The girls wanted tater tot casserole sooooo bad.

So I searched for hours on the internet and found a perfect, light, "healthy" version and cookied it up and everyone LOVED it.

It had veggies and turkey in it, and just the slightest crumbles of bacon.

I was so happy that I'd found a way to lighten it up and yet it was still tasty.

Except I only printed the recipe from the internet and have since lost it and I've tried to retrace my steps to find it again but with no luck.  I found a different similar version but it wasn't the same.  :(

 

Also, I finished a recent project which was..........my wall.  I can't even remember now what picutre used to hang there, but I wanted to do a little gathering of prints, frames, and other goodies that make me happy.  I wanted it to all center around my favorite print that I ordered from etsy of a Mary Oliver quote:

I love that quote because I realize how short and fleeting life is and that I only have one and it IS a precious gift so I shouldn't waste my time.

But anyways, I ordered a bunch more prints from the same artist and put them in different kinds of frames.  It was hard to find several that DIDN'T go together, because I wanted it to look eclectic.  It was hard but I did it.

I added my Eiffel Tower and a few other little things that aren't  framed, to add dimension.  I took some cute grey fabric that I had, hand-sewed a doily to it and put it in an embroidery hoop and topped it off with a grey bow.

 

It makes me happy to look at.

what we made for valentine's day

This year we made little sour cream container things out of cardstock. 

They are easy, semi-fast, and not too much trouble to make 150 of. 

For the girls' teachers we filled them with hershey kisses.  

Crimped the ends so they looked like the official thing:

Then the girls helped me cut out hearts, stamp a little message, and I scrawled their names on 150 of them.

The next step was supposed to be:  punch a hole in the heart and the goodie container, and attach the heart with a ribbon.  I had everything all set up and ready to complete that last step the night before.  After I finished all that, I was going to wrap up the cute Valentine's stuff I had picked up for my niece and get that all ready to take over.

But then at 5:45pm the power went out.   I spent 15-30 minutes trying to figure out what was happening.....because the lights went out, then they flickered, then they cam back on, then faded out.  It was like no power outage I've ever experienced before.  Then in our hallway I detected the dinstinct odor of fire.  Which was scary.

So I took the girls outside and Jesse came home and helped get the candles out.  The smell of fire went away (never did know what that was). 

We ate dinner by candle light. 

I stapled the heart tags onto the little packets of hershey kisses....because I couldn't see well enough to punch holes and tie bows.

I blindly put the present together for my niece, but I ended up forgetting half of it because I couldn't see where it was in the dark.

I went to bed reading by candlelight, which sounds kind of nice but it gave me the worst headache....the flickering made my eyes hurt.

If that's not a lesson to not procrastinate anymore, I don't know what is!  :)

we went....

...on a hike.

If I'm going to go through all the trouble of putting on uncomfortably tight workout clothes and schlepping myself around for 45-60 minutes and getting all tired, I at least want it to be worth it.  And the best way to make that worth it, to me, is to do it at Torrey Pines.

I decided I wanted to hike Torrey Pines at sunset.  Or at least as close to sunset as you can get, because the mountain closes at sunset.  It was a sunny day, perfect for a sunset.  So we got all dressed and drove all the way out there.

Except my beloved marine layer had come in just enough to a) cover the coast with clouds so that no sunset was visible and b) make it really windy and cold.

But we were there (3 of us...Arissa was sick), so we hiked.

 

A sunset wold have been nice, but we did get to see some spotlights on the ocean, which was beautiful just the same.