Tag: New year

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Goals

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“I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.”-Venus Williams

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”-Zig Ziglar

“Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.”-Viktor E. Frankl

“My life has always been about making certain I accrue the skills necessary to make my ambitions real.”-Stacey Abrams

“Pursuit of perfection is futile. Instead, I prioritize and often realize goals or tasks I’ve been aiming for just aren’t that important.”-Aisha Tyler

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Experience

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“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”- Douglas Adams

“Some days are just bad days, that’s all. You have to experience sadness to know happiness, and I remind myself that not every day is going to be a good day, that’s just the way it is!”- Dita Von Teese

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”-Oscar Wilde

“Our uniqueness, our individuality, and our life experience molds us into fascinating beings. I hope we can embrace that. I pray we may all challenge ourselves to delve into the deepest resources of our hearts to cultivate an atmosphere of understanding, acceptance, tolerance, and compassion. We are all in this life together.”-Linda Thompson

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'”-Eleanor Roosevelt

“Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, the shorter it is. People lose their capacity to walk, run, travel, think, and experience life. I realize how important it is to use the time I have.”-Viggo Mortensen


Adventures · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Happy New Year!

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“The beginning is always today.”
– Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”
— Chinese proverb

“Darkness must pass
A new day will come
And when the sun shines
It will shine out the clearer.”
— JRR Tolkien

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” (Little Gidding)”
― T.S. Eliot

“All great beginnings start in the dark, when the moon greets you to a new day at midnight.”
― Shannon L. Alder

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- New Year

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“If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.”-Robert Fulghum

“A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding…and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this.”-C.J. Cherryh, Fortress of Eagles

“Ring out the false, ring in the true.”-Alfred Lord Tennyson

At Rainbow Cake, January’s special flavors would be dark chocolate and coffee, those pick-me-ups we all needed to start the day- or a new year. To me, their toasty-toasty flavors said that even if you only had a mere handful of beans and your life went up in flames, you could still create something wonderful. A little trial by fire could do you good. After all, if it worked so well with raw cacao and coffee beans, it could work for others, including me.”- Judith Fertig, The Cake Therapist

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”-Bill Gates

“The spring, summer, is quite a hectic time for people in their lives, but then it comes to autumn, and to winter, and you can’t but help think back to the year that was, and then hopefully looking forward to the year that is approaching.”-Enya

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- New Beginnings

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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.” ― T.S. Eliot

“For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

“Don’t pass on your passions, to settle in the stale normality. Endure. Strive. Ensure.”

― Anthony Liccione

“It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.”

― Laini Taylor, Muse of Nightmares

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” – Amelia Earhart

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- A New Year!

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“The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they’re always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.”  – Norman Rockwell― Norman Rockwell

“Don’t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone.” – Alexander Graham Bell 

“I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.” – Brene Brown

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” – Amelia Earhart

“New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change.”- Sarah Ban Breathnach

Simple Sunday- New Year Edition
Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- New Year Edition

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“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier.'” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.”
– Neil Gaiman

Monthly Review And Recipe Roundup
Monthly Review · Recipe Roundup

Monthly Review And Recipe Roundup

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Sometimes when my baking projects don’t quite turn out like I think they should, I make up little stories. It helps me cope. 🙂 This one was a Christmas Eve series of texts to Kayla when the bread got a bit out of control.

To set the scene: I decided to make a new recipe for what I thought was probably nissu. This recipe was for Pulla from the Scandinavia cookbook. It called for currents, but I left them out. The measurements were all in metric and I forgot I had a kitchen scale that would measure in metric, so it took a bit to figure things out.

Here’s the first picture:

This is where it started to go a little wonky. This is my biggest Pyrex bowl. Before the rise had happened… After 8 cups of flour…

This is the dough after the rise:

Also where my texts started to get a bit silly…

“After the rise, the bread overlord demanded a warm oven…”

“Too scared to disobey, I complied with haste, in hopes that it would spare the household.”

Kayla thought it was pretty funny, but she wasn’t the one being menaced by bread gone wild. The Husband was no help, he welcomes our bread overlords. 🙂

The recipe said it “served four” and I’m not sure who it thought I would be feeding. Ice giants? Trolls? It made a ton of them!

Mmmmmm….. the rolls were delicious. They are all contained now and less menacing after being frozen.

I didn’t cook a lot this week, due to the holiday, but we did have the traditional Christmas Eve meatballs. Eric and I have added buttered noodles to our tradition and I like it.

These were just beef meatballs. Since I know where to find ground venison now, we generally add that too, but I wasn’t able to get to the store. We’ll have mixed ones for the party though. We also had salad with them.

I also figured out that although the peppermint truffle filling was a failure as truffles, it makes a great ice cream sauce. We had brownie sundaes and I made mine a peppermint one.

I also used a Roasted Garlic Chicken freezer meal, which we both enjoyed. My stomach objected to something extremely violently though and I wasn’t able to eat any of the delicious leftovers. The Husband had it as leftovers and was fine, so it was just my stomach being weird, I guess.

Now for the monthly review!

Food Review:

I made 17 new recipes and used 4 new cookbooks. I used four family or my recipes. We had a good track record of eating leftovers. I did horribly at actually making breakfasts and lunches.

Hits were the peppermint sugar cookies, the garlic chicken for the Husband, stuffed Italian meatballs, the GF chocolate Orange cookies, and the Mexican Hot Chocolate Crinkles.

Misses were the garlic chicken for me, peppermint truffles, and the chewy chocolate cookies.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, so if I figure it out, I’ll post it.

Food Goals: 

-Use the spice grinder and kitchen blow torch. 🙂

-Try to use at least one new cookbook a month.

-Make more tea blends and drink more tea!

-Use the InstantPot.

Craft Review

This month I made 4 hot pads, listed three new items on Etsy, sold 10 tea wallets, organized a little, and made two table runners. I started my Christmas skirt, but it still needs a lining and a cover for the rough zipper ends.

Craft Goals: 

– Finish two quilts from my stack of UFOs.

– Deliver the Rainbow Snowballs (When will it leave my house?!)

– Finish the second OT quilt and mail them off.

– Make a dress.

I have navy fabric ordered that has white baby dragon silhouettes and little gold crowns on it. It needs to be a sweet little dress with a gold Peter Pan collar and slightly puffed sleeves. It makes me giggle to think about it. My kids at work will love it, especially the little girls who think they are princesses. 🙂

I also really need to organize the basement and come up with a system to keep it organized. Hopefully I’ll find my serger pedal while working down there.

We’re possibly having family for the Epiphany party and want to be able to show off the whole house. The basement is a disaster from my fabric spread, the Legos, and Fancy’s proclivity for shredding cardboard. We also just found evidence that there may have been rodents nesting under the dryer at some point before we owned the house. We haven’t seen evidence of any there now, but need to get things sorted to make sure.

If you don’t hear from me by Monday night, send help… The bread overlords may have banded together with the fabric piles to take us down.

Also exciting news, my blog is almost a year old! I’ll be taking most of next week to review the good and the bad that went on this year. I’ll be splitting it up in sections, otherwise I think it would be way too long.

Let me know what you like reading about and if there are things I should change. That’s what the new year is for after all!