O, Christmas Tree!

Meant to have this posted two days ago. Limited 'net connectivity.

Here are the pictures from the day we decorated the Christmas tree.

Hung by the chimney with care...YAY! We have a chimney!

Joe pets an ornament and Jack looks SO FUNNY

A belated Merry Christmas to all!

Recipe: Healthy Mushy Crunchy Apple-ey Sweet Potato

I love sugar. I also hate it. I avoid it whenever I can. I also eat tons of it whenever I can. When I eat ANY AT ALL, my brain is (typically about five hours later) affected by a chemical imbalance which causes me to descend into a pit of depression and paranoia (aka "getting a case of the crazies.")

This recipe was a result of a 29c/lb sweet potato sale at the Commissary and my desire for a breakfast food that won't leave me needing a straightjacket by lunchtime.

Healthy Mushy Crunchy Apple-ey Sweet Potato

a sweet potato

an apple

half a handful of pecan pieces

a small squirt of honey (one to two tablespoons)

a sprinkle of cinnamon

Bake the potato at 350 degrees for an hour to an hour and a half, or until you can easily stick a knife into it and the skin separates from the potato. Slice the apple into bite-sized pieces and cook it in an ungreased dish at 350 degrees for half an hour to 45 minutes, or until you can easily stick a fork into the pieces. Remove the skin from the sweet potato (it'll be very easy, as the skin will be separated from the potato and will have the same texture as paper. I use my fingers.) Discard the skin. Smush the sweet potato. Squirt honey on it. Sprinkle pecan pieces and cinnamon on it. Mix well. Add the baked, cut-up apple bits. Stir again. Yay! Food!

Good:

1. I never knew sweet potatoes could be eaten without butter, brown sugar, or marshmallows, but I managed to cut out ALL OF THEM!

2. The leftovers refrigerate extremely well. I cook a few sweet potatoes and a few apples, Tupperware them, and voila, a week's worth of warm sweet winter breakfasts.

3. This takes so little work. The most labor-intensive part is stirring the sweet potatoes and the other ingredients...and everyone loves stirring, so that works nicely.

Bad:

1. Absolutely nothing.

My Death Sentence

    Because I never grounded myself in what the Bible says, I've been guided by worldly deceit (or, at best, worldly stupidity.)
    According to the world, a “bad person” harms others and is just generally scum. Because I met the world's definition of a “good person” – someone who doesn't harm others and does their best to be fair and to be kind to everyone – I felt pretty good about myself. I knew I was supposed to be asking God for forgiveness of my sins...but what sins? I'm fine. I don't do anything wrong. I'm a “good person.”
    So I rarely felt guilty about anything. Because I rarely felt guilt, I rarely felt the need for forgiveness. Because I rarely felt the need for forgiveness, I basically felt equal to God.
    So, there I was, reading the Bible (like a good person) when I got two big doses of truth.
    The first was: I deserve to die. If I were in Old Testament Israel, according to what's written in Deuteronomy 22, I'd have not one but two death sentences. We're not under that law anymore, of course, since Jesus's death, but God's perspective of the seriousness of those offenses hasn't changed. I still deserve death. Do you have any idea how disturbing that is? Here I am with every blessing imaginable – an amazing husband and a happy marriage; a safe, comfortable home; luxury, health, and my whole life ahead of me – when technically I earned death by rocks sometime back in 2004.
    When I came to that realization, I felt shaken and serious and kiss-the-ground thankful, like I just walked away from a car accident that should have killed me. I don't deserve to be here. Every second is an incredible gift.
    The second thing I learned about was God's perspective on obedience. Deuteronomy 28 starts off  talking about how, if Israel was obedient to the Lord, they would be rewarded with security, health, prosperity, every good thing imaginable. If they carefully followed God's commands, they'd be a great nation, a picture to the world of God's protection and favor.
    The chapter then lists the consequences for disobedience. The consequences include “curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do,” failure and loss in every area of life, and warfare so bad that the resulting famine would cause mothers to eat their own children. The disobedience warning in all its solemn horror just kept going on and on. It was unsettling.
    Anyway...I'm thankful that we're not in Old Testament Israel...and so thankful that God is with me, no matter how many death sentences I deserve.

Bedskirt to Tablecloth

Under our Thanksgiving dinner you can see the white tablecloth I just got around to finishing. (In the picture, it wasn't hemmed or anything, just a big piece of asymmetrical cloth with raw edges.)

The cool thing about this tablecloth is that it used to be a bedskirt. The bedskirt was packaged with a blanket I bought from a thrift store. Love the blanket, but the bedskirt...well, sea foam green wasn't really what I had in mind for the color palette of our bedroom. (Wow. Right after I typed that, I remembered that that IS what color we painted our bedroom in our first house. Weird that I completely forgot.)

For Thanksgiving, I cut the ruffles off, washed the white cloth, and put it on the table, with threads hanging off it and everything. Last week, I cut the shape to be more uniform. Yesterday, I hemmed the "tablecloth." No more dangly threads or almost-but-not-quite rectangular shape!

When I hemmed it, I folded the fabric so the raw edges would be tucked inside the hem so none of the loose threads could escape. Some did anyway, as you may be able to notice on the right side of this picture, but it looks better than hems I've done previously.

Bad:
1. This is an incredibly thin, cheap piece of cloth, 70% polyester and 30% cotton. Actually, you can see the table through it.
2. For some reason, the cloth smells like rotten milk. I've washed it like four times, once with bleach, and it still smells.

Good:
1. I have a white tablecloth!

10:00 PM = "Good Morning, Baby, How Are You?"

It's dark outside, and I've been awake for an hour and a half. If this were my regular schedule, it would be 5:30 a.m. right now, and I would have just gotten back from taking Joe to work (which I didn't do today.) It still feels like 5:30. It feels like if I just hang in there for a couple more hours, I'll get to see the sun come up and will have a significantly reduced chance of falling asleep in my chair.

Buuuuut...it's actually 11:38 p.m. Joe left an hour or so ago for school. New schedule: instead of 5:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., he'll be there from 11:00 p.m. to...like...8:00 a.m.

I don't know yet what that means for my schedule. Right now, I'm trying the I-sleep-when-you-sleep approach. I don't think that'll work too well,  because my birds and the UPS man and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Knology salesman aren't nocturnal, and someone has to keep them all quiet during the day so Joe can sleep. I'm actually thinking I should figure out a way to disable the doorbell.

We got three hours of sleep between the end of the old schedule and the beginning of the new. I feel bad for the guys (including Joe) who have to sit through 6ish hours of school and then do PT, all on 3 hours of sleep. Making this day-shift-to-mids-shift transition on an already-full weekday when there's a weekend RIGHT THERE seems like horrible planning to me...but the Army goes rolling along!

(Once, I had to listen to "The Army Goes Rolling Along" performed no fewer than 10 times in a row by 10 different privates suffering from varying degrees of tone-deafness. I was standing around waiting for Joe to be done with a locker inspection. He didn't have a locker at the time. Hadn't for months. The inspection took 30 minutes. Lol, Army.)

I keep looking at the window expecting the sky to be almost-sunrisey dark blue. It keeps being black.

Anyway, my exciting plans (read: attempts to keep myself from going back to sleep) include finishing a batch of do-at-home office work, finishing a batch of do-at-home Christmas shopping, and finishing a sewing project. If I have time, I'll lose a few games of League of Legends by attempting to play when I know I'm too tired to be competent.

It's 12:22 a.m. Happy Friday, everyone.

(P.S.: If you're my mom or a Country fan, you may have recognized the title of this post as a chunk of lyrics from the Phil Vassar song "Just Another Day in Paradise." It's about being super happy even when life = mundane chaos. It's wonderful.)

Candy in My Shoes!

Every December 5th without fail, right before bed, I've placed my shoes by the fireplace in my parents' house or the front door of wherever Joe and I have been living, and every year St. Nick/Sinterklaas has visited and left candy in my shoes. Last night was the night for leaving out my shoes...but I was afraid that Sinterklaas might have been too busy this year to visit everyone and would have to skip over me. I'm not exactly in his targeted age group anymore. I worried about it all week, but I left my shoes in the living room (up on my sewing table so Jack couldn't...interfere...if St. Nick left me anything) after I locked the front door. Just in case he had time for me.
 
Last night, like every night, Joe was in our bedroom getting together all his work clothes for the next day. I had already locked up the house and turned off all the lights and gotten underneath the blankets, because I knew there was no WAY St. Nick would visit us if we weren't in bed soon. I lay there fidgeting and watching the clock, seeing precious seconds tick by as Joe folded his ACUs and stuffed them into a backpack. "I need to get one more thing out of the living room, then I'm ready for bed," he said. He left the room, and I hopped up to brush my teeth.

For just going out there to get something, he sure was gone a long time. I hoped he wasn't putting out his shoes, because I had already done that for him.

He came back into the room, we went to bed, and I fell asleep as quickly as I could.

Well, this morning...you'll never guess what we found!

I LOVE TOBIES! And I also LOVE TOOTSIE ROLLS! And just the other day I mentioned a craving for Whoppers...and I wonder if St. Nick found those LifeSaver Gummies at the PX?


More St. Nick pics:

2009

2008

 In 2008, St. Nick left me a note. The P.S. at the bottom told me that he ate one of my York Peppermint Patties.

My Stunt Double (Cheap Dressform)

Dress forms are expensive. This one wasn't.

Thanks, Joe, for wrapping me up in duct tape. I couldn't breathe. It was fun.

(Once I was covered in 3 layers of tape, he cut the tape along my spine, and I was able to take the shell off. Then I taped it back together in the back where it was cut. Voila!)

Floral Print Accident

My second project, made the weekend after my first skirt, was also a skirt. (I loves skirts ^.^)

I had a simple sleevless shin-length floral print dress which I wore often (due to a shortage of other office clothes) and disliked thoroughly. Now that I don't have an office, I don't need office clothes, so I had the perfect opportunity to show the dress my true feelings. I eviscerated it with a pair of scissors.

I made three tiers out of the fabric, practiced my ruffling, and sewed the tiers back together to make a ruffled skirt.

Bad:
1. I thought it would be a good idea to turn the fabric inside-out to make it look less formal and different. It does look different...but not in a good way.
2. The tiers aren't sewn together very well, so there are some parts where...um...okay, how about a picture!

Okay. That thing that looks kinda like a hat or an anthill or a volcano is actually the skirt. What this picture is showing you is that my stitches weren't always straight, and they overlapped each other in a lot of places. Because the stitches weren't straight and because I didn't cut the fabric perfectly, in some places, the lower tier isn't even attached to the upper tier, creating gaps. None of the gaps are big enough to be noticed, though, and I could fix them if I really cared.
3. Sadly, overall, this skirt looks like what it is: rags sewn together badly.

Good:
1. I love this style. It's so cute and innocent and flirty and just fun to wear.
2. I learned how to make a drawstring.
3. I got ruffle practice.
4. I LOVE the contrast of the red thread against the navy & yellow fabric. Super-love it. Red's my favorite.

The dress, before I mangled it:

 Skirt:

Yeah, I know it's blurry. Trust me, it looks better that way.

Plaid Flannel and Duct Tape

One day while I was at JoAnn's Fabric looking for thread or something, I was digging around in the fabric remnant bin and found some green plaid flannel. Right now, I love plaid, so it came home with me even though I didn't have any idea what to make with it.

There was a tutorial over at Grosgrain I wanted to try, so I decided to use the flannel for that.

My skirt turned out kinda like that, but not. It's a skirt and there's elastic in the waistband, but that's where the similarities end. The skirt linked above is a simple circle skirt, and this is more like a kilt. When I was putting it together, there was a LOT of extra length in the fabric, and it's plaid flannel - turning it into a kilt-thing just made sense.

This is the first article of clothing I've ever made (though I did help my mom make some stuff for me when I was little.) It's messed up in a lot of ways...but I can actually wear it! (Especially if I put tape on it to make sure it stays the shape I want it to.)


Bad:  
1. The foldover doesn't stay in place. It, like, pulls to the side rather than laying flat.

But the duct tape helps with that. 
2. The waistband is super messed-up, so I have to wear a longer shirt with the skirt.


Good:  
1. The fabric. (Even if Joe thought the skirt looked like men's boxers, 'til I sewed the buttons on.) 
2. The length. Most dresses and skirts are too short for me. In this one, I don't have to constantly worry about accidentally exposing myself. (It does look pretty short in the pics. You know the public-school test of whether something's too short: put your arms straight down at your sides with your fingertips pointed, and if the garment reaches the ends of your fingertips or extends past them, it's long enough. That's what I went by.)
3. I love the seam down the middle in the back, and the slit at the bottom where I left the seam separated. The seam & the slit make me think of dressy skirts that you wear with a matching jacket.
4. I also super-love the fringe at the bottom. It only took me about an hour to pull out all the threads to make it do that. I did this at the very end of the project. Revenge for the skirt taking up an entire weekend? 'course not.
5. Joe helped me pick out the buttons ^.^

(Why, yes, it is kinda awkward to have a close-up of my rear posted on the internet.)