Pie Social and Bake Sale

The ladies group in our church is having a Pie Social and Bake Sale.  It's an annual event and a pretty good fund raiser.  Everyone makes a pie to be cut and served/sold and several other baked goods for sale.

This year these are my offerings....

A cherry pie.  I put all my efforts into looking pretty.  It's made from canned pie filling and a ready to use crust.  It'll still taste ok but I think it really is quite attractive!  (That's me patting myself on my back!)

This is a chocolate pudding pie on a graham cracker crust.  The pretty part comes from the white chocolate that I made into a lacy design. 

It was easy to do but I had to break off a few of the loops to make it fit on the pie.  So it's kinda just so so.

These are Combining Cookies.  Butter, sour cream, coconut, oatmeal, chocolate chips.  Yummy.  Nothing really pretty here but they are a family favorite.  Especially because the recipe came from this little lady.

Grandma Lora.  DH's paternal grandmother.  I've had her knitting on here before.  And now here are her cookies too. 

I mentioned before that she raised a big family and this recipe was made to fit that family I'm sure.  It calls for 12 cups of flour and yesterday when I made a 1/2 batch, it still made 6 dozen cookies.

I'm not taking all of them to the bake sale though...we love them too much to part with all of them!

Shortened!

It's done!

Shhh....let's not talk about the jeans....

If you need me

I'll be here. Probably for a week long engagement.



Doing repairs and alterations.

Two pair of jeans to shorten for my sister.

A couple worn spots to patch

for 3rd DS.

And the piece de resistance...

another prom dress to be shortened by approximately 5 - 6" for my great niece. What can I say. The girl is short. But she's sweet and I can't say no to her.

Think helpful thoughts for me this week. I really don't like doing repairs OR alterations. And did I mention that the prom dress has 5 layers to shorten? Uff.

On second thought, maybe I need a prayer for my sanity too.

Kym's March Madness

Kym needs you to help her decide the winner of her own "March Madness" playoff between the Black Cardigan and the Tote Bag.


If you go vote on her final two contestants you'll be entered into a drawing for a prize....and please mention my name in her comments so I'll be entered too!

Springish

The calendar has been saying spring for a few days now.

The juncos are back. But the grass is barely thinking about being green.

The robins are also back and are hanging out at the local watering hole.

I searched the yard far and wide to find something trying to be green and found these flowers. But there are no leaves popping out. And there are no spring flowers showing around town yet.

If I knew how to put audio on here though, there would be a symphony of birds singing. From early in the morning to sunset the birds are singing their hearts out.

What a wonderful thing after the silent winter.

And as for knitting:

I've almost finished the potholders. A bit more knitting and then a good hard felting and they'll be good to go. Yay!

Las Vegas 2012

DH & I decided we needed a bit of a break before another farming season starts and the seed plant goes nuts yet again and so we made a quick weekend trip to Las Vegas.

I've always wanted to take a picture of mountains from an airplane but there were always clouds in the way. This time there were less clouds and so I put my phone on airplane mode and shot away.

These weren't the highest mountains but when you are from ND anything over the size of a small hill looks like a mountain!

I don't know if any of you read the Yarn Harlot but she created the term "kinnear". And so on St. Patrick's Day I couldn't resist kinnearing this gal who was all dressed up for the day.

But! She caught me at it. Oops. Turns out she wasn't upset...just amused. Her & her friend, that was dressed almost identically, were happy to take a picture with me.

No. I'm NOT putting that on here...what do you think I am? Crazy? These girls are skinny and I look like 2 of them put together.

Whenever "Pawn Stars" is on we usually watch. And since it is just a ways north of the strip we just had to go see the place for ourselves.

It was a hoot to see. None of the stars of the show were around but the guys behind the counter are occasionally seen in the background of the show.

It was your typical pawn shop. Older building. Slightly dusty appearance on everything.

They let only a certain amount of people in at a time and as you can see in the picture everyone basically lines up and walks around the perimeter of the store.

They sell a lot of touristy things. T shirts, shot glasses, mouse pads, magnets, key chains as well as some very expensive items that have been pawned there. I thought it would be fun to pick something up from there. Ah. No. Guess not.

2nd DS was there a couple weeks ago and did a little investigating. He walked around to the back of the building to their warehouse where the big overhead door was open. Guess what he found inside. T shirts. A whole wall of boxes of T shirts and nothing else. He was like..."Can you say tourist trap?"!

There are no pictures allowed at any of the shows and so no more pictures but we went to Jay Leno who is the same onstage as the standup part of his nightly dialog. Fun to see in person but if you watch regularly it felt like you'd heard it before.

The next night we went to Kathy Griffin. Funny but with a bit more of an edge than I'm comfortable with but it was ok.

The last night we were there we attended Cirque du Soleil Love (Beatles). Amazing. Huge. Spellbinding. Very loud Beatles music. Acrobats coming from the ceiling, over your heads, up from the floor, down the aisle. Like a 3 ring circus, there was so much going on you couldn't see it all. Did I say Amazing and Spellbinding?

It's always fun to go to Las Vegas. People to watch. Shows to see. Lots of good eating. A little shopping. Relaxing.

If you can, you should try it sometime!

Pretties

My birthday gift from 2nd DS & DDIL. Are they lovely?! Tulips are the best.

If the tulips and daffodils that I planted a few years ago hadn't been eaten by gophers I would soon be growing my own with the way the winter is disappearing.

It actually was the "winter that wasn't" and is continuing to be unusually warm...upper 60s for the weekend. I think we are breaking temperature highs almost every day now. Nearly every speck of snow has already melted. As a farmer's wife it freaks me out a little wondering what the weather will bring for this summer.

President Clinton will have super weather to visit Grand Forks on Saturday. He will be here for the ND Democratic Convention. He was here in 1997 when Grand Forks flooded. It will be nice for him to see the recovery and see how much his efforts helped the town get back on it's feet.