Rebecca Homecca

On the first Wednesday of every month we have a company meeting. At the first of the year we sign up for a month in which to bring a snack. This Wednesday is my turn for the snack. I am having the hardest time figuring out what to bring!

Part of me wants to make something really good and homemade and in the spirit of Rebecca Homecca. The other part of me wants to stop and buy a coffee cake on the way.

Which come to think of it, is not totally out of the spirit of Rebecca Homecca.

Truth be told, I don’t think anyone would care either way. Especially if it is baked goods. They last about five minutes. Four if the meeting is boring. Which it usually is.

Oh! I just remembered that I have a lemon bar mix in the cupboard for just such an emergency. I may have just solved my own problem. I knew when I bought that it would come in handy one day.

Afterall-

Becky says: If you have to turn on the oven, it’s home-made.

Me: I will have a regular coffee

Coffee Girl: What size?

Me: Medium

Snarky Coffee Girl: Short, Tall, or Grande?

Snarky Me: Whichever one is in the middle.

I don’t know why these coffee shop people are giving me such a hard time lately. Do they not realize I have not yet had my coffee and therefore am not interested in their games?

click on the shroom above to see more pics!

I took some photos today of some of the mushrooms that were growing in our yard. We would occasionally get mushrooms in our yard in town, but they did not look like this!

My late art teacher David always had his eye out for beauty in unexpected places. I am trying to apply that and keep my eyes more open to things around me. Especially now that we are out in the wilderness where there are always new and interesting things. The second part of that is to remember to take pictures! I had to get these in quick before hubs mowed over them.

Not much interesting to talk about today. So here are some ramblings of things that come to mind. I make no promises about how interesting it may or may not be.

Big Blue, the snake, is still living in the pool. We were kind of hoping that situation would just take care of itself.

It hasn’t.

We are trying to come up with a plan, but we are not quite sure how to deal with a five foot snake. I mean, don’t they belong in the zoo or something? Of course it keeps raining just enough to keep him hydrated and stocked with frogs to eat.

Random topic shift-

I made greek style wraps for dinner tonight. Normally I would grill the chicken outside, but the skeeters are so bad, I did it on the George instead. It’s pretty easy. You just use dry Itialian dressing mix on the chicken, grill it and slice it. The sauce is plain yogurt, cucumber chopped up really small, Italian seasoning, paprika and garlic salt. My sauce did not turn out as good tonight because they only had fat free yogurt. They put that aspartame in it and it makes it taste funky. You don’t put that much sauce in each wrap, so go full fat! It tastes so much better!

I used sundried tomato wraps today, but spinach is good, as is Flat-out bread. I put the chicken, sauce, lettuce, feta cheese, and sliced red onion in the wrap and enjoy. We had it with pasta salad that my mom brought and watermelon. I made extra chicken for a meal later in the week. How Becky of me!

Topic Change! Put on the breaks!

We finally got some curtains up in our bedroom. YEAH! So now I will not be waking up at dawn anymore and I can get dressed in my room like a normal person. They are really pretty. I wanted to do 2 panels on each window, but they were kind of expensive, so I only bought one each. They are hung temporarily right now, because we don’t have any trim on the windows. I may have to break down and buy 2 more, because our windows are wider than I thought and they just cover them now. I was also thinking it would be nice to have them on rings, so it would be easier to open and close. We’ll see how it goes.

I guess that is all for now. I have been extremely tired and not feeling great this week. So I think I will head up and watch tv and go to sleep early. On a Friday…how funny that would be to me 10 years ago.

I haven’t posted any art projects lately and this one I really like. So I wanted to share.

This is a painting I did a couple of weeks ago. I really liked the orange against the blue/teal background. It was actually inspired by a picture in a furniture catalog. I loved the colors, and am always drawn to simple, single stem arrangements.

I often paint “off the page”, where only part of the object is on the page (the pot in this case). I think it adds interest. I especially don’t like when there is just a pot (or whatever) in the middle of the page. I like things floating off the page to be filled in by the imagination.

Also (here’s a little artist secret for you) I am not very good at painting containers symmetrically, and this way I don’t have to worry about it. It often doesn’t matter and most people probably would not even notice, but if it’s off, it drives me crazy.

I am also addicted to orange right now. I am working on some orange poppies that I’ll hopefully post next week.

Stayed tuned!

After moving in here, we noticed the mosquitoes were quite bad. We commented on it to one of the neighbors, and he assured us that it was not as bad as it usually is.

uh oh.

That was a couple of weeks ago, and it has gotten quite a bit worse. I feel like I am in that movie The Birds except with mosquitoes.

I would like to take a moment for a side story about the movie The Birds. I have clear memory of watching that movie at my Gram’s house when I was like 9 years old. Who lets a 9 year old watch The Birds? Needless to say, birds kind of freak me out to this day. But that was the great thing about going to Gram’s. You could do whatever you wanted. Although, we also watched Lawrence Welk (equally traumatic).

Anyway, as soon as I get out of my car I am swarmed by mosquitoes. So today I gathered up all my stuff (I always have a ton of stuff) and ran into the house flailing my arms about trying to keep them away. They have no problem biting you in the head. Unfortunately, because it was art class night I had to make a second trip out to the car and back.

You know it’s bad when I am actually running to the car and back. I had just made mention tonight that I do not run. I do not run to the store, I do not run down the street. No running.

Unless I am being surrounded by tiny blood suckers that buzz in your ears and fly up your nose. Then I will run.

Yesterday I went through the drive thru of a well known coffee chain to get a coffee on my way to work. It is not one that I normally frequent, but I had a gift card. I had a migraine yesterday. This is only relevant because while waiting my turn I determined that despite the fact that I had eaten breakfast about 30 minutes prior, I was starving (due to the migraine, it does that sometimes.) So I decide to order a blueberry scone along with my fat free vanilla latte (it’s all about balance people). This is where it gets strange.

The kid on the speaker box says to me “That is a nice combination. That will be delightful on this Monday morning.”

Um, whatever weird speaker box kid. Just give me my scone already.

So later that same day, I went to Jimmy Johns for lunch, because they serve magic sandwiches there. They always make me feel better when I have a migraine, on account of the magic (I think it’s the bread). Anyway, I order the ham and cheese (which is not my usual, but I am out of sorts this day). I imagine they probably make a hundred ham and cheese on any given day, it’s a pretty standard sub.

I am waiting for said ham and cheese and the sandwich wrapper kid says to me “This is a good looking sub”.

Why is everyone providing commentary on my food choices?

The other day hubs came across a blue racer in the yard (hubs 1 – snake 0).
Today, I saw some movement in the water feature in our yard and there is another blue racer, except about twice as long.
So all you folks that gave hubs crap for killing the first snake are more than welcome to come rescue this guy from his impending doom. He’s all yours.

Since Hubs is in training all day, I went on big adventures all morning. First I went to the Farmer’s Market. I only picked up a few things, but don’t they look tasty? I got my favorite onion bag (2 white, 2 yellow, 2 red), some strawberries, red potatoes, and Italian herb pitas for pizza.

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Then I went an got a pedicure. I did not document this with a photo. I don’t want some foot pervert finding my picture. It was awesome, you sit in a massage chair while your feet sit in a little hot tub. Then they massage and exfoliate and put a mask on your feet.  I got them painted a nice bright pink for summer. And I had a gift card, so it was free. Love That!

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Then I went to what was billed “A French-style Market”. We here in America call them sidewalk sales. It was kind a let down.

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Next on the agenda was a Bizarre Bazzar. This was, essentially, an arts and crafts show for hippies. You could smell the Petuli for blocks. Of course the best fun people watching.

I wish I had the guts to take a photo of the woman with the suitcase head on because it was classic. Her lipstick matched the ensemble, despite it’s poor application. I think you get the idea from this with the hat, highwater pants, and  the suitcase(?). Where is she going?

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For complete culture shock I then went to an art show in a very fancy part of town. This time the smell of spray tan and botox filled the air. There was some really nice art on display. My trip was cut short because it started to rain pretty hard. As you can see the artwork is covered in plastic. I was able to get a hot dog, chips and a drink for lunch for only $2. I thought that was a good deal and I am always a fan of eating on the street. I ran into some art class friends there too.

For more pictures of my adventure click on picture of my farmer’s market loot.

My big day does not end here! We have out of town friends coming to our construction site house for pizza. I am going to make shortcake with my strawberries to have for dessert.

Hubs and I went GeoCaching tonight. We left behind some lizards. He is terribly out of focus, sorry about that. Lizards are hard to photograph. They won’t hold still. This Lizard went in that hole there. I found that one, it was our 3rd stop. I did not stick my hand down in the hole to pull it out though. I just pointed at it with a long stick.

We were not able to get to the first one because of high waters. Monsoon season has made for some difficult caching. We came across this sink hole while looking for the 2nd one.

Hubs found that one and we left another Lizard. Here he is signing the log book.

There were also some downed trees from recent storms.

The last cache we did not find. It was down by the river and we are pretty sure it got washed away. That river was pretty high and fast recently, due to all the rain. We were a little surprised we could even get to the area where it was hidden.