TGIF!

It no longer only stands for "Thank God It's Friday", no my friends, on this day (which happens to be a Friday, I know) it stands for "Thank God It's Finished!

It = our dining room set

During my parents' visit back in April we went to the unfinished furniture store to pick out some chairs to match the farm table that my dad had helped my make back in PA.

 I loved the chairs that we came back with. They're not to big, not too small, and elegant but they're still simple enough to match the simple table.  They turned out to be a great "unemployment project", keeping me busy for weeks during the painting and staining process. 

 This was the resulting look. Don't ask me why but for the bit of time when I was finishing the table and chairs I developed a phobia of polyeurithain which explains the absense of any on the final product. I think my aversion may have been related to using it on a previous project prior to our move to France but I was hell-bent on keeping the farm table looking farm-ish. 

It only took a few months before I realized that this mindset is not practical for a soft-wood dining room table. Very soon the scratches and dents were taking over the table top, which really didn't bother me since it is a very "distressed" looking table top to begin with, but I didn't want to end up ruining my precious table. Thankfully, this decision coincided perfectly with the purchase of the 5th and 6th chair in the set (we had been saving up for a few months to complete the set) so over the past few weekends, we (but mostly Michael) have been working to get the furniture finally completed. 

 While I was at work Michael started by taking the seats back off the chairs, new and old, then priming the new chairs and paining the old in a fresh coat of semi-gloss black (stupid me had painted them flat before...it kind of went along with the no-poly-no-shiny thing from above but I'm learning lots about durability of paints lately). We also flipped the table so he could do a fresh coat of the semi-gloss on that as well. 

Then came the surprise!

 Blue chairs! On a walk one morning last weekend Michael made the tentative suggestion of painting his chair the french blue that we had used on my childhood stool. He thought I was going to laugh at the suggestion but in reality, I had been feeling that the simple black and stain look was a bit too plain for me so I agreed as long as the two end chairs could both be blue. In the end, I love the color and how they go so well with the paintings and other pieces of furniture in the room.

 Pep supervised and thankfully, never jumped on the table while it was drying.

Here's the final look complete with a shiny-topped table and blue chairs on the end. So, who wants to come over and test them out?

A List (cause I'm way behind)

1. Some of you may have gathered through family or even facebook that I am finally employed. It was a quick development; I dropped off a resume on a Friday, went in for an interview the following Wednesday, a kitchen interview the next day (Thursday) and on Saturday morning, I started my first day of work. I am doing something similar to my stint at CoCo's in Pittsburgh, working half in the front and half in the kitchen and while my ideal would have been to only bake, I do love my interactions with the customers. And it's a job! And I am enjoying it! Both the people (co-workers, employers, and customers) and the baked goods (all from scratch) have been wonderful to work with so far. I am really, very happy to be employed again after such a long break (1.5 years...gasp!).

2. Since beginning my job, we have had some serious issues with kitten separation anxiety. Case in point:

 And

3. A few projects were completed before I went back to work.

 My dad made me this stool when I was little and it has been used and abused, broken, fixed, glued and it was desperately in need of a new paint job. I'm loving the happy French blue color. 

 I'm realizing now that I have a thing for brightly colored furniture. I finished the orange weeks ago but it sat unused because we had no hardware for it. That is, until I came home from work to find that Michael had made handles from spare chair parts and a cork (on the door, which still needs to be messed with, but it works!).

And there it is with the matching wine rack and the pile of wine bottles we've been saving for this year's batch of wine.

4. Apparently, Kathy Lee's stylist and I are on the same wavelength. Thanks to my wonderful m-i-l Ginny for pointing out the match.

As a reminder, here's my dress from Megan and Mike's wonderful wedding.

 And here is Kathy Lee wearing my dress the very next week. At least I wore it first. And, I bet she didn't find hers on the Banana Republic Clearance rack with an extra 40% off!

5. After many failed attempts, I managed to remember that I can make a good baguette. The downside to that is that Michael will no longer accept Trader Joe's baguettes for his lunches.

5. We had a great visit with our friends from France, Megan and Joe last week. I'm hoping to post a more significant post on this later but they were in town for a poetry reading that Joe was the star of and despite having many friends to visit here (they lived in St. Louis before moving to France), they took an evening to share with us one of their favorite hole-in-the-wall pizza joints that I am sure will be come part of the Friday night rotation.

6. We've been tapping into our German roots lately with spätzel two nights in one week!

7. As a celebratory dinner this past weekend, Michael made me a very, very happy girl by buying two yummy lobsters so we could have my favorite meal of all time, lobster bake. Yummm!

Where to Begin?

I know, it's been forever since a post. 

We returned from our PA hometown over a week ago and I am only now just starting to feel like life is back to normal...whatever normal is these days. 

I have lots to catch up on here so you can look forward to many posts in the next few weeks involving everything from brothers and sisters to nieces and nephews with a few cakes, ripening tomatoes, growing jalapeños, pickling beets and sharpened knives thrown in for good measure. Notice please that all topics mentioned above, aside from family, has to do with food. 

That's just how I roll.

In the meantime, here a few lovely pictures from the mess I came home to find in the frantic day before flying to PA with a frozen wedding cake. 

That, my friends is wine from a bottle that popped its cork. It's hard to see in these photos, I know. It was much more vibrant in person, and the smell...oh the smell; my first concern was that Pepin had been boozing it up while I was out (kidding, kidding -- I'm not that crazy!). 

Again, it's hard to see but the wine shot from the bottle on the far side of the dining room, through the dining room and almost to the far side of the kitchen; 15 feet. I measured.

And it managed to touch on everything  nearby as well: the walls, the dining room table, even making it to a far wall to the left of where this picture was taken. 

Needless to say, it got cleaned up but only after I let it sit for an hour until Michael came home from work so I could show him. It was too funny and amazing, really, not to show him.

And that way he had to help me ;-)

Balcony Garden Update

 It's been a few weeks since I've highlighted the amazing growth that's been taking place on our little balcony. I've in no way inherited my parents' green thumbs (can't even count the number of plants I've killed) and we've struggled with some of the bi-polar weather this spring (frosts, cold and soaking rain, tornado warnings and high winds) but the opposite swing (over a week now of over 90° days) has really given the garden the kick start it's needed.

And in case you aren't the gardening type, you might want to skip this post. After reading over it, I'm amazed at how long-winded I can be over a 8x11 foot space.

I realize that I never got around to showing off Michael's Birthday presents. I purchased two blueberry plants because they apparently need to have another one around to facilitate cross pollination. And I purchased two types so that we would have different harvesting seasons, thus extending our fresh blueberry eating time. Now, I must admit that I never would have thought to keep blueberries in pots, but Gayla Trail in Grow Great Grub (my current container and small space gardening bible) makes it clear that container grown blueberries can do quite well. Our master plan is to transplant these babies into the ground when the time comes that we have our own yard. This particular plant is the "Patriot" blueberry, and as you can probably tell from the already blue berries, this is our early harvest plant.

This is our "Jersey" (late harvest) blueberry bush with my massive mint alongside. There are many green berries on this plant and while there are one or two blue berries, I don't expect that we will be harvesting for 2 months or so.

 Don't mind the wilty-ness, I watered just after taking the pictures. But regardless, these are my cucumber plants (top right and bottom left) which already have blossoms and tiny cukes growing. The bottom right plant is our lavender which has been growing like crazy; I've already harvested twice and am due to harvest again tomorrow before we leave. The strands of drying lavender are hanging on the same hook as my France calendar which happens to be on a Marseille theme this month. The pairing is very fitting. The herb on the top left is a new dill plant. Since the sage seemed to be over-taking the cucumbers, I opted to transplant it to its own container and put something a bit less invasive.

 Herbs clockwise from top left:

Cilantro is doing OK. It was taking over for a few weeks but unfortunately it went to seed and I didn't catch it in time. We'll see if it comes back or if I have to replace it. Since Michael has an aversion to Cilantro, having a plant means I no longer have to feel guilty about buying it in the store for only one of us to eat it. You could say I've become cilantro dependent.

Terragon is finally taking off after the addition of some worm castings (aka worm poop) to the soil.

Parsley is also starting to catch up with my demand. I have a problem with using too many herbs as soon as I get the plants, not allowing them to get really established before I start eating them.

Chives are also new to the garden. I struggled with the basil that was in this container. It didn't like the cold, wet weather that we had last month so when I finally decided to replace it I opted to move it into it's own container that could easily be taken into the house when the weather isn't perfect. The chives are still quite new but are establishing themselves nicely.

 As you can see, my upside-down tomato plant experiment has been working out quite well. The plant is huge and as of my count this morning, I have 7 tomatoes so far. Two of the three basil plants in the top have done quite well (Thai and the new Purple basil) but the Greek basil struggled with the cold weather and I haven't been able to get it to grow more than one stalk, so we'll see how that one pans out.

 The lettuce, radishes and onions are doing much better after a move to the other, cooler side of the balcony. We have been eating and thinning out the lettuce and onions for quite awhile now and I'm trying hard to keep the radishes happy and damp.

 All of the herbs seem to be loving our heat wave, including the transplanted sage (huge, right?) and the new basil which (thanks to more worm poop) has probably tripled since we bought it last weekend.

My jalapeno plant is doing well but teaching me patience. It has been flowering for quite some time so I was starting to worry that I wasn't seeing any peppers but my research this morning assured me that these plants can take 4-6 months to produce.

Home Improvement Part 3

Not too much has been done on the home improvement front in the past few weeks. As I mentioned in my last post, we've been busy. We have, however, acquired some apartment additions that have made a world of difference in how our spaces feel. 

 In this picture alone we have two things acquired (or purchased) when Miss Emily made her move to Boston, the floor lamp and the bookshelves. More than anything, I am so happy to have at least a bit more of our books out of storage.

 

We also acquired the floor lamp in this picture from Emily and the new bed was a great Craigslist find. It was a bit out of the city, maybe a 45 minute drive, but it was well worth it. And after a good rub-down with Howard Restore-A-Finish (which I highly recommend if you have anything with a dull or scratched finish), the bed looks almost like new.

What's Next?

As soon as we get back from our PA trip this weekend, this dresser will be receiving the same red/orange treatment as the wine rack in this blog post.  I also need to find some fun hardware to replace the fake chrome.

What's in your tornado kit?

I know we moved to the midwest but the reality of being in "tornado alley" has only just begun to sink in for this solidly northeastern girl. 

While Michael was still at work on Wednesday in his nice, cozy basement office (I'm not sure he feels that way on normal weather days), and while Pep and I sat at home, a string of very severe weather began to make its way through our area. The meteorologists has been predicting it for days, telling St Louis residents that the conditions were "very favorable" for tornadoes. We were placed in the "high-risk" area on the national map and I was ready with the TV on, to watch the action unfold. Unfortunately, nothing else was prepared. 

You see, up until this point, while we had been under tornado warnings on past bad weather days, and the sirens had blared before, there had never been anything resembling a tornado heady towards our house. And as I am sure you are all aware, the terrible tragedy that happened the past week in Joplin, MO has scared everyone into being a bit more diligent.

Wednesday was a different story though. I had the TV blaring while frantically cleaning (the nervous energy of tornado warnings makes me a great cleaner!) when I heard that there was rotation in the atmosphere and a funnel cloud had been spotted just a few miles south of our house in the shopping area that I frequent daily. At this point, the TV announcer suggested that anyone in the path of this particular cell move to the basement, naming our neighborhood in his list. 

Then I thought, "Oh, Crap! I have nothing ready!". Thankfully, we were still a bit away from the funnel cloud, and the TV was predicting that we would have 17 minutes before anything would be close. What better time to prepare an emergency kit, really?

So, here's my 15 minute tornado kit ended up looking like:

1. Sneakers (with the nasty pair of socks that I've been wearing all week to work out in. Sorry, I only own two pair, so new pairs are doled out sparingly.), cause shiny gold flip-flops just won't cut it.

2. Water

3. Food (a banana and a granola bar)

4. Mag Lite flashlight (I hope Preston isn't reading this, and if you're reading this Cayley, don't show it to him. He left it at my house 8 or so years ago and I never got it back to him.) with a pack of extra batteries.

5. Money, credit cards, insurance cards, etc

6. Phone

7. A sweater

8. Kitten in his carrier

9. Kitten food and treats
10. A book (specifically Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated)

Funny story about Pep and the carrier: 

He actually jumped in the carrier as soon as I pulled it out. While he doesn't like being shut in it the carrier, he does think it's quite a comfy bed to lay on (as you can see in the picture above, taken later in the evening before I got around to putting it away). So after he willingly jumped in his carrier I zipped it up and continued with my frantic packing. I opened the door to the basement to get a baggie of his food out of the stairwell closet and heard a loud "Meow" fly by me down the stairs. It seems that Pepin was worried I would forget him in the shuffle and figured it was every cat for himself! I was worried at first that he had ripped through his carrier but in reality, I had simply forgotten to fasten the clasps after zipping him in. 

I probably should note that Pep is slightly obsessed with exploring the basement and probably just saw his chance with the door wide open and me paying little attention (thinking he was contained.)

All ended well though. That particular funnel cloud never touched down and while the severe weather lasted a few more hours, it mostly involved heavy rain and some hail.

The moral of this stupid story is that we need to get an actual kit together so we're not scurrying around and nearly losing the kitten in the scuffle.

And also, I may have some unhealthy anxiety when it comes to tornado scares.

On a Happier note:

This happened two years ago yesterday on a cliff in Hawaii.

We celebrated with a movie and sushi and I have to say that I am so happy with the little life and little family we've made (minus the tornado alley thing). 

Two wonderful years down, and here's to many, many more to come!

Home Improvement Part 2: A weekend of progress

 Over this past weekend, Michael got me motivated to finish some of the half finished bits and pieces lying around the living room.  I've done a poor job of taking before pictures of our recent projects but nonetheless, I will show you the finished products.

I mentioned in the post about my parents' visit that we worked on hand-caning one chair but I realize now that I never showed the good, finished picture of the piece.

Silly me, here you go.

 Thanks to lots of help from my mother I was able to complete the hand-caned chair on the right. After my family departed I was left with a pressed (pre-woven) cane chair that I needed to figure out how to do on my own (shown on the left hand side, for comparison of the hand weave vs. pre-weave). 

 Thanks to the modern marvel that is youtube, I was able to watch a video 2 or 3 times then Michael and I were a able to replace the old caning within 30 minutes. Although I made a small mistake on the spline (the piece that goes around the edges of the cane), I must say that I can see why the pre-woven cane was invented, if only because this chair took 30 minutes to complete as opposed to the 10 or so hours that the hand-woven cane demanded. (That isn't to say that pressed-cane doesn't posses its own challenges.)

 I also worked last week on sanding and staining this adorable little tea tray that my dad made for me when I was 10 and still had tea parties. I don't know why I never got around to finishing it until now. 

 Also on our to-do list was this all-important wine rack. As you can see in the background, we finished bottling this year's 45 bottles of wine and were severely lacking a place to put them. Michael is putting on the primer in this picture.

 Here it is with in the finished red/orange color. (LOVE!)

 And holding some of our wine. As you can see, we need to add something to the bottom of a leg so it doesn't wobble.

On a slightly related note: if you have a very quick little kitty and are painting, lock him in a different room. Pepin was not very happy with the bath he received after this little mishap and still has some peach-tinged fur on his back.

Home Improvement Part 1

 You might remember our living room looking like this:

Cramped, smushed, and difficult to navigate. Unfortunately, if we wanted to make out anything on our tiny 17" TV, this is what we had to deal with.

Thanks to the untimely death (seriously, untimely. We were very lucky that we had been saving a bit.) of the 17" Samsung, our living room now looks like this:

While still not perfect, and not all in our style, this a serious upgrade from what we had been dealing with. 

On a slightly related note: I'm not sure if any of my brothers read this blog, but if you do, I just wanted you to know that I never expected that I would be playing Toejam and Earl on a 42" TV (the color is a bit distorted by the camera, but the picture quality of this TV is amazing!).

P.S. Blogger -- thank you for finally letting me post!

We didn't sit down for a minute...(cont)

My parents and Grandma set out on the 800+ mile drive on that Friday morning. The original plan was to stay the night along the way and arrive Saturday afternoon. I called it though, I told Michael the night before to expect a phone call saying that they were just going to tough it out and drive straight through on Friday. And the phone call came, happily, meaning one more day with the crew all here.

As you can see, Pep warmed up to the visitors quickly.

I'm not sure what we did on Saturday...I think we were a bit lazy, which was understandable for those who had spent 12.5 hours in the truck on the previous day. We did however manage to get out of the house and to the grocery store to pick up dinner supplies and tulips to adorn the table for our first meal at it.

Everyone is smiling in this picture but really, they are probably cringing from the pain of sitting on seatless chairs since up until this point, we still only had one solid chair that included a seat (Grandma is sitting on that one).

Sunday morning we hopped in the car and headed out MO rt100 towards the wine region. Grandma claims she was falling over from exhaustion in this picture but I think she was just being camera-shy.

Here's the group taking a tour of the wine cellars at Stone Hill Winery in Branson, MO.

And here we are during the post-tour wine-tasting. We cut Grandma off at this point (kidding...kidding).

I don't know what we did up until the afternoon on Monday but when Michael got off of work we met at an unfinished furniture store to fill out our dining room set with some chairs (with seats). We bought four for now and plan to get two more in the near future (although, since our TV just crapped out, I don't know when we'll be able to afford two more chairs).

I'll post more on the finishing process in another post.

Anyway, on Tuesday, we realized that our hometown Pirates were in town playing the Cardinals and get this: the Pirates had won the previous night's game against the Cards!

Sadly, the Cardinals won this game (but lost the next night's), but we did have a great time with a great view. I am anxious to go to another game to cheer for the Cards. I really tried at this game, but I just couldn't bring myself to root against the Pirates.

On Wednesday we loaded up into the truck and drove across the Mississippi river into Illinois to visit the Cahokia Indian Mounds.

Here we are at the top (Grandma didn't bother, there were lots of steps up). Dad and I may look a little tired. This was taken seconds after we raced up the stairs. Unfortunately Michael wasn't able to come along on this trip since he had to work. (boo.)

We may have been miles away but from the (relatively) high viewpoint on top of the mound, we were able to pick out the arch in the distance.

On our way back from the Mounds we stopped off at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.

The walls, ceilings, floors, everything is covered with 41.5 million mosaic pieces.

Coincidentially, after posting these photos to facebook I was told by Michael's Aunt Susie that "Many of these were done by the Frei Studio or Ravena (sp) Mosiacs...Joe's (Michael's Uncle Joe, that is) grandfather's/great-grandfather's company."

We have an exciting familial St. Louis claim to fame.

I particularly loved the red on the ceiling in this chapel, made to symbolize the blood of Christ.

And in this chapel we have the Cardinal hats, left to hang until they turn to dust. Literally.

After the day's excitement, Mom and I did more work on the chair we had been caning all week while Pep drank our cane soaking water.

On Thursday, while dad whipped up a balcony planter box for us, Mom, Grandma and I hit up the botanical gardens. There was much more color on this visit.

It looked as if an Easter basket had exploded.

I love tulips.

We visited the local gardening center at the Botanical gardens so I could drool over the raised bed gardens,

And the cold boxes.

And on Friday we hit up the free (with the exception of the 12.50 parking pass, unless you want to walk 1 mile for free parking, which is what we did) Zoo where we had the pleasure of seeing some incredible birds,

A tiger losing his lunch,

This rather large giraffe,

Pairs of penguins,

And an elephant coating himself in mud to stay cool. (I missed this one, I was busy fetching the truck from a mile away.)

And after the swealtering heat (something like 85°) at the Zoo, we were in need of some lunch and cold beer, so we headed off to Schlafly Bottleworks. After an excellent lunch we took the tour and...

(You guessed it!)...tasted!

And on their last night here we ordered take out BBQ from one of the highest rated St Louis BBQ joints and spent the evening finishing up the chair.

And we moved this beautiful family piece to it's final placement and filled it with all of our (mostly wonderful hand-me-down) china. I forgot to mention earlier that this China cabinet, my Grandparents' (first belonging to my Grandpa's parents) China cabinet, came with my family in the truck so that we wouldn't have to keep all of our special dishes in boxes in the corner of the dining room. Thanks again Grandma!

And thanks to all three of you for the visit, we had a wonderful time!