https://katyhdcom.wordpress.com

Please come visit me at my newest blog, Katy HD. I talk about my quilting, creative endeavors, and anything else that catches my eye, as a creative woman with adhd.

Congratulations to Liz!

Congratulations to Liz for winning the CSN stores giveaway! She was the only person who commented by Monday, which was the cutoff date. Sorry for the delay on announcing the winner. . . Work's been busy this week! I've sent Liz an email with instructions on how to redeem her credit. Everyone else, Happy Friday! Thanks for visiting!

Beautiful Red Enamel

Macy's had a screaming sale this December and I bought myself a gift that I've wanted for ages- a Le Creuset-like pan by Martha Stewart. It's beautiful and red (matches my Kitchenaid!) and I was very excited to get it for only $20.

When I received it, it was packaged with rubber to protect the lid from the base, and it came with lots of instructions in order to keep it safe- don't use a metal spatula, be careful banging it around, etc.

Despite the instructions (or maybe thanks to my housekeepers), the next week it had two chips out of it. I wonder if a true Le Creuset pan would hold up better than my Martha Stewart one?

As a matter of fact, you have a chance to win a credit towards a Le Creuset casserole pan, or another kind of houseware, through CSN stores. They've generously given me a $20 credit to give to one of my readers.

Leave a comment telling me your favorite kitchen item and you will have a chance to win. Entries will close on Monday the 11th. Thanks to Macys.com for the photos.

Pretty Potholders

My quilting projects have ground to a halt lately, so I've found something that's a quicker finish- potholders!

I'm planning to make some of these Martha Stewart heart-shaped ones (photo at right, from Martha Stewart.com) when I get around to it.

Here is some more inspiration, thanks to Rachel at Stitched in Color.

She also posted a Christmas bunting! I love buntings.

Giveaway Winner

It's time to announce the winner of my giveaway to csnstores.com- Sarah Evans!

Congratulations, Sarah. Thanks for commenting and I'll email you the details.

Giveaway to CSN.com!

Hello, Loyal Readers.

I know you're all shopping and baking and cleaning and crafting and whatever else you do to prepare for Christmas.

CSN Stores has sponsored my very first giveaway and what great timing! From TV stands for flat screens to ping pong tables to dollhouses, they have a lot of fun stuff!

Leave a comment for a chance to win, and I'll pick a winner this Friday.

In other news, I've learned that to Aurora, Christmas is synonymous with Candy Canes, and things are crazy at work. If I ever get out of the insurance biz, December will be a cakewalk with only the holidays.

Cats in Wigs!

Here's a new book I know you'll all want to check out: Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs.

And Mithra, Gary's cat, representing:

No Coffee for Me

I've been trying not to spend money lately because I have some big house repairs coming up, so I just checked my three starbucks cards that I've been keeping around to see if I can get some coffee without paying out of pocket (can you tell I work for a health insurance company?).

They all have zero balances. Sad day for me.

Sick and Tired

So weary ... Breathing is an effort.

Lovely Beans, Wonderful Beans!

I've been making a lot of food from scratch lately- chocolate chip bran muffins, all types of bread, hamburger and hot dog buns, refried beans, dried and frozen strawberries.

I love the creamy refried beans I get with my Mexican dinners in the restaurants, so I finally looked up a recipe and learned how to make them.

Soak your beans for a few hours in cold water (I left them soaking for 10 hours while I was at work yesterday).

Alternately, you can boil water and cover the beans with that and let them soak for an hour.

Change water and simmer beans for an hour and a half or two hours, or until you can smash a bean on the side of the pan with your wooden spoon. Add some salt and simmer a bit longer. For added depth, boil beans with a ham hock or a few pieces of raw bacon.

When your beans are almost done, saute up half an onion and a few cloves of garlic in oil. When they are soft, add the beans and mash them all together, saving the warm beanwater (I use a potato masher).

When the beans are all mashed, add your warm beanwater (doesn't that sound appetizing? You can drink the leftover beanwater if you want) and stir. Make your beans a little runnier than you would like because they harden up when they cool.

Voila! Delicious refried beans. Enjoy in burritos or my favorite, with Doritos.

Sew Sew Sew

I've been sewing a bit lately, which is unusual because it's mostly a winter hobby for me.

For my cousin Jennifer's baby's birth (I think she had her c-section a couple of hours ago. Eee!), I decided to make her a quilt. Since she not only threw me a baby shower but also cleaned the dirtiest parts of my house (bathroom and kitchen), and I offered to throw her a shower and then didn't, I racked my brain to figure out what could make up for that heinous shortfall.

A homemade quilt seemed the closest thing, so I got some brown and periwinkle (Baby Jimmy's colors of choice) animal prints and a big swath of robots and astronauts on the moon (for the back).

I made a baby quilt from a kit a week prior, and the tiny blocks with slippery minky and satin fabric took much longer than I'd anticipated. I made the blocks for Jen's quilt nice and big, and I only used cotton. It went much faster and was a lot easier to cut and sew. Nuts to that synthetic fabric!

Everything went swimmingly until I got to the binding. It's a nice bright orange to match the lions, two inches wide and satiny soft. I made my dad a minky blanket for Xmas and completely butchered the binding, so I kept that in mind as I attached my hulking zig zag foot to my sewing machine (a vintage Singer 301A which only does straight stitches).

I practiced a bit and figured out how to make nice wide zig zags, then started in on the binding. Modern sewing machines zig zag by moving the needle, but my 1950s machine has a big foot that actually moves the fabric. Side to side it zigged and zagged, I pulled on the binding, and after a couple of feet I could tell that my top layer of binding was getting longer than the bottom layer.

I ripped it all out and am now on the prowl for a new machine. (Whether I can afford one or not is a matter of debate.)

My darling friend Dawn is going to finish sewing the binding for me and if it's anything like the blanket she made for Smacky, it will be perfect. Then I can get a new machine that's a little more sophisticated, and I can start using my feet to do all the work. There's a foot for almost everything, even making ruffles. I have been living in the dark ages, I tell you. The DARK AGES!

This Year's Performance

I suppose it's a cardinal rule that if you don't want people to know about your skills and talents, you don't reveal them.

Most of you who know me know that I have little patience for karaoke. I can listen to classical singers who are learning or trying, but drunk people who are singing pop or rock, hideously, no.

Unfortunately, I gave in to peer pressure at a holiday party a couple of years ago, performing the singer's Christmas carol, O Holy Night. (Singers, am I right? Is it not the least cliche Christmas carol and the most fun to sing?)

Ever since then, the CEO has been trying to get me to sing at the Sales and Marketing Celebration that LifeWise puts on every year to talk about the year and recognize accomplishments.

Last year I declined because I wasn't sure how pregnancy would affect my singing (not much, after all). This year I figured I'd better do it or else, so I talked to my coworker Kristin, who also has a music degree and plays the cello. She was so openminded (or flumoxed, like me, by the lack of literature available to soprano and cello) that she allowed me to choose the song AND wrote her own part. Whee!

This year the performances were a talent show of employees, and we were all competing to win $5000 for the charity of our choice. Since I didn't think my choices of Planned Parenthood and Naral would go over well, Kristin chose a junior diabetes organization.

We added some stupid funny to our performance of Verborgenheit by Hugo Wolf, with fake crying, me pulling a tissue out of my bra, etc, and the crowd roared when we were finished. Although we didn't win, someone took a photo and it ended up on our company iWeb. Look at me, all grunge! I wish I'd had a Nirvana t-shirt, my skateboard and/or my big black doc martens.

Cancer Strikes Again

Some of you knew my old coworker, Sarah Breazile, a playful, sassy blonde woman who loved to get people together and have fun. Sadly, cancer took her last spring at only 25 years old.

I have another coworker who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She immediately had a mastectomy and just started chemo yesterday. You can read Heather Carlin's public journal on CaringBridge here. Please send good energy to her as she is feeling very sick.

No Paparazzi, Please

Smacky had her first photo shoot! We were put on several mailing lists (thank you, babies R us) and consequently got several postcards in the mail offering us a free 8x10 with no sitting fee.

At first I thought it would be more trouble than it was worth, but after my cousin told me she'd done that with the birth of her daughter, I thought we could see what it was all about. (Plus, what else do I have to do besides take care of the baby and do laundry?)

It was at a studio in the mall that specializes in children, as evidence by all the photographs and rugrats running around. When we were finally called, the photographer was super nice and patient, and she got some really cute shots of Smacky. They made me wait a bit so they could edit them, and when I returned, they brought out 5 or 6 framed shots of my precious baby. They were so sweet that I teared up, which made the saleswoman excited.

"Wait till I tell Jennifer that they made you cry! She loves that!" she enthused.

It was hard to choose but the purple-blanket one seemed ordinary enough but still showed off her personality a little. We have an appointment with a private studio this week so hopefully we'll get some unique photos from that. Then we can compare them all and take our pick. If you'd like to see the whole set, email me and I'll send you a link.

Warm Bottom, Please

Smacky has always been a noisy little creature. Especially when (not) settling in for the night, she has a repertoire of squeaks, groans, mouth smacks (hence the name), and particular sounds that are similar to a squeaky fan belt or a car turning too quickly.

I've learned that these sounds, accompanied by her punching and kicking the air, usually mean something is amiss. If she's glupping and awake, that probably means that she's hungry (again). Or she's soaked through her diaper, through the towel and onto the bed (again). Or she's cold. It's wonderful that there are so few things that can be wrong at this age, isn't it?

When I leave her on the boppy on the couch to run into the kitchen or the bathroom, if she thinks I've been gone too long she'll give a little frustrated shriek. Hey! The photo above is actually her yawning, thinking about crying, but then going back to her happy self.

Smacky really rarely cries. One thing she DOES hate is having her bottom cleaned with a cold wipe. Whoever invented the wipe warmer was a genius!

So Hungry!

Short post- baby is waiting! She just had a ton of milk and is eagerly awaiting either snuggling time or more milk.

Nope, after 6 ounces of fresh breastmilk, she is finally sated. Phew! Growth spurts really suck up the milk.

No More Yowling, Please!

June is flying by, although we've had hardly any warm or sunny days. Today again, it's overcast and the sky is white.


I would be perfectly happy to have a cool summer, since the one 90-degree day we had in May had me stripped to my underwear (at home, of course) and sweating like crazy.


The pregnancy is still going well, although now that I'm in my third trimester things are starting to get a little harder. The baby is tumbling, kicking, and sticking various body parts out during the day and night, but I'm still able to sleep at night and have only just started waddling. I won't go into other TMI details, but if you'd like to hear about them, feel free to call!


Thursday marks my 33rd week. It's hard to believe (and freaking scary!) that in 4-9 weeks I'll have a baby and be a mother. Yikes yikes yikes! Since I didn't find out until 12 weeks that I was preggers, my 6-month gestational period hasn't given me as much thinking time as I would have liked so I've had to cram it all into my brain next to the other changes that have been going on.


Oh! Billy called yesterday and said that Sylvia Snapper had a run-in with the next door neighbor's dog.


She tried to jump off the bed afterwards and collapsed, which alerted Billy to her plight, and the vet subsequently diagnosed a sprained ankle and prescribed her some pain medicine. Poor snapper, walking and jumping around on a sprained ankle. Nobody knows the true story about what happened, but since she and the neighbor dog were on nose-sniffing terms, nobody expected an attack.

In cat news at our house, Gary's socially needy siamese has taken to yowling when we put him in the basement at night if he feels that he hasn't had enough interacting with humans during the day. Unfortunately, his needs are at the bottom of the list so we're going to have to figure out another way to get him to shut up.

Any tips from our experienced cat-owning readers?

Aurora's First Quilt

I made my very first quilt a few weekends ago. Rag quilts are the easiest quilts to make, IMO, and since the seams are part of what makes it pretty and poofy, your cutting lines don't have to be perfect. (This is good for me because I'm not very good at holding the fabric straight when I use the quilting roller-knife.)

Here is a photo of the uber-girly quilt (for me) that took me mere hours to cut, sew, and clip. Please excuse the mistake in the last row. I was so excited about the green that I forgot to pay attention to the other squares.

I had intended to boycott pink as much as I could (which isn't easy, because baby clothes seem to only be made in pink and blue) but my alternate choice of purple had a pretty wimpy showing at the fabric store, and damnit, I like pink!

The top is all cotton, the batting is warm and white brand, and the back is flannel. I would have liked a plain cream-colored backing but I couldn't find any and this worked out better anyway- the burgundy from the back shows through on the front to give it a little more color.

Mittens helped with perspective on the back of the quilt. She's even multitasking. Clever girl.

I enjoyed my quiet time at home with the boys gone that week (they went camping for 5 days) but unfortunately my hormones were raging. I alternately felt lonely that Gary was gone and angry that the place is such a mess with boxes still festering from his move. Stinky old hormones. Good thing nobody was around to feel my wrath. (Mittens is exempt due to cuteness.)

7 months, 4 days

Portland is wonderfully cool tonight, although the house still retains some warmth from the earlier part of the day. Mittens has been hanging around this evening, asking for petting and shedding all over.

Mithra, one of my newest family members, is sleeping on the front porch. He follows Mittens around the house daily, heeding not her hissing and annoyed tail lashing, clumsily begging for friendship. Of course, choosy Mittens will have none of it. Their nights are spent together in the darkness of the basement, although I doubt that brings them emotionally closer. To the right is Mithra wearing his favorite (and only, so far) wig. He's hoping to add to his collection but will have to wait until Halloween to do so. He's a chocolate point Siamese with slightly crossed blue eyes and a terrific yowl that could wake the dead.

Gary and Arlo, 35 and 6, are off camping this week. What a relief! As much as I am learning to enjoy their boisterous and noisy energy, having gone so long without having children in my life is making living with one, albeit part time, very challenging. Arlo is very smart, well-behaved, and has little or no behavioral issues, so things are going as well as can be expected. Plus he and Gary give me plenty of space when I need it. (And they're quiet when I nap. Wow!)

To add to the excitement of changing house companions, I'm now 29 weeks pregnant. I'm so glad that I was able to lose 20 pounds last summer; besides starting out in fairly good shape, it also laid the groundwork for some good eating and exercise habits, although as stress threatens to overcome me, they have been falling to the wayside.

Here I am two weeks ago.

My chiropractor, massage therapist, personal trainer, patient coworkers and supportive Gary are helping ease my body aches and pains, and I can truthfully tell people that so far, my pregnancy has been very easy.

Hallelujah!

The baby has gotten to the point of giving me mini earthquakes when she kicks (what IS she doing in there?), my digestion is slowing down a tad (hooray for fiber!) and there are a couple of other mildly annoying symptoms, but so far I have only tiny stretch marks, little swelling in my legs and feet, no protein in my urine, and just a little bit (ahem) of crying for no reason. I had only the briefest amount of morning sickness in the beginning, too. (My ex-mother-in-law had Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I believe, which is like having morning sickness 24-7 throughout all 9 months of pregnancy. It sounds positively AWFUL. (Way to hang in there, Linda!)

I started getting braxton hicks contractions a couple of weeks ago and I pee like crazy day and night (which is only a little bit different from when I'm not pregnant, if you know me) but my midwives say I'm doing fine and I'm looking forward to a continued "normal" pregnancy and hopefully a normal labor and delivery.

Here is a slightly out-of-focus ultrasound photo of the baby's head. She was wiggling around so much that day that it was hard for the tech to get photos, and this was the best. It was taken on March 24th, right after Easter candy went on sale. (ahem) The sugar COULD have contributed to her wiggliness, but who can say for sure?

The sun has finally gone down and I'm ready to snuggle up with a book. The house is so quiet without Gary and Arlo- I'd better get the cats in here for some yowling.

Welcome (and welcome back!)

Time has passed since I've last blogged, gentle readers.

I'm positive you're all waiting with bated breath to hear the news- how is the weather in Portland? What's going on at the Raymond House? Are kittens imminent for Mittens?

Stay tuned to hear all the news that's fit to print.