Taking a break...

...for awhile.  Having surgery on my back to relieve my spinal stenosis.  Will be back in about a week.  See ya...

Remembering Catherine...

I  was reminded today of my late mother in law, Catherine.  I had read a blog entry earlier where the poster had received a very special gift from her MIL.  This lovely lady had given thrift store tea cups filled with potting soil and wheat grass as party favors at a recent get together that the daughter in law had attended.  She was very pleased with the thoughtfulness of the gift and was charmed by the exquisite china cup and saucer she received.  She wistfully told her MIL that she really wanted a nice china set, one that she could use for special occasions and for family gatherings. For whatever reason, she and her husband had not registered for traditional china when they became engaged to be married.  On the poster's birthday, she was excited to have received a set of china from her husband's lovely mom.  This was a special set of china however...there was one place setting each of many different china patterns.  The MIL had scoured thrift shops all over town to find 8 complete place settings.  Each place setting was unique, and there were none alike.  The perfect shabby chic china, a proverbial Martha Stewart bonanza of mismatched china.  The blogger was thrilled and so very touched that this wonderful lady had gone to such trouble to create such a one of a kind gift. 

So why would this little story prompt me to write?  Because I wistfully remembered my mother in law Catherine while reading.  She has been gone for many years now, a blessing really after having been ravaged by the terrible thief of the elderly, Alzheimer's.  Catherine and I spared for more than 20 years over trivial things it seems now.  She was a very strong and a bit opinionated woman, used to getting her way.  In many ways we were very similar.  We had our likes and dislikes, our wants and our need to provide the very best for our family, whether it be dinner, home baked cookies, holiday traditions or housekeeping.  I miss her.  In her last months, she wanted me to be with her, me the daughter in law she had been most vexed by.  In her mind, I think she liked that I stood up to her, like she did to her mother in law.  Whatever memories she had of our "engagements" over the years, it was me she talked to, told her stories to over and over, and to me she voiced her fears.  I think I helped her, just by engaging her and being there to listen, to offer my thoughts and to reassure her that she had done a wonderful job, she had lived a good life, she was a good person, and most importantly, she was loved. At Christmas time, I run my hands over the beautiful embroidered tablecloth she spent hours working on, a special gift she made for me.  I display her Christmas favorites as they have become my favorite decorations too.  I wear the huge and heavy Christmas tree pin because she loved it so much when her young son who was later to become my husband gave it to her after picking it out himself at the five and dime one Christmas long ago.  I page through the picture albums she so carefully kept for over 50 years, gazing on long dead but familiar faces from the past, and I think of her.  I cherish my memories, and shall always think of her with love, for above all, she loved us all.

The polish prince went to bed at noon yesterday because he was bored. See? Not having a hobby makes life boring. Ya think he’d do a dish or clean the toilet? Nah… that’s beneath his dignity I guess. Me, I am never bored. Ever. I make crafts, I read, I surf the net, I write nasty blog entries, I call people on my phone. Bored. Not in this lifetime anyways.



I am working on some new creatures…I am calling them plumpkins. I am searching for my style with this sculpting thing. I have lots of ideas, but haven’t yet honed my skills. Here is a picture of my first guy. He is made of paperclay.

Then I made these guys from some leftover sculpy clay that I was using when I was learning to carve.

That is another blog, but to recap, a friend of Gene’s at John Knox Village is a wonderful wood carver. His name is Don, and he and his partner Connie live in one of the cottage homes in the Village. He graciously offered to teach me how to carve basic things from sculpy, thinking that this would help me in my quest to become a sculptor. Well, to make the proverbial long story short, when carving you are removing matter…in the type of sculpting I want to do with paper and polymer clays; you add matter to an armature. Not quite the same thing.

Let me know what you think. They are rough sculpt and have to be sanded and filled in where necessary.  I plan on painting the figures but am planning to just paint eyes on the little faces…with a bit of color to the cheeks. No mouth I think. I had thought of taking words that I would create on the computer, antiquing them and then burning the paper edges and then placing them on the figures, kind of like naming each one and giving them names. However, I just found another artist who is using this very same idea while I was tooling around Esty last night. Darn, I thought it was an original idea too. This artist uses a similar medium (clay) and makes similar little figures! I would fear that it would appear I was stealing someone’s idea, or copying that artist’s style. Even though I had seen this done on other mixed media pieces, and it is common, I had thought my idea was so unique. Dang. I am still continuing with my new pieces, but am bummed that I really am not as original or unique as I had thought when the ideas formulated in my head…

Epic fail apple pie

When a blogger posts about an “epic fail”, it usually means that an attempt to create something, be it food, home décor or DIY project has gone south, i.e. wrong…horribly wrong in some cases. Like mine as you shall see. Paulie brought home two cans of apple pie filling. They caught his eye because they contained Fuji apples, one of our favorites. Those two cans joined the can of Musselman’s apple pie filling that had been languishing in the RV pantry for a while. Why I purchased one can of pie filling escapes me, but I must have had some puff pastry at one time and thought I’d make some turnovers. When Paulie, (my hubby/ DH/ better half/ significant other, who I named the Polish Prince long before I ever knew what a blog was so no tsk-tsking me for giving him a cute name like all the other bloggers in blogland), brought home the apples I told him I would make him an apple pie with crumb topping. He loves crumb topping on pies, like moi, so the other day when I saw then apples while looking for something else, I decided to make a pie on Tuesday. I don’t know where I stored the rolling pin to make a homemade crust and I wasn’t in the mood to go to the grocery store for premade pie crusts so I googled no roll pie crust and found several possible recipes. I picked one and got to work.




Here is my step by step “tute” for making a smoosh crust canned apples homemade apple pie…

Gather your ingredients for the crust: 1 1/2 cup flour, ½ cup veggie oil, 2 Tlb sugar, ½ tsp salt and 2 Tlb milk.  Sift dry ingredients and then mix all ingredients together. Smooch into pie plate to cover plate and up the sides of the pan, just like a regular rolled crust.

 Open cans of pie filling and dump into the crust in the pie plate.

Mix crumb topping ingredients with a two forks or a pastry cutter:  1 ½ sticks cold butter broken into smaller chunks, ¾ cup brown sugar(use what you have, light or dark) 1/3 cup white sugar, ¼ tsp salt and 1 ½ cups flour.  Mix with the forks or pastry cutter until crumbly.  

Sprinkle over apples. 

Look how lucious this looks....

This recipe makes a generous amount of topping so you may have to press it into the top of the pie. Place the pie on a foil lined cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for one hour.  Smells wonderful right out of the oven. Cool then slice and serve.

Looks can be deceiving and this is a prime example.

The pie was HORRIBLE.

The apples were tasteless, the crust disgusting and oily (and underdone I might add) but at least the topping was good. I threw it away. All of it. Paulie ate his slice; I would not even try again after the first foul bite. Ugh. Epic Fail. So much for pie. If I ever go to the trouble of making a pie, I am going to make it right. Butter pie crust made simple and fast in the food processer…real Granny Smith apples with real sugar, cinnamon and spices…same topping though! What was I thinking?

In retrospect after writing this, I think I should have prebaked the pie crust.  I don't recall the site where I got the recipe  so I can't go back and see if I didn't read all the instructions.  That was prolly where the problem started.  I also should have sprinkled some flour into the bottom crust.  I read on a tip sheet that helps prevent a soggy crust. I suppose I should have tasted the apples before I put them in the crust to test for spices but I didn't do that either.  Shame on me.  The apples were overly sweet and had NO taste at  all.  Like I said earlier, the crumb topping as always, is very good and is a great addition to any fruit pie.  I especially like it on blueberry and mixed berry and sour cherry.  It is too sweet for peach, but I make it anyway...

So...if you should have any canned fruit pie filling laying around and decide to make a pie, I offer these suggestions...taste the filling before you use it.  Adjust for your taste by adding whatever it needs like cinnamon, or if there is too much gooey stuff and not enough fruit, add some if you can.  If you use a new recipe, be sure you book mark it or copy it or try printing the full recipe out rather than writing it on a scrap of paper like I did.   Sometimes my cheapness thrifty nature gets the best of me.  I use glass pie plates and I KNOW that I need to check the bottom of the pan to make sure the bottom crust is browned and it was done.  I used the timer as my only guide.  I am an experienced baker and sometimes I forget the little things. This is a bad habit that costs me time and money.

There you have it.  My RV Homemaking blog and my first fail.  Live and learn.

After the terrible and bitchy side of me ridiculed a number of blogs and the authors/bloggers here at Witchella, I have decided to join the party and have a blog of my own about homemaking…but with a twist. Since we live in a motorhome, my take is rather a selfish one…I am living the sweet life of a nomad. A gypsy existence, one where whims, weather and how my back feels in the morning dictate my activities. My husband Paul and I travel here and there, visiting friends, relatives and exploring the country. Our kids are actually two very spoiled yorkipoos so few cute pictures of my kids doing stuff like modeling the new dress mommy just made out of a tea towel and scrap burlap or eating the cake pops she just whipped up. No contemplative youngsters wistfully looking at rainbows or splashing around rain puddles in their Pottery Barn Kid rubber boots that cost $150 per pair. OK, I jest and am being a little bit mean, but you cannot believe some of the stuff these bloggers have their kids do for mommy’s blog pictures. Every stinking one of these kids is cheek pinchin’ adorable, and dressed to the nines in current styles I’ve never seen since I am an old woman who is no longer a slave to the Spiegel’s catalogue. I live in a motorhome that is the size of some of these bloggers master bedroom walk-in closets or kitchen pantries and there is a decided lack of stainless steel and granite/marble/quartz in my kitchen. Our motorhome is 10 years old and the best it boasts is solid surface counters that did not hold up as well as I had hoped and ceramic tile in the hallway. V You won’t see me posting pictures of my neat and tidy food pantry with the glass jars with chalkboard labels that is all the rage now. I am lucky I can open my pantry without a can of baked beans falling out and breaking a toe. Ask me how I know this…. So, you ask…a blog about homemaking in a motorhome? Yeah, why not? There are tons of RVing bloggers and blogs out there. Beautiful photos fill these travel blogs, and some post wonderful nature photos of the surrounding areas where the RVer’s are staying. Me, I wanna talk about homemaking in a motorhome. The good…the bad…and the stupid. Stay tuned.




PS….I am looking for blog names…send suggestions…yanno, serious ones please…

After a long absence, I've finally decided to write something.  I have cleaned the slate and gotten rid of the old stuff...it was really really old stuff...

I have, over the past month or so, become enamored with blogs about home decorating, crafts, remodeling and of course of all things sacred… homemaking. Yep, homemaking. Decorating, sewing, baking, crock potting, gardening, you name it, I’ve found a blog about it. All things Pottery Barn, Anthropology, TJ Maxx and Big Lots if you are into shopping. It started innocently enough. I had googled how to do something, like paint cabinets or some such thing and I found a really interesting blog written by a SAHM who has a home based business finding trash and turning it into dollars. You know, the incredible woman who can take some piece of ugly from the curbside garbage heap dotting any suburban neighborhood street on trash day just before the collectors appear, spritz a coat of Rustoleum on it or slap a coat or two of leftover latex paint on the heretofore piece of junk and then sell it for 100 times whatever. Foolish me. I was hooked. This gal had what she called a “linky party”. I didn’t have a clue about what it was but quickly discovered there are tons of women out there, worldwide I tell ya, who write blogs about their daily lives, what they make their kids for breakfast, how many loads of laundry they did today and other such mind numbing trivia. They all had cute nick names for their kids, even cuter names for their significant other, and this I am perplexed about…they NAME their houses. Yes, I am not making this up. They christen their lowly abodes with names. They all have names that include “cottage” for some reason, say something like The Purple Pea Cottage….some French appointed street, like the House of Soup du Jour, or a name loosely based on some whimsical relationship with Gnomes and Elves or some deep seated psychological longing…like Little House on the Midwest Prairie…Personally, I blame The Pioneer Woman. Don’t know The Pioneer Woman? Don’t watch day time TV obviously. She has made the rounds recently, promoting a $40 cookbook. Her name is Ree and she has built a personal fortune blogging about marrying a cowboy she refers to as The Marlbourgh man, posting recipes we have all made already, but with really nice pictures, and then weaving her courtship into a romantic continuing serial and then cleverly selling books created from said blog posts. Smart, smart woman. Entertaining reads too. I enjoy reading her blog. I am a sucker for the giveaways she has…Kitchen Aid mixers, I Pods, cameras. Her kids, numerous pets, ranch animals and even friends and relatives are adorable and their photos are plastered all over the internet. I know more about Ree’s kids and her homeschooling (yeah…she does that too..jeesh a bonafide modern day do-it-all gal!) than I know about my own nieces and nephews cause my sisters don’t blog. Or, don't want to share their daily lives.



Back to linky parties…when some blogging mommy has a linky party, they all put up a link up to their blogs on the host’s site so the hundreds of that bloggers “followers” can check out their blog, their latest crafting creation or change of curtains. Yep. I simply click on a link and am swept into the home and life of a blogger. Cute abounds in blogland.you must understand. These blogs drip cute. They also contain numerous photos and “tutes" . A tute is a tutorial on how to duplicate the craft/recipe/décor the blogger has recently completed (or copied or a challenge response) is linking you to. I will state that many many of these bloggers write well…take excellent photos and have some stunning decorating ideas/talents/sense. Others…well, not so much.


So, over the next few days, I am gonna discuss “tutes”, linky parties blogger give aways, challenges and all things blogland.