Here's a cool story. It's about custom made watches. The site for 121 Time is hard to get to, so I have included a link directly to one of their women's watches. From that page you can click on the different styles on the left, and then modify your watch you have chosen. At the time I am writing this, I could not get their main site to come up. I'm guessing that the article on Reuters got so many hits that their server was overwhelmed. I got interested in custom watches from an article I read on BoingBoing about a steampunk watch.

Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cello player of our time, was laid to rest today in Moscow. If you are unfamiliar with his music, I highly recommend his Bach suites; they are my favorite cello recordings.

Crazy fun with Microsoft Picture It! Express 7.0

Here is a peek into how my brain works. Last night I was looking at Cute Overload (which I heard about on Dawn and Drew) and decided to put a picture of my own cute kitteh on my desktop. So tonight I was trying to tweak the picture because I didn't like the way his eyes looked (there was a lot of flash light in them and they looked demonish). I was looking at all of my photo editing software and decided to try to use the redeye fix to deal with it. A while ago I downloaded the free version of Microsoft's Picture It! software (which is no longer available) and decided to try it. This is one of the crazy pictures I created. I giggled for at least an hour playing with that silly redeye tool...

Earth Day and Cougar News

In honor of Earth Day we decided to make homemade laundry soap. Ray actually did all the work, I just helped shop for the ingredients :-)

Here is a link to the recipe and a photo of our "slime". We used Kirk's Castile soap, Arm & Hammer Laundry Soda and 20 Mule Team Borax. These were all available locally in our small town, so they should be easy to find. I will let you know how well it works when I try it out this weekend.

Now for the cougar update- A few years ago I was driving down a dirt road in a pretty remote area of northern Michigan and saw a large animal crossing the road. It was a cougar! Now, I am something of an outdoorsy type and have seen many wild critters while delivering the mail, camping and fishing, so I think I know a cougar when I see one. However, the official word from the DNR at the time was that there were no cougars in Michigan. As time went on, more and more were sighted in Michigan. Well, I thought I was one of the only people to see one in my area, but on Monday a customer of mine came running out to my car to tell me that he had seen one across the road (about 200 feet) from his house! I was so excited to know that I was not a lone loony! He also told me that the corner store had a photo of a cougar, and that another local had seen one feeding on a road kill deer. I will have to make sure I have my camera with me from now on. If I get any pix I will post them.

My granddaughter, Nola Sophia Mason, Born 4-14-2007.

... See my Tabblo>

Just a quick post today... I am in Montana awaiting the birth of my first grandchild- photos to follow!

Easter Dinner

Although we don't celebrate Easter, we use any excuse to prepare a special meal. Here is the delicious leg of lamb we prepared for dinner yesterday. We cut slits in the meat and stuffed quartered garlic cloves in it, then rubbed it with olive oil and seasoned it with sprigs of fresh rosemary, coarsely ground pepper and kosher salt. We also had roasted garlic & buttermilk mashed potatoes with gravy, buttered corn and whole wheat hard rolls. For dessert we had the cake from yesterday and ice cream.

If I knew you were coming...

Yesterday we decided to try making fondant to decorate cakes. This was Ray's first time making a cake from scratch and he was pretty excited. We also enlisted David to help us, since he wants to go to culinary school after he graduates.
Here is my lemon layer cake with lemon curd filling.

Yummy lemon buttercream frosting!

Here is Ray kneading the marshmallow fondant that I worked on for about half an hour. I told him- "All of the glory with none of the work!"

The finished cakes! Notice the pacman on Ray's cake?
He made a chocolate layer cake with buttercream filling and fondant frosting. I made a lemon layer cake with lemon curd filling, lemon buttercream frosting and fondant decorations.