OK, now you can put on your thinking caps.
Here is the clue for this weeks Mystery Photo Challenge. I made it especially hard this week!
Wow this week’s was a hard photo to guess and one person actually got it.
So here is the clue
And Gene you’re the winner!! It was a glass insulator off the telephone pole! AWESOME guess!
I’m thinking that we’re going off the grid for a week starting tomorrow with internet service – so don’t miss us too much!
ps: Work on the mystery photo, you’re going to need the extra days to solve it!
Shazam! How in the world did you guess this one? Right when I think the clue is too hard, someone gets it right away.
OK, here was the clue
and the answer was a Sad Iron! Awesome job!! 
It’s crazy how fast the Monday rolls around isn’t it? Well I’m finally got my birthday treats made for work yesterday afternoon and I have to admit that I almost caved in and bought donuts instead.
Well I knew that I had all the stuff to make them now but I sure can get lazy – – and for a couple of minutes I even thought that I should just run to town and pick up something that’s already made. But even I knew that this was a pretty dumb idea. I mean if I didn’t make the pumpkin cake roll yesterday afternoon, I’d just be hanging out in front of the fireplace watching TV or something. Yup, I needed to just get this done.
I had to made a 4 times batch of the recipe and when I was all done it seemed to be the perfect amount. Now I’ve made this recipe for a lot of years and only lately have I started to use parchment paper. Let me just say that parchment paper is your friend when you’re making any cake filled dessert. The recipe for this pumpkin roll is on the dessert page on top of this page.
With the cakes all done and now I’m just hanging out by the fireplace. I’m sure glad that I ended up making the treats myself instead of buying them. I hate to think that I would be that lazy! This is how the pans were lined up before they went into the oven
And the picture of the day? Well they moved in the crane down the road for a cell tower for our area. Check it out – It’s HUGE! 
Now why do you think our house gets so messy and we don’t even have little kids in the house anymore? It doesn’t make sense does it?
When you have kids, you’re always in the ‘pick up’ mode. You have toys, Cheerios, socks, and sometimes even pants in about every room in your house. Well, we did anyway. And you’re picking up stuff and trying to just keep a path going, right? Now when you don’t have kids in the house, the mess just creeps up on you and you’re not in the pick up zone anymore. All of a sudden you look around and find some socks in the living room and realize that the dog that you just left in was digging around in the laundry basket and found some treasures he wanted to keep. And the only reason you found the sock was because the blanket moved when he got up where he hid it underneath.
Now come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t all your kids messes and you just thought it was. I mean I’ve got soap setting all around lately and if we had kids, I sure wouldn’t be doing that!
And we’ve got our taxes all sprawled out on the floor and before we’d have to worry that someone would either color on it or sparkle glue them before they’d get to our accountant. Now? Well we’re just worried about bringing them to the accountant.
But all in all, as long as it’s not like gross or anything – why do we care so much? Our house will never be as clean and perfect as others that I’ve been in, so I just will have to keep trying! And mostly just remember that it’s just all part of life.
The picture of the day is one that I took after a meeting that I had downtown. It’s snow coming off a building and it caught my eye. We’ve got our tax appointment tomorrow night downtown and I’ll check to see if it fell off by then. 
Snow coming off the roof on a building downtown
This is the front view
I knew that I was going to get a lot done today when I realized that even before 6:00 am, I got a load of laundry washed and the second one in the wash machine, dishes done, dinner made and the fridge, and the floor scrubbed. Yea.. can you say Super Woman? OK, maybe not so much Super Woman – but I think I definitely went to bed too early the night before.
Now that I had those things done, it was time to make a couple more cards for my Mom and then get ready to go to town. I still had her card box and with a couple of birthdays coming up, I knew that I better get it filled and get it back to her. I ended up making 4 more cards this morning to add to her collection. Score for her!
Next thing to do was to cash in on a gift certificate. The gift certificate was for a ‘Day at the Spa’ and man oh man was it nice. The boys gave it to me for my birthday last year and I’ve been hoarding it ever since. Do you ever do that? You get something that is so good that you never want to use it? It happens to me all the time. I still have some gift cards that are 5 years old! Well with the gift certificate being a year old and about to expire, I thought I better cash it in. Now seriously, if I had about a billion dollars I would get a facial more often. And to finish off the day was a pedicure and a manicure. Yup, living the good life.
Next on the list was to drive back home (around 30 miles) and then pick up Daryl to go shopping (opposite 45 miles) to town. We needed a couple of things and we also wanted to take William out for supper for his birthday. It was a really nice night and after the kids went off to go to a movie or something, we headed back home to our town to see what was going on.
Whew! What a busy .. but fun day!!
First of all, did you know that ‘Cheez Balls’ are discontinued? Well if you didn’t know this you can join my group. We had this container forever that we use for throwing change in at the end of the day and I always thought it was an empty Cheez Ball container. Only to find out that it really was a Cheese Ball container and a knock off of the original. I kind of feel like I was cheated or something.
So why in the world am I even talking about this? Well, today was the day that we find out the amount of change we’ve gathered throughout the year! And it was being stored in a Cheese Ball container.
How this works is that when you come home or if I clean out my purse, all the change goes into this plastic container that we have just literally sitting around waiting to get filled up. It’s a pretty good gig and even the boys help out with tossing in their change when they’re home. Now normally we have a contest with everyone in the family and you guess how much the change was going to add up to. And what does the winner get? There’s no set amount, but sometimes they get $50 and I think once someone even got $80 for guessing it right. But sad enough, the boys aren’t around tonight and well.. Daryl and I are just going to pocket the whole thing. Whoo Hoo!!
Well of course I had a couple of errands to run tonight and before I was heading to a local town, I decided that I’d stop at the bank and drop the money off first – you know, so they can have it all counted when I came through again. First things first. I took my ‘Cheese Ball’ container and poured it into two ice cream pails to be able to get it to the bank. You can see that the container is literally on it’s last time and it’s starting to break apart.
Then I grab my purse and out the door I go. I decided not to bring the pails into the bank at this time just in case they didn’t have a change machine in there. I mean it’s been a year since we’ve done this and maybe they don’t offer this service again? So after I said my hello’s to everyone in there (small town, everyone knows everyone!) I ask them if they offer change counting? I got kind of a funny look and then a funny throat laugh and said that they do, and the machine is right over there. Humm, OK. Then they said that it was self serve. Crap. I didn’t have time right then to do it and I was really glad that I left the money in the car at this point. They asked how much I had and I said two ice cream pails pretty full. 
Then I saw this scared look on their face and said – yea, self serve. So out the door I go and say that I’ll be back a little later. They were really nice about the whole thing, but somehow I got the feeling that they were hoping that I wouldn’t be back.
OK, after some running around in town, I go back to the bank. And guess what? I think I was right about the comment that they were hoping that I changed my mind. The first thing they said was , ‘Oh you did come back’. See what I mean? They said the machine was self explanatory, but when I was standing reading the instructions, I ended up getting help anyway. Then after the machine just stopped for some reason, guess what? Now there was three of us working on it. By then end of sorting out the two ice cream pails of coins, having the machine stop for a little bit, changing out multiple coin bags that were full, and jamming the machine with foreign money that got stuck (note for next time: do not mix in foreign currency when you bring change to the bank – they don’t like that at all!!) my time at the bank was finally done.
But after all of this, I was the one that was smiling. We were around $650 richer!!
Now where can I get another Cheese Ball container for next year?
I heard on the radio yesterday morning about the Full Snow Moon or the Full Hunger Moon, but honestly it was on the radio and when I hit the highway and started to drive south to work – well that was the last time that I thought about it all day.
Well, it was the last time that I thought about it until last night. I had a bunch of errands to run after work and of course by the time that I got done it was later in the evening. I started to drive back to our town around 6:30 and just for the life of me couldn’t figure out what was so bright and orange in the sky.
Then it literally dawned on me the moon conversation that they were having on the radio this morning. But man oh man if I knew just how huge, bright, and orange the moon was going to be, I sure would have listened harder to what they were saying.
So now I’m driving down the road and reaching for my camera to see if I can get a good picture to show just how amazing the moon was. If you remember any of my other moon pictures, you know that I’m not very good at all at taking moon or star pictures. So after I was trying to take the picture and look at them .. and then drive at the same time, I realized just how unsafe this whole scenario was. OK, it wasn’t like I was texting or anything, but it might be not such a good thing either. So I finally pulled over and found out that the picture that I took while I stopped the car on the side of the road looked about the same as the others. Yup, they all needed some help.
Now I’m driving home and put my camera away but still amazed at how bright and orange the moon was. Then I realized that I was in the zone. And I’m not talking a ‘good’ zone either. I’m talking the deer zone that deer stand on both sides of the road and I swear they have contests with each other to see if they can dart between cars. Yea, not a good place to be staring off into space – literally! I decided to pay attention and keep my eyes open for deer until I got home.
So when I got home I grabbed a different camera to see if I could get a better picture while I was standing still in our yard. And the answer was…. nope. Well I guess I’ll have to share the picture while I was coming home tonight as the photo of the day.
The bright light on the right side of the picture is the moon. It was really orange, but didn’t photograph that way.
And now a little bit of trivia. Do you know why the February Full moon is called the Full Snow Moon or the Full Hunger Moon? Since the heaviest snow usually falls during February, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.
I bet you didn’t know that did you? 🙂
OK, so it was dark outside when I got home from running around after work tonight and honestly also kinda cold – so this weeks photo challenge is something that is used inside and was very common in the old days. Can you guess what it is?
