The movie is based on a book by Julie Powell – who took the challenge of cooking all of  the recipes in Julia Child’s MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I will. I loved Julie Powell’s book.

Of course…like so many others that choose to blog….one can’t help but wonder if their life story has potential for a book or movie.

MY problem is — when things get crazy here — I don’t want to write about them…I wish I did, but I just can’t make the words come out the way I want them to – so large chunks of my life go unrecorded (yes, lots of craziness and hectic times here….).

One area I  often wish I had written more about what it was like when we had the convenience store. The crazy employees, the customers, break-ins in the middle of the night….I’m convinced this period of my life would make a great comedy/drama.

But…oh what a trauma it would be for me to have to go back and think about reliving all those horrid memories.

Maybe one day…LOL…but not today….

I won’t say things are all better now….BUT…life does go on….and I am trying to get back into some routines again…blogging….being one of them.

I’m not sure what I want this blog to be about though….

I was originally going to follow Martha Stewart as I decluttered my house….then…I was going to try to post my thoughts and reviews on various things for certain days of the week….

Now…I just want to get back on track with something on here….either back into the routine of my articles….or maybe just summarizing on things as I go along…

Anyway…I’ll try not to be gone so long this time…

I already know what I am doing….you don’t have to try to give me your version of it….

Aaargh…..

So….for now…I’m just going to pick a topic as often as I can and see if I can’t get back in the routine again.

I am still trying to do my photo a day www.365daysingeorgia — though this past week that didn’t happen everyday either.

Time to rethink, regroup, and reorganize….

I’ll be in touch….

NOT last night.

I decided to have Irish Stew and Soda Bread. It was a great idea, but what a disaster!

The Irish Stew called for Guiness Stout. The store didn’t carry Guiness Stout, but DID carry Guiness Extra Stout. I had already been warned not to use a Lager – so home I came with the Extra Stout. More about this in a moment….

The Prep time for the bread was suppose to be fifteen minutes and the prep time for the stew twenty. HA!

Bread wasn’t that hard to make, but the amount of flour the recipe called for was in my opinion too much and I ended up having to add extra buttermilk to even things out.

 Thirty minutes later after adjusting the buttermilk and flour - I had a nice round dough ball sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter and it was on to the Stew.

I peeled, diced, sliced, and chopped. Forty-five minutes later I was finally ready to brown the meat. (Maybe the person who wrote the recipe used a machete???)

The meat browned nicely, I sauteed onions, mushrooms and garlic. Added Beef broth and tomato paste. It looked nice and smelled great when I added in the Guiness.

Now…the recipe said…”simmer for sixty minutes”. Usually, the first time I try a recipe I follow the directions to the letter – so that is what I did. BIG MISTAKE!

The vegetables never did get cooked. Yep, big bowl of crunchy undercooked potatoes and carrots….and it was NOT pleasant.

Now on to the Guiness. I learned later from several that they made the mistake of using the Extra Stout. It gives it a horrid, horrid bitter taste that I can only describe as AWFUL!

Luckily…the bread turned out fairly well — though a bit crunchy on the bottom…okay…crunchy is not quite the word….maybe…ROCK HARD…One could easily have cracked a tooth on the crust…. I’m thinking of keeping it and using it as a weapon….

Anyway…at least I can say dessert was a success….it is hard to screw up putting pre-made Jello Cups into parfait glasses and covering them with cool whip….though if I had screwed it up….it woudn’t have been a surprise….some nights I’m a domestic goddess…other nights we should have ordered pizza and this was one of them!

How about you? Ever have a dinner disaster with a new recipe? I’ll probably laugh about it all later….but for now….I may just open one of those remaining bottles of Guiness and for tonight…order takeout….

Today has been a very bad day…no time to even think about blogging today until I was checking my emails.

So….here’s a photo from a few weeks ago.

I’ll also confess I tried to get a photo of the full moon – a night shot the other evening, but…LOL…I had no clue what I was doing. I got several very blurred shots….interesting…but NOT what I was looking for.

I also discovered I need a tripod…and I have one, but it’s been years since I’ve seen it…guess I’ll have to see if I can dig it out…

The headache came because our upstairs A/C has been out for three days and it was so hot last night I couldn’t sleep…so I decided to leave the window open just a crack…

BIG Mistake!

Sinuses very, very unhappy with me doing this. Thus the headache.

Anyway, instead talking about cooking…I’m just going to ask…

What’s For Dinner Tonight?

Here, since the air is back working again, (part of why my day got off  track was because I waiting on the repairman) I am thinking BBQ chicken….oven roasted though since I’m not up to dragging the grill out. With sides of scalloped potatoes…and maybe baked beans????

 Hungry yet?!

I did buy a new BBQ sauce the other day….so I’ll let you know whether I liked it or not!

Until next time….

Below is a good site to get you started:

http://www.garden.org/zipzone/index.php

Remember though that even though you know what zone you are in, certain factors may not be taken into account. If you are having a longer winter than normal, or a milder winter you may want to get your plants in a little later or earlier (though if earlier you must be prepared for an unexpected weather change!) depending on what the weather appears to be doing.

Drought, excessive rain, heat, or  other factors that may come about later in the year can also factor in to whether you have a bumper crop of squash or none at all.

Still it is important to remember that knowing the zone you are in is meant to give you an idea of what will work best for your area, but that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with something that is not suppose to grow well for your region.

I have had a lot of success with lavender which I was initially told would not do well for me. BUT that being said – if you are in a Zone 2 and you want to plant something that does best in a 7 you may not have the best of luck. A level above or below the zone you live in is the best place to start if you want to variate from the zone you are in …stick within that range for now at least until you see how your plants are going to do! 

There will be plenty of time for experimenting as your knowledge of gardening increases and starting with simple things that are almost guaranteed to grow will make your first year of gardening a pleasure rather than a headache!

Until next time…Happy Gardening!

There are several steps one must take when one decides to organize something. We will cover the other steps over the next few weeks, but for today we are going to discuss time.

In the past I would start a project and then never get finished.  In some cases whatever I was working on looked worse when I was done.  A good example of this would be attempts at organzing my closet.

I can’t tell you how often in the past I started to declutter my closet only to turn around a few hours later and have more clothes stacked on the bed or in the chair, than in the closet, with no order to the stacks and unsure of what to do with them. I would be dead tired, out of energy and patience, yet  I still hadn’t gotten anywhere and now the stuff was all over the room and I certainly didn’t want to do anything else with it at the point.

So…I would end up tossing everything back in the closet where it would remain until I decided months later to tackle it again.

There were several things going wrong with this project, but the one I will discuss today is my failure to realize just how much time cleaning out the closet was going to take me.

Whether it’s cleaning a drawer, closet or the top of your desk, people tend to do one of two things. Overestimate the amount of time something will take or underestimate it.

In my case, I tend to underestimate.

So, how do you overcome this?

One rule I recently learned is:

NEVER TAKE OUT MORE THINGS THAN YOU CAN PUT BACK IN ONE HOUR.

This means – break the project down into parts. Instead of unloading the whole closet and then not having time to sort through it – do a shelf or section at a time and decide what you are doing with those items before you move on to the next section. Set an amount of time you plan to work on the project and see how far you get during the first hour.

I find I get easily distracted so I like to use a timer. I do the task for fifteen minutes at a time, and then fifteen minutes more and so on. I also plan “breaks” where I can walk away for fifteen minutes and recharge, or rethink what I am doing.

The important thing is, if you block off three hours to work on something, the last hour needs to be reserved for putting everything back.  If you didn’t get done with your project – leave the area that you did work on clean and tidy so you can see you did accomplish something and you didn’t just waste a bunch of time. 

Go ahead remove the things you plan to throw away – get them in the garbage as soon as you leave the room, and if you are giving things away go ahead and get them in your vehicle so the items will get to where they are going and not end up back in the closet or somewhere else in the house.

Take out your organizer when you are finished and plan when you will return to the closet again. When you are working on decluttering something like a closet, it is a good idea to try to work on it each day until it’s finished, but the most important thing is since you now have a better idea of how long the whole closet will take because you were keeping up with your time when you worked on it, you can consistently schedule the amount of time you are going to need to do it.

Remember it doesn’t have to be an all day project, fifteen minutes here and there can work very well too – just keep in mind – don’t make a bigger mess than you’ve allowed time for because you will become discouraged if every time starts with you having to clean the mess you made before back up!

Tips:

Use a timer to break projects down into fifteen minute increments.

Never take out more stuff than you can put back in the time allowed

Decide when you will work on the project again and schedule it. Consistently attacking the area will get much quicker results than taking on too much or dragging it out too long! 

I also do a Project 365 blog (a photo a day for a year — ww.365daysingeorgia.wordpress.com ) and this is one of the shots that didn’t make the grade for that blog because I had taken a tree shot the day before, but I still really liked this photo!

I tend to take a  LOT of pictures of tree and clouds. I just like the way the limbs make such neat patterns against the sky.

I really want to get some night shots – when the tree are black and the sky seems gray, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make my camera do that yet - but maybe one day I’ll have some of those images to share!

Until Monday…have a great weekend!!!