Summer thus far.

How has everyone's summer been going? I started working part time at a women's clothing store a couple weeks ago and massage has started to pick up again. It's a strange thing in my life; when I'm busy I tend to get really busy and when I'm not I'm not. Oh well, all I can do is take things as they come.

It looks like my camera will be out of commission for another month, so I researched so photo editing apps for iPhone and found several that I like. ( Snapseed, A Beautiful Mess, Afterglow)

I know phone photos are looked down upon in the blogger world and it would be preferable that I have some large expensive Canon with a detachable flash...but a girl has got to have priorities. Food is a priority. Camera equipment not so much.

Today, is my day off. I have a fairly important massage meeting to attend to later this afternoon and I'm pretty nervous. I'll be showcasing my chair massage skills for some people at the hospital I work through and things like that always make me nervous. What if I fall on someone? That's never come close to happening before but what if today's the day I fall on someone? How do you recover from that?

Nerves aside, this summer has been a good one. Being able to get our produce from farmer's markets, spending quality time in dirty second-hand book stores and trying out new recipes (my first Smitten Kitchen recipe!) makes for a nice couple of months.

The weather is actually starting to cool down already which has been a nice break, but truly the heat hasn't been so bad this year and for once I wouldn't mind Summer sticking around. 

Passion, a thing I know nothing about.

This post has little to do with books or reading. It is a post about me, and since I love books and reading they will probably make an appearance or two.
This is a post about passion, or rather lack thereof.

I've been going through some things lately, things like depression, feelings of utter failure and lack of energy.
Today is the first day I feel a little closer to the me that I like so I decided to do some reflecting and thinking about my life.
I've been fighting feelings of failure lately. Right now, my life seemingly has little direction. I need to find a better job. That's my life right now, trying to get hired again at Starbucks. Swallowing my pride. There's nothing wrong with working at Starbucks. I like being a barista, but when I was 19 thinking about what my 24th year would look like it was drastically different than the reality. It looked like this-

I had a little office in Colorado where I practiced massage, just me and maybe a part-time receptionist if I ended up selling any product. I was able to support myself with my practice and I was going to school in the evenings to finish my bachelor's degree in English. I occasionally wrote wellness articles for a little local newspaper. I lived alone in an apartment with a dog, probably a Shepard mix, that would go almost everywhere with me. I was busy, I was happy...

I get teary eyed and wistful when I read that. I am happy where I am now, I do like how things how turned out, but there's one thing I'm missing that the girl in my dream had- passion.

In high school and in college I journaled daily and wrote your typical angst poetry and published it to MySpace. I had people tell me how well I wrote and how they loved reading it. However, I've had a public blog since 2010 and I've yet to have anyone outside my family comment on it. I've racked my brain as to how I could become a popular blogger. I've tried all the tricks that the other successful bloggers have used and yet I get nothing. I purposely narrowed to scope of this blog to try and fill a niche or something like that.

This morning while doing the dishes (household chores are the best time to reflect on your life I've found) I've figured out why I feel like a failure, why things aren't working out for me.                                                      I once offended some random poet on MySpace because I wrote about PETA and how I don't believe most of the things they post. I changed the blog according to his opinion which I don't remember now what it even was.                                                The point is I didn't want anyone to feel offended, and that has carried over into my blogging. I tried to keep this superficial and have taken to using a gross amount of !!!! because that what I've seen other bloggers do. I've been doing all this for the wrong reason. What made me a good writer was my passion for expressing myself using words, sometimes strong words that made an impact. I've been trying to do the opposite of that for the past three years trying to make everyone of my imaginary audience happy and trying not step on any toes. Even with my review of Supergods! I really really don't like Grant Morrison, but I felt like I had to give him a fair shake in my review. He did drugs and cast spells to write some of the series he did that's not art that's a farce and I don't respect anyone who tries to prove that wrong. (And he killed Jean Grey in New X-Men, unforgivable).

Anyway-

The point of all this self-reflection is that I want to put passion back in my writing, my massage, my life. This blog is my starting point of all that because I quite honestly don't really know how to do that in the other aspects of my life. My writing, however, I know. 

This blog is about books and reading and me. Since I don't just read books everyday other things will undoubtedly pop up on here. But, I do read quite a lot so it'll still mainly be about books and reading. I won't try and cater to an imaginary audience anymore, I'll probably still use too many !!! because it's grown on me and I might end up offending someone,most likely a Grant Morrison fan, because that's how these things go. 

Once upon a time I loved to write, I loved massage, I loved books, I loved life and I really wanted to live in Colorado and own a dog. I'm finding my way back towards that path because that was the right direction to go in.

Begonia dear, you look lovely

Saturday Ben worked with some of the neighbors to fix up our atrocious attempt at landscaping. We went out looking for flowers and came home with this hanging begonia. I spent (probably too much) time photographing it in the afternoon light. I spent even more time fiddling in photoshop elements trying some different things, and I thought I ought to share my results with you. It's always good to start the week looking at something pretty. Especially since it's supposed to be cloudy and rainy this week. 

How was your weekend? See any pretty flowers?

April, thus far

 

So far, April has been a good month-

We had lunch in our quaint little downtown area which was very photogenic.

There is life among us! And yes the fifth picture is just of the grass in our backyard. Everything looks prettier in sunshine.

Last Monday we spent at my parents and even though my mom wasn't feeling well she managed to make breakfast for dinner with Ben as her helper.

We are also experimenting with making our own bread and peanut butter since we have a bread machine its not too labor intensive, and there is something rewarding about eating something you made from scratch.

How has April been for you?

Recap of the last 3 weeks.

Sometimes you forget about the internet for three weeks.

1-3. Last Monday I woke up weirdly early and made french toast for my birthday. I found a recipe that used strawberries and blueberries. Perfect for welcoming the slightly warmer spring weather. 

4. Ben brought home a dozen of my favorite flowers that Sunday and they are blooming perfectly.

5. Ben's trying his hand at soap making his first batch is almost completely cured.

6. I sewed something! My mother in law gave me this material to make a blanket out of around Christmas time and I finally gathered the courage to brave the sewing machine with her on speaker.

7-8. I also went magnet crazy. I found this tutorial through craftgawker.com (I've become a little obsessed) and just kept hot gluing magnets to plastic cats and soup cans. (I'm also enough of a dork to display my birthday cards for at least the next month I can't just toss them.

9. I love hard boiled eggs (mainly deviled eggs, but who doesn't) and I heard about baking them instead of boiling them so I gave it a try and it worked well.

10. This Monday is cloudy and we've all been napping, someone gets a little grumpy when he gets woken up!

I've been thumbing around Marvel Unlimited this month and am planning on reviewing it soon!

How has your month been?

We started making our own cleaning products...

I found a recipe for making laundry detergent a couple of months back on Pinterest and saw that it wasn't too hard, but then I forgot about it. 

Recently, a friend talked about making her own and I remembered being interested. The recipe I orginally found was for a liquid detergent and she had made a powdered detergent which sounded a lot easier since we didn't have to worry about boiling water and storing it in a 5 gallon bucket, so I searched for a powdered recipe and found this one which seemed really easy. While on that website I also found how to make dryer balls which really appealed to me since Ben and I both have reactions to dryer sheets. While on this website I also found a recipe for dishwasher detergent and saw it had several of the same ingredients as the laundry detergent and wanted to go ahead and try that as well. We were able to get all of the ingredients at our grocery store and a Jo Ann's for the dryer balls. The only thing we had to get off the internet was the citric acid, but we later found out that we could find some at a tractor supply store. All of the ingredients including the wool and citric acid cost us $45 and will mostly last for a year or so.

 I had my dryer balls in a bowl on top of our washer with the essential oil I like to use. Right now I only have lemongrass and eucalyptus but I'm planning on building our collection (except slowly, a lot of essential oil is expensive especially Rose and Sandalwood which are two of my favorite smells)

We decided to buy 5lbs of citric acid at one time we knew we would use it and it'll last forever.

 I ended up using the old Cascade and Tide containers for the laundry and dishwasher detergent. They were a good size and they have lids so it work out great.
So far the everything I've made has worked out just fine. I know on the website the laundry detergent is recommended for HE front loaders but we have massive old top loaders and it works fine with those.
I haven't tried white vinegar as a rise agent or as a fabric softener as the articles suggests because I'm still using my store bought ones.
I'm really interested in the website diynatural.com and have liked the recipes I've found so far. I've decided that as I run out of household products that I'll give their recipes and try and see how it goes!

Are there any cleaning products you like to make?

Baked apples and eggs

 Sometime last week when Ben got home in the morning I decided to do an experiment with baking eggs. You don't know this about me, but I love watching the Food Network. It's pretty much the only channel I watch (except for Spike when they have those repo shows on. Super trashy, super entertaining). I'd seen people do baked eggs in a lot of different ways that mostly included some other baked concotion. Since, I don't wake up with a mind set to cook for several hours before I eat I aim to make things that take less than 45 minutes. That led me to baked eggs and as I was looking around for something else that I could throw in the oven I came upon a bag of apples. Baked apples. My sister in law had made scrambled eggs with apples at Christmas and it was delicious. Turns out that eggs and apples pair well together. The first time I did this I baked both things on 400 for forty mintues. For me, that was a little too long for the eggs though Ben really liked them. The second time I did this I baked the eggs for 20 minutes and the apples for 40 at 425. Both times I've seasoned the eggs with salt, thyme and cayenne (a flavor combo I've been recently putting on my popcorn as well) and the apples with cinnamon and honey. You can't beat cinnamon baked apples and honey.

And there was bacon.

I greased a muffin tin with cooking spray and the eggs were easy to pop out with a fork

           

I wrapped the apples with cinnamon and honey in a foil bundle. It's a good idea to wrap it twice because it will start leaking very hot honey when you take it out of the oven.

Ha! Bet you thought there wouldn't be a cat picture in this post.

What are some of your favorite breakfast recipes?