Flower bed #1- boxing complete!

This past Saturday the Hubby and I had friends over and the men were able to box in the first of the flower beds in the front!!!!

Before the front of the house/flower bed looked like this...

Now, after 4-5 hours of hard work and approximately 20 landscape timbers the front looks like this: 

Already the front looks so much cleaner, and that is only one side! We're hoping in the next couple weekends we'll be able to get the other side boxed in as well. We already have all the timbers, re-bar and nails. Once we do that we'll be checking with the HOA to find out of the paint takes care of the rule that we have to have the bricks in the front covered. If so, we're going to go ahead and take out the box-woods, since they aren't even- and we just dislike how they look. After that we'll be looking into buying a truckload full of topsoil to fill up the boxes before we plant anything else. We're still debating what plants we'll get- that also largely depends on what the HOA says. No matter what the box-woods will be coming up at some point. 

We also hung up the hammock that my boss was kind enough to give me since she no longer uses it. 

Unfortunately, it's sprinkling so I wasn't able to used it right away. However, I was able to lay on it briefly.  which gave me a lovely view of our trees covered in cicadas.  This has been a good weekend! 

Kids make me smile

I've always had a dream, that depending on how close someone is to me, may or may not be secret. That dream is to publish AT LEAST one children's picture book. Luckily, due to my job as a children's librarian, and the friends I've made throughout the years, I have many testers for my stories. I recently wrote one that I  have titled Norma the Bookworm that I sent to a friend from graduate school to share with her kindergarten classes. About a week after I sent the story to her, she messaged me on facebook letting me know her student's liked the story, but they thought it needed illustrations, so they drew me some. She then was awesome enough to mail them to me. They arrived yesterday (Friday) which actually was perfect because I desperately needed the smile they gave me since my Grandmother died earlier that morning (which is a blessing, but still sad). SO! I went through them and pulled out my favorite ones to share with you at the same time I share my story with you! I am sorry I can't share them all with you, there is just no way I can without taking up too much space.  Also, I am very excited and nervous that I have sent a manuscript (not of this story though) into a publisher for consideration. I'm starting out small because even sending it to one publisher is a big step for me. 

So I hope you enjoy Norma the Bookworm, written by me and illustrated by my friend's students. 

Norma the Bookworm

Hi! My name is Norma, and I'm a bookworm. I live inside the books at the library. What are you making that face for? Living inside books at the library is awesome! I get to go on as many adventures as I want to.

How you ask? It's easy! I just pick up a book and dive right in.

Look! I'm a pirate, sailing the seven seas. What? You say I have no arms so I can't be a pirate? NONSENSE! With books there are no limits.

I can be an astronaut and fly to the moon! You know that it's a giant ball of paper right? Those craters are actually bites from all the bookworms that have flown there already. I bet you didn't know that.

I can be an archaeologist, traveling around the world digging up artifacts that tell the stories of our past. Look! There's a mummy!

I can be a dancer, twirling and leaping on stage! What's that you say? I have no arms... why are you focusing on my lack of arms? I'll just be an Irish dancer!

Or I can be a knight, rescuing a princess from a vicious dragon! Uh oh....that dragon is looking at me like I'm a snack. You know, I've heard that they think bookworms are delicious. I think I will go before he confirms it. 

But what I like best is that no matter how many adventures I take, I know I can go on more just by diving into a new book. I love being a bookworm. 

Awww, the library is closing. Time to take a nap before my next great adventure! (Meep, meep meep, meep -this is the sound of a bookworm snoring). 

THE END

CSA Cooking: Week 1 Swiss Chard and Cheddar Quiche

This year the Hubby and I decided we wanted to try signing up for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) where we pay them a lump sum at the beginning of the season and we get however many weeks of fresh produce. The produce varies week to week depending what is in season and what the farm is growing. Since it is just the two of us, we decided to split it with my parents- which worked out this year because we can admit we wouldn't have been able to afford signing up for it by ourselves.

Anyway this week is the first week of our CSA and we are SO EXCITED! We pick up our box of goodies on Tuesdays and on my way home from work I drop of my parent's half at their house. This week we got strawberries, green onions (gigantic ones), beets, sweet potatoes, asparagus, radishes, spring greens and swiss chard. We ate the spring greens the first day but we had never cooked, or even eaten, swiss chard so we had to figure out what to do with it.  I decided on this Swiss Chard and Cheddar Quiche from Real Simple. However, we didn't have ALL the same ingredients they called for, and some additional ones, I altered it some.

This is what I started with :

Ingredients: 

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 bunch swiss chard (we actually had half a bunch)

1 green onion chopped (ours was huge)

1/2 cup regular egg substitute
1/2 cup egg white subtitute

3/4 cup evaporated milk

kosher salt and black pepper

1/2 cup cheddar cheese, shredded

1 prebaked 9.5 inch pie crust

If you have to make your pie crust, do that first. That is what I did- and I used dried out chickpeas to weigh down the bottom of the pie crust when I baked it so it didn't puff up. Then on to the quiche itself!

1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

2) Chop your swiss chard and green onion(s) into bite size pieces. Heat the tablespoon of oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the chard and onion and cook until tender. 

3) In a bowl, beat the egg substitute, evaporated milk. Season with salt and pepper (I would suggest around 1 teaspoon salt- I used less and it was not enough). Add the cheddar and the chard mixture and mix it all up. Pour into the pre-baked pie crust and bake until set, 35-40 minutes. 

After the quiche is done baking let cool for a few minutes  before cutting into it. Then serve it up and enjoy!

So far we are enjoying the CSA, but it is also only week one. The only problem that I have encountered is that usually I do my grocery shopping on Friday and I have the next week's meals planned before I go shopping (we've cut our grocery bill down by a little more than 1/3 by doing this); however, with the CSA we don't know what we're getting until I get it on Tuesday. So I'm having to plan a few more options so that the meals are more flexible. I'm finding that a little frustrating, and it makes it harder to stick to the meal plans, but we're getting there!

Planning for flower bed #1

One of the things that Superman and I have quickly discovered is that with the house and making updates to it, it is all about baby steps. We know this, we still find it frustrating, but we know it. We are slowly starting to embrace the baby steps. The next baby step is working on boxing in our flower beds in the front. Unless we can find the landscaping timbers cheaper at a local lumber yard, we will be starting off by just doing one of the flower beds at the end of the month when we have friends coming over to help. However, the first step is figuring out how many we need! A couple weeks ago during Home Depot's "Spring Black Friday" sale we got some of the landscaping timbers (granted we didn't realize they were on sale until we checked the prices online recently- oops!) so that we could use the timbers to figure out how many we needed for the length and the height that we're going to make the bed.

So today I did a very quick, and I do mean very quick, dig around the edges of the flower bed so that I could lay down the timbers we have to try to get the idea. The result was this :

As you can see, Snickers wanted in the picture too

How you can tell we are clearly just trying to get an idea- there was no attempt to cut the timbers to size :-) 

The whole point of this endeavor was to see how timbers we need to buy- we don't want to have to make multiple trips because we don't get enough. The end result will have all the top edges even with the top of the bottom step leading up to the door. We've figured we're going to need 18 more timbers, round it up to 20 for extras in case of cutting mistakes, etc. once that is done we'll lay down a barrier so that weeds can't grow up through the bed, add more dirt and then re-mulch. Right now the mulch is shredded leaves from our backyard. We still have plenty of leaves to shred- and some already shredded hanging out in the back. We also have a pile of brush to shred. So we'll have to buy the timbers, hardware for attaching it all together and the dirt- hopefully we'll have enough leaves and brush to shred for the mulch. Hopefully in June we'll be able to do the other side. I don't expect us to plant any flowers this year, but you never know, we may be able to squeeze that in as well.

Of course, watching me do the small amount of digging and laying out the timbers was exhausted work for our little hound dog, so now she is chilling out on the sofa with her Daddy, with only her nose sticking out.

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“Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who decided to stand their ground.”

All I can say about the above quote is no freaking kidding- in regards to the nuts deciding to stand their ground . I was soooo  excited to get the backyard cleared.  A month and a half ago our backyard looked like this :

Now I understand this was before everything starting blooming, but this was a couple months ago. 

NOW after everything has starting blooming our backyard looks like this: 

To be fair, we knew the area towards the middle of the picture would look like this. But the rest, that all sprouted up in the last 2 months. 

It's harder to see in this picture- but there are little green oak leaves coming up every couple feet. This is the area that I spent hours pulling up all the little saplings. 

 I know things grow quickly in the spring, but this is ridiculous. We're going to mow all the sprouts down and keep on top of them to try to keep them from coming back. We're hoping when we get to the point of planting grass seeds the grass will help smother the little oak trees. But I've also decided that oak trees are the rabbits of the tree world.

Don't get me wrong, I love oak trees. They are very important to me religion wise. Oak trees symbolize the half of the year where the sun is growing strongest. They are also a symbol of protection and prosperity (depending on your beliefs and how to treat the trees). They are simply sacred to me. However, I would also like to be able to use our backyard as a yard, not just as an area to grow brush. Even the stumps that I had sawed down are sprouting again. *sigh* oh well. It's better than it was.

In other backyard news. We have a giant ant hill that we're slowly working on getting rid of. That is not so fun. However! I also found out we have at least one chipmunk! This made me ridiculously happy!

This is our chipmunk friend, I've named him Dale.

Here is Dale again. 

The day I saw him I went around singing the little bit I know of the "Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers" Theme song- much to the amusement- maybe even annoyance- of my co-workers. So that is how I will leave you!