Melarky

I knew if Hilly was anything like Welly I wouldn’t get a good nights sleep for over a year. And yup, he’s just like his brother.

P.S. I never take a nap. Obviously I am taking a nap there, but that was some crazy wonderful fluke. Thanks Barb for letting us crash on your couch.

Mark’s favorite pie is Lemon Meringue. When we were first married I attempted to make one for him. Being newly married we didn’t have a lot of pots and pans so we just had a cheap dollar store sauce pan. This resulted in black flecks coming off into the lemon pie filling. I can’t remember why I finished making the pie with black pan flecks in it but, Mark, being so sweet, still ate it. I’m sure it wasn’t good for him or good tasting for that matter, but he ate it.

Fast forward 6 years, and I still hadn’t attempted the pie again…Until last week.

Forever now, Mark has raved about his Auntie Loraynes Lemon Meringue Pie. It’s apparently the best he’s ever had. When she still lived in Logan, I meant to ask her for the recipe, but I kept forgetting. Time went by and she moved away (far far away) to Sweden. My husband happened to talk to her on the phone a few weeks ago and he asked her for the recipe. I knew he was really excited to get it. A little while went by, and she hadn’t emailed it yet. We figured she just got busy. Her family has a large dairy farm in Sweden where they live a REAL farm life (milking cows, making cheese and butter, cooking on a wood burning stove, the whole nine yards). So I figured I’d just find a recipe that looked good online and give it a try, heck maybe I’d get lucky and it would be as good as Aunties.

Mark was really excited when I called him at work and said, “Guess what I’m making?”. I made the crust, the filling, the meringue all by scratch. I was pretty proud. It looked really good. Until we cut into it.

Anyone what a drink of pie?

During the cooking process (specifically stirring the filling) I got distracted. I was supposed to be continually stirring it, but my three year old was being naughty and my baby was heading for the toilet, so I turned off the heat and stopped stirring it. I figured it was okay. I guess I was wrong.

It was kind of funny because we took the un-cut pie over to my in-laws to share it and what they got was lemon meringue soup instead. They were all very sweet about it and ate it right up and said it tasted wonderful (I love my in-laws).

I was determined to try again. I wanted Mark to get his pie. But this time I needed THE recipe. Mark had remembered that his brother had a few of his Aunts recipes. He emailed him asking for the Lemon Meringue recipe, and he ended up sending a bunch of other incredable pie recipes with it (thanks Rob). When Auntie Lorayne gave the recipes to Rob she made special notes in her handwriting in the margins, giving tips and changing things in the recipes, making them perfect. When Mark saw this, he made a cute, very nerdy reference to Harry Potter and the book that formally belonged to “The half-blood prince” that had notes and corrections that yielded better results than the other students textbook instructions (to his defense, he did just watch all of the Harry Potter’s with Welly a little while ago).

So I finally had THE recipe. I made sure and sufficiently ignored my kids while I was stirring. I tried my best to follow the recipe exactly (except the eggs we had were so small I added an extra one). I did also add two or three drops of yellow food coloring for fun, although I don’t think it did anything. And guess what Auntie? It turned out great!

Mark was so happy. I was so happy it turned out. My in-laws came over to try it again with us, and they were so happy they didn’t have to eat lemon merienge soup. Thanks so much Aunite and Rob, you’ve made Mark the happiest man and me the happiest wife because I could finally make his favorite pie.

In another effort to try and support our community through sewing, we’re meeting to make baby blankets to donate to CAPSA. If your not familiar with CAPSA, it is a community center, where they provide a safe and confidential shelter, advocacy, and support for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Some sad stats: CAPSA serves about 450 people annually. Between July 2006 and June 2007 CAPSA sheltered 371 individuals (including 6 men, 138 women and 227 children), took 5,500 calls on the crisis line, assisted over 3,100 clients out of shelter, responded to 543 mobile crisis team calls, and received over 400 rape-related calls on the hotline.

Read more about how you can serve your community

Do you ever have times where you just don’t feel like cooking? Well last Friday night was one of those times for me. I had planned on making spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, in honor of my sons new favorite show, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. But after picking up my husband from work the appeal of getting out of the house for a bit, not cooking or cleaning up afterwards was greater than that of meatballs. My husband suggested trying a new pizza place in town. I love trying new places! Especially when it comes to good pizza. Mark had read a glowing review of Jack’s Wood Fired Pizza in the local paper that day at work and so it was decided-PIZZA NIGHT!!!

We had seen it before while driving down main street, but just barely. Their signage isn’t very good. I’m assuming they know this and for one reason or another they can’t get a bigger, more visible sign up yet. As you can see from the picture it’s kind of under an awning, hiding a bit. But their lack of a more visible sign from main street doesn’t stop people from coming in, lots and lots of people!

Read the rest of this review

Welly loves to do projects with me, and if we’re hanging out together you can usually hear him say “We’re doing guy stuff…”. Doesn’t matter what we are doing, it’s “guy stuff”. He has also started referring to any hardware store as the “guy stuff store”.

Yesterday we went to my dad’s garage to visit Scotty (he was finishing a project that I’ll let him post about, but let’s just say it’s incredible and I can’t wait to read about it on his blog). We stopped by Cal Ranch first and picked up some little leather gloves so he could have gloves just like daddy (he’s pretty dang cute in those “glubs” as he calls them).

He was really good the whole time we were there, and put his hearing protection on while Scotty was using any power tools. It was getting a little late, and we were about to head out when I looked over and saw Welly crouching in the doorway nodding off then snapping his head back up (while the orbital sander was blaring). I quick woke him up before he could get a power nap in before bed time and we said good bye to Scotty.

I love doing guy stuff with Welly, and I can’t wait until Hilly is old enough to join in.

UPDATE: I just went to my brothers site and saw that his wife posted about the project he was working on. Go check out the Adirondack Chair Scotty made.

We sent some pictures of the amazing Pac Man blanket Mark’s sister, Holly, knit for our son to spritestitch.com (spritestitch is a video game inspired craft weblog). Check it out!

Hurry over to the mom blog, for a give away! Just leave a comment and you can be entered in to win a carseat canopy! These things are great! Anyone can enter! Hurry over though, cause the giveaway ends this afternoon!

CLICK HERE TO ENTER!

There’s nothing like sitting in comfort while your jousting ostriches, fleeing ghosts, jumping barrels or saving the last human family. This is why it was a nessicity that we recover our well-used, overpressurized game room barstools.

We liked the barstools we purchased a few years back for our growing game room (/kitchen). The price was good at $20 a stool, but mostly we liked that they were plain black (flames, car logos, and the Tasmanian devil just isn’t our thing). Over the years they were well used, although most of the abuse came from our kiddos. I think I caught my son on more than one occasion stabbing the seats with a screwdriver or pencil. The plain black cover eventually started flaking off, the fluffiness was gone, basically they looked ready for the dumpster, and they have now turned into the pancake of a cushion you see now.

Continue reading about this project.

While the wi-fi at our house did a sufficient job for surfing the net, when it came to using the wi-fi to steam media, it did a less than stellar job. We mostly noticed it when someone would use the microwave the same time we were steaming a movie from our computer upstairs to the TV in our family room downstairs. We tried a few different solutions to fix it, but came to the conclusion that wiring our house with CAT-5e would be worth it for us. Often we stream media not only to the TV in our family room, but to the arcade computer in kitchen/dining room and to Welly’s arcade computer in his room as well. So there was no doubt it would get well used. It not only improved our streaming capabilities it eliminated the mass of endless feet of cable cords we had rolled up under the desk.

Mark tried explaining to me the technical side of the project, but it didn’t all get through. I must have asked him a million times, “Now why are we doing this?”, “How much is it going to cost?” and “How many holes are you going to make in the walls?!” and “Why are we doing this?”, but he assured me it was going to be great.

Mark did a lot of research on the internet using mainly Instructables to help him. Monday Mark took the day off and along with his brother-in-law, Gary, wired our house.

Continue reading about boring wiring