Ticket to Ride

Rounding out the year with new games to enjoy! Great present!

THANKS!!

Chugga, chugga,

choo, choo!

Each player has train pieces, and collects cards (ie, orange, purple) to build tracks to different cities around the board.

We love games, so if you read this and live close by, call me and we'll play!

House a Fire?

I was feeling very festive and after getting some kind of lights in all 3 front windows thought, ooo! I could go outside and take a picture.

So I did.

Didn't bother to really look at it until after the holiday season so missed the opportunity for retakes.

Kind of looks like our house is on fire, right?

The flames in the picture window are leaping toward the ceiling, the middle window is engulfed in flames, and through this angle it looks like the higher up window has light from the encroaching fire.

Good thing it was just Christmas lights, a bad camera setting, and a nit wit photographer!

Cinnamon Rolls

As I raved about here, my new to me bread machine is wonderful! I've made cinnamon roll dough numerous times and they are so delicious!

I've used a couple but Crystal's from Moneysavingmom.com is amazing! Just watch out if you let the dough over rise and flow freely into the bread maker. MESSY!

However, making a batch..or two a week has to stop! Delicious, yes. Healthy, no.

Baby of Cuteness

While visiting Baby up in the chilly north I took lots of pictures with his mom's camera. None with mine. oops!

His holiday ornament is the 2010 baby boy ornament. I love Christmas ornaments. My sister and I both have our baby ornaments. She has a super cool baby buggy, and I have an etched glass toy box. I always thought hers was so superior!

Then I googled Hallmark baby ornaments. That was the ornament for the year she was born, and the toy box for mine. No one was loved more, Hallmark just had an off year (in my opinion) my year. I do appreciate my ornament more knowing it was probably the one to choose from.

I already miss holding baby.

Baby's mom, if you are reading this. Congratulations. You made a temporary escape from the constraints of Mommyhood. And I love you. And I want pictures.

Baby Mobile

It works. I like it. I now know how to make the next one better.

The beads add some light catching fun, but sure did throw a wrench in the weight distribution factor!

I had first hand evidence that baby eyes did look at it and seemed interested.

Advent

We didn't do much for advent this year, and we haven't really had a calendar for it ever as far as I can recall.

I guess chocolate every day isn't a great way to start the day. Not that I don't occasionally try. (referencing one particularly bad December morning where I had a ice cream drum stick for breakfast on my way out the door! The shame!)

This might be a simple one that is fun.
The crafter in me likes it because it is magnetic so if I was feeling really crafty I could make 24 more magnets in a different theme for another year.

If I had time. And craftyness.

Her Baby Boy!

My sister had a new baby boy!

Talk about a distracting day, I was lost in the middle of dozens of sentences today just thinking about how amazing this is!

Need Book

Thanks to Facebook here is a list accredited to BBC about books people might read in a lifetime.
They figured most people would only have read about 6 of them. It seems to be a rather odd list, perhaps most popular for a period of time?

Regardless, I just requested from the good ol' public library ( after paying a few fines arg!)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton



As I am in need of a new list of books to read (and Anna Karenina isn't catchin' on yet) I might fill a few more in.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – most of them..
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Fixing it

Sad day: Blow drier stops working one morning. Spend week without blow drying hair. Some questionable hair days.

Happy day: We take apart hair drier, clean, clear, wiggle wires, put back together. Blow drier works. Bad hair days can no longer be blamed on broken hair drier.

Now what?

I looked at Target while I was waiting to have time to take it apart and found that hair driers are anywhere from about 18 dollars and up. Some cute patterned ones were 20. I could swing 20 bucks so my hair doesn't look like my head is exploding chaos. But by doing that, I'm spending 20 dollars on something I already have, and throwing away something that obviously could be fixed.

I'll start scoping out good hair driers in the event it breaks again, but for now an old hair drier is still working and blowing my hair in all directions.

Quick Hike

By the stables in Palmer Park. It is a short loop trail, but has some good elevation gain and great views. On ambitious day go twice or thrice.

Overview look

Wonderful clouds, sun, and atmosphere view.

Carmel Apples

Invention Idea - Caramel that is not individually wrapped. Waste of plastic and time. I've heard from a good friend that we can make it, so perhaps I'll try that next time.

And I lost the Popsicle sticks. So we went "green" and used forks. They made it look fancy!

Ohhh...so delicious and difficult to eat. But yum!

We spent time eating and carving pumpkins on Halloween this year.

Muddy Buddy Mmm

Love Chex Muddy Buddy Mix. Cannot make again soon. It is gone. Too good!

I heart Colorado!

In an effort to keep my heart healthy and stay out of the hospital needing heart repair I went for the first of hopefully several hikes. That sounds desperate. I don't want heart repair in 40 years.

I love Colorado. It is so beautiful. And the parks IN the city are amazing. An hour hiking, felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, and only saw 2 people outside of the parking lot!

Love it!

Summit with a View

Finally!

I've hiked to the top of Pikes Peak twice and never seen much of anything. Once was during the summer and by the time we got to the top in the afternoon it was IN a cloud and we could barely even find the summit house. The second time was my fault, it was a night hike and so !duh! when you get to the top you see sky, maybe a light or two between clouds, and then scurry back down.

This Wednesday was different!

The lazy way this time, a ride up the cog railway took about an hour. From the city Pikes Peak looked a bit cloudy but up top was above the clouds and it was beautiful.

Puffy clouds floated past and we looked down on a fluffy blanket of clouds hanging out below other mountain tops.

The clouds followed the mountain range north and south. Below you can see the cog railway track.

Taffy Apple Tartlet

Not the best pictures but they were delicious!

Better warm than not, and I liked the ones without the peanuts on top.

It is from a Pampered Chef recipe book.

I especially enjoyed the home grown apples (thanks mom!) and the melted Carmel at the bottom!

School Blog

If you haven't checked it out, More Than the ABC's is a blog I started this fall for my students, parents, and classroom. I love being able to share videos, pictures, and info quickly and easily on the blog.

I plan to stick with the same types of posts and format for the year but after reading The Other 8 Hours which I talk about here, and here, and here I wondered what else might become of such a blog someday.

What would I do if I didn't care if I failed, or even better...knew I would succeed?

Start a teacher blog that would promote great books and programs, and be an amazing resource for parents and students. I would want to encourage families to help raise independent thinkers in a supportive environment where they know more about the world around them every day. Students are excited and able to experience something new and encourage to try out new ideas.

I keep searching for a website that has those wonderful creative classroom ideas that sparks an interest in me as a teacher and could be supportive to parents who were reading it as well. I find a few that are nice, but still haven't seen that great ONE! Hmmm...

Book: Water for Elephants

Thanks for passing along the book Kate.

I was a bit surprised to feel as if I was not only reading a story but learning how a circus works. It had a few "The Notebook" moments regarding an elderly person telling the story looking back on their life which is an interesting storytelling method.

I spent a few more days on this book compared to my usual read it in a day style. I probably got a bit more into it because it was spread out over time. However, the books I read in a day or two are usually because they are SO AMAZING I can't put them down.

So...somewhere inbetween.

Awaiting a full room

I labeled this post "not so good things" comma "good things"

The freshly painted empty closet of my new niece or nephew. This is an incredibly good thing because my sister and her husband will be amazing parents.

And I know the baby already has more than will fit in the closet as soon as it gets arranged in there. Another amazingly good thing and a testament to the generosity of others.

And a place to create a room for a baby is a wonderful thing.

Except when I don't get to see it.

Or feel the baby kick before it is born.

Or most likely be there when it is born.

Or get to see the looks of joy on my sister's face.

Or melt at the tiny hands and feet.

Or help to decorate the room.

Or fold some tiny baby laundry.

Or see the baby every few days, or weeks...sigh...or even months.

Or buy a cute outfit at...(let's be real) a garage sale, go home and disinfect/wash it and go put it on unborn yet desperately waited for baby.

It's a good thing.

Except when it's not a good thing.

Breadmaker!

Have you ever felt like perhaps there is someone out there, a long lost sister that you've been missing.

INSERT

Karin's New To Her Bread Machine

The basic recipe. I am planning on experimenting outside this one this week. I would prefer to make some higher nutritional quality bread sooner than later. But I love knowing everything that is in my food.

SWEET!

Flour (unbleached at least...) on sale for .99 cents. That way I can know how much my loaves of bread cost.

The beauty herself!

isn't she lovely...

isn't she wonderful...

Pickled Peppers

What fabulous green jalapenos!

30 Tomatoes

6 Onions

4 green peppers

1 red pepper

5-8 jalapenos

2 cloves garlic

*clink*

cans sealing!