I got a little ahead of myself and twittered and facebooked about five crafts but I hadn’t gotten to this one yet. So HERE is the fifth craft: These are happy little challah bread napkin rings made from recycled plastic trash bags! They don’t exactly look like Challah Bread but they are braided and a whole lot prettier than the plastic bag they came from.

As everyone knows plastic bags blow. However! They are actually quite wonderful as a crafting medium. You can make all sorts of things with them: rope, crocheted into a bag, fused together as fabric…the possibilities are amazing.

Here’s how I made napkin rings:

First you’ll need the tan colored ones. These are not as common as they used to be. In my town everyone has switched to white for some reason. But check around, they still exist in MASSIVE quantities, probably in your own garage, pantry or under-the-sink hidey hole.

Next smooth out your bag of any creases and cut it into three strips. Don’t worry about the handle portions being longer. You’ll trim the excess off later.

Next you’ll need to “fuse” the ends together so you can start your braid. To do this you will need a hot iron and some tinfoil. Fold your tinfoil over a couple times so that there will be two sheets between your iron and the plastic bag strips. Now, very carefully, hold the iron down on the tinfoil in 15-second increments until it fuses. (Be careful not to touch the plastic with your iron or you’ll have a messy clean-up job later.)

Now it’s time to braid!

Braid about six or seven inches and stop. Give yourself about a half inch of unbraided ends and then trim the excess off with scissors.

Wrap your braid into a circle big enough for a cloth napkin to slip through and then carefully insert your tinfoil and iron onto the loose ends using your tinfoil. You might need to fold the tinfoil into a triangle to fit it inside the napkin right. Repeat the ironing technique used above and fuse your ring together.

Voila! You have a fancy napkin ring and you saved the landfills from one more plastic trash bag! Isn’t that a great way to start off the new year? L’Shanah Tovah!

What do you do when you are buried with work, deadlines are falling all around you like giant redwoods in a timber harvest, you have guests coming in from out of town and you decided to have a great big fiesta on Saturday with lots and lots of friends? Do you knuckle down and get your work done so you’ll have plenty of time to clean your house and get ready for the party before your guests arrive OR do you walk around your house and dream up some impossible last-minute DIY home-improvement projects? The latter of course!

Because you wouldn’t want your guests to see the bathroom floor looking like this:

The horror! Actually, it looked much worse than that. The paint had come up in spots and it was soooo dirty. Muddy kid bathing, running-over sinks (that’s another story) and dogs with hair and claws do not do well on painted pressed wood (not to be confused with plywood, that would be a step up). It was the floor that could not be mopped. Oh, I tried to mop it. Believe me. But scrubbing seemed to just make it worse. You know you have a problem when you moisten the wood and it just comes up in crumbs in your hand. It was icky.

So I decided to paint the floor! Giant deadlines be damned. (Don’t worry clients, all’s well in the end.) My mom had taken all the girls over to her house for Camp Grandma so I decided to attack the floor with wild blood-shot-eyes of craziness and then get my work done on the side. That’s how we get things done around here.

Oh yeah.

First, I was just going to paint some flowers to distract from the ugliness of the dirty mint green paint. I drew them in with a sharpie and was quite pleased. Then I painted the flowers and leaves and some odd purple paisleys around the toilet area and discovered that the new fresh paint made the old dirty mint green paint look like a hot mess of awfulness. It didn’t detract at all! It pointed instead and screamed, Look! Look! It’s dirty in here! You’re probably going to catch something awful if you walk in here barefoot!

Oh woe is me.

Did I mention that I was using old house paint from a craft project from a long time ago and I didn’t have enough paint to cover the whole floor and definitely not enough for more than one coat? Good thinking, that thar me. But I tried anyway. I tried and tried to skimp out every last scrape of “lemon icing” paint to cover the ugly mint green but there was just NOT enough.

This is about the time I started walking around my house naked doing a one-woman stand-up comedy show all by myself for myself and the dog. I really wish I could have recorded that because I think I am pretty funny. But there was nakedness and blood-shot craziness so no recording was going on.

I did jot down some notes for this post though. I’m such a blogger like that.

Here are my notes:

1. Don’t have a dog, with hair when you are painting your floor. No matter how hard you sweep and wipe up the hair with a wet paper towel, you will miss about 80 thousand of them. That is why they call painting white wash. You are washing the hair with paint. Check your OCD at the back door.

2. Don’t paint with old paint from a past project because you WILL run out and you won’t be able to match it with your home stash of acrylics or the kid poster paint.

3. Do not leave the phone on the counter where you can’t reach it later without stepping in wet paint.

4. Do not forget to paint behind the door. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

5. Do not paint in your favorite nightgown.

That’s all I wrote down but I’m sure there are about 95 more things not to do when painting your floor. In the end I went to Home Depot, shelled out 88 trillion bucks for a gallon (They don’t sell smaller containers. Gah!) of “lemon icing” matched paint and a gallon of epoxy garage floor paint for cement to put over the top and hopefully make the whole mess more mop-able. I really hope it works and doesn’t peel up my masterpiece when I roll it down Friday morning.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention how drying times had to be factored in. You know how I am so great at math. Ha ha. Imagine me with a calculator and smoke coming out of my ears. It turns out I do have enough time to get it all done before the party on Saturday (when my guests will mostly likely need to use the restroom!!) but it was close. So close in fact that I had to step aside and painfully not paint more detail so that I could give it a whole 24 hours to cure before laying down the garage floor epoxy laminate clear coat, or whatever that stuff is called. It was hard stepping aside. I desperately wanted to add more flourishes and scallops and maybe some tapered dotting but I started stepping in paint in places I couldn’t cover up and I knew it was time to cut my losses.

My original plan was just to paint some flowers as a temporary measure until I could put some groovy old 70′s linoleum down but now I’m kinda liking the flowers. They’re bright, they’re crazy. They make the rest of the bathroom look like an old lady running away from a flower child on acid but I kinda dig it. If this clear coat thing works out, they might stick around for a while.

At least so I can tell this story over and over.

This is a first for me. I signed up for a cooking contest and I’m entering my recipe here. I thought you guys might enjoy it even though I’m not really a foodie.

Anyway, “…as part of the launch of new Knorr® Homestyle Stock, an authentic tasting stock in a new concentrated format, 200 bloggers put their culinary talents to the test to become one of the Knorr Four™ – a panel of bloggers who will share their insights and expertise to provide tips and recipes, and participate in other food fun for exciting rewards. And the first reward is a big one – eight finalists from this recipe contest will win a free trip to BlogHer 2011!”

I already have my ticket to Blogher but I’m hoping I can win this contest and maybe give the ticket to my sister-in-law who is locked away up in Northern California. It includes airfare!

So here goes:

There are three things I like a lot: A strong cup of coffee, chocolate and a dry red wine. Not necessarily together of course but when I dreamed up this recipe for Knorr’s new concentrated chicken stock, I decided a little bit of all three might just be delicious. I’m calling it my new holy trinity.

And of course I sampled all three while I slaved away in the kitchen! That’s what good cooks do!! I didn’t sample the unsweetened chocolate though. That would be silly. I have my other stash of 70% dark cacao in my pantry but I did let Bug have a tiny bite so she’d learn just the way I did way back in the day that not everything that looks like delicious chocolate is. It was delicious in the chili, of course—just not so much by itself.

Yes, this chili with chocolate and coffee and wine is a little rich but I think in small portions it’s very very good, especially if you are big fan of mole like I am. Add a big healthy salad on the side and I don’t think anyone will complain. The chicken and corn and also the lack of anything tomato-based made it work for me but you might want to tweak to your own favorite chili flavors.

So here is my recipe:

1 can of black-eyed beans
1 can of white cannellini beans
1 can yellow corn (though white would have been fancy)
1 small can green chilis (I chose mild)
1 onion
1 clove of garlic (or 1 tsp of garlic paste if you are like me and HATE the smell of garlic on your fingers for days)
5 chicken thighs cut into bite-sized pieces with excess fat removed
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
2 oz unsweetened chocolate (shaved with a fine grater)
1 cup of strong coffee
1 cup of red wine (I used 2-Buck Chuck Shiraz)
1 tub of Knorr® Homestyle Chicken Stock
1 cup water
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1 1/2 tsp ground pepper
Avocado slices and goat cheese crumbles for garnish

First the prep work: Drain and rinse your beans and corn, chop your onion, mince your garlic, cut your chicken.

Saute onion and garlic in a generous amount of olive oil until translucent.

Add chicken and cook through until juices run clear. Don’t cook it to death of course. You want your chicken to stay nice and juicy but you don’t want to add your wine and coffee before it’s done because that can change the molecular structure of the chicken and taste nasty.

When the chicken is done and no pink is showing, add 1 cup of strong coffee (hold the cream and sugar of course), 1 cup of red wine (if you’re like me just slosh a glass-full in, sort of like picking blueberries: one for me, one for the pot) and 1 cup of water. Next add the tub of concentrated Knorr chicken broth (don’t worry about diluting it per the directions on the side of the package—that will just happen in the pot as you cook). Stir and let the gelatin break down into a soup like so:

Let this simmer for a minute or two and then add your chocolate.

I know! Chocolate in dinner! It’s like dessert, but not! Mmmmmmm…enjoy that heavenly aroma.

Once the chocolate has been stirred in, add your seasonings. Let that simmer for a bit while you go yell at the kids to bring in their toys from the front yard and you take a few more sips of wine.

Add your beans, corn, chilis and let simmer on low for about 30 minutes. Just enough time to go check your email and surf around Facebook for a while. It could simmer longer (I know some recipes call for an hour) but I usually just wing it. I’m sure sometimes it simmers for less than 30 minutes and it tastes fine. Just make sure you check it and nothing is burning of course!

Mmmmmmmm….it’s starting to smell like dinner around here!

Serve with some avocado slices and goat cheese crumbles (or sour cream if you’re sensitive to hot spicy chili) and ENJOY!

So here’s a quick flick through my camera stream lately. First a photo taken by Rapunzel of her own hand. She’s not afraid to grab the camera and get in there with the interesting shots. I love that.

Another one of my old saguaro. She can’t believe that I never took this shot myself. Nope, I didn’t. Too prickly!

We had a little tiff at dinner so I’m feeling a bit sentimental as I post these photos. Teenagers are so complicated!

I spray-painted an old wooden chair my mom had laying around. I wanted to give the chair its own post but it’s not like I’m really a DIY home-decorator blog or anything so I’m just going to smash it in here instead.

Spray, spray, spray. Don’t you love it when you forget to change the ISO setting on your camera and the last thing you shot was a product shot inside at 3200 and then you go outside and over-expose everything so bad that your backyard looks like heaven from the 70′s?

Maybe that’s just my version of heaven from the 70′s.

Anyway, the chair looks fantastic! It went from country bumpkin to eclectic mess which is sort of good except I hate eclectic mess. I love the chair though. I just need to de-clutter my house a little so it can shine on its own.

It’s already a favorite for family meetings.

And vain self-portraits.

Speaking of, I need some better self-portraits because I’m A PUBLISHED AUTHOR NOW!!!! And I had to put some dumb hand-held frumpy mom shot in the back of my book. I know I could pay someone to take a real portrait but I like to keep it real (or cheap). I am self-published after all, it’s not like I have a big book-contract deal. But I do have an awesome agent/publisher friend who is hooking it all up. I’m so excited. This is really a dream come true for me.

It dropped on Amazon yesterday for my birthday! This is just a soft launch. I have two more books to illustrate and then we’re going to launch a blog tour with giveaways and prints and a book party (squee!) and I’ll probably talk about it so much you will all get sick of me. But until then check it out! $2.99 yo! It’s only on the Kindle right now I think but you can get a free kindle ap for your mac or ipad. I’ll share more when I get the hang of it. I’m new at this still. (Also available in the UK and Germany)

In the meantime I have two books still to illustrate! (And many more after that I hope) I’m so behind. If you see me goofing off, feel free to kick me in the butt. I’ve got work to do!!! It’s always feast or famine around here.

Yes, my birthday was fantabulous. Thank you for asking. We kept it low-key with a night out with my best beach gal pal DMA and a new friend on Friday and then a family dinner with the niece-com-poops and my Aunt Keren and Grandma on the day itself. My grandma made me my favorite birthday dinner (peanut encrusted Thai chicken—soooooooooo yummy you could die) and Rapunzel made my cake. How can I be mad at her when she’s so sweet like that. Teenagers! She kills me.

Anyway, it was super sweet and fun and the kids had a blastola swimming in Grandma’s community pool.

I love summer.

Why yes, I did make a peach pie. I know! All this fun going on when I have work to do!!! This is what I’m talking about. I should be shackled to my laptop but no, I’m in the kitchen pretending to be Martha Stewart or something. It’s just that it’s summer and the fruit is going bananas (or more correctly, peaches) and it’s such a wonderful new thing to me that I just can’t bear to let it rot! It’s me and the fruit flies and I’m not about to let them win.

Peaches, zucchinis, apricots, plums, sugar snap peas and soon tomatoes. I can’t even keep up with my camera. Life does not stop for the weary!

You know what brings all the kids to my yard? Popsicles that’s what. I’m keeping the whole neighborhood regular with these fruity yogurt pops. They are so delicious and good for you! Well, not counting the sugar in the vanilla yogurt I add… but the fruit! Delicious summer fruit!

This week I added apricots to the mix since we have so many of them. They are so tasty all blended up!

And pretty too!

It’s popsicle o’clock!

Now go make some. Here’s my official recipe:

Cut your ripe juicy fruit up (maybe a cup or two). Add two heaping big spoons of vanilla yogurt, blend in your trusty blender, pour into your popsicle mold of choice, freeze for a day and EAT!

We’d been yelling at the kids to stop knocking the apricots out of the trees for what seemed like months. Finally, it became apparent that the kids weren’t knocking the apricots out of the trees anymore. The birds were and the apricots were soft and ripe when they landed on the ground which means it’s picking time! (Yes, that chair is totally busted.)

Hooray! I didn’t spend all spring paying that water bill for nothing. It was time for me to cash in on some yummy orange fruit!

While I went to the store for canning supplies, the kids picked whatever they could reach and Rapunzel, my oldest niece, got a ladder out of the shed and picked the higher-up ones. They left some yellowy-green ones for later.

You can’t just let these babies sit around and draw fruit flies. Nope. They have to be canned, into apricot jam specifically.

This is the face you make when you know you’ve got a big ugly mess ahead of you. It’s canning day.

My mom did most the cooking. I just cut up the apricots. Boy, did they smell good.

I love the smell of fresh hot jam.

We made 29 jars of jam which is a lot. Four batches. There are more apricots left too but I think I’m done with jam. My mom’s talking about dehydrating the rest but I’m going to let her do that at her house.

I’m done with messiness for a while. Phew!

It was worth it though. TWENTY-NINE JARS! Christmas presents, DONE. Now I just need to design some kind of cool label for them and maybe invest in some kind of big round paper-punch. There’s no way I’m cutting out 29 circle stickers like I did for the Marmalade. No way.

I did make some scones with some of the leftover cut-up apricots though. I just used my lemon scone recipe and added apricots instead of zest except I added a lot more than 2 tablespoons. They turned out super dense. Kind of like an apple fritter without the glaze. Pretty tasty really. You might want to stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

I’m really digging this rural living. What’s next? Tomatoes, I think. Salsa anyone?

Lest you worry that we are all doom and gloom around here, I wanted to let you know that there are happy times too. We know my Grandfather is in a better place and we had a lot of time to mentally prepare for his leaving. He was really sick in the end and now he has no pain, which is so much better. Of course we miss him. Sometimes I get so bummed out that we all can’t live forever. I want my grandma back, my Aunt Lois, the lady at the laundromat and all those pets I’ve lost… but this is life. The sooner I wrap my mind around the fact that it’s fleeting, the better.

There are still many many reasons to keep on loving and smiling and having the best time that we can while we are here.

So before a whole slew of relatives showed up for the funeral this Saturday, I decided to have my grandmother and aunt over for a pizza night. Of course they’ll be invited when all the relatives are here too but they appreciated a quiet night with just us. Especially since my aunt is just out of her cast and wobbling her way through physical therapy and my Grandma is well, getting old. She gets tired easy. But not too tired to come over and I love that she still does.

I made the dough. It’s really easy, it’s just a matter of remembering to do it an hour beforehand. Have I posted the recipe before? If I did, I can’t find it so here it is again:

PIZZA DOUGH

Ingredients:

1 cup warm water (105ºF —which as Bethany says is hot but not too hot, sort of like kid’s hot chocolate at Starbucks)
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 tbs olive oil
2 tsp honey (I accidentally put tablespoons and it tasted just fine, maybe better in fact)
1 tsp yeast

Instructions:

1. Add salt and honey to warm water in a bowl. Mix and then add the yeast. Let sit 10 minutes.

2. Gradually add flour and olive oild and start mixing (hello, kitchen aid dough hook)

3. When mixture gets too heavy to mix, start kneading (my wrists love you, kitchen aid dough hook).

4. Knead until smooth (ish), make a ball, coat with olive oil.

5. Place in a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise 1 hour at room temperature.

6. Punch down and let rise another hour (or not. I always skip that extra rising.)

7. Shape, punch with holes with a fork and add toppings.

8. Bake at 400-450º F 20-25 minutes until crust is light brown.

This pizza was for me, Bug and my dad. I’ve been loving having my dad all to myself this week.

And this pizza was for my aunt and grandma with all kinds of icky things on it like onions, mushrooms and garlic! Ew! But that’s why I love pizza night, everyone can bring their own toppings and make what they like.

Then we popped them in the oven.

And it was delish!!! So don’t worry too much about us. We’re doing fine.

p.s. Don’t forget to stop by my review blog for chances to win a mop (which you’ll need if you have a pizza night) and some mulah before May 31st! While you’re there, check out the spin spin spinbrush post too if you haven’t already. Thank you! :)

The idea was to dribble so much sugar onto these cookies that I am not tempted to take even one bite. I think it worked. I didn’t eat a single one and just thinking of them makes me a little sick. But oh they were so much fun!

Fun fun fun! All the way up to…

clean-up time.

Groan.

Today after I finished up work, I rewarded myself with a trip to the local thrift stores—two of them to be exact. I’ve had it in my head for weeks now that I want a coffee table. Just something little that can sit nice and low between Bugly and Beatrice so we can set our coffee on it. (Imagine that, using a coffee table for what it’s for!) That way we won’t be resorting to setting our coffee cups on our laptops like my Uncle Tim did when he was visiting, crazy Uncle Tim.

Anyway, a long long time ago there was this neat little octagon table, probably about two feet high and maybe a foot and a half wide that would have been perfect. Except I didn’t buy it back then when I first saw it because I didn’t have Beatrice and Bugly yet and I didn’t know I’d be on this 70′s furniture kick. I do remember thinking that it was especially hideous but might look cool spray-painted pink or orange or…both! I get crazy ideas like that.

Well, you know how this story always goes. I went back for the table and it was gone. Duh. I’ve looked for it a few (hundred) times and have determined that nothing else like it will ever exist again. Predictably, I went home table-less again today and just felt sad and tired. Which also might have something to do with my terrible habit of waking up at 1am and working until 5am but whatever. Life is all about the hunt, right? Some days you just don’t find what you want, that’s the fun of it.

After sitting outside on my park bench and sighing loudly for nobody to hear, I finally hatched a new plan. You could say I had a bee in my bonnet.

I remembered this spool we found in the dumpsters by my aunt’s seamstress shop back when we were looking for empty boxes for my sister-in-law’s move. Don’t worry, it wasn’t dirty dumpster diving. All the trash in this dumpster was clean. It was full of empty boxes and some random things that cable companies use to hook up direct tv or whatever it is they do. We had no idea what the cable could be good for but the spool looked like it might be fun for Bug to play with. So we threw it in the back of my mom’s SUV with all the empty boxes and never thought of it again.

That is, until now. That spool was destined to become pinkified.

Perhaps that shade of fuchsia that is so popular around these parts? I just happen to have some spray paint in that color already. I wonder why?!!

So we pinkified it. Pink, pink, pink.

Then we spray-painted an old broken phone that happened to be within reach. Nothing is safe from THE Pink.

“I got it, I got it!…Hey, Barbie! What’s up girl?”

“Like totally. Hang on, my mom wants me to help her with something in the living room. I’ll just walk and talk.”

“Seriously, it’s like my mom thinks she’s on some kind of interior decorating show or something.”

And that’s the story of the pink spool in my living room. I realize it’s not the best fix. It looks sort of like a cross between something from the set of The Borrrowers and something from a college dorm room but it does get the job done and it’s small enough that we can just wheel it off to Bug’s room if something better comes along.

I think it looks pretty cool, especially with the new (old) dishes my mom just gave me. Aren’t they groovy? My mom bought them when she was pregnant with me. Nineteen-seventy-two, baby. What a good year that was.

* * *

In other news, don’t forget to stop by my review blog and comment on my Slim-Fast post if you haven’t already! Sweepstakes be-a sweepstaking!

Houston (and everywhere else too), I have an oven!!!!

It is so great. It is the best thing EVER.

You know the best way to make someone bake tasty treats? Take their oven away for half a year. It worked like a charm on me. I never knew I used an oven so much until I didn’t have one.

It was so exciting to have one again that I was baking in that thing less than three hours after it was installed. I’d probably have baked sooner but I wasn’t in town yet. I was still out at the beach for our weekly visit with Toby. But you can bet I hightailed it out of Orange County as fast as I could so I could get home and put this hunk of 1970′s junk to work. I was soooo very happy.

My Dad is here this weekend and in less than two days he has installed my oven, painted my bathroom floor mint green (that actually clashes terribly with the avocado green tub but is a zillion times better than the water-damaged press-board that used to be there), fixed the one spot in my yard that Holly was escaping from AND taken the cover off my swamp cooler so I can be cool as a cucumber once summer gets here.

Tomorrow if he has time after jury duty (he’s a busy guy) he might even install a motion sensor light in my backyard so I can do laundry in the dark without having to plug an extension cord in. Is my Dad awesome or what? He blows me away with his selflessness and this is just how he is. He’s always like that. He’ll give you the shirt off his back and then ask if you’d like his shoes too.

Anyway, back to my best-thing-ever oven. I do not care one bit that it’s an old hand-me-down from my mom’s trailer on the other side of town. It is a thing of beauty in my eyes. And it works!!! That’s all I care about! So I shined it up…

(I’m just a wee bit excited with the Fonzie thumbs.)

…and put it to use making lemon bars of course! (I seem to have forgotten the “s” in my recipe. Oh well.)

The cherry on top of this whole first-day-of-baking after not being able to bake for five months was that I finally got to use the hand-me-down Kitchen Aid that Bethany gave me back around New Years. I know! Do I score when it comes to hand-me-downs or what?!! It even came with stickers! Bethany got a new one for Christmas and mailed me her old one. You know that postage was a whopper.

Sadly, when I got it I had to leave it in the box and hide it in the back corner of Bug’s room. It didn’t fit on my counter and I knew that I couldn’t really use it for anything until I got the oven fixed, which seemed it like wouldn’t happen until the tenth of Never the way we were going around and around trying to find a thermal couple that didn’t exist.

Well the tenth of never did come! And baking with a Kitchen Aid is about a thousand times better than I even expected. The ease! No wonder all you crazy foodie people love baking so much! It’s easy when you have a handy dandy mixer machine that does all the hard work for you. I had no idea!

So I mixed and I whirred and twirled that Kitchen Aid like I was a musician and it was my guitar. And then I texted Bethany excitedly, of course, and took about a thousand pictures. If you ever want to know why there is flour in the buttons on my camera, now you’ll know why. But don’t worry, I blew a bunch of compressed air on it afterwards and I think it’s still as good as new—I hope. What can I say? I use my equipment.

Then I popped those lemon bars in the oven and went outside to enjoy the sunset with the neighborhood kids.

There were these really cool lenticular clouds out that looked amazing at twilight. I tried to capture it on the camera but unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to take a photo of them without all the distracting houses and trees in the way. Distracting cat-fairies riding by on tricycles are great though.

And then the lemon bars were done! They were so tasty. Except I got a little over-zealous with my backyard lemons and added an extra tablespoon of zest that wasn’t in the recipe. Ooops. All the kids in the neighborhood have been reporting with puckered lips that the lemon bars are way way way too sour, which leaves way too many lemon bars for all the adults who are so annoyingly watching their calorie intake. Watching calories can be so tiresome. Thankfully, I have had company over in the last few days and I’m happy to report that I only have about four lemon bars left in my fridge taunting me. Tomorrow I’ll have to take a glamour shot of one so I can share the taunting with you. It’s only fair.

I’m happy to report that I have baked lemon bars, roasted cauliflower and cooked a Sunday roast (actually my mom cooked it but I still got to take credit for it). And! As if that wasn’t enough good news I now have towel bars, something my kitchen was sorely lacking.

Life is good. It’s oventabulous.