Cates includes two recipes : Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies and Chedder-Sage Scones. During this, the first day of true Hurricane Sandy weather here in VA, I've made both recipes. LOVE THEM.

Brownies after cooking. 

 First up was the Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies. The picture to the left is of the batter prior to baking, and of course the novel the recipe comes from! This was my first time making brownies from 100% scratch and IT WAS SO EASY! Usually I'll just buy the packages because I thought it was way easier than making them from scratch. Nope, not true at all. These are SUPER easy and SUPER delicious. These are, by far, my favorite brownie recipe I've ever had. You can bet on seeing these in the future if anyone asks Superman and I to bring dessert to a get-together.

Now, next up, the Cheddar-Sage Scones. Again, my first time making scones! Lots of firsts today! These are also super easy! I never realized that making scones takes pretty much no time at all! Ok, I don't know if that applies to all scones, but definitely does to these. What took the longest (other than the actual baking of the scones) was actually chilling the butter. But they are delicious! Yay!

Now, just for fun, since the recipe comes from a novel that involves herbal magic I'm going to share folklore about sage!  Sage is generally known as a cleansing herb, both if digested and burned. Native American tribes, and later on New Age religions (and possibly other older Pagan religions) use sticks made of dried sage as a type of incense to purify a room of negativity. The smell is wonderful, especially if you combine it with another type of herb or plant, like cedar or juniper.  In addition to burning dried sage for purification, sage is believed to promote longevity and is an important part of diets that promote healing. There is an older saying : Eat sage in May and live for aye [ever].
Folklore surrounding the gardening of sage includes the idea that planting sage yourself in your own garden is bad luck, a stranger  should be found to do the work for you. I personally think a friend should be used, because there is at least a known, positive, connection there. The other tidbit of folklore surrounding the gardening of sage is that a full bed of sage brings ill luck, so one should always make sure that the plot, bed, or pot is shared with another plant.

So there you have it! Where I got two recipes that I tried today and love and some fun folklore about sage!

Enjoy!

~Elphie ~)O(~

May your hands always have work for you to do.....

Pictures in the Living Room! (Some of them)

We really are almost done unpacking our boxes! We have a box of coats left, and we have a box of "study" stuff that is open, I just have to suck it up and finish unpacking it all. We've also gotten almost everything hung up! The only things left are my degrees and a painting a friend's brother made me of a UMW building, but I think that needs to be reframed since I think the frame is broken.







As you can tell. We have a lot of pictures and wall hanging things! Everything got hung up upstairs since downstairs isn't finished and I just don't see the point of hanging stuff up in rooms we don't use yet.

I LOVE this picture. It's a signed
print that Mom and Dad got me for my birthday
this year. LOVE IT.

I've also started moving on from working just on the stuff on the inside of the house, to also working on the outside. Yesterday, I spent a couple hours outside working on weeding the front flower bed and pulling up the damaged boundary markers. It's not the best weeding job ever, but since I didn't have any gardening tools, just a rock, I'm happy with how it turned out. I'll be putting newspaper down around the plants underneath the mulch once we get to that point to help with weed control. The only issue is that I got eaten alive by mosquitoes which gardening. My legs are COVERED in bites and I'm trying very hard not to scratch. But still PROGRESS! I'm hoping tomorrow to be able to gather up all the fallen branches and stack them in the backyard to turn into mulch in the coming weeks (since we don't have a fire place) and rake up the leaves in the front yard that are remaining from last year (I'm guessing here).  I also need to pull up the ugly damaged garden barriers on the other side of the front steps, but there really aren't any weeds in that flower bed so it will be a lot faster. Although I was reminded that I HATE DANDELIONS! They are one of the hardest weeds to pull up. RAWRG. We also have to try to clean up the side of the house, and we really need to clean the gutters but neither one of us particularly likes ladders, but it has to be done. That's all for now as far as house updates! Hope to have more soon! :-D

Weeded front flower bed

~)O(~ Elfie ~)O(

We have a house!

It's official, we have a house! Ok, well, we've had the house since 9:45 am on Thursday, August 30th. BUT I'm just now getting a chance to post about it.

It's our house! We've got work to do on it, but it is ours. There will be a more in-depth update about our house later on, with more pictures, when I can find the camera cord and when I'm not quite so exhausted.

Dryer balls and multi-surface cleaner

One of the things I would like to do when we move is try to have a greener house. In a way because I want to use less chemicals, and in part because making my own cleaning solutions can save money, and saving money is a good thing. So the first things that we are trying are dryer balls. All dryer balls are, is wool wrapped up into a ball and felted so that they don't come apart. They take the place of the dyer sheets to help with static and supposedly help reduce the amount of time it takes to dry loads. So far it does seem like they help with the drying time, which is awesome. Static isn't an issue at this point because of the season/humidity so I'll have to try to remember to make note of that once the colder weather sets in.

The other thing I'm trying is a natural multi-surface cleaner that I also have seen all over pinterest, as well as in multiple books of mine. All it is, is white vinegar, the peels from two lemons and about a teaspoon of rosemary and you let it sit for a week and a half to two weeks. To use it you mix it half and half with water. We'll be using this after we close so that we can clean the house before we move in. I'll have to report how it does.

Book Review: This Dark Endeavor

There will most likely be a decent number of book reviews on this blog. Reading books is kinda my job and a lot of them will be YA and Juvenile books- because that is my department within the library. So here is the first of what I'm sure will be many.

I originally picked up This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppel (author of Airborn) because it was nominated for our Cafe Book program. Cafe Book is a program where librarians go to local middle schools during lunch breaks and the members of the Cafe Book group meet in the library to eat their lunch and discuss the selected books. My new job includes doing the behind the scenes work for this program which means that I was able to read the books and take part in the discussions during the selection committee meetings. This Dark Endeavor is the last of these books that I read. Ok, I listened to the audiobook, but it still counts and it was amazing. I ended up sitting in the car once I pulled into the driveway because I wanted to find out what happened next. Even with one of the committee members kind of ruining the ending for me, I still HAD to finish listening to it because I needed to know HOW it got to that ending. This is definitely a story that succeeded in sucking me in, but I guess you want to know what the story is actually about...

This Dark Endeavor  is the first book in what I imagine will be a series about the apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein. That is correct, the Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelly's famous novel. It tells the story of how Victor turned to the study of alchemy, and I'm sure eventually human bodies and medicine, but this particular story is mostly about alchemy. I don't really want to go into more detail because I"m afraid that I will get carried away and end up spoiling the story for you, as it is some of what I say next might turn you off to the story, but I beg of you, despite how it might read as I write about it, give this book a chance.

It is pretty rare for me to say that there is something for everyone in a young adult novel. If you like romances, there is romance. If you like action and suspense, there is certainly that too. If you like stories that have a touch of reality, this story has that as well, specifically in the relationship between Victor and his twin brother, Conrad and Victor's irritation with having to follow his parents rules when he thinks he knows best (like so many teenagers think they do). If you like elements of fantasy, this book has that. Like I said, there really is something for everyone in this story. However, be prepared to be frustrated at the ending, because it is a frustrating ending. If you absolutely, positively, CANNOT stand to read a book that doesn't end with happily-ever-after, you probably shouldn't read this book- but then again, I normally say I can't stand non-happy endings but I simply adored this book and am looking forward to any future additions to this series.

This book made it into the Cafe Book final selections for the 2012-2013 school year program and I can certainly see why. If you aren't a "reader", try the audio book. Heck, even if you think you might HATE this book, try it, you might be surprised.

~)O(~ Elfie~)O(~

Welcome to the Craziness

Hello! Welcome to our blog! I can't really tell you what all you might see on this blog, but chances are good it will be about motorcycles, books, the house we are in the process of buying and anything else we feel like writing about at the moment. We decided to start the blog to help keep our friends who do not live close to us, or that we don't talk to on a daily basis, informed of what is going on in our lives. I decided that today would be a wonderful day to write our first post for this blog because it is our 4th wedding anniversary. We've been excited about today for about a while because not only was it our anniversary, we were going to go to our favorite restaurant at Tyson's Corner mall : Seasons 52. It is a restaurant that focuses on locally bought food and therefore it's menu changes with the season, and often week to week. This was my second time going, it was Superman's third time. Tonight, we shared a Portabella mushroom flatbread that had a truffle sour cream on it. I had caramelized grilled sea scallops as my entree and Superman had Filet Mignon. For dessert we each had one of their specialty "shooters" (mini-desserts), I had a raspberry cannelloni one and he had a blueberry cheesecake one. Dinner was amazing. But honestly, one of the best parts of the whole evening (aside from being able to spend time with Superman) was the vase of flowers that were waiting for me when we were seated.

Aren't they GORGEOUS? I love the colors. 

So there you go, welcome to our blog, prepare to hear A LOT about our house and the frustrations of the house buying process.

~)O(~ Elfie ~)O(