Grandma Bell

After many years of life on earth, we will dearly miss our Grandma "Bell."

See you in Heaven.

In Memory of Lorraine C. Isbell



She always opened her home, and welcomed us with food and love every time we came to visit.

She tolerated all our cousin shenanagans and let us eat treats from her neighboor.

She always had a hug to give, and we will miss her dearly, but are glad her suffering on earth is done and she is rejoicing with the Lord in heaven!

Missing Fall :[

September 28, 2010

Cherry Valley, IL 67degrees

Colorado Springs, CO 83 degrees.

Where is fall in Colorado????? Please come soon!

Zucchini Bread Day 2010

Here it is. Zucchini Bread Day 2010. Well, this is really just one of the many days- but alas. I baked up a storm.

So I share, once again, the delicious recipie, with a few changes.

Zucchini Bread
Yields 2 loafs.
Ingredients:

WET
3 beaten eggs
2 cups sugar (whisk/blend well into eggs)
1 cup cooking oil (I use canola)
2 tsp vanilla extract

DRY
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1.5 tsp baking powder
3 tsp ground cinnamon
0.5 tsp ground nutmeg
0.25 tsp ground cloves
3 cups flour

Add last:
3-4 cup grated zucchini (with rind, loosely packed)
1-1.5 cups chopped nuts (optional) (I use walnuts)
05-1 cupRaisins (optional)


Instructions:
Mix all ingredients together.

(I find that doing it in the order listed, and preparing all the dry ingredients together then slowly adding them to the wet mixture is easiest, but it doesn't matter.)
Grease 2 loaf pans (medium or large size)
Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour in the middle of the oven
Cool in the pan first on cooling rack (approx 10 min), loosen sides of loaf from pan with butter knife, remove from pan and finish cooling on cooling rack.


These freeze nicely!

My Garden

This is my first real attempt at a garden, and while it is very late blooming and producing, it looks like I will have at least some delicious home grown veggies of my own before it frosts!!!!!!!!!!

baby zucchini

baby pumpkin

more baby zucchini

growing, growing, growing big

beautiful sqash blossoms

baby yellow squash

baby cucumbers

first carrot harvest

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topsy turvy tomatos

delicious tomatos!

where there was a window, now there will be a door.

Brute

His first bath :]

Valient Brute ready to take me home from work

garden..sort of

I can grow edible things! Well just tomatos.. but we have big hopes for the pumpkins and carrots. possible zucchini. but I am WAY behind my mom's garden... so I am not that hopefull. But I have BIG PLANS for next year!!!!!!!!

a small victory against yard work

This morning, I took the fence we tore down that divided the back yard, and some other yard trash, to be recycled/composted/mulched at a local business in Colorado Springs.

It only cost me a donation to Care and Share of either canned goods or cash. I did canned goods and took the opportunity to clean out the pantry a little more.

Kudos to them for helping Colorado Springs Citizens recycle yard trash instead of putting it in a landfill, and for supporting a worth while non profit organization that feeds hungry families in Southern Colorado!

(It was a little difficult to find :] From I25 and S. Circle, head East on Circle, then at the first stop light directly after the Crowne Plaza, turn Left/North on Janitell Road Northbound. Janitell will dead end at Las Vegas, Turn Left on Las Vegas, Rocky Top will be on your Left. If you get to the High School or Kohls, you have gone too far on Circle)

MON-FRI 7:30AM-5PM
SATURDAY 8AM-4PM

Rocky Top Resources, Inc

1755 East Las Vegas Street.

Colorado Springs, CO

80903

http://www.rockytop.us/

Info@rockytop.us

Tel:. (719)579-9103

Fax.: (719)579-9104

The Catch 22 of waterbottles.

Waterbottles. A favorite item of mine. I am very much the poster child for those PUR and Britta commercials that say filter and use your own reusable waterbottle. I have many cute ones.

While at work and filling up one of my many cute waterbottles, I realized there is quite the Catch 22 when it comes to waterbottle mouths.

There are first the wide mouthed waterbottles.
There are most excellent for filling up with ice quickly, but difficult to drink out of without spilling too much.

Then there are the narrow mouthed waterbottles.

These are awful to fill up with ice and require you to buy some special  ice making tray that make slender rods of ice. But, they are easy to drink from with minimal spillage.

 In the middle are the moderately open mouthed waterbottles.

These are not great to fill up with ice, definitally done better by hand than just holding it under the dispenser, and are somewhere in between on the spillage factor.

There are also specialty waterbottles, such as the camel back vareity with a wide mouth for easy ice cube insertion, but screw on lid with no-spill sip-straw. But I find that when you simply want to chug some water, these bottles do not provide you with the flow you desire. They are also quite difficult to clean.

There are also the less fancy straw waterbottles, with flip up and suck. I find these are just as bad as the camelbacks and leak.

There are flip top waterbottles also. I find mine never close the same after washing and it leads to leaking.

Alas, some smarty decided "oh what about freezable inserts," but these leave you with ice for only part of the day. Once thawed, the ice insert takes many  hours to refreeze.

Alas, all of these downfalls have simply led to me having a wide variety of waterbottles for all occasions, and I greatly enjoy all the different ones I have. So in the end, this is a good thing.

house to do wish list

A wish list of things I want to do at our house.

Donations of money and labor accepted.

-raise the garden up and plant an awesome garden every year
- replace all the rock in the front with river rock and move the rock bed over a little on the left side of the driveway
- put some fast growing bushes along the back fence for more privacy
- raise up the ground along the back fence and redo the rock to prevent weeds
- replace the entire fence and fix the gate in front, and put a chain link fence up to divide off the extra parking area so athena can't dig her way out anymore
- build a holder for firewood outside
- repaint the kitchen and cabinets, put in a tiled backsplash in the kitchen
- open up the master bathroom with half walls on either side of the doorway from the bedroom to the bathroom
- install a ceiling fan in the other upstairs bedroom

 this list subject to change :]

Caleb Perry-O'Hare Palmer

June 20, 2010

12:26 AM

5 lbs 10 oz

19 inches long

Born to Ginna Lucia and Michael Palmer

I am now married to a very hot Enterprise Rent a Car ASSISTANT MANAGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tony got the promotion he has been working hard for during his management trainee program. He interviewed for a few slots before AT, then picked right back up and turns out God put him right in our back yard- literally! He is now the Assistant Manager at the branch closest to our house and he is really enjoying it so far.

Plus, he looks good in his work clothes.

Soon we will have very official looking business cards.

We are waiting for "the note to roll" as Tony put it for it to be officially official, but I think it's official enough for me!





We will be accepting donations to hold a party in his honor.

ready set illinois

we are off to illinois on a sisterly road trip to visit the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and many other family members who we hope to see while attending our family reunion hosted by our grandparents and great aunt and uncle.

this is our first real road trip. YES! i even bought a cooler especially for it (plus we needed a cooler)

I am very sad that Tony cannot come. :[ but he must fulfill his duty and report to drill.
I wanted him to be able to spend some time with my side of the family, since the wedding doesn't really count, and they are much further away than his family. Alas, at least he will be home when I get home, not at war.

Moving on.

Whilst planning for said adventure, I Google Maps'd (yes i just made it a verb) the route. And then found that through the miracle of technology and satalites, I could acutally view their house on Google Maps. Yes, view their house in what I believe is close to real time. It was quite interesting. I then found that apparently my house and my parents house are not avaliable for "street view" as they called it. Which is funny. Maybe it's because NORAD put out some big blocking signal over Colorado Springs (that was very goverment conspiricy of me to say).

It was kind of fun! While looking I almost expected to see my mom's van pull in- because she and Holden are already there!

Well. We are off on Wednesday morning to drive straight through for a short but sweet visit.

I am actually VERY excited!

State FRG Conference

This past weekend was the State FRG conference. The FRG volunteers and commanders and 1SGs all gathered for leadership training and networking to better build our FRGs. Being such a new member of the FRG, this was my first time. We retreated up to Breckenridge, CO and it was a treat! It was sort of nice not to know very many people- I talked with people when I wanted, and got alone time when I wanted. I learned valuable life and FRG leader skills at the conference, which was overall a pleasure to have attended. I am feeling slightly more prepared with better tools to tackle my FRG leader responsibilities.

As a bonus, Tony came along and relaxed while I was at the conference, and we got to spend a lot of time enjoying the town and each other in the evenings.

It was surprisingly relaxing and refreshing- I hope to jump right back into life with a new purpose, passion, and motivation.

the beautiful mountains

sunset

where we stayed

walking around main street

the view from the conference center area. the tents are where we had breakfast.

tony's new truck

Well. We have been thinking for a while about getting a truck as our next car to replace Tony's VW Jetta. This was supposed to be down the line. But after realizing the convenience of having a bigger car, and and oil change that turned into the Jetta needing more than $1000 of work done, we decided to start LOOKING.

So Tony started looking, and lo and behold, he finds, literally, the PERFECT truck for sale through Enterprise's Car Sales department- and I mean PERFECT. The right color, transmission, features, size, interior, everything he would have picked out new.

A few months ago when he was looking for fun, he said he couldn't' find anything even close in a reasonable price range that was used. Alas, he wanted to buy new. And yet, here God goes and plops this is our lap.

So after a short test drive, we end up sitting down and purchasing it last night.

These are the pictures from the Enterprise Car Sales website, since we haven't even had a chance to take pictures of our own.

Tony is very happy, and it even fits in the garage with some minor renovations (like taking down the work table).


Alas, we decided that we should take advantage of the great opportunity that God placed in front of us and get ourselves a new truck.

Camping is in the future :]








PS: Enterprise Car Sales is AWESOME! It came with a free car fax, warranty, 190 point inspection, the works, plus they were super nice. I would recommend them for anyone in the market for a previously owned vehicle. MENTION TONY'S NAME IF YOU USE THEM!!!!!!