A "Mother's" Love

I am tickled to death about my very first knitted sock! Made from purple sheep's wool from my deceased grandmother's trip to New Zealand, it's warm, cozy, and hideous!

And yet there is beauty in it's holes and awkward seams. Each represents a learning curve. Somehow it fits like a dream and is now my most treasured sock because I made it (not quite all by myself, thanks Becca!).

I realize that only it's creator could love it like this, but it deserves the devotion simply because it actually looks like a sock (an effect I didn't really think I'd achieve). Now on to make it's mate who will hopefully be it's better half!

Mary had a little lamb....

(First, apologies to any animal lovers, I can vouch for the happy life of the second sheep, but unfortunately the first is a story I'll never know)

Ahh...the joys of being a married biology major. One minute your dissecting a sheep eyeball, carefully separating the muscles from the sclera, disconnecting the lens from the ciliary bodies, and slicing around the iris, not through it! The next minute your slicing and dicing another part of a sheep, but instead of throwing it into the bio-hazard bag, you throw it into your skillet.

So there I was cutting the fat off of some lamb shoulder for dinner. And this was NOT Mary's "little" lamb. This lamb must have looked like one big, rotund, squishy hairball with four little legs sticking out and not touching the ground. This lamb had FAT!

I entertained myself by trying to name the various muscles and tendons, figuring out where they had been attached, and contemplating the God who made such incredibly intricate things. After about 30 minutes of cutting fat off of 3/4 lb of lamb and still struggling (profusely sweating), an enlightening verse popped into my head:

What God has joined, let no man separate.

I've never understood that verse so well :)

clip art courtesy of www.clipartof.com

Snowy Dreams

I was reading a blog set in Norway and dreaming of my ancestral homeland, with out of the corner of my eye I spied a quiet flurry of white. Day dreams do come true! And now I must quickly get away and walk in this second time of snow. All baking projects are ceased to enjoy the perfect afternoon delight!

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Edit to update: You know you are a southerner when you grab your camera to go for a simple two hour hike in the snow and come back with 100 pictures of snow... just snow. To top it all off, somehow I found 20 short videos of it snowing. Yeah, nothing was going on but snow. Yeesh, I either need to get used to the snow or get a life. But it was fun!

The Present Dress

The reason this dress exists is because I found some fabric that I thought was hideous in my stash and used it to experiment with a new dress pattern. As it turns out, I absolutely love the pattern now. Go figure! It was officially named when a classmate exclaimed, "You look just like a present all wrapped up!" So it's the present dress. :)

Ways to Beat the Heat

All my life I've lived in the South and summers can get hot! However, I've almost always had an air conditioner on inside, but this summer all that is changing. I'm determined to turn the air on ONLY when absolutely necessary (i.e. when the humidity is sustaining all mold life forms in our home). Luckily that has not happened yet, so we've only turned it on a few times when a guest was about to expire. So what are we doing to keep cool? In the end, we got so used to the warmer temperature that I ended up carrying a light sweater with me for trips to the grocery store, classroom, etc because their air conditioning felt too strong!

• Drinking lots of water, tea, and lemonade. For the first time in my life I've drank more than one glass of liquids a day. Mint tea and cholophyll water has become such a treat for me. But best of all is mixing some freshly squeezed lemons with maple syrup in water. It tastes like summer!
• Leaving the windows open at night, and shutting the windows that let the heat in during the day. One set faces a shaded area with a breeze so they usually stay open all the time.
  
• Carry a hand fan around with you. This has been one of my favorite ways! I feel so delightfully old-fashioned with one of these.
• Reusable ice cubes (the kind covered in plastic that you can freeze again and again) work great for those nights when you just cannot sleep! Damp washrags also work well.
• Small, portable fans. While we don't own one, my in-laws do and I love to use it on those hot, humid nights. I've found that as long as the wind is blowing in my face, I don't think about how hot the rest of my body is.
  

Hope some of these help you stay cool. Let me know if you use any other methods.

It's a Zoo Out There!

Our house guest for the summer.

Romantic Updo (Old Fashioned)

I wanted to create a hairstyle that would stay out of my face and off my neck during the summer. I also wanted it to frame my face in the front (otherwise I look quite bald), and look nice in the back. This is what I created.

• To start flip your head over and section off an inch from ear to ear over the top of your head.

• Start at one ear and being twirling the hair above it. Move the twirling over your head to the over ear by adding a little hair to the twirl each time (similar to a french braid.)


• Twirl until just behind and below the other ear and then braid that hair.

• You can see how the braid at the bottom comes out of the rolled (or twirled) hair. Split the rest of the hair in two and braid each.

• Now wrap the three around the back of your hair (bobby pinning in place). Each should be slightly seperated from each other and all ending near the middle of your head.

• If you have extra hair left at the ends, roll it around two fingers and pin in place.