Cooking, Crafting, Quality Time with Friends

On friday night I went over to Mitch and Dom's for a game night.  When I got there, Mitch gave me the blanket she had been making me.  I somehow got KW to pose for the pic (none of my buddies usually want to pose for blog pics!)

I was so excited I took another pic.  KW caught me and said "Are you taking a selfie of yourself with the blanket?"  Yes.  Yes I was!

This is my new comfort blanket.  I've been cuddling under it after long days of schooling.  It's soft and warm and just all around WONDERFUL!

After getting my awesome new comfort blanket from my best best bestie ever, I went into Mitch/Dom's kitchen to get a drink.  While in there mitch said "Don't drink that, it's bleach"

What does it say about my character that my friends have to, very specifically, tell me not to drink bleach?  Ha!  Also, that evening I got a loaf of homemade bread that KW made.  It was AMAZING!

It was then my goal to see how many things I could make out of this delicious, delicious bread:

1.  A ham sandwich (please not there's a bit out of the top piece of bread because it smelled to good to wait to eat:

2.  An accompyment to Ham and bean soup

3.  Grilled cheese (this was, hands down, the best use of the bread):

4.  Garlic Bread to go with spaghetti (Sorry, no pic, I forgot)

The bread had wheat flour and honey and noticible hints of sunflower seeds.  It was all around wonderful..

My other cooking adventure for the week was making crockpot refried beans.  I had bought pinto beans for this specific reason over a month ago.  It was pretty easy, although, between soaking the beans overnight and then letting them cook it the crockpot, it was about 24 hours from start to finish!

I made up some rice with cheese, refried beans and corn.  I also made way too much, so I'll be eating this for a couple of days:

I tried making an invisible bookshelf this week.  I put my blood (literally), sweat and tears into this project:

In the end, though, I was too much of a chicken to drill a hole in the wall.  So, now I've got some sweet books ready to be screwed into the wall...maybe I'll bring them home for dad or Joel to use.

School has been really busy.  This is page 1 of 2 of what I had to get done this week.  It's thursday and I'm done page 1, and starting on page 2 soon.  Yay.

I'll end this blog with a blast from the past.  On my first Christmas, my dad made me a Jaida doll.  They named the doll Jaida, so they wouldn't forget how much they loved that name (which eventually became my little sisters name).  You can tell my dad put a lot of time and love into it, although, the clawed hands freak me out a bit as an adult.  Enjoy:

Dishes, Valentines Day, Downton Abbey, and a New Computer

This week I did a bunch of cooking.  My rule of thumb with cooking is to do the dishes as soon as possible.  As the dishes were soaking, I thought "Uggh, I hate dishes and there are so many, AND my drying rack is full of wet things I don't want to dry. "

Then it hit me!  I have a dishwasher!  I rarely use it because as a single gal, it's just quicker to manually wash a plate or spoon here or there, but for once I was BEYOND thankful for modern appliances!

Friday last was Valentines day.  Since I didn't have a beau, I made lollypop superhero valentines for my friends.  I stole the idea from dad (see 2 blogs ago), who, I think, stole the idea from Pintrest.

On valentines day eve I baby sat for Jared and Chel.  While I was playing toys with the kids I saw a toy I remember from my childhood.  The toy cash register was always super fun to play with, but I think it thrown out when toddler Joel fell face first onto its corner (which isn't even sharp!!) and cut open his face.  Classic Joel.

I made a deal with KW that if he watched Doctor Who (arguably one of the best shows ever), I would watch Downton Abbey.  Honestly, I didn't think he would...Wrong!  I had been putting off watching D.A. for a while.  It looks so dumb.  People in old timey clothes talking and such.  Blech.  Wrong again.  I watched Season 1-3 last weekend and fell head over heals in love!

This also meant that I bailed on hanging out with my friends on saturday because I was devistated over the loss of a main character.  I'm still pretty heartbroken.  Speaking of broken.  My computer did this on Sunday:

This has been happening for a week or 2 now, so I didn't think anything of it...until 2 hours later when it couldn't recover anything!!  A few hours later and most of my tax refund gone, I got this baby (stats here):

The screen is about 2 inches smaller than my last computer, but that's not even noticable.  I'm liking it so far, although windows 8 is a bit of adjustment.  

The next few weeks might be small/no blogs.  I started up 2 new courses as of monday and they are kicking my butt already!

Cooking gone wrong...then right.

On Sunday I was cutting potatoes for oven roasted potatoes, when my blood thirsty knife decided to attack me!!  It cut my ring finger and the nail on my pinkie finger.  The pics are a little gross, so don't click this link unless your ready for some fingernail cuts:

http://imgur.com/a/TrqCt

It hurt so bad.  I went thru 5 baindaids trying to get the bleeding to stop, but finally got them cleaned up and bandaged:

It is now 2 days later, and thanks to some antibacterial ointment the cuts are healing well, but still hurt really bad :(

The potatoes turned out good, but I was so shaken I forgot to take pics.  The other thing I made was french bread.  I really wanted tuna melts, but didn't have any bread.  This was the first time I got to use my dough hook!!

 I forgot to take pics of the loaves themselves, but the tuna melts turned out so yummy!

Star Wars, "Yucky" pancakes, Valentines from home and Mittens

Last weekend, Mitch, Dom and I met up at KW's house to have a star wars marathon.  We watched episodes IV, V and VI.

Since we were there so long we ordered some food.  Mitch, got pizza and it looked like a tidal wave of cheese had washed over the side of her pizza!

We were done watching the movies around 9pm.  We watched the blu-ray version that George Lucas had "fixed" by adding/deleting scenes.  Honestly, it was pretty awful compared to the original.  A lot of the movies were us saying "UGHH!  NO!  WHY?"  Like in the last scene where all the ghosts are smiling at Luke, they replaced the old man Darth Vader ghost with teenage Anakin from Star Wars II.  ARGH!

We were still wide awake after the 3 movies, so Mitch recommended that we watch Space Balls.  Good call Mitch!

Sunday, I woke up to find a picture of my niece Darcy on instagram with the caption:

Favorite child of the day award goes to the one who didn't beg for waffles for breakfast then refuse to eat them because they contained "corns" (chopped apple) and were topped with "yucky cheese" (butter), then sobbed about having "nuffing to eat!!"

That sounded really good, so, I made pancakes (don't have a waffle iron) with corn and cheese (and scallions and sour cream).  I just found a generic pancake recipe and threw corn and scallions in.  They were surprisngly delicious.  No surprise.  I remember dad making us corn pancakes occasionally and really loving them.  Good memories.

On Tuesday I received a package.  I had to wait all day to open it, but it was worth the wait.  I unwrapped the package and this cute box was waiting inside:

When I opened it, it was filled with popcorn and valentines gifts from mom and dad.  I'm not going to lie, being the frugal grad student that I am, I ate that pop corn.

I got an angel.  She is perfect.  Black hair is always my favorite.  I LOVE dad's crafts.  It reminds me of the spindle santa's he use to make.  I remember going to craft fairs with dad so we could look at stuff and see the santa's he was selling.

He also made me a button heart!

Which looks GREAT on my wall next to the Christmas ornament he made me for Christmas of 2012:

There were a ton of sweets!  Cookies,

and Pink chocolate covered pretzels with heart sprinkles:

and a Super hero lollypop <3

and a bag (made by mom) of hugs and kisses (Hershey's candy):

I am so thankful to Dad and Mom for doing this for me.  They usually just send gift boxes to the grandkids, but as a single person who sometimes finds valenties day sad, I am SO thankful for this happy, sugar filled reminder of how much I am loved.  Best. Parents. EVER!

On wednesday we had a really bad snow storm swoop in, so I prepared on tuesday by getting all of my homework ready to work on offline at home.  Once I was all done my home work I spent the rest of the day crochetting mittens from a pattern Mitch found for me.

It's been a busy week full of friends, love from the family and being productive!