Choice Morsels

The Mama Kat for today was to, "write a post in 13 lines." I really didn't have any ideas, so I wrote about that. I must find an idea But here to look? Under the sofa? Just dust bunnies there. In the cabinet? Hmm, I could eat a snack How some coffee? Maybe Pinterest will inspire me. 3 hours and 2 mugs of coffee later... Still nothing. Under my closed eyelids? Maybe tomorrow. ***** (Really, I didn't look at Pinterest at all or eat a snack, I just started typing and let it free flow to come up with this. I did have a cup of coffee.) Thanks for Visiting! Join the Mama Kat fun! Sign up for her Writing Prompt list email!  Remember the Link-up is for posts on one of the Weekly topics!

The Mama Kat challenge today is, "What's better? Being a kid or an adult? List 10 reasons for your choice." Photo from Pixabay When I was a kid, getting to be "grown-up" seemed optimal. Now that I'm a grown-up, I see many advantages of being a kid I didn't fully appreciate at the time: 1)  Less to worry about. The biggest worry I had as a kid was whether or not I was liked well enough for someone to want to trade papers with me. It seemed huge then, but, looking back, it was trivial. I just didn't have the judgement to know it. 2)  I didn't have to earn money. My whole profession was going to school and learning stuff for free. 3)  Related to earning no money is having no bills. 4)  Being a kid was a life with minimal demands. I did have a few household chores to be responsible for, such as changing my bed or helping hang laundry outside and taking turns washing dishes with my sisters, but really my time was my own the ma...

T he Mama Kat writing challenge today is a "College Memory." After 4 years in the Air Force, I decided I was ready for college, so I was older then most of my fellow students, who were right out of high school. My first semester of college was in the fall 1980. The year John Lennon died. That alone sent a memorable wave of grief over the school population. I was enrolled in a 2-year Commercial Art program. It was a small country college. The class wasn't big. Maybe 20 students in my graphic art classes. I remember this one guy was obsessed with the band "KISS" and, anytime he could, he made them the center of his art. He was apparently great at drawing KISS; less great at anything else. My instructors were both commercial artists who'd worked in the field before becoming college teachers. Brad Rock was one of them. He was new that year. A blond, forty-ish guy taking on a room full of greenhorn artist wannabe's. One day that first semester,...

In Florida, Spring starts "springing" around the first of March, though the Azalea's are already done and everything else is still prepping to bloom. So for Mama Kat today,  we have a brief tour of what's Springing in my neck of the woods: Piles of Pink Shamrocks! This display is in a large oval bed out front that's centered by a large Gardenia shrub. This pile of Shamrocks actually planted themselves here and periodically I move clumps of them to other places, since they do make such a wonderful ground cover. On the other side of the Gardenia in the same oval bed, I have this container garden: It's centered with Gladiolas surrounded by cheerful golden-colored Creeping Jenny, which stays beautiful all winter! I added the Dusty Miller as well, for visual interested doing the drab days of winter, since it also thrives through the cold. Next is another bed in front, this one closer to the house. It fills the corner between driveway and sid...

I n honor to October 15 being "National Grouch Day," today's Mama Kat blog writing topic is "What makes you grouchy?" To answer this I had to ask the Hubby for his perspective. To me, the distinction between being irritated and being grouchy isn't that clear, but he says, "there's definitely a line of difference between the two," and he can count off the 3 things that make me grouchy on his fingers: I can be grouchy in the mornings. Hubby is a bubble of cheery sunshine from the moment he gets up bright & early and he married me, who is not-a-morning person.  The earlier I have to get up, the more likely it is I'll be grouchy. My brain doesn't start firing on all thrusters until after 30 minutes and a cup of coffee.  I can be grouchy if I'm overly hungry.  This usually only happens if I don't eat enough protein with a meal. Or if there's too much space between one meal and the next--and my blood sugars drop t...

The Mama Kat blog writing link-up prompt for today is, "What is an unpleasant experience you had eating?" I can immediately think of two horribly unhappy eating-out experiences! The first happened early-on in our marriage while we were still living in the Washington D.C. area in the early 1980's. We had decided to try a Chinese restaurant in College Park. It wasn't a buffet. Chinese all-you-can-eat buffets hadn't come into vogue yet. This was a traditional sit-down, order-from-a-menu, moderately expensive Chinese Restaurant.  One of their specials that evening was "Chinese Style Crab." Now I had no idea what this was, but it sounded interesting, so I ordered it. What I got was a platter of small, nearly unrecognizable crab parts in a dark barbecue-like sauce. I picked through it, hardly able to find anything edible in it. When we left, I told Hubby I was still really hungry and could we stop at a McDonald's? I'm pretty sure I gobbled do...

The topic for the Mama Kat blog writing prompt this weeks is, "Share something you learned in March." I've learned that affiliate programs are kind  of like the wolf in Red Riding Hood disguised in Grandma's jammies; they talk a bunch of sweet stuff, but they can bite. I've been buying my seed from Park Seed online for years and decided I'd try signing up for their affiliate program. Since I do a Wednesday Garden blog, I though having an ad from the company I use might be nice for my readers, who might be interested in ordering.  Of course, they use a neutral party ad manager system I had to sign up through and I did describe in great detail that mine is a lifestyle blog covering different topics different days, with gardening being just one topic on Wednesdays. Then I waited with baited breath, afraid my blog wouldn't be judged as suitable. I mean, it's not exclusively gardening. To my great surprise, around the first part of March ...

Actually, I found this recipe and pinned it on Pinterest myself, which to me is close enough. I was interested in it because it was a no-bake cookie bar. A pan of No-Bake Rocky Road Bars sounded delicious! And easy. Well as it turns out, it wasn't quite so easy. Nor did it work as expected. There was too much graham cracker crumb and not enough evaporated milk called for in the recipe.  The picture attached to recipe Plus, the pic attached to the recipe wasn't even the correct one. This is it. A fancy 3-layer bar. (And there's even coconut on top!) How the bars should look This pic is what the bars should look like, since you're not layering anything, but just clumping all the ingredients together in a bowl, then pressing them into a pan! Mine didn't come out looking like this--not quite. A mere 3/4 cup of evaporated milk mixed into 12oz of melted chocolate chips DID NOT make the chocolate thin enough to adequately saturated 4 cu...