Saturday, March 16

Black Forest Shortcut Strudel

Black Forest Shortcut Strudel  
8-ounce can of refrigerated crescent rolls
2 single-size Hershey chocolate bars (1.55 ounce size)
About 2 to 3 tablespoons cherry preserves

    Unroll the crescent dough on a greased baking sheet. Press seams gently  to seal. You now have a single rectangle of dough. Break Hershey bars into individual squares and arrange them on the middle third of the dough. Using 2 spoons, dot evenly with cherry preserves. Slash sides of dough every few inches and fold sides over filling. Bake at 350 degrees about 20 minutes or until golden brown and flaky. If you like, drizzle with a glaze:

½ cup confectioners sugar
About 2 teaspoons milk
½ teaspoon vanilla flavoring

    Mix until sugar dissolves, adding a few drops more milk if needed. Put the glaze in a sandwich bag and cut off a tiny corner. Squeeze glaze back and forth across the strudel. Serves 6 to 8  for dessert. 

Sounds good and easy but not for me.

Friday, March 15

Winding Down

Two weeks from today we will be on the road. It does not seem possible! From here we plan to go to Arkansas for a bit and then to Missouri for a bit. It concerns us some that there is still snow on the ground in Iowa and quite a bit of it in some places. We are hoping that two to three more weeks will change that scenario.
We are getting anxious to get back to work on the house and continue where we left off last fall. We need to get some cupboards ordered and they told us that can take up to six weeks. The plumbing needs to get all its connections hooked up. All of the trim work throughout the house is yet to be. The stool and vanity in the bathroom installed. We have purchased the stool but the vanity is yet to be purchased but we do know where and what we will be getting. When we saw it last fall we both liked it right away and that is an unusual thing. I have asked Butch to build our bed like an RV bed and we have the bed struts on order. This will afford us much underbed storage. The engine takes up a fair amount of space in our current motorhome but in our first one the space was all open and plastic tubs fit under there perfectly. I had a  paper listing the contents on top of each tub and that made retrieving  items fairly simple. The bed struts will allow us to lift the mattress and hold it up while we gather items from beneath the bed.

So our thoughts are turning northward...
Smileycons!

Wednesday, March 13

Paper is not dead



Check this out!! Language is not important for this one.
http://vimeo.com/61275290

Backed up

I have all my pictures old and new, important documents etc. backed up on an external hard drive. This morning I made the mistake of starting to look through them. I had to stop myself or I could have been there all day and into next week!
Here is one that caught my eye...taken in 2003

I have been enjoying my "retirement". I never really thought it took up a large amount of time when I was president but I am finding the difference is greater than I imagined it would be.

Monday, March 11

Having a bit of fun

I have been very busy doing what I like to do! This morning I arose at 5:32 AM and Butch says in a slightly grumbly way,"It isn't going to be light out for two hours yet." I replied, "I am not asking you to get up." I was wide awake and thinking of things I could be doing and really, early morning is my favorite time of day.

The last two days I have had inquiries about doing a blog. If starting a blog is something you have entertained doing there is a very good tutorial here: http://www.d.umn.edu/~hrallis/guides/blogs/blogger.html It looks easy to follow to me. And if you need some help, holler.
I have been doing some cleaning up and organizing on the computer and this morning I messed around and deleted a bunch of email some of which I had not read. After mulling it over a bit I decided it probably did not matter much. This is how that happened; I decided to give Thunderbird another go. Thunderbird is an in-computer email program much like the old Outlook Express we all knew and loved that is no longer available from Microsoft. I deleted all the old email from Thunderbird not realizing I was also deleting it from my web mail. If you have an interest in an in-computer email program you can find it here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
Then you too can accidentally delete all your email. That is a joke, folks.

The time to leave is fast approaching and there are things we always like to get done before we go...like the last trip to Mexico to get essentials for ourselves and others. After things clear out a bit we plan to do some Spring cleaning. As always when the time approaches thoughts turn in a different direction. I think I will start my todo list....hmmm....