Posted by barb on Mar 1, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts This time around I decided to try Bitch, PhD’s suggestion of using colored sugars or rainbow sprinkles anchored in the horses with butter. (I had thought about using colored sugar, etc., but couldn’t figure out how to make it stay in the horses – I might be able to do complex integrals, but anchoring sugar in a cake pan with butter is just too hard to figure out on my own.)
I tried lots of different sprinkles to see what would turn out best – several colors of sugar, rainbow jimmies, rainbow nonpareils, rainbow sequins. After loading up the horses, I put the pan in the freezer for a few minutes while mixing up the batter. This kept the sprinkles in place when I put the batter in the pan.
I’m not sure it turned out better than the colored batter attempt:
The jimmies, nonopareils, and sequins all ended up melting into the cake, though they did still keep their colors basically in the shape of their respective horses. The sugars seemed to slop all over, despite my best efforts to clean up the pan before adding the batter. The purple actually looks pretty good, and the blue and purple show up much better than the pink and green. Hmm…I didn’t have any of the crystal-type decorative sugars…I wonder if those would have worked better. I have one other idea to try, too; though, I’m beginning to think I might be stuck frosing the horses after baking.
Tags: baking
Posted by barb on Feb 21, 2006 in
Crafty Me,
Pictures I spent much of this long weekend scrapbooking. Saturday Sandy and I got together with Laurie to introduce her to the fine world of scrapbooking. Though, we didn’t actually get much scrapbooking done – we spent almost all of our time together shopping (!).
Sunday, though, I started working on my “Wedding Odds ‘n’ Ends” book (honeymoon, bachelorette party, rehearsal dinner, girls getting ready, etc.). My previous wedding books were all done in blues and yellows (our wedding colors), but this album I finally got to start using some of my other fun papers. Here’s a picture of Sunday’s creation (it says “Becoming Beautiful…Isn’t Pretty):
That spread took forever to make – I’m noticing that each spread I work on is getting more and more elaborate. I’ll need to start dialing it back if I expect to ever get caught up in my pictures!
Yesterday was a government holiday, so I spend the day scrapbooking and watching 24 DVDs. I finished 4 more spreads (working nearly all day!):
Tags: scrapping
Posted by barb on Feb 20, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts I tried baking with my carousel bundt pan again – this time I didn’t make the mistake of topping it with powdered sugar, and I think it turned out better than last time. Instead, this time around, I took out some of the batter before filling the pan, colored it, and then put the colored batter into the horses. Then I filled the pan with the uncolored batter, and baked it. I think the horses came out a bit better, though the colored bits slopped out of the horses.
I have one other idea to try, and I might do that next weekend. Any other suggestions out there?
Tags: baking
Posted by barb on Feb 20, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts Last weekend:
This weekend:
Posted by barb on Feb 8, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts I took a quick trip to Minnesota last weekend, where my Dad gave me a cold, so I’ve been in my jammies for the last two days. The room has finally stopped spinning enough for me to write up a quick post.
I flew out on Thursday, and got to have dinner with Sweetie and her sweetie, Jeff (too many Jeffs!). Poor Jeff was in for a grilling, but he came through with flying colors. (My first question was what makes him good enough for my best friend, and his response was that he probably isn’t good enough – good answer! Not that he’s a not a good man, but no one is good enough for my Sweetie.) After dinner, Sweetie and I had some “girl time”, but I’m not at liberty to divulge anything that we talked about (like Las Vegas, what happens during girl time stays in girl time!).
The above pictures are my mom’s cats. Alexis (on the left) was actually originally my cat, but Mom got attached, and wouldn’t let me take her with me (actually, I couldn’t take her with me when I first moved out, but later, when I could, Mom wouldn’t let me). Allie has been a part of my life for 17 years, and I probably won’t see her again. But it was really good to see her on this trip – she’s gotten really thin, and has kidney disease, but perked up while I was there. I’m not sure if that’s because I was there, or because of the fluid treatments that my Mom has been giving her (probably the latter), but I’m glad I got to say good bye.
Callie, on the other hand, is a bit of a terror. Mom and Dad have a lot of antiques and collectables at their house, and many of them have had to be put away, because Callie likes to knock things off places she wants to sleep. She’s also a clutz. But she’s cute and fuzzy, so she does her job.
Read more…
Tags: trip report
Posted by barb on Jan 30, 2006 in
Crafty Me,
Pictures I haven’t been blogging much – if you can believe it, I’ve had better things to do (!) I’ve had many blogging ideas, but instead, have been spending my evenings on scrapbooking our wedding reception (it’s only been a year and four months, maybe I should wait longer 🙂
Here are a few pics of what I’ve been up to:
Tags: scrapping
Posted by barb on Jan 29, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts One of my Christmas presents from my parents was this cool bundt pan in the shape of a carousel. Tonight was my first attempt at making a cake with the pan. I used a Death by chocolate bundt cake recipe from Recipe Source.
The cake turned out really well; however, I wanted to try and bring the carousel out more. My first thought was to sprinkle it with powdered sugar. As you can see in the picture, that was a big failure. The carousel animals were visible in the cake, but completely disappeared after I sprinkled the powdered sugar.
Next time? I’m not sure. I’d prefer not to have to frost the animals all individually, but it may come down to that. Any ideas out there?
Tags: baking
Posted by barb on Jan 23, 2006 in
Cute Pets,
Pictures 
Artemis does not have a diaphragmatic hernia. In fact, she may not have any problems at all, other than a curved-in chest cavity (so smaller lung capacity) and perhaps some scar tissue. If she were diseased, then there ought to have been some change in the last 6 months, but her chest cavity looks exactly the same as it did in her previous x-rays. Plus, she’s gained a little weight since then (she certainly didn’t need to gain waight, but the vet pointed out that often weight loss is a symptom of disease).
So, it looks like we have a healthy kitty who just has some trouble breathing because her lungs are smaller than they should be. Yay! (for the healthy kitty, not the smaller lungs) We’ll keep an eye on her, as we always do, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. < sigh of relief >
Tags: pets
Posted by barb on Jan 23, 2006 in
Cute Pets,
Pictures 
Artemis is at the vet again today for more tests in her ongoing saga. About a year ago, we noticed that she was breathing hard pretty much all of the time. Last June, the vet took some x-rays and saw what looked like a mass in her chest cavity. After some steroids, he concluded that he was confused – it could be cancer, and if so, she wouldn’t be around very long, it could be her anatomy (she has a divit in her chest, so there could be stuff going on that they don’t know about). The advice we got was to either take her to the expensive clinic for lots of tests (lots of stress on her), probably for a diagnosis of cancer or to wait for the cardiologist who periodically visits our clinic to have a look at her x-rays.
We decided to wait. Of course, we didn’t know that it was going to be 6 months before the cardiologist visited. He came to our clinic two weeks ago, and looked at her x-rays. He didn’t see cancer (plus, if was as bad as the original vet had thought, she should have been in bad shape by now). Instead, he thinks it might be a diaphragmatic hernia – the stuff that the original vet said looked like a mass might be intestine coming into her chest cavity. He left us feeling very good about her chances of living a long life, if we find that it is a diaphragmatic hernia and get it repaired (major surgery, but he reassured us that the mortality rate is generally very good).
When our normal vet returned to the office (she was away at a conference last week), she had an associate call us to arrange a barium swallow for Artemis – this should show them if, indeed, she has intestine in her chest cavity. However, the vet that Andrew talked to also cautioned that if the liver is coming through to the chest cavity that there could be other complications to correcting the problem.
So, now she’s at the vet today for her barium swallow. I’m telecommuting, as usual for Mondays, and the house feels so empty. The boys are here, but they haven’t moved from where there were when I woke up this morning – Artemis usually follows me around a bit, and demands attention while I’m at the computer. I miss her. Send her some good mojo today.
< Side Note > We had to take away the kids’ food for the night, since Artemis wasn’t supposed to eat after midnight for her test today. Ares was so hungry this morning, he was seeking out toy mice in the house to eat off their tails. What a silly guy.
Tags: pets, suckitude
Posted by barb on Jan 2, 2006 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts Happy New Year everyone!
Andrew and I returned from our trip on Saturday, and I’ve been lazing around the house ever since. I put a few pictures up in a Flickr set, and put all of them up on Flickr: Christmas in Montreal.
I’ll hopefully add a few pre-dated posts in the next couple days, but I make no promises (I’m still feeling lazy, plus I have the AAS meeting next week to get ready for…at least I don’t have to travel for that one this time).
Tags: trip report
