Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Other stuff’ Category

LOL, sounds kind of crazy doesn’t it? I don’t wear make up. I barely remember to put moisturizer on my face. I’ve always been lazy about my hair… I keep it short so that it’s easy to care for and I use cheap shampoo. I just have never been too interested in looking like everyone else.

But I saw something advertised recently that sort of interested me. I have an eyebrow problem, always have had. If I don’t do something I basically have a big brown caterpillar across my face. For most of my life I did nothing most of the time. Shave off the middle, maybe, if I even bothered to do that.

Then a friend told me that getting my eyebrows waxed would probably work really well AND it wouldn’t hurt nearly as bad as I thought. I knew tweezing was never gonna be my thing. So, I went and had it done. I was amazed… it really =didn’t= hurt that bad, and I finally had shapely eyebrows! This was 10 years ago or so. Since then I’ve gone to salons to have it done, tried various products at home to do it myself, but I was never really happy with the results. The best eyebrows were that first time. Then it all went down hill. Got one of the best haircuts once, but the stylist who cut my hair so well almost gave me two black eyes doing my brows. It’s sort of a hit or miss thing… even with the same stylist. I’ve come home far too often with mismatched brows. Doing it myself is almost as bad… sometimes wax strips would work, sometimes they wouldn’t, and I tried quite a few products. Cold liquid wax, strips, goo, glorified tape.

So, when I saw this new heated wax system being advertised I thought… hmm, maybe. It’s the Sally Hansen Simple Spa Wax Warmer kit. Not too expensive to try, at about $20. I got one. No cloth strips, which I was skeptical about. Can they really make a wax that doesn’t need a way to get it off?

Yes, they can. It works beautifully. It works better than any hot salon wax I’ve ever had done. Much better than the cold wax stuff at home in any variation. No cloth strips to either wash or throw away depending on the type of goo used.

The applicators are just craft sticks… popsicle sticks and tongue depressors, and that is a mistake. Need a thinner stick for eyebrows, really. Not a problem, I can find the size stick I need for next time. The wax heats up in about 20 min. or so, and you test the heat on your inner wrist before using. Don’t want it too hot. Apply it… and this is the tricky part if you are doing your own eyebrows, lol! I managed to drip some right into my eyelashes… that small craft stick is too big even for my bushy eyebrows. But it comes off with a bit of baby oil, so I didn’t have to yank out my puny eyelashes. Let it cool a bit, then rip it off. It takes all the hair and not the skin. Most of the home products always take some of my skin, too. This one didn’t. Not only that, but the redness went away faster.

So, and I know this is a weird place and time for me to be posting a beauty product review… but I love this new kit. It works better than anything else out there for home use, and I rate it better than salon wax, too. Hey, if I mess up I have only myself to blame… I’m sort of tired of paying someone ELSE to give me mismatched eyebrows. Five stars for the Sally Hansen Simple Spa Wax kit!

Hugs,
Vyx

I know it is, because our lilac is blooming. Not as great as it did last year, but it’s going good. Can’t blame the lilac… we had a dry summer last year and I watered and made a few things bloom at the wrong time. Lilac and Jane magnolia both bloomed in late summer, eek.

I’ve got radishes… those seeds I planted back in February. They need water right now, but we are supposed to get rain Sunday so I may hold off watering. I need to rototill the rest of the garden anyhow… the regular garden, and the new bit we started last year. I picked a nice handful of eating size radishes today, yum YUM!

Artichokes. I’ve got artichoke seedlings to plant out. That new bit we dug up last year is going to be home to those. I’ll have to baby them and keep them alive through our hot dry summer and then mulch like crazy in the fall to keep the roots from freezing in winter… but I’ve done it before. I have high hopes I can do it again. This time with =real= artichokes, LOL! I planted some a few years ago, did the baby thing with them… but I had the cut dried flower kind instead of the eating kind. Sigh… but still, same family, same care. I want to do it again, I miss fresh artichokes and I’m not willing to pay $3 each for last years old tough ones that we get in the stores here.

I won’t be planting 15+ tomato plants this year. Maybe just 6 or so. No peppers, I never use them all, they just go to waste. Perhaps a bit of squash and a cuke plant or two. No pickles for us this year, but that’s okay. My neighbors seem to have moved and are not planting a garden next door, so I won’t get free cukes like I have for the past couple years. I don’t really have the space for cukes… but I’m also not insane enough to plant 2 or 3 fifty foot rows of cukes. Well, my garden rows are only 25 feet anyhow, but still… :) The guy next door would go a bit nuts planting and couldn’t give it all away fast enough before everything would max out and quit. Couple cuke plants, couple squash, I’ll still have more than I can eat.

My grapes are budding out with leaves. Even the muscadine grapes seem to have survived my pruning. I thought I pretty much killed those, because since I pruned them they’ve been bleeding sap out like crazy. But I see swelling leaf buds finally… the regular grapes are leafing out. I oughta get grapes this year of some kind. I’m probably insane, but I want to plant a few fruit trees this year. Right, Vyx… you’ve got 5 grape vines, and 50 feet of blackberries… how the heck are you gonna take care of more fruit? I dunno, but I want to. :)

Well… I need to get outside with the camera this weekend and hope it works… lots of cute little wild flowers this year. With ME doing the mowing everything has more of a chance to grow.

hugs….

Vyx

It’s not all about babies, although I have those…

New grandbaby is awesome! I wish I could see him more. Time for that… he’ll get even cuter as he gets older.. up until maybe the teenage years, lol! I posted a couple new photos on FB, so I won’t post them here.

We also have kittens. MeepMeep decided to have kittens, and I decided to freak her out because she wasn’t in with her new (but cleaned) kitten by bringing her and the kit in the house. So I make a bed, make a cave, put a litter box in the house in a bedroom… etc… etc… and bring MeepMeep in with her baby. I wasn’t thinking about Meep not knowing in the house is good… she’s not a regular visitor inside, like some of the other cats.

So, bringing her in, That was no help, it freaked her out, shut down her labor. There is a DOG in the house, for one thing. I shut the bedroom door, and visited with her, but it was not okay. In the morning I took them both back out to the heated kitty house on the porch.

When I got home from work she’d had more… and another cat momma, Patches, decided to have her kittens too.
Well, the natural thing for our cats to do is have kittens together. They share Momma duties. As they get older they sometimes don’t LIKE to do that, but at least for a first litter, help is okay. (last year Libby and Patches had kittens at the same time, and Patches ousted Libby, took over her kittens) I thought for sure that Patches would be ousting Meep, but if she tried it, Meep wasn’t going for it. I’m glad Patches is helping her out, showing her the ropes and all.

Patch and Libby still don’t get along. Patches has been forcing Libby away from food, starting fights with her. I guess I’ve got a queen war going on, but since Libby is so laid back she just backs off. I make sure Libby gets her share of the food, and try to keep Patch from picking on her. About all I can do.

One thing I think is worth reporting… the Momma cats kicked everyone else out of the heated house. That was fine when it was warm, but then it got a bit chilly again. I had to take the kitten bed I’d made for in the house outside and fix it up for other cats to sleep in at night. Dusty and Snowball got right in there to sleep. I think their feelings were hurt that they got ousted… they are still kittens themselves.

News other than kittens and babies… plants are growing. Or not, as the case may be. I planted a number of grape vines last year, and I pruned them one nice weekend in February. Since then they’ve been bleeding to death from where I pruned them. I hope they grow… it’s mostly the muscadine vines doing that, not the regular table grapes. I’m not doing anything to them, might make things worse…. just waiting and seeing.

Of my three peonies planted last year, only two have come up. The third one may yet still pop up, wait and see on that, too. Considering that they were “guaranteed to bloom” I’ll be happy if they just grow… I didn’t expect them to bloom last year even with that guarantee. Come to think of that, what a bogus guarantee that is… who expects a bareroot chunk of something to do well the first year? Get established yeah, bloom, hah!

My Jane magnolia is blooming nicely. I even took a photo! Two, actually… that came out okay.

I just love Jane magnolias. Didn’t know they were magnolia trees for a long time, I always called them tulip trees. We planted one in honor of my sister Cherie in her yard and it’s done well. Much better than the dogwood there has done.

The mini iris also bloomed fairly well. They are so cute and tiny. I really should move them everywhere… they usually bloom before we get to mowing and they are so short that even when we do mow it probably wouldn’t hurt them at all. It would be nice surprises in the yard if I dug some up and scattered them here and there.

Also growing well is my clematis. I’ll wait to photo that until it blooms. Weeds have taken over everywhere… the weeds that get the purple flowers that look so lovely in big chunks. They rake out pretty easily and actually die off pretty quick when the weather gets warmer, so I’m not too concerned.

Last year I became enamored of blue blue blue hydrangeas. The bluer the better, and I’ve seen some super blue ones. I was thinking that that’s what I want for my birthday this year, a bluer than blue hydrangea. Has to be super blue, like the ones I’ve seen locally. On the other hand, I also adore the crab apples blooming this time of year, especially the deep red ones. Plus there is my favorite hedge shrubs… flowering quince and forsythia mixed together in a hedge. I love the orangey pink of flowering quince and I love forsythia too. Just can’t beat that totally yellow. Quince are slow growing, but forsythia is a quick grower. They look pretty together, but eventually the forsythia will take over, have to whack it back and all. I know where I can get plenty of forsythia cuttings when they are done blooming… and my Mom will probably thank me for regaining some of her yard, lol! The quince… well, I want an old fashioned orange/pink one. Might be harder to find, I know my Mom doesn’t have any.

I moved one of my bluebird houses. I had it pretty close to the house and sparrows kept wanting to nest in it. So I took it down and moved it way out in the field, attached it to a tree. They won’t be bothered by me messing with my flower bed, or with cats too close. Forgot to check on it today, but I did check the box by the blackberries and that looks like it has a bluebird nest in it. If I start seeing junk in the nest, I’ll pull it out… that’d be sparrows using trash for their nest. I built those boxes for bluebirds, not the dang sparrows.

I’m almost done feeding the birds. I don’t usually, because of all the cats here… I don’t want to be luring birds to be cat food. But we had a lot of snow in February, so I made feeders out of 2 liter bottles and got a big bag of sunflower seed. I also stocked up on suet cakes and a new suet feeder. Ran out of the suet cakes pretty quick, and I’m down to maybe one more filling of the feeders before I’m out of seed. Then all the feeders will come down and the birds will have to find a new place to eat. It’s one thing to be feeding them when the ground is 2 feet in snow and the cats are huddled in their house…. I don’t want to come home to any piles of feathers on the porch. It’s not fair to the birds to lure them here and bait the cats with them. It has been interesting to see all the birds, though. Three kinds of woodpeckers, cardinals, and a bunch that I don’t know what they are. Finches and goldfinches in winter color. But too many I just don’t know. I need a bird book to refresh my memory. :)

Ron has been slowly getting better… he’s progressed to taking a shower without the cervical collar. Bath time is a lot quicker than it was. His next doctor appointment is Tuesday and he’s hoping he can have the collar off all the time. He still won’t be fully recovered to go back to work, but at least he’ll be able to move a bit more. I’m not really expecting a lot more help around the house with stuff for a while… I doubt he’ll be mowing the lawns this year, but if we can at least move the furniture back to normal it would be good. He’ll be super disappointed if that collar has to stay on, so I hope he’s healed enough for it to come off. I think he has… he’s hardly ever in pain any more, and I think when he is it’s caused by the collar now. But we’ll see.

Well, this was just going to be a short note about spring flowers and I turned it into a long rambling post as usual… LOL! Guess this is it for now…

hugs,
Vyx

I would have loved to post a photo of my rye bread. I should have, actually, the camera still works for some things. I just forgot to do that until I’d ate half the not so beautiful loaf, lol!

I’d love to post photos of all the birds that are coming to my feeders.

But I haven’t, because my camera isn’t working right. I’ve got a point and shoot camera with auto focus, and the auto focus isn’t working. Bad timing on that, I can’t afford a new camera, not with what’s been going on lately.

I’m thinking, though… that instead of going for another simple camera I’d like a digital SLR camera. More like a real camera, and able to focus it manually. It’ll take some saving up to afford one of those, so in the mean time… I’ll have to do the best I can with the point and shoot.

Which isn’t that great. I tried to take a photo of one of the bald eagles that was hanging around back in December. All I got is a dark blob in a blurry tree.

At the time I just figured it was because of weather and light being wrong or something. I don’t hang around outside taking photos a lot in the winter. The sun was almost directly behind the eagle, but it was at the same time foggy/cloudy. I walked to where the sun was a bit off to the side, still got a blurry photo.

I tried again in January. I took great pictures of my cinnamon rolls, but anything at a distance isn’t focusing.

Great photo of a kitten sleeping in a stainless pet food dish… LOL!

Photo that same morning of the field… all blurry. The camera is getting worse on that auto focus thing.

It’s starting to mess with things close up now. Blargh! Mostly what I take are close up photos. I’ve never had a lot of use for pictures of scenery, no matter how beautiful it is. But I WOULD like to take photos of the birds I’ve been feeding against my strict rules of no bird feeding because of outside cats. I’m getting LOTS of birds, a big variety of them. I must have the only feeders in miles… plus, it’s snowy and no one can find food.

I want a photo of teenager cat Stubby sitting in the tree, way out on a branch and covered with snow trying to stalk birds. Does he think he’s going to fly to catch them? Hah. I tried to take that picture, but all I have are a blurry tree, blurry birds… and a blurry snow covered cat. It’s NOT me… I know to lean on something to keep the camera from shaking. I got the green light… but the picture when transfered to my computer was a blurry mess and I wasn’t zooming. Sheesh. (nor was it in macro mode, after a year of using this camera I’m pretty much set in knowing how it works)

Anyhow. I guess the camera is no longer good for anything over 5 or 6 feet away. At least it can still take some photos… it could be worse. My last camera just started inserting static into all photos some of the time, that’s why I got a new one a little over a year ago. I love this little camera, although I’m not fond of how it can use up batteries so quickly. Selling point: takes regular AA’s. Bad point: only uses 2, instead of 4. Even with rechargeable batteries you can go through them rather quick. In fact, I thought the batteries might be the trouble, so I put two fresh regular AA’s into it to see if that was the trouble with the focus. Didn’t help.

Oh well, life goes on… and I’m not going to be taking a photo of Ron in his cervical collar anyhow. LOL!

Ron IS doing much better, though. I expect to go back to work on Monday, for a partial day. Shopping tomorrow for stuff we need and things he can nuke to eat while I’m gone… soups in manageable sizes and microwave ready stuff. I think I’ll pick up one of those long reach grabber things, too, because if Ron drops anything he can’t pick it up. Mostly because he can’t see it when he can reach it. Grabber might help with that.

Well, it’s almost time for chat, so I guess I’ll go do that now…

hugs,
Vyx

Today I’m baking cinnamon rolls, using my sweet roll dough as the bread dough part of it. I’ve tried different recipes, including some made with Bisquick (ugh). I prefer a nice yeast dough to start out with.

I’ve made Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls a few times. The first time I followed the recipe exactly.

I didn’t like them very much, too greasy. That’s an excessive amount of oil in the recipe in my opinion. Plus, who needs baking powder in a yeast bread? Not to mention the fact that the recipe is way too large unless you are planning on giving lots away in which case it’s fine. I cut it in half and decreased the oil quite a bit, and it was much better for me. I do have to admit, though, that while I can’t see the point of baking powder in a yeast dough, I have been known to put a little yeast into a biscuit dough.

Anyhow, I’ve had my own sweet roll recipe for a few years. I usually make it as dinner rolls for a holiday dinner, even though it is on the sweet side. They sell those Hawaiian rolls as dinner rolls… so why not? Portuguese people eat sweet bread with dinner type stuff, and I’ve always loved a good Portuguese sweet bread. It’s probably where they get the Hawaiian bread originally… from Portuguese people that came to live there.

This originally started out as a bread machine recipe. I have it written down in a notebook… but because I’m pretty good with bread baking I didn’t feel the need to follow a recipe the last time I made it. (besides, the recipe is a little off… my son made it as written in the bread machine and ended up with batter instead of dough) I haven’t used a bread machine in a few years… I like kneading dough. Plus, it’s easier to adjust flour if you have the dough in your hands.

If you aren’t comfortable baking bread without actual measurements of flour, this recipe is not for you. If you are, jump right in!

Ingredients:
1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt (oops, forgot this in todays batch!)
1 6 oz can pineapple juice
2 eggs
3 to 5 cups flour, either all purpose or bread flour

(Flour as you like or happen to have on hand… todays rolls have a mixture of both, as I ran out of bread flour and had to switch to all purpose.)

Basic dough instructions:

Stir yeast into warm water and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cut up butter and melt in the microwave. Stir in sugar, salt, and pineapple juice, and when cooled, whisk in eggs.

Add a cup of flour and beat with a spoon until combined, then add in the dissolved yeast. Add more flour as needed to make a soft dough. I’d guess it took about 3 cups today, but can’t be sure as today was one of those days that I didn’t use a measuring cup to scoop out flour. Just add a cup at a time until you have a good dough going.

(Which reminds me of a book I’d love to own… a cooking book that is all about proportions of stuff rather than exact amounts. Gotta remember to find that book again and put it on my wish list!)

Turn dough out onto a well floured surface and knead, adding more flour as needed to keep it from sticking. Knead like you would any other bread dough, until it becomes nice and smooth and elastic. Round it up and put into an oiled bowl, turning to coat all sides. Cover and let rise for a couple hours or until doubled in bulk.

Punch down, let rest for 10 min. At this point you can form it into dinner rolls or carry on and use it for another purpose like I did today…

If making dinner rolls, divide dough into whatever size rolls you like… you can make cloverleafs in muffin tins, or just divide the dough into bits that will make the size roll you are going for. Place on parchment lined baking sheet and bake 20 min. or so @ 350 until golden brown. That’s what I usually do… and I make rather large dinner rolls. This recipe fills up a baking sheet pretty tight, though. Rolls all stuck together.

But today I wanted cinnamon rolls. So, after punching down the dough and letting it rest, I got my trusty pastry cloth back out and my wonderful non-stick rolling pin (thanks Val!) and rolled the dough out to a sort of oblong. Melted a stick of butter, poured about 1/2 of that on the dough. Sprinkled about a cup of sugar onto that, cinnamon until it looked right, and then a double handful of raisins.

The rest of the butter went into the baking pan… one of those throw away foil pans with a plastic lid for carting to work or where ever.

Rolled the dough up tight and then cut into really thick slices. I think I overdid it. Not to mention, the pan wasn’t big enough but I am lazy and squeezed all the slices into the one pan anyhow. I’m going to take a photo in a few min. but I just wanted to warn you… I probably should have used BOTH pans not just the one, and cut the slices smaller… one inch, rather than two inches. This recipe was fine for one large cookie sheet of dinner rolls, but with all the filling and slicing and all.. a bit much for a 13×9 cake pan. No surprise really… the cake pan is half the size of my cookie sheets. Duh!

So, no icing yet. I may not put icing on these… I can’t see it going anywhere but OUT of the pan… or maybe totally swamping that one roll in the middle that didn’t seem to pop out like all it’s sibs did. :)

It’s dinner time, and guess what I’m having for dinner? Heh….

hugs,
Vyx

Okay, so… I logged out and went to have a cinnamon roll. They weren’t cooked, too overcrowded. That must be an important thing to follow: do not overcrowd cinnamon rolls in the baking pan. Give em room to rise and room to expand even more in the oven or you will end up with a pan of half baked and/or overbrowned rolls. I got both, but after taking out the middle two I put foil over the pan and stuck it back in the oven until they were done.

Won’t be doing that again! (the overcrowding/undercooking, that is) Lesson learned. :)