Christmas in July!

I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last post! I have been enjoying the summer and doing some volunteer work. I volunteer in the community garden every Tuesday and Thursday, and I volunteer at the library on Wednesdays. Plus I have my church obligations and the family and the records transcription for family history, etc. etc. etc. I didn't realize I was so busy until I wrote it all down! And I just got a new church calling.....I am now the Relief Society mid-week activity committee chairman. I have a really good committee, although we need a couple more to replace the two we lost, but that's probably the easiest of all my responsibilities. We just had a Christmas in July meeting that was so much fun! We made Joy blocks.....

and thumbprint Christmas cards.....

and Cinnamon Stick Nativities....

and yo-yo Christmas Trees!

Click on the links and it will take you to instructions for the projects. They are all from my Twelve Days of Christmas 2012 except for the cards. I got ideas for those all over the Internet, but the link will take you to Squidoo, where I found the most ideas in one place. And I don't know what's going on with my pictures, but some of them won't let me make them bigger. Sorry!

We had Christmas cookies and milk for refreshments and everyone had a good time. That's what a good committee will do!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to since we last talked. And next Tuesday, I will be having surgery on my other hand, so it will probably be another few weeks before you hear much from me. You all take care and keep crafting!

A great recipe!

When my children were really young, we lived for a couple of years in Grantsville, Utah. There are some really super people there, and we enjoyed our time there. One of the ladies in our ward (LDS church group) had a daughter coming home from her mission, and I volunteered to help her at the after-report reception. We don't do these any more, because they became a we-can-do-it-better-than-you kind of thing. but this was back in the day. Anyway, she served this wonderful dessert called Trifle, which I had never heard of. She got the recipe while she and her husband and family were in England, and she was more than willing to share it with me.

It's a beautiful, easy dessert. For my family, who eats this like it's going out of style, I use two small boxes of instant vanilla pudding, one yellow cake mix, two baskets of strawberries, 3-4 bananas, 1 pkg. frozen raspberries (or fresh, if you have them), 1 box Danish Dessert or 1 tub of strawberry glaze for making pies, and one large tub Cool Whip. Start by baking the cake in a 9x13 pan and letting it cool. While the cake is cooling, pick the tops from the strawberries and slice them. Add just about 1/4 cup sugar. Don't add too much because it will make the filling too juicy. Slice the bananas and add them, with the raspberries, to the strawberries. If you have Danish Desert, make it according to the instructions on the package. If you have strawberry glaze, us it as is. Add the glaze to the fruit and stir well.

 Last of all, make the pudding according to the directions on the package. Now break the cake up into small crumbles and start layering the ingredients in a straight-sided glass bowl, or Trifle dish. (They really do make dishes meant for trifle!)

Start with a little bit of the fruit mixture, just enough to moisten the bottom. Now your layers go like this: cake, fruit mixture, pudding and Cool Whip. The fruit should always go on top of the cake so that the juice will soak into it and not juice up the pudding. (My bottom layer is backwards, but the top layer is right :0 ) My trifle dish has disappeared, so I had to use more than one dish.

When you get it all layered, it will look really beautiful! Serve it to your family and listen to the compliments roll in. It makes a splash at parties and potlucks, too!  I hope you will try this recipe and let me know what you think. I like to have this for my birthday instead of a cake.

Until next time, think about this: Birthdays are good for you - the more you have, the longer you live! Happy summer and good eating!

Happy 4th of July!

We had a good 4th, and I hope you all did, too. If you want to see pictures and a video of the fireworks, go to my other blog, Gramm and Crackers, to view them. We were basically lazy. We didn't do any gardening or housecleaning, or much of anything. The guys and kids went fishing and Kristen and I watched movies. Great day!

Here are a few pics from the parade. though. It was really long, but probably the best one we've seen in Ashland yet.

The REAL weinerschnitzel!

Andy and Cameron's scout group.

I caught Andy in the middle of a sentence, and how about the "cool" Cameron?

We had a good day and I hope all of you did, too. Love you all! See ya next week.

I'm Back!!

Well, I'm back. My hand is healing nicely and I have almost full use of it again. I was all wrapped up like a boxing glove for a week, and it was pretty hard to do anything with that hand.

After a week, I got to take the big wad of gauze off. Boy did it feel good to be able to wash my hand! The betadine or iodine or whatever they used didn't want to come off. I had to scrub three times to get it off! The stitiches looked like a caterpillar. I had to put Neosporen on it and I still had to keep it covered, but I could begin to use it now. Only problem was, the bandage wouldn't stick to me, so I still had to wrap gauze around it to hold it all on!

My good friend, Bobbi, brought me a puzzle, and my husband and I put it together. Another friend brought me a huge bunch of flowers from her garden, and I forgot to take a picture! They were beautiful, all in pinks and reds. I LOVE flowers, especially the ones NOT from a florist. I like the homegrown and wild varieties the best. (Of course, I would never turn down a bouquet from the florist. :} )

Okay! Enough about the hand! Except to say that I will be having the other one done soon, and we start all over. Okay. Now some pictures from our trip to the coast. We went to Brookings, Oregon, and we had so much fun! We took our motorhome for the first time, and stayed in an RV park. It was really nice and just a five minute walk from the beach. We also took our dog, Molly, who had the best time of her life! And the RV park had a pet place just up a little hill, with a great view, where the dogs could run and do their business. It was great.

This was our camp site or RV spot or whatever you call it. I liked the fact that there was small gravel instead of just dirt. And you can tell there was greenery all around the park. We really liked it.

We are re-doing the motorhome in red, white and blue. It's not totally done yet, but it's a start. This is my son, Andy, looking at the activity guide for the weekend. It was Azalea Days and there was a parade and all kinds of activities going on, and we were trying to decide what we would do. We went to the parade and wandered the booths a little, but mostly we just enjoyed the beach and being able to sit back and do nothing. We did some crabbing, but we didn't get anything we could keep. Maybe next time. We went to Azalea Park, which was in full bloom, and let the kid's play at the kid's park while Kristen and I roamed the main park. It was so gorgeous! So here are some of the highlights of our trip.

We all had a lot of fun and I'm sure we'll be doing it again soon! I'll have a new project for you soon and I think you will really like it. See you soon.