The Heathen Housewife

We had a wildly busy, fun day today. We started off running a couple of errands. First, to Michaels to get some craft supplies for home. Julie absolutely loves playing with glitter glue. She doesn’t really use much control with it – she just loves to squirt it out of the tube and spread it all over whatever paper or object she’s using it on. Today when we got home and Sophie went down for her nap, Julie went to town with the glitter, and these were the results…

She used up two brand-new tubes of the stuff in about ten minutes, but she was happy and she’d had her fix. We also stopped at Target and picked up some things for our upcoming trip to camp. Julie got a new sleeping bag, and she was crazy with excitement. Today was a jackpot day for her.

All summer so far, I’ve been trying to create a decent cold coffee drink at home – something that can satisfy my *bucks craving. Let me just say that they have the iced coffee drinks down – uh – cold. Even the local coffee shops and chains don’t compare. My attempts at home have been pitiful. The other day I saw this article about cold press coffee (via Not Martha) and I decided to give it another try.

The result was not as good as the real thing – the giant pile of whipped cream they put on top doesn’t hurt, and the girls LOVE it when I give them tastes of the whipped cream before I suck down the drink. But the one I made was still tasty and somewhat satisfying. Still, it seemed a bit watered down. I took the remainder of today’s cold-press and stuck it in some ice cube trays. My next attempt will involve using frozen coffee in place of regular ice cubes. I’ll let you know how it goes. Don’t ask me about the recipe so far – I just splashed stuff into the blender willy-nilly.

Now for the best part of the day. Tomorrow, our wonderful Canadian friends are coming home from their extended vacation there. We are so excited, we could practically pee our pants (well, one of us does on a regular basis anyway, but you know what I mean.) Julie had been bugging me to buy her some of that sidewalk paint all summer long, so I this was a perfect excuse to give in.

We drove over to their house and did a little graffiti work. The girls had a blast, and we all ended up covered in chalky mess. I did a little Photoshop work to some of these pictures to blur out the names, but you can get the idea.

To the left of the H in home is my very lame attempt at drawing the state of Minnesota.

I am so not an artist when it comes to drawing. Knitting is the perfect outlet for my artistic streak.

Julie and Sophie had fun laying down the color.

I used Sophie’s croc to trace some footprints down the path.

I’m banking on the fact that it’s late at night and they’re probably already asleep and will be too busy in the morning to be reading my blog before the get home and see it for themselves. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain between now and then. Can’t wait for a play date!

Oh, and SwissKnits – you always come up with the good questions. What size niddy noddy is a good all-purpose one, she says. I dunno. I guess it depends on what you’re doing with it. I ordered the medium-sized Kromski from Mielke’s a couple of weeks ago. It winds a 48″ skein, and I was really just guessing what I wanted. I haven’t really used it much more than to just try it out for a few minutes, but the resulting skein feels a little small – when I’m winding 450 yards at a time, that’s going to make a pretty fat little skein. Also, I’m going to want to wind it up pretty fast as I’ll probably be running around lawn chairs out in the back yard while the kids are playing in the sand box. I’m pretty tall, so I have pretty long arms and I think the large size niddy will be just as comfortable for me to use as the medium. So I went ahead and ordered a large Kromski a couple of days ago. It makes a 72″ skein. I picked the Kromski ones because they were inexpensive yet decent looking. That’s the best answer I have so far. But good question!

Oh, and about the old biddy next door. Yes, Biddy McTacky. Just so you know, I actually feel sorry for her myself. She leads a hollow shell of a life, as far as I can tell. The little stuff that I’ve shared with you is all actually kind of silly b.s. The thing that really led me to dislike her in earnest was the day when she stood in my yard and told me how much she disapproves of interracial relationships and mixed-race kids. While I was holding Sophie in my arms. Of course, she was talking about her (white) niece and her great-niece’s (black) father. So I’m sure in her mind it’s totally different than our family (or maybe not) and somehow acceptable to blather about shamelessly. I don’t really care what the F she thinks of me, my yard, or my family after that. I just wish I had had the nerve to tell her to get off my property at that moment, instead of the much more mild, diplomatic “Oh, how very sad for you” that came out of my mouth. (I meant how very sad that she’s a racist – I’m sure she thought I meant it was sad that she has a halfie niece.) Whew. There have been a few other things, but that’s the worst one.

You know, I may just consider some long prairie grasses. I actually like the way some of those look. I have a good nine months to think it over.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.