15 Minute Project while you (Alyssa) wait!

I've been intending to make a frame style jewelry holder for quite a while now but have been unsuccessful finding a suitable frame.  Today I was on a mission, but still couldn't find a frame.  I did find a cute box at Michael's on clearance and I figured I had nothing to loose.

Not bad for a 15 minute project!

It is hanging inside my project and only houses earrings.

I apologize for the camera phone quality photos.  If you are considering asking what I am going to do with stud style earrings, I haven o answer for you.  Hence the boxes at the bottom.

So that's what I did with 1/4 of the time I gained from time change.  Still sorting out what to do with the other 45 minutes....

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

It's like I'm in grade school all over again!

I've finished "Half a Life."  The purpose of a book club must be, at least in part, to get you to read books you would never look twice at otherwise.  I also think it's interesting to try to figure out why someone would choose a particular book and I look forward to finding out a little bit more about that when we meet next.  The book was a memoir of a man who hit and killed a classmate at his high school.  It's essentially the story of how he lived with, or through, or around, the event.  Books, and stories, are amazing because quite frequently they meet you where you are, no matter where that is.  I was drawn to his conclusion which, to paraphrase, is things don't go away and you can't escape the past.  And it's not strength that makes you more or less able to cope, it's human nature.  How true that is.  Despite our vastly different stories, I could relate to him.  Books are magic.

And then there's writing!  Yesterday officially started NaNoWriMo!  I (awkwardly) attended a 'write-in' kick off event in Mission Viejo where I successfully completed my first 1600 words!  Go me!  My story seems to be taking on a life of it's own.  I'm functioning under the working title of "The Tracks" and the assumption that it will awful when (if) it's done.  Still I have a goal: 50,000 words this month, a little over 1600 words a day.  One more or less completed novel in November.  Jen is participating as well, although I haven't heard her progress yet.  Mike also committed to some amount of involvement, pending my daily success, while we were in Vancouver although the details of which have yet to be clearly recalled by any of the witnesses.  

I really just threw in Arithmetic because I thought it made the title awesome, but in the way of basic math, I have been testing out Mint.com this month as a financial tracking cloud based software.  It's fine, but to be perfectly honest, I'm way happier with my personally created excel sheets (although import is a bit tedious and they became slightly more complicated each year).  Eventually, I recognize the necessity of a more streamlined process, but for now I'm holding out.  Maybe Mint will grow on me?

I know I'm late with my Halloween post and will do my best to get that posted ASAP.

What's for Dinner?: Cheater Edition

A blog about what we had for dinner!

This week Gavin and I cleaned out our pantry, so in the spirit of Other People's Pantries:

Our idea is to make the space more useful and easy to keep clean.  It's a work in progress, maybe I'll post again soon after we've finished.  As a result, we based our menu after cleaning up our pantry/freezer.  Life was busy and hectic, so it was nice to be able to defrost some food we'd made previously and still have homemade food without the work.  As a result, we only really cooked on Monday (and Sunday, but that will get it's own blog late this week)

Monday: Ricotta and spinach stuffed shells, back of shells box recipe.  Very easy and very good.  I also served this on Wednesday for Veggie Wednesday. 

This weekend is cheater edition because the rest of the week we ate leftovers!  We determined that some foods (Upside down pizza for example) defrost wonderfully and are almost as delicious as first time and others not so much. 

We've got some good recipes planned for next week and I'm looking forward to it!