Pressing Onward

All you crafty ladies might enjoy this site chock full of FREE Amy Butler patterns. A longtime goal/dream of mine is to make a quilt. This remains a dream as I haven’t delved much into the world of quilting, but I do like to collect ideas! These quilts are nice and bright and I can picture them in Aletheia’s room.

Over the years I’ve collected a few vintage cracker jars and I received a few as wedding gifts, but I’d like to fit out my pantry with a few more in the future. I love their simple lines and prefer their look to plastic storage containers. We keep our granola or cold cereal in one and various baking items (nuts, coconut, sugars, etc) in the others. They are hard to come by in the vintage world, at least at a decent price, but I just found them brand new at the Container Store. With prices ranging from $3.99-$6.99 I will definitely keep them in mind for the future.

So four weeks ago after the lovely announcement about our future plans and our move to Moscow, we were surprised by a call from a CREC congregation in Sulphur, Louisiana that is looking for a pastor.  John has been interviewing with them since that call and they actually flew all of us down the weekend before last for John to preach and interview some more. It also gave us all an opportunity to meet the congregation and look around the area.  So far they haven’t made any decisions on whether to call him as their pastor, or not, but at this point our Moscow moving plans are on hold.

John will be flying back to Louisiana this weekend for another round of preaching and a Q&A session. Please pray for his traveling mercies and that he might be a blessing to the congregation there. Also, please pray that our plans will soon become more solid. If you know me, I hate being halfway between two places (wherever those places might be!) and love to have a goal and destination to plan and prepare for.

We are over halfway packed now and I’ve also been working on cleaning room by room for preparation to list. I’ll keep updating as we know more.

My husband has found and shared quite a few interesting articles (I can’t vouch for all of the website’s content) with me over the past year from the Art of Manliness website. One of their latest articles is on men’s suit tailoring which I found quite interesting. Perhaps some of you will too!

Fused vs Canvassed Suits

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Brown together the beef, green pepper, onion, and garlic until the meat is no longer pink and the vegetables have softened, about 8 minutes. Drain liquid from pan.
3. Stir in tomatoes, tomato sauce, rice, salt, basil, oregano, and the cayenne, white, and black pepper (adding more pepper to taste, if desired). Spread mixture into an ungreased 9×12-inch baking pan. Top with cabbage and Colby cheese.
4. Cover and bake in preheated oven for 65 to 75 minutes, or until the rice is tender.

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Yet another recipe that we all gave two thumbs up to! I made our version with a batch of andouille chicken sausage and it was terrific. Made excellent leftovers.

For all of you Beowulf fans, don’t miss out on Benjamin Bagby’s talented musical performance in the old bard style!

In order to pare down my kitchen contents even more, I decided to part with my little stack of Everyday Food magazines that I’ve collected for the past couple of years. They are about the only cooking advice from Martha Stewart’s company that I ever use. Everyday Food was the sole survivor of the cooking magazine nix which took place last year.

Martha has a lot of amazing advice and ideas, but I also don’t think most of her recipes and interior decorating fits in with my lifestyle or budget! What with my energetic children, pets, and an entire household to run with no bevy of assistants to hand prepare take-away dessert boxes for my dinner guests…..I honestly don’t have the time to use many of her ideas.

All to say, I wanted to hang onto my EF magazines for they contain excellent recipes that are budget & time friendly, but I told myself, do you really want to cart around a pile of magazines just for a few recipes. So I went to the site this past weekend and I found that I could search for my favourite recipes and save them to an online recipe box which I can bring up at any time. Woo Hoo! Lightening the moving load and I still get to keep my favourite recipes.

Amid the process of packing boxes, I’ve put together an indoor moving sale. John has been selling off a massive quantity of books from our library.  Between the two of us we’ve held it the past two weekends and have had a fairly good turnout. I still have LOTS of boutique quality clothing that I haven’t sold. Essentially I pared down to about half of my wardrobe. There were so many items that I wore for work that I can’t fit right now and I was tired of them taking of space for my clothing that does fit!

One thing I’ve noticed is that though I have a large amount of name brand skirts, dresses and dress suits, I’ve only had a handful of women even look at them. Seems like most women don’t wear dresses or skirts that often. If any of you blog readers are on the lookout for dressy skirts or dresses, or even evening wear, let me know. I’ll be happy to take pictures of items and if you like them, you can PayPal me and I’ll ship them off to you.

Anyone local? You might be interested in glassware I’ve thinned out of my cupboards.

Brandy Snifters (set of 8)/$10

I also have a lovely set of wine glasses from France that are of a light colored glass. They look vintage to me. $5/set of 4

And a set of hefty, clear glass beer steins from Italy. $5/set of 4

Looking for work? A friend of mine referred me to oDesk as a great source for freelance jobs. I’m happy to say that after getting my profile set up and taking several proficiency tests, I’ve already completed a fixed price assignment and received invites to interview for several other positions. As of yesterday I landed an hourly assignment that should last for several months or longer.  So check it out for a great, legit way to work from home. Plus, if you are a business or individual that has more work than you know what to do with, oDesk is an excellent way to find reliable help.