Navigating life as a military wife.
I recently read about these cute little edible icing sheets from Ticings. Be sure to check out their website! Ticings makes modern press-on edible icing sheets which you just add to your own cupcakes for a unique look. How cute would these be for at your next party? Love them!
My hubby hates Peanut Butter (how they let him in the Navy, I’ll never now…I’m pretty sure a hatred for PB is about as un-American as you can get!), so whenever he’s gone, I make lots of peanut butter desserts. I made these for a Spouses Club meeting the other night…they’re one of my go-to desserts, a little different, super easy, and YUMMY!
They’re called “Squirrel Bars”. They come from a cook book called Just a Matter of Thyme, and the woman who created the recipe originally called them “Swirl Bars”, but her daughter had trouble saying “swirl”, so she renamed them “Squirrel Bars”. Love it! Anyway…here’s the recipe:
Ingredients
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together peanut butter, butter, brown sugar, and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla. Stir in flour and baking powder. Spread mixture in a greased 9″x13″ pan. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top and bake for 3 minutes. Take out and “marbelize” the top (run a knife through the melty chocolate chips one direction, and then the other, kind of like you’re cutting them, and swirl chocolate around). Return to the oven for another 18-20 minutes. Cool and cut into bars.
Enjoy your weekend!
After I finished cleaning out the Man Cave, I just couldn’t stop, and I went right on organizing and uncluttering in the garage! I cleaned out our garage a few months ago, but somehow garages seem to require more maintenance to stay clean than other rooms of the house. So while it didn’t need a full on purge like the Man Cave did, requiring me to pull everything out, sort it, and then put it back, I did consolidate some tubs and organized everything so that it looks neater. I didn’t take any before pics, but here’s what it looked like after:
It’s still pretty garage-y looking, and all my tubs don’t match, but at least it’s nice and organized! I also got a refill for my label-maker. I forgot how much I loved that little gizmo! And now all my tubs have nice little labels:
After all this cleaning, I took a load of stuff to the Salvation Army. Now I just need to sell a few things on Craig’s List and persuade my hubby to take a load of electronics to the electronics waste place, and my spring organizing will be done (Spring Cleaning is a whole different matter…)!
So I’ve been itching to do some organizing down in the Man Cave for quite some time now. We have this wall of cabinets, which is awesome…but in the year and a half we’ve lived in our house, they’ve gotten a bit out of control, and a lot of the neatly organized and labeled bins were still nicely labels, but they held things we didn’t use or even need! So this weekend, I begged my hubby to sit down with me and go through some things. This is what it looked like at approximatly 3:00pm on Sunday:
Anytime I’m doing serious organizing, whether it be a room, a garage, or a jewelry box…I start by taking everything out. This may seem a bit counterintuitive, but it is actually an essential step. Seeing all the items you own out in front of you allows you to see for yourself exactly what you have–you can then ask yourself “Do I really need this?”, “Do I use this?”, “Is there another place or way to store this item that may be more effective?”. This is the hard part! But once you take the time to ask yourself all these questions, and then act on your decisions, putting things away in nicely labeled bins seems like a walk in the park! And after a day of organizing and uncluttering, this is what those cabinets look like now:
With room to grow…
I’m pretty excited! We got rid of a lot of outdated electronics, outdated, and things that we just don’t need! I took all the camera equipment out of those little bins in the first picture and put them in those larger bins with no lids. Now that I’m blogging, I use the camera almost every day, and I needed to have a place where the camera stuff could be contained, but where I wouldn’t have to mess with lids and such every time I got the camera out! I also had all our linens jammed in a cabinet half the size of the one they are in now. I realized it just wasn’t working! What isn’t working for you in YOUR house? Don’t just sit there…GO FIX IT!
P.S. Please don’t judge the decor in the Man Cave…it’s the next big room I have to tackle in my adventures in decorating…until then, we’re trying to make do with what we have!
Right now I’m in a decorating lull. I’m not doing much for a few reasons: 1. First of all, I have a couple of large projects in the planning stages, so I’m trying to bank my decorating budget for a bit to save up for those. 2. I’m leaving our summer decor up for a [...]
I love my Hubby. Dearly. He’s my best friend. My rock. He keeps me sane when I go crazy (which is often). He sticks around even when I decide to redecorate a room at 11:oopm at night. Or when I go into a dressing room with fifty dresses and decide I don’t like any of [...]