For Jackie (and Christine!)

Fresh Strawberry Cake With Cream Cheese Icing

• 1 Package Plain White Cake Mix
• 1 Cup Chopped strawberries, with juice
• 3/4 Cup Milk
• 1 Package Strawberry Gelatin (3 ounce)
• 3/4 Cup Vegetable Oil
• 3 Eggs

Grease and flour two 8 inch round baking pans or one 9×13 inch pan. Gently mash strawberries by placing them in a large plastic bag and rolling over it with a rolling pin or large can. Place cake mix, milk, gelatin mix, vegetable oil, and eggs in large mixing bowl. Beat with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy, about two minutes or so. Add in strawberries and juice, mix again until well combined. Pour into baking pans. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. If using two round pans, allow to sit for ten minutes before turning out of pans to cool completely. If baking in 9×13 pan, simply allow to cool in pan.

Cream Cheese Icing

• 8 ounce Cream Cheese, room temp
• 4 Tablespoons margarine, room temp
• 3 Cups confectioner’s sugar

Combine all ingredients and mix with electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Ice cooled cake.

Store cake in refrigerator.

*Some people add 1/2 C crushed, drained strawberries to this icing as well. I leave them out to make the cake a bit prettier and easier to ice but feel free to add them in for more great strawberry flavor! Just mix them in after your icing is smooth and creamy and all other ingredients have been added.

Prayers for the University of Alabama

Have you ever worried about your kids at college?  Wondered if they're eating right, getting enough sleep, hanging out with the right people and staying out of trouble?  If you've had a child away at college, I already know your answer.  We all worry about our children, but I can count on a couple of fingers the number of times I've worried about them because of the weather.

An ex-colleague of mine, who happens to share my last name though no relation to my husband, has a daughter at the University of Alabama.  She's an excellent athlete, one whom I frequently claimed as my own when people would compliment me on her wins in tennis or basketball.  She's playing tennis in Tuscaloosa, and she's good enough to have won conference player of the week twice this season as a junior.

As a high school player she was undefeated.  (She also scored more than 1000 points in basketball.)  As an SEC freshman she played number 2 singles.  As a sophomore, she and her partner were ranked number 16 in the national rankings.  Just a week ago she was named the SEC women's tennis scholar athlete of the year as a junior. This girl is the real deal.

So imagine what must have been going through the minds of her parents yesterday.  If you've been hiding under a rock somewhere you might have missed the news accounts of the mile-wide tornado that leveled Tuscaloosa.  Because of this devastation, classes have been cancelled, as have final exams, and graduation, which was planned for May 7th, has been postponed until August 6th.  Two students, at last count, are among the 32 confirmed dead in this city alone.

My friend's daughter was not one of these students.  I haven't heard her personal story, but I understand from other friends that she is fine.  Praise God.  However, I'm sure that no one at the University of Alabama will be the same again.  The campus appears to have missed a direct hit, but the off-campus housing areas resembled  a war zone.  Reality has shifted for these students.

Again, I've never really thought about the weather when I've worried about my college senior.  This is what I know now:  you don't ever know, do you?  You tell them you love them, you kiss them when they leave, and you tell them to be careful on the drive back to school.  And you pray God will take care of them, as I pray He'll take care of these students and their families.

This Auburn tiger would like to ask you to pray for the Crimson Tide families, as well as the families of the 250+ dead and the untold number of people who are now homeless.

Never thought I'd say this, but Roll Tide.

Furniture Pictures!

Did you read the last post?  Here's the pictures that should have gone with it!!

sofa fabric

top of table that goes in bedroom

table we're still painting

not a very good picture of the chest of drawers with the cool new pulls!

Still have to do the redo the end table and finish the coffee table!

What did you do last week?

So....my daughter and I are in the process of redoing a bunch of old furniture pieces.  We bought an old white and gold (gag) Bassett chest of drawers and painted it and added new hardware.  Our $45 chest has a brand new look and we're very proud of it!  ($45?? Well, before the paint and the ten drawer pulls that had to be replaced--the old ones were hideous!)
The chest is sitting at this moment in my kitchen.  It's the only project we've finished completely!

We also had an old side table (this one was in my parents' house in Tullahoma back when I was little--we moved from there when I was 8, so it's old like me...) that we'd already painted for the apartment she's in now.  I repainted the top surface a different color and drew the pattern from one of the squares from her quilt onto it.  We started painting it last night...I think it's pretty cool too.  It's not finished yet but we're close. (This one was free!!)
The table is also in my kitchen.

Our biggest project so far is a coffee table we made.  (http://www.hgtv.com/living-rooms/build-a-factory-cart-coffee-table/index.html)  We didn't put the wheels on--we bought legs instead--and our top boards are run lengthwise instead of the short way, but other than that it's the same.  It's not stained yet, but it's built.  After buying all the boards, nails, screws, wood glue, stain, wood conditioner, sandpaper, countersink drill bits--did I forget anything??--we could have bought a super nice table already built!  But this one is going to be cool, and we did it ourselves.  (Kinda proud of that!)
The coffee table is upside down in the dining room, waiting to be moved to the deck to be sanded again before it can be stained.

Our next project is having the couch cushions recovered.  We've bought the fabric and I think I've found somebody to sew them.  It's a wooden couch, with three seat cushions and three back cushions which are loose, so it isn't exactly like taking it to be reupholstered. I just have to take one of each size to Varnell to let the lady decide if she can do it.
Let's just say it's a good thing JoAnn's has upholstery fabric and they put 50% coupons in every Sunday paper...

In the meantime, I've got canvases to do.  Right now, there are at least a hundred bottles of paint and several cups holding my brushes on my dining room table and a bunch of canvases leaning on chairs, table legs, etc.  I've got all my drawings I use for patterns in there too, along with a bunch of scrapbook paper I used for some other canvases.
The problem with using your dining room as your studio is it makes it tough to have an Easter meal in the room!

On Mondays we keep our grandson.  So everything was on hold today.  It was actually nice to have a "day off" from my projects.  Today we ate breakfast, played in the swing on the deck, went to Chick Fil A for lunch.  We strolled around the neighborhood.  We played with the balls and Tigger and we watched the dogs run around outside.  He's 10-months old and he's so much fun right now!

I'm wondering, how did I ever have time to work??  Retirement is wearing me out!!

Trees in Fall

newest canvas...16" x 20"

Sunday at the Masters

No.  I'm not there.  I haven't even watched it all on TV today.  But I'm watching the very end, and apparently that's all anybody needed to see.  Tiger and Geoff are already in the clubhouse at 10 under, which looked promising at the time, but now Jason Day, Adam Scott, and Charl Schwartzel are running away with it.  Not so familiar maybe, but right now Schwartzel is leading, and everybody else is running out of time.

Rory McIlroy, sadly, if you like him, has imploded.  His lead of the previous three days has disappeared.  He's about 8 back at this point and looks like he'd pay to get off the course.  NOW.

But the Masters isn't just about golf, or the green jacket, or the azaleas.  To me it means spring is truly here, that I really can plant anything I want to now, and it used to mean that spring break was over and I had to go back to work tomorrow.  Now that I'm retired, that last one is gone and it just means time to plant!

So no matter who wins this Masters, we all win.  Because spring has once again made it to Georgia, and who doesn't love that?

P.S.  Unless something truly funky happens in the next 5 minutes, a big congratulations goes out to Mr. Charl Schwartzel from South Africa on his first Masters win!

Today in History

In Toronto, on this day in 1969, John Lennon recorded "Give Peace a Chance."  It was his first solo single.  Lennon wrote the song during his "Bed-In" honeymoon. On April 7, in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, the song was recorded on rented equipment.  Lennon played acoustic guitar and was joined by Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, also on acoustic guitar.  (Does anyone else find this fact more than a little strange?)

Vietnam peace talks had been going on since January; by April of 1969, however, over 540,000 U.S. troops were in place.

Lennon and Yoko Ono, known for their anti-war beliefs, staged several "bed-ins" to draw attention to these beliefs.  Lennon told one photographer, "We're going to sell peace the way other people sell soap."  The verses of the song are little known, but everyone knows the tune and words of the chorus.

This I know:  the way things are going in the world in 2011, maybe a bed-in isn't such a bad idea.

For old times' sake:

Two, one, two, three, four

Ev'rybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, That-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m

All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Yeah!
C'mon
Ev'rybody's talking about Ministers,
Sinisters, Banisters
And canisters, Bishops, and Fishops,
And Rabbis, and Pop eyes, Bye, bye, bye byes

All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Let me tell you now
Ev'rybody's talking about
Revolution, evolution, masturbation,
Flagellation, regulation, integration,
Meditation, United Nations,
Congratulations.

All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Ev'rybody's talking about
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan,
Tommy Cooper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer,
Allen Ginsberg, Hare Krishna,
Hare, Hare
Krishna

All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance

I Love Banana Pudding

What do you love about the South?  

I decided I'd try to compile a list, and I actually stayed awake last night going through it in my head (I should have gotten up and written it down, 'cause Lord knows my memory isn't what it used to be!)  I wanted to do this to show my friends who live elsewhere what they're missing.  Then I realized that even a lot of you true Southerners aren't going to know about some of these things because you grew up in the city.  Or you're too young to have experienced some of it.  Or you're so old you've forgotten.

So here, in no particular order, are some of the things that make me love where I live.

1.  Tomatoes.  Home-grown, just picked, bite-into-it-while-you-stand-there and have-the-juice-drip-down-your-chin, tomatoes.  Yellow, orange, red, heirloom (Black Prince, Mr. Stripey, if you don't know what I'm talking about, shame on you) tomatoes.  I love 'em all.  (Except fried green tomatoes...I've never liked them much.  Does that make me a Yankee??)

2.  Sweet tea.  I'm not talking about some powdery mix stuff with fake lemon flavoring.  I'm not talking about your sweet-n-low tea, or splenda-fied tea, or even truvia-ed tea.   I'm talking about so much sugar that your teeth hurt tea.  So much that you almost can't make the sugar dissolve, even when you put it in while the tea's still hot; sweet tea like grandma used to make.  (I drink my tea unsweetened...but when I was little my Grandmother Breeden made the best sweet tea EVER.)

3.  The smell of newly-mown hay.  You probably don't know this one unless you had pasture land in front of, on either side of, and behind your house.  And you got to drive the big one-ton stickshift truck while your dad and anybody else he could find quickly threw the giant bales of hay into the back of it to beat the rain coming in.  When you were 12.

4.  The taste of honeysuckle.  When you're little you're taught how to pull the center of the flower out and suck on the nectar.  We'd do this until we felt sick.  (We'd also make earrings out of the seed pod of some other kind of flower out of my mom's garden, but I don't remember what those were called.  Somebody help?)

5.  The early yellow bloom of the forsythia bushes.  While I'm pretty sure they are hardy enough to survive further north, I still think of them as typically Southern.  I know I could use buttercups as my early-blooming example (that would be daffodils to you Yanks) but somehow forsythias always made me know that dogwoods would be blooming soon, and dogwoods are one of my favorite trees.

6.  Barbeque.  While other areas of the country claim to have barbeque, we know better.

7.  Going to Daytona for spring break.  All you Yankees went to Fort Lauderdale; we went to Daytona.  If we absolutely had to, we went to Panama City.  But in my day, Daytona was the place to be.  No details.  This is a family show.

8.  Mowing the grass in a real, pesticide-free yard, and smelling the wild onions.  We pay a lot of money nowadays to keep those out of our sod.  What a shame.

9.  Hearing people say the following truly Southern words or phrases:
     honeychile, all-a-y'all, fixin' to, I been knowin' her, it's cattywampus (it ain't straight),  I'll tote it for you, I'll carry you to town, it tumped over and spilt, I'd ruther you go, he'll whup your butt, (okay, you get my drift here...)

10.  Catching lightning bugs.  These would be fireflies to the uninitiated.  We'd catch them, put them in an old mayonnaise jar, and freeze them.  Then we'd pull their little butts off and smear it on us like war paint.  And play chase in the dark.  Nothing like glow-in-the-dark bug guts, huh?   (PETA isn't big on lightning bugs, is it???)

11.  Banana pudding.  I LOVE banana pudding.  But it has to be truly home-made, and you have to use 'Nilla Wafers.  And put uh-rang-a-tang (meringue) on top.  It's even good warm.  Or for breakfast.  Yum.

Okay.  I know I've left out some of the best things about living here.  The weather, the long blooming season, the people, there are millions of things that make us the luckiest people on earth.  I know this.  I don't have to live here.  I choose to live here.

What are your favorite things about the South?  Make me remember.

Let's Shop!!

My daughter is graduating from college early in May.

This fact brings all the usual prideful feelings to me, those typical of any parent watching their youngest finish with a degree these days.  And while I couldn't be more proud of her, there is something that would put a different sort of mother into a panic.  

No, she's not moving back home.  (She's moving to Thomasville.)  And no, she's not going to be one of the many out looking for a job, any job, after graduating with honors and no employment in sight.  (She's going to be a grad assistant, getting a free master's degree while doing what she loves most, coaching soccer.)  What then, you say, could cause a mother to freak out?

Here it is.  She's lived in a furnished apartment for four years.  And her new apartment?  You guessed it.  It's unfurnished.

Many moms would, at this point, start looking for things around the house that would make perfectly good, first apartment, early I'm-on-my-own kind of furniture.  Or maybe check out the neighborhood yard sales and see if they can pick up somebody else's old stuff.  Me?  I'm shopping alright.  

At antique stores.

Now anyone who knows me knows that I'm not rich.  Remember, I'm a retired teacher and my husband is a retired firefighter.  While we do have pretty good pensions--especially when you consider many have lost all they had saved and now don't have any chance of retiring because of the economy--we still have the same bills to pay as when we worked.  (Actually more, if you count that boat we bought last year...)  So it's not like I can go to some furniture store and buy two bedrooms worth of stuff, along with a dining room, a living room, and maybe an office. Oh, and don't forget the washer and dryer.  But I can (and did) check every antique store in Gwinnett County. (I got a really good price on an antique rocker with a caned back and sides and a newly covered seat cushion for the living room.  And an end table that we're going to refinish.  Oh, and a cute antique square dining room table with spindle legs and two ladderback chairs.  And a thick mantle piece that's gonna make a cool shelf.)  This is what I know:  I love antiques.  (So does my daughter.  Really.) And I love, really love, to shop.

What's next?  Well, there are a lot more antique stores between here and Thomasville, and I just bet I'll find several more things that I, I mean she, just can't live without.

PS.  Okay, I confess.  She is taking an old couch from the basement.  And a coffee table.  And she's taking one of the desks from our house.  But did I tell you I'm looking for random vintage china pieces for the china cabinet she found at an antique store in Milledgeville today??