Kelly Times Two

Yesterday I hosted the Barlow Baby Boy BOO Brunch after a string of baby showers for sweet little girls over the last several months. It was a nice gathering for Lonna and her friends (and mine). She gave me a somewhat little guest list, but we still had a decent turnout. A few more were here than I have pictures of. Since Lonna is due in October, I asked her if she would mind if I went with a fall or Halloween color scheme, and she was on board with the whimsical color palette. Take a look! Zoom in on Wilbur's board if you want to see the menu. What a pretty mama! Too bad I didn't capture a picture of Paige's "Daggers 'o Fruit," which went well with Michele's Pirate's Booty Dip (aka Hawaiian Fruit Dip...get it? Pirates find treasure in the Caribbean, or Hawaii...my friend thought we meant the other kind of booty...lol). Lindsay's "cowboy caviar" was a delicious success too. Zoom in on the little black BOO buckets on the right of Li...

Our Relief Society presidency visits new members who move into our ward boundaries and we sometimes have baked goodies to take with us, sometimes not. So I found these little scented candles and made this 3 x 3 welcome card, with a removable insert inside that has our contact information should they have any questions or need to get in touch with any of us. I wanted to do something kind of "Texan" and be able to do several, and I like the way these turned out. There are a few variations, but this is the idea.

Their faces lit up and they thanked Lindsey "a million times," according to Lindsey. So the mums were a big hit. Aren't these girls beautiful?

Today is homecoming at my daughter's high school. In my youth, I moved around a lot and went to a ton of different schools, and had to call my friend, Tammy, whom I graduated from high school with to ask her if we had this odd tradition at our alma mater. She said we did, but I know it's nothing like here in Texas! Geez. This is the most unusual thing to me. The girls especially get into this giving and receiving of "mums," as they refer to them. They are basically large award looking ribbons with a fake chrysanthemum in the center, bedazzled with all kinds of ribbons and little plastic trinkets to show school spirit. It's kind of a popularity contest in a way, some girls at school will be covered in mums that they received from friends. It's a huge racket too! They cost a fortune at Michael's and many stores around town have jumped on the mum bandwagon to cash in on the school pride. I'm a sucker. I only have one daughter, and she's got three more...

This morning I drove the back roads south through Dripping Springs, and beautiful Texas Hill Country, with a blue sky a perfect temperature of 78 degrees outside, and all alone in my Toyota Camry, as I headed to the church cannery to dry pack some basic grains and such for our family's home food storage, as we've been advised over the years to do. There were only three of us from our ward who took advantage of this opportunity, including Monica, Minda, and me. So I could rest my stress fractured foot off and on, I brought a stool with me to sit on, and operated the can sealing machine to close each of the lids once they were filled with white flour, white wheat, red wheat, sugar, oats, rice, pinto beans, white beans, dried apples, non-fat dry milk. This machine is heavy duty and requires a firm tug of the handle to the right, to seal in the food tightly. A little silver oxygen foil pouch is included inside every can or mylar bag except for those containing sugar, which does...

On Friday night, Kelly and I went to a last-minute piano performance by renowned pianist Marvin Goldstein, a Jewish Mormon convert, who shares his story of what led him to his conversion. He's very humorous and pleasant, not to mention highly skilled at the piano. He never knows what he'll play until he sits down at the piano, and without an ounce of music, each song flows into the next. He encourages the audience to listen to the Spirit as he plays the children's hymns, which was moving and comforting, and breaks away from the piano, back and forth to the microphone as he shares an uplifting message. He played excerpts of Fiddler on the Roof, and said you're not really Jewish if you don't know those songs. He kept the audience engaged, and I am so happy we were treated to an evening with this unique musician and Latter-day Saint. The event was organized with very little notice, two or three days, as Marvin was in town working on putting together a foundation with...

I should have taken a picture myself of the scallops I cooked for dinner tonight, but couldn't wait to eat them, so found this photo to illustrate how blessed we were at our meal. I bought one pound of colossal scallops for $9.99 a pound, which was six scallops total. I heated the double burner griddle, which was overkill, but because it was out and I hadn't put it away yet, that's what I cooked them on. After it was hot, I added some olive oil to heat it up on medium to medium high. In the meantime, I put garlic sea salt and black pepper on both sides of the scallops, which I had rinsed in water, then drained. I cooked them on each side for a few minutes until they were golden brown, and served them with a green salad and a pasta salad. Kelly is in Boston this week, so we enjoyed our fine dining in his absence. They were spectacular--tender and packed with flavor, not fishy or gritty at all, we all loved them! Try some soon!

Adele is a wonderful lunch date--we try out different restaurants in Austin and today we went to a place called Vivo , and selected their lunch combo of a tasty verde enchilada with shredded chicken and a "puffy taco" with ground beef, not to mention quite a few chips and salsa and fresh guacamole, beforehand. Their salsa is a deep, dark red, with a chipotle, smokey full-bodied flavor. The verde sauce had a slight sweetness to it, and the overall taste was tops. It was served with brown rice, my favorite. It wasn't your everyday standard Mexican food that I was expecting. Each of us was given a long-stemmed rose at the end of the meal. The unique, Austin establishment was filled with bold and colorful, a bit eccentric, artwork with oversized paintings of women. I could do without the artwork, but the food is lovely. After lunch when we headed for the parking lot, Adele's new black Lexus was sandwiched in behind a tortilla delivery truck, blocking a few cars. There...

Sherrie, my neighbor, called me this morning to see if I could watch Scott for her while she played tennis. He is such a delight to have come over. It was still kind of early for me, so I thought I could sort of halfway sleep on my bed while he watched some kids' programs on PBS, some dragon show, and some other new shows that weren't around when mine were little. He was hanging out in my room at the end of my bed, then saw the stash of pillows on the ground and went over to plop on top of them. I looked at him and told him how cute he looked and said to stay there, while I go downstairs to get my camera. He did just that. But when I came up with my camera, he had this silly face to show me. You can tell he has older siblings! He's obviously no stranger to photos and had fun posing for me. It was so funny. He cracked me up. He was getting into his cheesy smiling for the camera, so then I stopped and showed him the pictures. He thought it was fun, so we took a few more. Thi...

My husband is in California for a conference for the next three days and I just called him to tell him about the news alert I just got. The company he works for just sold the division that he works in, so he won't really know what that means to him. He works with more than one group, so it could go either way. He's very marketable, and had ten job offers to consider when he chose the job here in Austin, so I'm not worried at all. Since then, he's gained a lot of experience and recognition in his field since we came here in 2000. Stand by to see what this means. Should be interesting!

Today was Christopher's first day of T.A.G. at school and he enjoyed it very well. He's been in reading TAG (Talented and Gifted) since first grade and has had the same teacher every year. He basically gets excused from his regular class for an hour or so, and goes to another classroom three days a week for TAG. Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he doesn't. There are 57 TAG students at his school, and I think it's nice that he is challenged. It bothers me though, that other kids who aren't in it, might feel like they're less talented and gifted. Yet I still appreciate the extra opportunity he has. He's always been an excellent communicator and I am very proud of my little boy for being such an excellent student. Christopher is doing very well riding his bike to and from school every day. He came home from school one day last week, after bicycling home by himself for the first time, walking into the house, removing his bike helmet, all sweaty and red-faced, ex...

The first game of the season was great fun and the University of Texas Longhorns beat Arkansas State 21-13. It had poured down rain the night before and I was expecting rain at the game, but it was a perfectly dry night. These seats in the south end zone pictured above were added last year. More seats were added this year, and the construction will continue to add more seating in the north end zone area. We've always had seats on the east side of the stadium where the sun shines on and it's toasty warm. The sun started to set part way through the game and it was actually very pleasant outside. The band usually faces the opposite side and we don't get the best view, but they're still fun to watch. Everyone wears burnt orange. Except the kid in front of us, that is. This was an exciting moment when the football players first ran out into the stadium, while showing this video footage on the giant screen that made it seem like longhorns (the four-legged type) were runn...