Lauren

This story isn’t really ready to tell, because it’s not finished.

In a nutshell, Lloyd has had the same leather jacket since college. It’s held up, but the collar is wearing away and it looks pretty ….. grimy.

Sometime last year, we stopped at a fancy leather store in Omaha and he found one that he liked, but it was $400. We balked at the price and decided to wait. The salesman gave him a card that had the jacket’s information (name and number) in case we changed our mind.

In February, he went online and found the same jacket – same number – on a website. It was only $239! He bit the expensive bullet and ordered it. The website said the company was located in the UK.

A couple of weeks later, a small-is package arrived……from Pakistan. “I’m worried that this is my jacket,” Lloyd said. It was a jacket, yes, but not the jacket he ordered, and it was also a little too small. We decided to return it. I asked him to find the confirmation number to make sure that the jacket information was what he thought ….. and there wasn’t one.

I looked on the website, and there are no actual addresses listed, and the phone number listed was not in service. I tried contacting them but did not get a reply…….and some stuff is happening.

I’m going to end this story until we actually get it resolved. Sorry that I’m leaving you hanging!

I haven’t done anything with my photos from Ireland. I had plans to do something cool, but I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.

I have some good ones of Lloyd, though, and thought if I made one my iPad’s background, I could see it often. This was taken at Avoca – the Meeting of the Waters:

At the Meeting of the Waters, the Avonmore and Avonbeg rivers come together to form the Avoca River.

The ‘Meetings’ as the locals call it, is the place where the famous Irish Poet Thomas Moore penned his famous Irish Melody, “The Meeting of the Waters”. (Click HERE to read more.)

I got a good shot of him looking contemplative, just like Thomas Moore.

Looks good, right? Except for all that nonsense in the upper right. Let’s get rid of some stuff like the lady and the banner and the railing.

Much better.

Yep. That’ll do.

Long ago in another life, Lloyd and I used to go to Lincoln to the surplus auctions. We’d stop off at Super Saver to get a couple of donuts, and usually could get a couple for a buck. Now? Auctions are held online and donuts are over a dollar. Cherry Rosettes are my favorite, but they’re often sold out when I get to the store.

Well, King Arthur Flour has an AMAZING recipe for cinnamon roll dough. (Click here to read it.) I’ve made a couple of batches, but instead of the cinnamon-sugar filling, I’m using raspberry jam.

I make them smaller than the recipe suggests – they say this makes 8, but I make 16. Then? I package them up by twos and freeze them.

Get out a package and warm it up, have with coffee. (It would be better with frosting, but this is just fine.)

Take that, Super Saver.

I’ve been on a baking kick lately, but haven’t taken photos of the process. I do have a couple of baking stories. This one is about Costco’s chicken bake.

The Costco food court is a pretty good deal, but their chicken bake is my favorite. It’s a giant log of chicken-bacon filling inside pizza dough, held together with Caesar salad dressing. when Lloyd and I go to Costco, we get one and split it.

aeWell, the internet says you can make a pretty good copycat recipe, so I made some dough, cut up some chicken and bacon, used parmesan cheese (because that’s what I had), and the Caesar salad dressing that I couldn’t believe was in the fridge. Who uses that stuff anyway?

I rolled it up, sprinkled cheese on it and popped it in the oven. Then I looked at that bottle of dressing.

It expired in 2021.

I exclaimed over the grossness, but we ate it anyway. It was pretty good. I’ve never had Caesar dressing on its own, so I am hoping the tanginess is part of the original flavor, not the result of being expired for two years.

(We survived, and it was actually pretty good.)

If you haven’t read yesterday’s vitamin story, go do that first.

The problem with having a wood stove is the installation. The place I’d like to put it is in the shed, but that involves cutting holes and committing to a layout inside. My current daydreams involve making a bay-window-type bump out and running the stove pipe up through that.

But…….that’s so much work…….

I looked into free-standing alcohol stoves and found this:

It burns a special kind of alcohol, and it sure ticks off a lot of boxes! Free-standing, so I could move it around if needed, it actually gets warm from fire (you have to have good ventilation so you don’t die), no need to cut holes in the shed, and…. cheap! The fuel is expensive though, and – remember – I hadn’t taken all my vitamins.

I didn’t buy it. Some reviews said the paint was poorly done and chips off. But, the idea was in my head. I have some cans of gelled alcohol fuel that I’ve messed with in the shed, but surely I had something…..

I do.

I’ve had a Perfection kerosene heater for forever. You’ve seen it before. It looks like this:

Well, there are NO photos of the several-day process to cut a hole in the side. Let’s just say that Lauren did lots and lots of unsafe things that should never be done by untrained humans, especially Lauren. No major wounds were suffered, and there were a few bouts of regret, but the uneven cuts are just part of its charm:

I think it has a real ‘Beauty and the Beast’ look to it – like it might come to life and sing about metalworking safety or something.

Anyway, it works great. I rigged up some metal rods to hold the bottom of the fuel can that fits in the hole inside. Here’s a short video of its test run. (There are skewers holding the can – it was in deep prototype phase.)

So, the moral is: Lauren saved a bunch of money AND didn’t have to get stitches for anything.

Remind me to finish those vitamins.

I finished a bottle of vitamins! Granted, they were children’s chewable vitamins so it wasn’t like I was choking them down, but I’d often forget. I think this bottle has been around a looooong time.

I was happy because that meant I could buy another bottle! But then…… I noticed that I still had another bottle of boring, grown-up vitamins.

Ugh. Who wants to take those? However, I am trying to not be so wasteful, so I counted them out to see how long it would take to finish them.

As it turns out, if I take one a day I should be finished by the beginning of May. I’d need some sort of motivation, though, so I wrote this on the bottle:

See? I even gave myself enough grace to skip a bunch of days, and since I obsess about tiny wood stoves, this is the carrot on the stick I need to actually do something about it!

It’s been working pretty well. Having the bottle right by my coffee cups is a good reminder, except for the mornings when I unload the dishwasher and just grab a mug from there. Eh, nobody’s perfect.

As it turns out, the wood stove might not be necessary……… (that’s tomorrow’s story)