The Tiny Quilt Shop

I'm so proud of the birthday present I made for my mom this year! She has a wonderful Christmas village, and since she owns a quilt shop, we've always looked for quilt shops she can add to her village. Well we've pretty much maxed out all the ceramic quilt shops for villages you can buy (all two of them, heh), so this year I decided to make her one!

This was so much fun! I went a little overboard (I made 40 tiny bolts of fabric only to discover they wouldn't all fit inside). I found the miniature quilts at a local dollhouse miniatures store--my mom even has one that is very similar to the yellow tulip! Bill helped by installing the light, and the kids helped by giving design suggestions and placing the fabric bolts inside.

My favorite part about it, of course, is Nellie. Nellie is the "shop dog", and everyone loves her. She's a wire-haired Jack Russell Terrorist (uh, I mean Terrier), and adorably, she has this tuft of white fur that sticks up right on the top of her head (she was my grandfather Do-Daddy's dog, and he had a matching tuft of white hair on the top of his head!). So, naturally, I had to glue a tuft of cotton to the top of "Nellie"'s head before she took her place on the bench. This was so fun!

The Ugliest Cake I Ever Did Make

I love, love, LOVE to bake! Thanksgiving provides me with an especially exciting challenge: both of my inlaws are diabetic, and up until recently my dad required gluten-free. (True side story: the first time I ever met my future inlaws was a Thanksgiving meal, way before Bill and I were dating. He invited some friends who had nowhere to go to his parents'. My parents were in Louisiana that year and I was alone, so I went. Bill failed to inform me that his parents required sugar-free, and I ever so naively brought with me a huge batch of sugary pumpkin pie bread. My (future) mother in law was so kind about it, but I was mortified!).

But I digress. This year, Thanksgiving was special because it so happened my mom's birthday fell on Thursday, as it does every few years. I love Thanksgiving on her birthday because I am so very thankful for her. I decided I wanted to make a sugar-free red velvet cake for our Thanksgiving/birthday celebration.

I gotta tell you, I sampled the batter while mixing and I was really worried it was going to taste like plain old flour, only red. I was totally under-impressed with the batter. And the cake itself (with sugar-free frosting from scratch) turned out to be the flat-out UGLIEST cake I have ever had the fortune to create:

Interestingly, and not quite coincidentally, I'm sure, it was the very first cake I've ever made from scratch and not from a box...hmmm...I'm sure this cake could be prettied up with some sparkly red sugar decorating the top, but that would kind of defeat my sugar-free purpose.

My stepson summed it up correctly upon tasting it when he giddily proclaimed: "Wendy! That horrid cake you made tastes really good!". Hahaha, we all had a good laugh at that. And he was right: despite its terribly homely appearance and my fears over the bland batter, it ended up tasting pretty darn good. Not bad for my first try...

Incidentally, I also made a sugar-free pumpkin pie, and I want to share the recipe with you. Me, I can't stand pumpkin pie so I don't eat it, but Bill and everyone else says it tastes just like a "regular" pumpkin pie. So if you're looking for something sugar-free that tastes as good as the sugary version, this is your recipe!

Meet the Members of Our Zoo: Cloud

Anyone who knows anything at all about me will recognize this sweet face as the canine love my life:

That's my baby, Cloud. She's a 10.5 year old Lab/Husky mix. She was a stray given to me back in 2000. This dog has been with me through thick and thin, good times and bad, through my divorce and single days and second marriage/stepmomhood. I can honestly say she's one of my best friends: I can tell her anything, I can be a total bitch around her, and she still loves me and goes "Weeeee weeeeeeeee" excitedly when I get home. She is precious and amazing. I love this dog so much sometimes I can hardly believe the depth and hugeness of how I feel about her. I would step in front of a train to save her, if it meant I got five more minutes of life with her. That sounds morbid but now that she's almost 11 and is obviously getting elderly, I think sometimes about life without her (can't even begin to imagine) and I know that my heart is going to shatter when it's her time to go, which is now sooner than it is later. All I can do is enjoy the time I have left with her (God willing at least a few more years, please) and treat her like the sweet princess she is. Yes, she's pretty much spoiled rotten. But she's so adorable!

Cloud is most expressive with her ears: I can tell just by the slant of her ears what's she's thinking. She has the "I Did Something Wrong" ears, the "I Want Something From You" ears and the "You Need to Pet Me" ears. Bill loves to play a game where he puts her ears down and says "Lab" and puts her ears up and says "Husky". Lab Husky. Lab Husky. Haha!

One of the things I love best is how vocal she is: because she's part Husky, pretty much every thought that crosses her mind, she feels compelled to share with everyone else. She can make some pretty freakin' adorable noises when she's excited! Sometimes, every now and then, she gets her Husky on and she howls:

She did this when Bill took Snowball for a run on the bike without her the other day! (Lest you feel sorry for her being left behind, he took Cloud first--you would have thought she'd have been too tired to howl like that, but she wasn't!).

We all know you're not supposed to have favorites but everyone in our house (including the animals) recognizes Cloud's position as Oh Favored One. She's such a good girl, she doesn't even abuse it. :) I love my Cloudybaby!

Worst Christmas Songs EVER

Bah Humbug!

Okay, confession time: I've been listening to Christmas music on 103.7 since November 1st. What can I say, I love this time of year!

That said there are at least three (and probably more) holiday songs that put me in a decidedly un-festive mood. Now I know there are a lot of "worst Christmas songs" lists out there and a lot of people have already weighed in on this issue. But now it's my turn: for your consideration today are what I consider the top three WORST offenders.

3). Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"

Now don't get me wrong, I love me some Boss (especially since he uses my name in "Born to Run"!), but this screechy, scratchy, yowling mess of a song has no business being played over and over and OVER again.

2). Speaking of over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER again:

Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime"

This song makes me want to stick a fork in my ear. I despise songs of any kind that repeat the same thing over and over. This is one of the worst offenders I've ever heard in that regard. This is one of the worst offenders I've ever heard in that regard. This is one of the worst offenders I've ever heard in that regard. This is one of the worst offenders I've ever heard in that regard. Does repeating it make my thoughts any more meaningful or relevant? No, Mr. McCartney, it doesn't. So stop, already.

1). Gloria Estefan's "This Christmas"
I'm sorry to be a hater, but I really can't stand anything by Gloria Estefan, and this one definitely tops the list. I'm not really even sure why I dislike her so much, for some reason I just find her voice to be whiney and annoying, like bloody ragged fingernails down a chalkboard. This song makes me want to jump over the balcony rails outside my office every time it comes on. Which, 103.7 The Christmas Station, if you're reading this, is entirely too often over the course of one day. Is there nothing else you can play?!

Bah Humbug.

What are YOUR top three worst songs?

And now just to prove that I did not post this with the sole purpose of leaving you with a daylong earworm of the above mentioned songs, for your viewing and listening pleasure, one of the best Christmas songs ever made. What can I say, it makes me happy!

Snoopy vs. The Red Baron

Meet the Members of Our Zoo: Snowball

I talk about my pets all the time; I figured it's about time I gave each one of them a chance to shine in the spotlight. Today's introduction: Snowball.

Snowball is a beautiful, sweet, energetic 5 year old black Labrador. Bill thinks her name is hilarious.

This dog is in some ways the craziest dog I've ever known...she is pathologically mentally ill when it comes to food. I really believe she really believes she is going to starve if she doesn't take every chance she can get to snatch food whenever an opportunity presents itself to her. If we don't practice preventative maintenance, she will steal from the trash, off the counters, and occasionally straight out of the childrens' hands if they are not paying attention.

But even though she's crazy she's also pretty much one of the sweetest dogs I've ever known; she wouldn't even hurt a fly (not intentionally, anyway). I love it when her ears perk up like she's listening really hard, we call those The Cute Lab Ears. She has the prettiest brown eyes and when you look into them you can practically read her mind. She's also very, very smart. Much smarter than Cloud.

She's a black Lab but Bill and I are convinced she's got more than just Lab in her, maybe some Golden Retriever, because her fur is much softer than a typical Labrador's coarse fur. She is soooo soft.

Snowball also loves to play! Her favorite toy right now is a big rope with a knot on the end. She swings it around like a mace and growls at it. She really gets into it:

She cracks me up! The girl can drive me crazy sometimes with her antics, but I really do adore that dog.

School Zone Speeders and Report a Litterer

Nothing, and I do mean quite possibly nothing, irks me more than people who speed in school zones. It really makes my blood boil! Typically, the people I see speeding in school zones, are the ones who are either pulling into or out of the school parking lot with a car full of kids. Now that really chaps my hide, because you know if someone else caused an accident speeding that parent would be the first to sue the pants off of them.

Unrelated to that. Texas has a program in place as part of the Don't Mess With Texas campaign, where you can report a litterer. If you witness someone littering, even so much as a cigarette butt, you can anonymously report their license plate number and the state will send them a trash bag and a letter reminding them that littering is wrong. I love this! I am totally outing myself as a goodie-goodie here but I report every single litterer I see. 99% of them are cigarette butts. I'm sure smokers don't even think twice (or likely consider this as littering), but if you've ever been in a heat wave in Texas in August during a drought you know how dangerous a carelessly tossed lit cigarette butt can be: we have grass fires on the highway medians all the time in the summer here. Not to mention it's just plain freaking RUDE to throw your trash around. ARGH!

So here's my brilliant idea: why don't we come up with a way to anonymously report school zone speeders, just like the littering program? They could get a letter reminding them that children die in pedestrian accidents near schools every year. The school zones remind people to slow down (and get off the phone/stop texting) for a reason!!

The only drawback I can see to a school zone speeder reporting program, is that folks like me might be so busy trying to write down license plate numbers that we ourselves might be less careful in a school zone than we should be. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot...

Still, I will remain eternally hacked off every time I drive through a school zone and see somebody whip past me with their carload of kids. I think steam is coming out of my ears just thinking about it...

Cupcake Pies

Check out my latest cupcake creation...blueberry and cherry pies! So fun (and very easy)!

I think I might be obsessed. :)

Good Reads: Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts

Being a self-confessed true crime junkie, it's no surprise that when I came across a website called The Charley Project a few years ago, I was hooked. It's a detailed catalog of people gone missing in the United States dating all the way back to 1910. There are almost 9,000 missing people profiled there: all of them tragic, some of them quite mysterious.

I've never found any of them to be quite so mysterious (or quite so haunting to me) as that of 10 year old Beverly Potts, who disappeared just yards from her home in a crowded park back in 1951. Beverly was a lovely, and by all accounts, extremely shy girl. She was minutes from home, having enjoyed a talent show in the park with thousands of her neighbors. There have been many hoaxes over the decades but no solid leads and no clear answer to what happened to her.

Recently I read Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts by James Jessen Badal. A synopsis by Amazon reviewer MLPlayfair has this to say:

"Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts" by James Jessen Badal is the spellbinding account of a community's search for a 10-year-old girl who vanished without a trace less than a block from her Cleveland home.

Born in 1941, Beverly Potts lived with her family in a quiet Cleveland suburb. On a summer evening in August 1951, she walked to a park just a few doors from home to see a local talent show with her best friend, Patsy. Her disappearance later that night led to what Badal calls "the largest manhunt in Cleveland history" and raised "the chilling possibility that she had been grabbed literally within sight of the family house."

Badal investigated the case by sifting through old newspapers and police files. He describes the dynamic interaction among the three vying newspapers in Cleveland -- an intriguing story in itself -- along with the city's political machinations. The author retraces the shy girl's activities just before she disappeared and provides an exacting timeline of events. He talks about the public's reaction to the crime: Many helped in the search while crowds gathered in front of the family home to get a glimpse of the "gloomy house where tragedy struck."

The authorities tracked down all known sex offenders, drained a pond, sent divers into Lake Erie, did flyovers in planes and led basement-to-attic searches. They followed up on cryptic messages and false leads and even took calls from psychics and extortionists. As Badal says, the hoaxes ranged "from the merely stupid to the heartlessly cruel."

Decades after the crime, police were still investigating, interviewing serial killers and molesters. Even today there are a lot more questions than answers. The ordeal was so horrendous for Beverly's mother that she "died, quite literally of grief, in 1956," says Badal.

We tend to think of the abduction of children as a modern phenomenon, forgetting that it's always been a terrifying fact of life. 

MLPlayfair has written an excellent synopsis and I highly recommend this book for true-crime mystery junkies. The only thing I didn't like about this book is certainly not the author's fault: it doesn't solve the crime. We are left hanging, as folks have been for nearly 60 years now, as to Beverly's fate. How tragic.

Halloween At Cowboys Stadium

Bill and I were so lucky to have tickets to watch the Cowgirls (um, I mean Cowboys) play at the new stadium on Halloween! Not only was it the first time for both of us to check it out, but it was also awesomely awesome to be there on Halloween and enjoy some of the most interesting people-watching such an event provides. I am an avid people-watcher to begin with (I love airports) and this was one of the best opportunities I've had in a while.

My favorite part was when they put pictures of people in costume up on the Jumbo-Tron! Check out just a few of the samplings. There was also a great halftime performance by the beloved Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders dressed "backwards", and being stalked by a large crowd of zombies (ultimately doing a fantastically choreographed dance together at the end). Fun stuff!

By far our favorite guy in costume was the one I'm going to show in the first two pictures: he started out with a Texas Rangers jersey on, which he then ripped open to show his Cowboys shirt...clever!