Tag Archives: Reruns

How To Shop For Fabric, revisited

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The 2013 Sizzlin’ Summer Shop Hop is coming up in June. This year’s grand prize is a quilt retreat for the winner and five friends at the Wimberley Quilt Ranch. Now that’s a prize! In preparation, I’m revisiting my rules on how to shop for fabric.

(1) Clean out the trunk of your car (or the back of the SUV or the hatchback, whichever is appropriate) so that you have room for your purchases.

(2) Load the fabric shop addresses and phone numbers into your smart phone or GPS.

(3) Start out with a full tank of gas and an empty bladder.

(4) Pick up your best fabric-shopping friend.

(5) Have an envelope with your cash in it for the shopping trip. It’s very important to stick to a budget.

(6) Have two credit cards with available balances to use after you spend all of your cash.

(7) Be ready with made up stories you will tell people in the checkout line as to what project you are buying the fabric for. Fabric does not need a project in order to be bought, but some people just don’t understand this concept. Pay no attention to them; they are amateurs.

(8) Buy fabric.

(9) Eat lunch and bring the bags of your new fabric into the restaurant so you and your friend can swoon over each other’s purchases even though you were right next to each other when you bought the fabric.

(10) Buy more fabric after lunch.

(11) Buy enough fabric so that you have enough to fill up your washing machine when you get home. There is nothing worse than coming home to a house with nothing that needs washing and not having enough new fabric to warrant using the washing machine. (We are, after all, very ecologically aware.) Under no circumstances should you accost your husband and say, “Take off all of your clothes!” He will get the wrong idea and you will not get to wash your fabric right away. Those of you who do not wash fabric before using it can skip this step.

(12) Add the new fabric to your collection. It is beautiful just sitting on the shelf.

(13) Schedule your next day to shop for fabric.

Lottery Lunacy

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The Powerball lottery jackpot for this coming Wednesday is $425 million, cash value $278.3 million. Well, I don’t need all that money, but in case I win, I have a plan (Lottery Lunacy originally posted in September 2009).

We all have plans for when we win the big money, the lottery. Most what-to-do-with-the-money lists probably start out about the same: taking care of family, house, car, bills, charity, travel. You know, the usual stuff.

But what about after that? What about the interesting stuff? What do you have planned to do or buy that’s just plain fun, silly or both?

Here’s my idea of a silly waste of money, waiting only on the right combination of Quick Pick numbers to come my way (cash option, of course):

I’m going to buy a pair of Crocs for each professional football team. Then, when I’m watching the games on TV, I’ll wear one shoe from each team. For the team going left to right, I’ll wear their shoe on my left foot. For the team going right to left, their shoe will dangle off of my right foot. When the quarter ends and the teams change direction, I’ll swap shoes as well, right to left and left to right.

As a lottery winner, I’ll finally be able to afford the NFL Sunday Ticket and I’ll get to watch all the games. That means that on Sunday mornings I’ll move 30 pairs of shoes to the living room. (One game is on Monday night. Later in the season, Thursday night football on the NFL Network will take another game off of the Sunday line up.)

Each time I change the channel to watch a different game, I’ll get up and change shoes. I’ll count that as part of my daily physical activity. It’ll be fun, really.

Now, if I could just remember to buy a lottery ticket . . .

Black Friday Trifecta, Part 2

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From November, 2009. It happens every year!

The Pod Husband season now starts when the advertisement for the Bass Pro Shop day-after-Thanksgiving sale comes in the mail. When my husband sorts through the mail and the flyer comes to rest in his hand, his eyes start to glow.

“Sweetie,” he calls to me in the other room, his voice wavering slightly, “want to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving?”

We can agree that this is not My Real Husband (MRH)?

No, indeed. My Pod Husband (MPH) has returned.

The Pod Husband season now covers Black Friday, Christmas Eve and the Day After Christmas. Resistance is futile.

On Black Friday, MPH is awake just after 4:00 a.m. to get dressed, feed the dogs and hit the road to northwest San Antonio, where the nearest Bass Pro Shop is, about 75 miles away.

He has several items in the Bass Pro Shop advertisement circled. He even lets me circle some items in the advertisement and he’ll buy them for me, so there is some benefit for me for having this Pod Husband. On Thanksgiving night, he moves the advertisement and the GPS into his truck, to make sure he doesn’t forget either of them on Friday morning.

He’s usually home from San Antonio by 9:00 a.m., when we pour over his purchases, a bit like kids on Christmas morning.

Oh, gotta go now. MPH is home and we’ll be leaving soon for Cabela’s. Got some items circled in that sales flyer, as well.

Black Friday Trifecta

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The Black Friday Trifecta arrived: the sales flyers for Cabela’s. Bass Pro Shop, and Tractor Supply. Hubby is drooling. Here then, is how I discovered that my real husband disappears during the Christmas shopping season, from November 25, 2009. I’ll post the second part on Friday.

Several years ago, two days before Christmas, the man sitting across from me at the table — who I thought was My Real Husband (MRH) — said, “Let’s go shopping tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” I reply, stating the obvious, while trying not to stare at him.

“Exactly!” he says, his pupils dilating. “Fry’s Electronics is opening at 8:00 a.m. We can be there when they open.”

“But tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” I repeat, wondering who to call for help. “Everyone else will be out shopping. It will be awful.”

“No, it won’t. We’ll be there when they open and be gone before the crowds show up.” He seemed so excited about the idea of shopping on Christmas Eve.

Are you kidding me? Why couldn’t he just drive down to the nearest gas station/convenience store combo like everyone else? I mean, they have t-shirts, gimme caps and koozies. Some of them are even open on Christmas Day, for Christ’s sake!

I’m done with my Christmas shopping by Thanksgiving. I’m also the one who stocks up on non-perishables just before Thanksgiving so that when I do have to go somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s only when in dire need of food and even then I can rush in and out of the grocery store. See? Grocery store. Not retail stores where throngs, crowds, hordes of people actually shop for Christmas presents.

We continued discussing this silly shopping idea and he made some vague reference to the phrase “for better or worse.”

It was then that I decided that this was not My Real Husband, but an alien replacement. A Pod Husband, so to speak. It’s the only logical explanation for him wanting to go shopping on the same day that almost everyone else on the planet will be shopping.

I don’t know how or when the switch was made, or where my real husband was, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

Fine. I went shopping with My Pod Husband on Christmas Eve.

That was just the beginning.

Lentil Soup

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November 9th and the high is predicted to be around 82 degrees. That’s about 15 degrees warmer than normal. It’s going to get cold, sooner or later. When it cools off, I’ll be in the mood for soup again. Here’s a post from my old blog, written in the summer of 2011.

In addition to my new Black Bean Chili Soup recipe, I recently made Lentil Soup from Rip Esselstyn’s Engine 2 Diet book. The real name of the recipe is Savory Lentils and Greens and it is on page 222.

I had the list of ingredients in my shopping app when I was at the grocery store, so when I started making the soup, I had all the ingredients. That’s a good start. Everything was going fine and dandy until it came time to add my leafy green of choice, kale. There wasn’t any room for it in my Dutch oven pot. (Dutch oven pot: is that redundant?) It was just chopped up green stuff but when I took off the lid after the soup had simmered for 45 minutes (or thereabouts), there was no room. In fact, my supposed-to-be soup looked like lentil chili, it was so thick.

The Black Bean Chili recipe called for 3/4 cup of water; it was supposed to be thick. It was in self defense that I ended up using 5 cups of water and making it into soup. This recipe called for 5 cups of water and 5 cups of vegetable broth. I just knew it was going to be soup-y. No? Obviously I’m still having “issues” with soup recipes.

No room in the Dutch oven for the kale? I got out my second Dutch oven and transferred half of the lentil chili into it. To make it soup, I ended up filling up both Dutch ovens with several more cups of water and it was still a little on the thick side. Now I had two 5-quart Dutch ovens full of lentil soup. That’s a lot of soup especially considering I’m the only one at my house interested in it.

Although I had read the recipe correctly and had all the right ingredients, there was one little detail that I had missed before starting this endeavor. The recipe “serves a firehouse of 10.”

Oh.

Well that explains it. When I try a new recipe, I like to make it exactly as written for the first time. I just wasn’t prepared for the quantity. Next time, I’ll try cutting it in half. If I remember, that is, and I probably won’t.