From My House To Yours

Blooming

Dogwood Trees are blooming - Ahhhhh Chooooooooooo

Our first water lily bloom for 2021

Front Yard flowers

My mini roses are in full bloom.

My aloe vera plant is starting to bloom...

I love these purple flowers - they are perennials and come up every spring.

I do nothing to them and they are drought tolerant.

Nastruisums

And these little flowers are wild - they are a ground cover that I won't pull up because they are so pretty.

From this...to this!

From this

To this

It is done.

The husband did a very good job for an old man.

It took him 3 1/2 days - he finished today at noon.

Last night's chicken dinner was delicious however I don't think I will marinate the chicken in yogurt again - it was messy. It did seem as if the chicken was moist and tender. Marinating in good old-fashioned buttermilk is not as messy.

Here is the recipe for the Yogurt coffee cake. It was good but needs some tweaking. I plan to try some other "yogurt cake" recipes.

I now have 3 tubs of yogurt left. I've tried to give a tub away - no one likes plain yogurt. They are good till June 6.

The Potatoes.

I hate to waste food. I don't have a basement or a root cellar and our 100+ degree summers are just around the corner. I've already made scalloped potatoes with our salmon the other night - Potato soup and last night we had mashed potatoes. I like potatoes but not this much.

I found where you can cook the potatoes and then freeze them. I do like potato salad and since it is salad time of year, I'm going to make a huge bunch of it. My sons love their Mom's potato salad.

People nowadays don't use potatoes like my mom did. They tend to buy packaged potatoes. I've always made my mashed potatoes from scratch.

Next time I won't be so quick to accept the burden of the free food.

Potatoes and Yogurt. Yogurt and Potatoes.

This is not a cooking blog, but every now and then I will post something about food. Saturday I came into 4-32 oz containers of non-fat plain yogurt that is good till June. They also gave us, 2 10lb sacks of Idaho potatoes. I had just bought a 5 lb sack so I gave Char the 5 lb sack and we are left with 20lbs of potatoes. I made a potato soup and tomorrow I will make a potato salad. Tonight we're having fried chicken, (that I will marinate in yogurt) mashed potatoes, and homemade pan gravy.

I also made a yogurt cake up above. It has a really unique taste - I like it. Not too sweet. You load up half the batter and then top it with walnut, brown sugar and cinnamon crumble - add the final layer and top with the remaining crumble.

You can't freeze yogurt - it changes the texture. So I have till June. It's plain yogurt - while I don't care for fruit ladened yogurt due to its just too sweet for me, I did get some frozen strawberries. That was good - and also we can add some honey to it.

I have a feeling I may be sick of potatoes and yogurt in the not-so-distant future...

The not so pretty home projects or maintenance.

Those things have to be in a timely matter or can get out of hand. We don't want to be like some old people, that just haven't kept up their home maintenance and then have to sell due to a family death and get practically nothing for their house. I have a good friend whose husband was a packrat - and he didn't like spending money on the house. He died in March of 2019 and Margie is still trying to get her home, clean and everything fixed. Plus she just turned 80. Bless her heart.

The husband mowed both the front and back yards - We need either to sod or reseed our lawns. Probably won't happen this year. We had 2 garden boxes in the middle of the yard - and had planned to put rocks around it - and have a smaller lawn area. Then we decided we didn't like that and pulled out the boxes and now have 2 dirt plots in the middle of the lawn - they look like freshly dug graves. Boo!

The husband will be replacing a 3 section part of our fence on the side yard that we share with a neighbor. Our neighbor refuses to pitch in and told my husband that it was "his problem." He doesn't care how it looks on his side so what do you do?

We have a dog that could get out and he's patched it but it's time to replace the fence. It's not worth fighting and arguing over. Other than being downright cheap, they are good neighbors. The husband wants to put up a chain-link fence. I asked him if this was his version of "Love thy Neighbor." I know he wants to do that for spite. He later came back and said he wouldn't.

We went in with our neighbors on a fence a few years back. That section my husband has to replace is because the neighbor insisted it wasn't that bad - funny, the next winter, is when it came down. The patched section of the fence, we had to do, because their 2 dogs like to chew the bottom of the wood fence. I do wish my husband had taken more care in mending the fence. I think he was mad and just threw some boards up there. It bugs me.

Of course never any offer by them to help fix where their dogs destroyed the new fence. Aww, neighbors - you gotta love them.

After the fence, he also wants to add an extension to his work shed so he can build things, have more room, and have an open area with a roof so he can work in the hot summer and keep his tools protected. Last year, he broke his toe which grounded him in a big boot he had to wear for several months. It was a bad break for him and our "projects." We have a lot of catch-ups we need to do this year.

This is a "have to" this year. The paint is peeling on the hot, south side of the covered patio - the wood needs to be replaced and repainted.

Provided he doesn't break anything this year, these should be fairly easy to knock out.

I have my own projects I need to do - I'm the painter of the family.

Spring 2021

The weather has been consistently warm for the last 2 weeks - so I've decided it's time for me to clean out my closet and put away 90% of my colder weather clothes for my summer stuff. It's April though - this isn't it. So I always plan some outfits that will be useful for when it turns.

My yard is blooming - without me even doing anything to it. My Iriss' are blooming and we had white ones this year and some yellow ones are coming in, that I did not plant.

I guess I could start my veggie garden - in years past when I have, the weather has changed and practically flooded out my tomatoes. We have a long dry growing season - I usually have tomatoes clear into and after Thanksgiving.

We bought a patio orange tree. It will be fun to watch it grow and produce.

More poppies this year on our hill.

Planted the Queen Anne palm on the hill and this date palm container, we just moved it up onto the hill where the irrigation is better when we have our hot dry summer.

This is the best time here; before the hot dry winds and smoke from fires. Sadly, it doesn't last that long.

Little annoying repairs

The not so pretty part of having a home is when something wears out and needs replacing. A dumb piece of hardware, we're trying to find it and so far, non of the big box stores have it.

I'm talking about my silverware drawer - the metal track on the inside (bottom mount) is broken and it's difficult to pull out and close the drawer and it is a heavily used drawer at that. It gets knocked off its track due to the roller thingy, that is broken. This house was built in 1992 - not that old but still hard to find. When you go into Cabinet Stores, they don't want to sell you a $2.50 track - NOPE, they want to sell you completely new kitchen cabinets. I think I found where I can order it online but the husband is such a know-it-all at times and believes he can get it at some store. We'll see.

I want to wallpaper the inside of my cabinets - I know I know, kinda crazy. Especially since I don't have glass doors - so I'd only see it when I open the cabinet door.

Well, I need to get my drawer fixed first...not to mention everything else I want to do.

The "green" around my house

So what's going on at your house?

Do you go all out and decorate - complete with lights and all?

The "green" is all around in nature -

My dusty millers are such a pretty soft green.

Looks like I have white Iris popping up that I never knew I had.

Last year I had the rootbeer-colored ones.

I wonder how many new ones I have?

This was my mother's bell.

She used to collect bells from all over.

I donated most of them but this one I really liked.

Although not an Irish teacup - this was my sister's.

She bought it in Spain.

These shamrocks or Oxalis were given to us about 6 years ago from my

Father-in-law. My cat started munching on them, so my husband just planted them in our front yard and they have flourished ever since.

They are especially meaningful this year as we lost him in Dec 2020. He was 94.

Happy St Patrick's Day

Overwhelmed

Seems I couldn't be a minimalist even if I tried. The last few years I have been ruthless in getting rid of things. NOW I received stuff that belonged to my sister (she died in 2015) and with her only child now deceased (she died in 2020) I was the next to receive all of these things. Going through them has been heartbreaking but I tried to tackle it with a stiff upper lip.

I'm keeping this beautiful display bookcase she got in Mexico. I love Mexican pine furniture!

Very California. I was cleaning out my china cabinet - this is not how it will stay. I haven't decided yet what I will put in there.

The three teapots on the upper shelf and the Willow Tree couple, I gave to my daughter-in-love.

Very cute but I don't have grandkids and honestly, I don't have any place to put it. So it went to Sara, who collects teapots. I did keep one teapot she bought when she was in London. That was a keeper.

Front and back

I don't know if people actually use these teapots. I'm practical.

Or if they are just for display.

The cute couple - my son and his wife just celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary. So this was a given.

That's Ed on the bed for their guest room

There also was a bed - that was an antique back in the mid-'60s when I turned it down and my sister got it. That was a big mistake on my part but I was going through my little "hippie" BoHo stage. IT used to have 2 dressers but I guess through the years they were tossed. Also came with 2 antique mirrors that my DIL doesn't want.

I have knickknacks that belonged to my mom, my grandma, and her mother. Photos, old letters, just stuff. Needless to say, I am terribly overwhelmed.

Susie, Snow and Daffodils

Susie, amazed at that white stuff she rarely gets to see.

This is what we woke up to last week. We only got 5 inches here but Shasta Dam was snowed in with snow still on the ground, Saturday when we drove up there - 11 miles away!

My daffodils broke off from the weight of the heavy wet snow. Oh well, there's always next year.