Thursday....

 It seems like nothing is moving along this week. Might be because I have been playing my phone games at night and in the car line rather than stitching. 

Normally, Thursday is my day off. I did however log into work today for a little bit (because I said I would) to check on the status of something that ran last night for a Blitz Day change I made yesterday. It worked so I promoted it to production this morning and updated everything I needed to for it. I have not heard on the other one... I'll check on it tomorrow. We don't promote things to production on Fridays.... don't want to cause errors on a weekend! Blitz Day's at work are when we stop working on the long term projects and work on some 'little' things for the business customers that will only take less than a day to get done. We tend to do them at least once a quarter. I got a couple assigned to me yesterday and got both completed.

After that, Greg was still outside with the chickens so I headed out for a bit to hang out with him and the Chickens.  

This is 8 of them. Just Rose missing from the photo, she is around the corner.

Then it was time to find the sewing machine. The quilting on the Cobblestones was started. I just did straight lines (ok, freehand with the walking foot but close enough!) on either side of the grey strip. 

Took a break for lunch (last of the soup, whatever will I have tomorrow for lunch?) and to make the soft pretzel dough. I'm thinking it is 'enough' quilting on it to hold it since I used warm and natural batting. I want it soft and snuggly, not hard and stiff. I was ..... reminded ..... that someone wants to press the binding so I am not allowed to do that part yet. I will cut and sew the strips together while the dough is on the first rise so Emily can press it in half when she is home from school. I guess I can trim it up as well so it is ready to stitch on tonight. 

That leaves me with project 2 today - the mini magic stars quilt. 

I think I know what I want to do on this for quilting so if time allows I will start on that today as well. Might there be 2 finishes this week? Time will tell.

A very bad photo of the pretty birthday flowers that were handed to me last night when Greg got home from work. So bright and cheerful. If only I had fabrics in these colors for the new Bonnie Hunter mystery - Grassy Creek - in my stash. I think I will do it this year (we are not discussing the partially started On Ringo Lake.... but I did finish Easy Street and Celtic Solstice!)  Shopping the stash for possible fabrics will be another post....... I have ideas but we will see what I find.

Meals?

 Would you believe the family expects meals AGAIN this week? Sigh. This week I have absolutely no appetite thanks to a bit of a cold bug. Hopefully it is just a cold bug! Hubby got to do shopping last night for me after he got off work. Kids are attending in person school.... I did verify their 'rules' and if they have no symptoms they can go.  No, I have not done any testing. Just rest and comfy soups and lots of liquids. I even took tea with honey with me in the car to pick up kids yesterday from school! I dislike tea a lot... and only resort to it with funny feeling throats. Not sore, mind you just off.

On that note - I felt like soup. I really wanted chicken enchilada soup (to use those 2 avacado's in the fridge. I'll have to remind Aidan he can have guac for a snack) but figured I should shy away from the tomato in that so went with a nice beef barley. I pulled the prime rib bones from the freezer Monday morning with a slice of the prime rib. I boiled up the bones with some chicken and beef broth and veggies and barley. I cut off the beef from the bones and cut the other slice up and added it back in. Yummy. I had it for lunch and dinner yesterday and lunch again today. The honey oat bread is just out of the oven.... waiting to end lunch with a nice slice with some butter. 

Monday - the kids had Berber chicken with some baked sweet potato fries. Em had a Kiev and Aidan had broccoli and cheese. These seem to be hit or miss lately and the last month I have not been able to find the Kiev (herbed butter one). I saw a 6 pack the last time I was at Publix and grabbed it. I also have a 6 pack of the cordon blue (Em won't eat these because of the cheese - lactose intolerance) and a 2 pack of the broccoli and cheese. Something for the kids to easily grab and bake if they turn up their noses at dinner!

Tuesday - Mexican chicken and rice skillet - since it is quick and Emily has a FFA meeting after school so we will be late getting home and this one is easy for Greg to make for us.

Wednesday - pan grilled Pork Chops, roasted red potato with rosemary and a green veggie.... or beets. I have not decided yet! Might have both =)

Thursday - Southwestern Egg Rolls. I even got Egg roll wrappers for this instead of using the flour tortillas. I might bake them... but will probably fry them in a pan with a little oil. I wing it a bit and double the recipe - everyone loves these! They tend to go in the kids lunches the next day. I usually just cook up a couple handfuls of spinach instead of frozen. Serve with ranch dressing. Thursdays are my day off so I usually feed the sourdough starter and make some soft pretzels with the extra batter. The kids enjoyed having them when they got picked up from school for the ride home last week.

Friday - after talking with Mom this morning...... I'm thinking shephards pie! We have not had this one in years. It will be interesting to see if the kids will eat it. I remember my Mom browned the beef with a little onion, salt and pepper. Then put it in the bottom of a glass casserole. Add a can or two of corn - including the juice. Then top with homemade mashed potato. A few pats of butter on top and pop it in the oven to brown the top a bit and heat through. When I went to college - they served theirs with a beef gravy over it which was a great addition.

Saturday - Shrimp Scampi (I hope I am hungry by this point again or I will delay this meal!) over pasta.  A salad and maybe some home made bread. Another one we have not really done before. Getting sick of baked salmon and cod so switching up the seafood a bit. It was this or crab cakes but I don't have the crab on hand. I'm the only one that will eat scallops - they just don't know what is good, silly family! The shrimp is in the freezer. The kids actually like tuna (bleck - I do not!) and will eat tuna from the packet (Aidan) or a can drained with some mayo and pickles (Em and Greg). The cats get the juice - they enjoy tuna days!

So that is my tentative meal plan for the week. I have added links to recipes I reference for my meals. Notice I said reference.... I use them as a guide and modify to tastes and what I have on hand. 

Time to test the bread and head back to work.

If you are in the USA - Hopefully you have exercised your duty to vote in the election already or will be doing so today. I sincerely hope the results are clear and both sides respect the will of the people without any unrest or questioning. We need to get back to a united country and not a deeply divided one.  

OMG for November....

 I really want this Cobblestone quilt finished so it will become my OMG for November. Get it quilted and bound by the end of the month! This is a 63x63 quilt. Each cobblestone row has 14 scrappy blocks using 2 inch strips. I used a 2 inch strip of grey in between each row to coordinate with the grey middles in each of the blocks. 

Linking up with Novembers One Monthly Goal.

October OMG....

Well, I did not meet my goal to have this as a completed top BUT.... progress was made. All 4 borders are attached. I still need to add the vine to all the corners to connect them and add some more flowers and some leaves. 

This Midget Applique quilt top went from this at the beginning of October 

To this at the end of October. Progress at least! 

 

Last RSC in yellow.

 This week I made 6 yellow sweet confetti blocks after carefully counting and finding 90 blocks so far. I needed 96 for the quilt. I laid them out (in way too small of a space it appears). Count of 95! There are 6 yellow blocks. I'm not sure where the other one ran away to, or if I just counted wrong..... Oh well, it will either turn up before I decide to sew these together or I'll just make another one in yellow. I hope I like this one more when I spread out the colors a little better and get it sewn together. A bit busy. Not sure if an all over baptist fan or just outline quilting on this one but plenty of time to think on that decision. This one should measure 54.5x72.5 according to the Sunday Best Quilts book where I got the pattern from.

I did get the cobblestones pinned yesterday. Hopefully it will get quilted this weekend. We finally got some cooler weather.... my morning walk was in 56 degrees without humidity. It was heavenly! The house is opened up with everything open and 73 degrees.

Linking up with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge Saturday morning.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is a horse show where Emily rides. A 'home' show so 4-5 hours. Last time a couple years ago she had her in 4 events.... we are novices at this so we will find out as it happens. The end is a Halloween contest for horse and rider. Emily is going as Sarah Sanderson from Hocus Pocus (the blond witch) and Lance her horse will be somehow dressed as a broom. We have brown fabric, raffia and thinking PVC pipe or brown construction paper for the broom handle. Not 100% sure how it will work but we will see how it goes tomorrow! Greg got tomorrow off so he could go, however.... he was on his back fixing the dryer heating element yesterday morning and is feeling it today. He called out reluctantly tonight after hemming and hawing for a couple of hours this morning. Let's hope rest and Tylenol and Advil and he will be better for work on Monday. Grandma is planning to come over for the show so she will have at least 2 people cheering her on! 

 

Meals.....

 Some weeks I am all prepared for meals and other weeks I stress it out not knowing what will be for dinner until right before I enter the kitchen. Thank goodness I have a stocked freezer, pantry and fridge so I can come up with 'something'.  If people turn up their nose - the boy will grab frozen salmon and cook that. Emily would grab a hungry man meal or make mac n cheese. 

This past week I decided with the kids going back to school and me having to pick them up for 3:45... which means we get home a good half hour after that... I decided no stress was better this week!

I made a list of meals.... trying to come up with things we have not had in the past week or two. We seemed to have had a lot of chicken last week, when I actually cooked! 

My list was - lemon chicken and rice, egg roll in a bowl, chicken enchiladas, grammy's spaghetti sauce (from the freezer!), meatloaf.

So far this week - I have done pretty good. Everyone in the family looked at the list and 'approved' it. 

Monday was grammy's spaghetti sauce (meat sauce I made earlier this month) with pasta. 

Tuesday - hubby was home to eat with us so we had lemon chicken with thyme over rice and some green beans and asparagus. Emily turned up her nose at the beans and cooked up some corn for her veggie.

Wednesday - I picked up some pork chops Monday night at Sam's club so I cooked up some of them tonight with the leftover butternut squash, home made applesauce and to use up some of the long english cucumbers - a cucumber salad (Emily) and a quick pickle (Aidan).

Thursday - if I can get some ground pork.... will become egg roll in a bowl with the big bag of coleslaw I picked up Monday night. I don't expect leftovers! This is also called Crack Slaw! It is sooo good. Looks like I could use italian sausage too. 

Friday will be meat loaf, a veggie and potato. I use the recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook for fluffy meat loaf. 

Saturday - after a long day at horses for a horse show.... it might be chicken enchiladas. We will see how hot it is and how much I feel like cooking.

So, that was my meal 'plan' for this week. I'll be thinking this weekend what to come up with for next week's meals! 

Monday update

 The kids had a good day at school and were ever so happy to be back to in person schooling. I even got a 'I'm glad you forced me to go back' from Aidan which is high praise. A little snafu in the morning had him going to 3 different places for his 'Panther Primetime = homeroom'. The first 2 were in error (there were a lot of kids going back and some confusion) but.... he got to see two of his old teachers from last year and this first quarter! They were happy to see him in person (his gifted teacher is his history teacher for all 3 middle school years and his robotics teacher - same person as last year and first quarter). Despite the mishap I think that actually started his day off good seeing some old faces. One of the boys from his classes last year asked him if he remembered him! Aidan said of course Tyler, I remember you. It has been since the second week of March when they last saw each other.

Emily remembered some names and faces from virtual in her classes and in Ag - one of the girls approached her and said she has seen her at horses and does she remember her! Today is their 'B' day for the other 3 classes so we will see how it goes. No picture allowed so I did snap this one as they were walking to the car yesterday morning. 

As for me.... I think I am finally done with the crown! I had my dentist appointment yesterday afternoon. Other than them not being able to just pull the temporary crown out (it was the old permanent one that cracked as they were putting it in last time!), the new one went in and all is good again. I was out of there in plenty of time to stop and get a reward iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts on the way to pick up the kids.

One of Aidan's roses is in bloom. I snapped this last night while supervising 9 chickens released from their run to roam in the yard and eat grass and bugs.

In my wait time... I got a couple of the hexagon QAYG stitched down! It is just like stitching binding, which I actually like doing! Win, Win.