When it comes to our embattled Gov. Dead Meat.  He insists he’s “absolutely innocent”.  Yeah, right.  What his lawyer is saying is this, “The governor did nothing wrong and the evidence against him was illegally obtained”.  This simply does not add up!  No matter how the evidence was garnered, there is incontrovertible evidence of his wrongdoing.  Just because the evidence may have been gathered illegally does NOT MAKE HIM INNOCENT!!   Am I the only one seeing the gap in the logic here? 

In other news:  There is an unidentified species of rodent in our basement.  According to Chris, (who saw it, I have not), it is “black, bigger than a mouse, and doesn’t have a tail”.  Which to my mind leaves either a vole or a rat.  Mooch seems fascinated by where it’s supposedly at, but won’t make a move to touch it or try to catch it.  The other two boys could just care less. I picked Buddy up from his spot on my bed, took him downstairs, showed him the last suspected place for said rodent, and informed him that it was time to pay some rent on his cushy accommodations.  I also informed him I did not want the resulting carnage left in my bed or on my desk as a gift; to exercise his discretion as nature’s garbage disposal and dispose of it.  He gave me a look like, “you got me up for THIS???”  and followed me right back upstairs.  Sinatra gave me the “Siamese death glare” when I avoided his attempt to get on my lap and told him to go catch the rodent instead.   We don’t want to use bait or poison or sticky traps,  due to said lazy felines.  That leaves humane traps, IF I can find some, and if curiosity doesn’t get the better of said felines and they bat it around and  make it useless for it’s stated purpose.  Of the three cats, Mooch is  most likely to catch whatever it is, but once she manages to play it to death and it stops moving,  she’ll lose interest and leave it to rot wherever…which means we’ll have to track it down to stop the smell.  Yuk.  UPDATE:  Chris is looking at a solution that involves target shooting with a pellet gun…shakes head in disbelief.

Snow Day for Chris.  Second one in a row, I think this might be a first for his job.  We actually got him out there today only to be faced with an empty parking lot and one boss who said there was a problem with getting the word out to the local radio station that announces closures.  So  he’s home and I have to brave the icy streets for work.  NOT my idea of fun.

NOT to buy a cheap carrot cake mix again.  I was reading the ingredients on the box and got “carrot flavored pieces”.  CARROT FLAVORED PIECES!!!???!!  What the….  I bought carrot cake;  real carrot pieces, even dehydrated ones, would be nice.  Well, hopefully after I followed the “ultimate” directions on the bottom of the panel it’ll be ok… I added pineapple, raisins, and coconut to the mix.  Looked pretty good when it went into the oven.  The problem will be what to do with it when it comes out of the oven, seeing as how I don’t own a cake plate.  I think my mom used to cut a piece of cardboard and cover it with foil, but that still leaves the problem of covering the cake so it doesn’t dry out.  Hopefully something will come to me.

I’ve been baking up a storm.  Chris has practically a never-ending supply of cookies, and though the baking my own bread thing hasn’t worked out well (because I never have enough time),  I’ve still baked enough for us to enjoy.  I’ve also been rediscovering simple things like oven-baked potatoes.  Chris much prefers oven-baked to microwaved, and though I can’t tell as big of a difference as he swears he can, the ones I made the other night sure hit the spot. 

Since it’s just us for Christmas this year, we decided on an alternate route for dinner.  Steak, baked potatoes, corn for Chris and a huge salad for me.  

The weather people are forecasting one of those “OH CRAP” winter storms.  So Chris’s job took heed and shut down the plant today starting after first shift.  Then, of course, the weather people backed off the forecast and pushed it back four hours, which is going to really screw us up for tomorrow, instead of today.  He may miss two day’s pay this week, because of course they don’t pay them when they shut down the place for weather.   Right before Christmas is not good timing for that…

Anyway, the cake is in the oven and I still have to figure out what to do with it when it comes out of the oven, so I’m thinking this would be a good time to get my tail out of this chair and go do that…

Alright, so Gov. Blagojevich finally got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  All that means is the feds finally got enough proof to arrest him.  Anyone who has lived in Illinois for any length of time already knew he was crooked.  It’s a time-honored part of Illinois politics to deal in corruption.  Not saying I don’t wish that was different…but now maybe we’ll get someone in the governor’s mansion that actually has a clue.  Nahhh…I don’t think the higher echelons of power in Illinois would stand for someone who wasn’t corrupt in that office.  I’d love to be proven wrong on that, however.  I can’t wait to read the tirade my Christopher will end up publishing in HIS blog.

Working on printing out my Christmas cards.  I decided to go the scrap route with them this year. (Big surprise there, right?)  And what I ended up doing is a cross between a scrap layout and a photo card.  I did find out real quick that if you’re doing a photo type card, USE GLOSSY PAPER!!  It made ALL the difference in my test printings. 

I’m mailing out more cards this year than I think I ever have. Usually if I’m lucky, close family gets cards and that’s IT.  Well, this year I decided to participate in a few Christmas card exchanges.  So now I’m mailing cards all over, including Canada, Argentina, and Norway.   These are all online friends I’ve had for years and years, so I’m glad to be able to exchange something tangible instead of electronic.

From all the digital scrapbooking card sets I bought, I ended up with a design from Shabby Princess.  LOVE her work.  I could have done my own, goodness knows I have the supplies (between Nitwit Collections and Flergs I am overflowing in digital Christmas kits this year), but this was just easier.  And so pretty!  I should probably try to upload a copy of it somewhere so y’all can see…or maybe I’ll just use it as my Christmas entry…

School is going well. I’m still on my perfect score streak, 3 weeks completed in my second set of classes.  I got a huge “atta girl” from my IS 102 (computer apps and software)  professor on my discussion post for this week.  He’s been really pushing for researched, APA-cited posts, so I gave him one.  The darn thing took me about an hour and a half to put together and properly format, but it got me big props and a thread in bright GREEN titled “Everyone look at Shelly’s post!”.  I still don’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. 

Keyboarding is going better, I’m now averaging about the speed I’ve come to expect from myself.  I have two finals in there due before Wednesday of this week and I’m done.  I also have a midterm and two Excel spreadsheets due this week for IS 102, so I’m expecting my perfect score streak to get broken.

The latest graphic achievement was duplicating a “glass and silver” alphabet I saw in a shop.  The original cost about six dollars, and of course you would be limited to one font only, plus only uppercase letters. With the purchase of two Photoshop Actions from Atomic Cupcake, I can now do unlimited versions with unlimited fonts.  They’re time consuming, but actually a lot of fun.  Once I got the first set of uppercase letters done, I experimented with “filling” them with a sand texture from ArtRage and some shell and starfish elements I had.  Turned out great, but I don’t think I’ll be mass-producing them anytime soon.

Santa came early for me this year.  I got the best present ever - a new stove!  This was a piece of luck, and one of those “stumbled upon” deals.  It’s great, a Whirlpool Estate series, black on black with self cleaning oven and sealed gas burners.  With a dependable oven available to me now, I’ve been baking up a storm.  The craze at the moment is bread.  Baking bread is something my  mom did once every blue moon or so, and it was always almost immediately GONE.  Once me and my cousin Laura got hold of a loaf, that was just all she wrote for that loaf… it was in our tummies.  Well,  I just took out my first batch of white all homemade bread, (I did a loaf of multigrain from a mix last weekend), and it’s getting rave reviews.  I find this to be a good thing since, if you break it down in economic terms…. a loaf of the cheapest white sandwich bread is going to run you 1.20 - 1.39 a loaf.  One bag of flour at 2.49 will make approximately six loaves. Yeast is 99 cents for three packages, one package makes two loaves of bread with the recipe I am using.  Makes sense and tastes sooooooo much better!  Now the trick will be making the time to make it every week.

I started to title this post “Adventures in Photoshop” til I reaized that my biggest discovery this week wasn’t Photoshop related at all.  It did start out that way, though so I guess my instincts weren’t that far off.

My inner 3-yr.-old started clamoring this weekend about glitter.  Now, the fabulous Flergs makes glitter fills like no other, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned more than a few times.  But at five bucks a pop for matching glitter styles and fills to match her kits, I’d be out of good bit of money going that route.  So I wanted to learn to make my own.  A few months ago I ran across a plain silver/grayscale glitter fill online, and with the help of Photoshop’s “variations” dialogue, was making glitter fills to my heart’s content.  But was that good enough for the inner toddler? Oh, no, of course not.  After blowing up one of Flergs’ fills and having NO luck whatsover with figuring out how she did it; and Googling it with every variety of search term I could think of with no luck, I finally broke down and posted on the DST forums.  As it turns out, the “secret” to glitter fills isn’t in Photoshop at all, it’s a program called ArtRage.  I installed it, and WOW.  I can’t tell the difference between my glitter and Flergs’ glitter, so if she’s doing it differently that’s fine, if I can’t tell the difference then my OCD is satisfied laugh.  Since I don’t plan on selling it, I’m sure she won’t mind sharing her mad glitter skillz with me.

The other adventure was felt.  During the DSD madness, I bought a double layered felt action from Karen Stimson via Scrap N Tag.  This weekend was the first time I’ve had a chance to look at it.  During the interim, I’ve installed Photoshop CS4, and none of the actions or styles I have are rated to work in that yet because it’s so new.  Well, it kept throwing me errors of “command not available”. I didn’t know if it was something I was doing wrong, the version of Photoshop, or what, so I tried it in CS3.  Nope, same errors.  I ended up writing to Karen, and as with Miriam Lima, she went above and beyond to help me.  The problem turned out to be that I wasn’t rasterizing my text and/or shape.  She’s got a customer for life now, and there’s a few of her actions I have my eye on for the next time I have money or she has a sale…or hopefully both. 

I also have my eye on a few things from Atomic Cupcake. If you don’t know what that is, the short explanation is that it’s a fantastic designer resource for Photoshop styles and actions.  There’s also tutorials, etc. there.  I really want the silver and glass actions; so those are going on my priority wish list.  I saw a really cool glass alpha with silver edging that I’d like to be able to duplicate…the preview showed it filled with ’sand’ (which I can also do in ArtRage).  I was thinking it’d look pretty cool filled with glitter, snow, or water too.  So as you can see, I have no shortage of digital graphics projects ahead of me! 

I still have no plans on becoming a digital designer.  But it’s nice to know “how” some of these things are done!

Ok, I know it’s been awhile since I posted.  Things got a little hectic, as they have a  habit of doing.  For the record though, I came out of my first class with a perfect score!  980 out of 980 points, and a couple of comments from the professor that said “Outstanding work!”.

This semester I have two classes for the first four weeks.  IS102, Computer Applications and Software, is my first full length (8 weeks) class.  The other class is Keyboarding, which surprisingly enough is a challenge.  My hands hurt after the drills, and my speed isn’t what I’ve come to expect from myself from other tests.  But it’s getting better, slowly, and after this class I’ll have a more accurate idea of my speed and accuracy for future uses.

I’ve also had some computer issues.  We had some power fluctuations on Wednesday, and one of them was evidently bad enough to take out my motherboard.  So we had to scramble to put me something together for school in a big hurry.  As usual after Chris has to work on it, though, I ended up with something better than I had to begin with.   It had been discussed that eventually when I needed to upgrade, I’d probably go to more RAM and Vista 64-bit.  Since 32-bit operating systems can only “see” and therefore utilize 3 gigs of RAM and under, it wasn’t worth upgrading unless I did go to 64-bit.  So while we had it apart and had the RAM on hand, that’s what we did.  Only to be reminded when I looked at the space on my C: Drive that 64-bit OS’s take up a fair bit more room.  That led to me moving everything over to the new hard drive (Oops I forgot to mention here that I replaced one of my 160 gig drives with a 400 a few weeks back),  and repartitioning my OS drive.  Then reinstalled Vista 64-bit AGAIN, and this time I have room.  The only thing I really lost by doing this was my installed software and some time.  I have all my install files so I don’t worry too much about software reinstalls.  There are some differences in 64 bit though, I had to go get a new version of Yahoo! Messenger.  And I’m very impressed with it, this is the nicest version of it I’ve ever used.

Now that we’re all caught up with the computer issues, I can get into what originally inspired me to write this post.   Everyone who knows me knows I’m a Christmas music nut.  But I’m picky about it; there has to be something unique before I’ll just get it because it’s an artist I’m familiar with.  And I LOVE a capella anything.  So, I picked up the new Rascal Flatts Greatest Hits album on the strength of the three Christmas songs on the bonus disc.  Just gave that a listen and OH. MY. GOODNESS.  The guys do an a capella version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” that will knock your socks off.   Even if you don’t like country music or Rascal Flatts it’s worth a listen.  It doesn’t sound “country” in the least; and the a capella rendition will lay to rest any doubts about their actual vocal abilities. 

Speaking of Christmas…the store has already started decorating. I walked into chaos on the south end front on Monday.  I remarked that it looked like we’d run into a time warp, since they went straight from Halloween to Christmas decorating.  The store director remarked that he didn’t know what to do for Thanksgiving other than put up a big turkey, and I promptly let fly with “Well, we could always stuff YOU and put you on a  couple of pallets.  That’d take care of the TURKEY part of it!”  Amazingly enough, he agreed with me.  And yes, I still have a job.

The college bookstore opened today for us to order books for the next session. So, I’ve gotten that done, and now I’m halfway through my first Personal Development class. The next two weeks’ worth of assignments won’t be bad, especially since they aren’t group projects. I was blessed with two fantastic ladies to work with, but I still prefer working on my own. Next up for me is IS102 (Computer Applications and Software), and MO110 (Keyboarding). Considering I just finished Microsoft Word 2007 Step by Step in preparation for my Microsoft Office Certification, and also the fact that I type 70+ words per minute as tested by Brainbench, I don’t see me having too much difficulty with either class. At least I hope.

It’s raining and dreary here…perfect sleeping weather. Staying awake while starting on my online library assignment may be the hard part.

…for the weekend to be over. Since both Chris and I worked Saturday, today has been our only day off together and it didn’t go anywhere close to the way I wanted. I could really use another day in this weekend.

Chris had a very important group project due for school. His day started on the wrong foot with the alarm going off. We normally do not set the alarm for Sunday mornings, that is our one day to sleep in as late as we like if he works Saturday. Well, today it had to be set so he could get up and get part of that project turned in by noon. I knew finishing up this project and doing the presentation for it would be frustrating for him, I just didn’t allow for the inevitable snags that turned it into one of the three worst days we’ve had since he started school. Suffice it to say, I’m worn out just from watching him be frustrated and upset.

My week is not going to be as easy as I would like, as my schedule somehow got changed and now I’m working three days in a row, losing my Thursday that I usually devote to school. I’m not happy with it, but I understand my boss is shorthanded and needs me that night. Supposedly, however, I am off both weekend days, so we’ll see how it all works out.

Capirotada means “Mexican Bread Pudding”. This version comes from a mystery book by Virginia Rich and Nancy Pickard called “The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders”. I’d never thought about making bread pudding like this but I tried this and it is sooooo good!

4 cups boiling water

2 cups brown sugar

1 whole clove

1 stick cinnamon

1/4 cup butter

1 loaf raisin bread-cut in 1 inch cubes

1 cup raisins

1 cup chopped walnuts

1/4 lb shredded monterey jack 1 cheese

1/4 lb shredded colby cheese longhorn style

To one quart boiling water add brown sugar, clove, cinnamon, and butter. Simmer until light syrup forms, then remove the clove and cinnamon. Cut 1 loaf raisin bread into cubes and dry in 250F oven until crusty. Rinse 1 cup raisins in hot water, then drain. In a large buttered baking dish, continuously layer the bread cubes, raisins, walnuts, Monterey Jack cheese, and longhorn cheese (cheddar-jack) until all ingredients are used. Spoon the hot syrup evenly over the bread mixture.

Bake in a preheated oven at 350F for 30 minutes. Serve hot or cold.

Makes 6 to 8 portions.

…but it doesn’t mean I have to like it! Last week I finally went to Walmart with the intention of replacing the makeup that my darling Melora took with her when she went back to Texas in July. I’m sure you’re thinking, “You went from July til now with no makeup?” Well, yeah. I hardly ever even wear the stuff, but you know how it is, it’s one of those things where when you want it, you want it right then. And, as a female, using female logic, I feel weird not even owning any makeup…I know that makes no sense but there it is.

So, I really like the L’Oreal Bare Minerals makeup. It doesn’t weigh anything on your face, and it’s supposed to actually be good for your skin. I am blessed with good skin anyway, but I do like the way it smooths out the blotchies and blends. But, wouldn’t you know it, Walmart didn’t have the shade I needed. So the saleswoman talked me into a set of Physician’s Formula, that was almost the same thing but not quite. It had what they call Mineral Veil, a pressed mineral powder and a pressed glow/blush compact. All three for 20 bucks, which isn’t bad, and since I’m not known for patience, I went ahead and got it. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that Physician’s Formula’s Mineral Veil is NOT the same as L’Oreal’s mineral foundation. It’s designed to be finishing product, not a base. Grrrr.

Ok, so today I needed to go back to Walmart anyway to get Chris’s protein bars, so I thought I’d check the makeup and see if I could find a matching foundation to go with what I already spent 20 bucks on. What happens? I run smack into a display of the L’Oreal that I wanted in the FIRST place, packaged in a kit with the foundation, finisher and glow, in exactly the shades I need, for five dollars more than I spent for the Physician’s Formula, and to add insult to injury, they have a set of eye makeup (mascara, which I desperately need, eyeshadow and liner) all in the Bare Mineral line that I love. Now don’t get me wrong here. Physician’s Formula is good stuff. But it’s not what I prefer. Annoying, to say the least.

After some inner debate, I finally decided to go ahead and get the L’Oreal face stuff, and maybe go back and get the eye part next week. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend $43.00 all at once on makeup, when I just spent $20.00 last week on stuff that I now have no idea when I’ll use. I guess I should have gotten both pieces, or gone to the regular display and gotten two eyeshadows and a mascara. (I never use eyeliner, though my daughter is a genius with the stuff.) I had close to sixty dollars more than I budgeted on my check this week, and Chris had over a hundred more than I’d budgeted on his. But all that needs to go toward tires for the Tracker, so I really didn’t want to go on a spending spree. I also need jeans and some more long sleeved tshirts for both sleeping and wearing out, so spending that much on makeup really isn’t practical. Sure doesn’t stop me from being annoyed about it, though.

However, I do have some good news. My study group and I have that midterm group project finished and ready to turn in. My goal was to have it done before Erica took off out of town for her anniversary, and we did it! I can basically now take the weekend off from school, except for checking in on the discussion boards. How’s that for efficient? Also, that post I did for school on my Pink Flannel Elephant Philosophy got an “atta girl” from the instructor! Considering he’s pretty quiet, I count that a real triumph.