As much as I have been avoiding doing too much around this house in hopes that it’ll put us closer to building another house, I finally gave in and decided we needed new window treatments in a few of the rooms around here. The kitchen blinds that were installed who knows how many decades ago no longer worked and looked like someone vomited on them at some point. One of my friends told me about how she used for her handmade Roman shades the same kind of pull mechanism that are used for mini blinds. A quick Google search revealed several no-sew tutorials using mini blinds to make Roman shades. This sounded much more appealing to me than my old, tried-and-true method. How had I not known about this before all the Roman shades I’ve slaved over?!? So a couple of Saturdays ago I got all the supplies needed to make my Roman mini blinds, and about an hour later I was staring at a completed set of Roman shades for my kitchen. Seriously, it only took me an hour to complete two Roman shades. Well, I did have to let the fabric glue dry for a few hours. The supplies only cost me about $25 total. Here is the tutorial I used, in case you are interested in trying this out yourself: Roman mini blinds.

You may recognize the fabric from a previous project I made. I didn’t intend this to happen, but the lime green camera, turquoise owl, and peach deer kind of limited me on colors. In the end this was the only fabric that seemed to have the same retro feel and color scheme that I was looking for. I had a hard time getting decent pictures because the only and very little light is coming from the windows which the shades are actually hanging.

P.S. There was toast toasting in the toaster oven while I snapped these pictures.

Before starting with the official subject of this post I had to explain my absence for the past couple of weeks. Two things prevented more frequent posting from me.

First off, tax time has a cometh. Whoa, starting and having a new business really changes how I used to prepare for this time of year. Needless to say, I’ve been hunkered down trying to get all the appropriate documents, receipts, assets, and such to the accountant along with our usual personal items. It’s all done now, and what a relief to have that burden taken off my shoulders.

Second, my website (and several others I maintain) were hacked! Some of you noticed something awry with the site, and even a few were redirected to with inappropriate images. I cannot apologize enough if this happened to you. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry! How shameful I felt to have been in this vulnerable situation. The original hack seemed to occur several weeks ago. From what I could see a bunch of people were in the same situation around the same time as me. I have no idea if they only targeted my hosting company or WordPress (the blogging format my website is using). After much research I thought I had found and fixed the afflictions. It took hours upon hours of basically going through each file on my website and deleting the malicious code that caused redirecting and doing some other tinkering. All seemed to be good for a couple of weeks even when I did a site scan, but eventually the hacks occurred again. There was even a point where I couldn’t access my dashboard in order to edit/add posts and other website related things. Apparently, I wasn’t hacked again but instead the hack had found a back door to gain access to my files in order to keep “re-infecting” them. So after some more digging around the world wide web, I finally figured out how to close this back door and put big padlocks on it. Crisis averted for now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it. It just makes me so angry that apparently a certain group of people have nothing better to do in life than attack innocent folks’ websites.

Anyway, onto what I’m really writing about. The family and I went back to Minnesota this past weekend to celebrate a big milestone for two people. My mother-in-law turned 70, and my brother-in-law, Jim, turned 50. Sara, wife of Jim, thought it would be a good opportunity to have a combined celebratory luncheon. Sara got each of her nearby siblings to contribute lots of food while she baked two cakes and chicken divan casseroles. I also contributed a yummy appetizer which used ground sausage, ranch dressing, various cheeses, and wontons. Lots of compliments came my way:)

The gathering brought all of Kathy’s remaining siblings and a few of her good friends, and the girls were pleased to also have their cousins there to play with them. It was a relaxing day, and I’m glad we were able to attend.

All the adults gathered around to chat while the kids ran amok around the house and outside. The weather was actually beautiful that day allowing the kids to spend most of the day outdoors. Hooray for good weather!

Sara amazed us all, once again, with her cake skills. This is Kathy’s cake. If you can’t figure out from the theme of the cake, Kathy is an avid crossword puzzle doer. Sara explained the technique of how she did the crossword puzzle design, but she lot me at buttercream frosting. All I could think was that I must lick that buttercream frosting. Now!

Jim’s cake really was a piece of art. Just look at the gradient within the sky and grass. Awesome!

Time for cake!

It’s always startling how quickly the children appear when cake is near.

And here are the birthday boy and birthday girl. Happy birthday!

We’ll be seeing Sara again in a couple of weeks as she does her monthly office visit. Kathy mentioned that she might also come out for a quick visit within the next few weeks. She’s only be here once for Annie’s baptism and went home the same day. She is definitely due for a “real” visit to the farm. Hopefully, the weather will stay the same as it’s been this week. Wowzers!

According to everyone around here last winter brought an insane amount of snow. There were about 3 weeks worth of snow days last year at the girls’ school. After dealing with all that it was assumed that this year would be much the same. The school came up with an idea of doing snow packets where it had several days of work for the kids to do should there be numerous snow days in a row. However, up until yesterday there hasn’t been more than a couple of inches of snow each time it snowed. Then last night we got dumped on with about a foot of snow. The snow has stopped since early this morning, but we are supposed to get more this afternoon.

In anticipation of all this snow school was cancelled yesterday, but the snow didn’t actually begin until around 4-5 p.m. yesterday afternoon. I kept checking the website for school to be closed today, but they didn’t list our school until after 8 p.m. last night. I was looking forward to sleeping in a little this morning. However, the girls greeted us at 5:30 this morning. What in the world is wrong with these kids? On a usual school day we have to drag them out of bed at 6:15, but on days that they can sleep in they always get up earlier. Grrrr!!!

Annie was so excited to finally go through her snow packet, whereas Mimi had to practically be pinned down to do her work. Annie even had me print her off some more worksheets today because she got all her work done really early this morning. She is so not my kid! Mimi’s snow packet was completed yesterday, so I printed her off some worksheets as well. She was not pleased with me, but she’ll thank me later when she’s really good at counting forwards and backwards by 2′s (one of the worksheets had what seemed like a hundred of those practice sequences…haha). Annie is also figuring out how to do algebra thanks to her Math Dictionary she got from her book order last week. So Mike has been working with her on solving for x in simple equations. Again, as good as I was at math growing up, I NEVER asked to skip ahead in my studies or do extra work.

The girls promptly went over to the neighbor’s house to play, so I didn’t get any pictures of them out in the snow. But I took Violet out for a few minutes and snapped a couple pictures of her trudging through the snow.

We also watched Daddy using his tractor to plow all the snow. How have we survived this long without a tractor? Just think how quickly we could have plowed our 10×20 foot driveway in Wisconsin. Just two scoops, and it’s done!

The neighbor was out doing his portion of the property at the same time. He had some kind of huge snow blower attached to the back of his tractor. I’m amazed at all the attachments you can get for these tractors. Mike is planning on getting a log splitter attachment, and I’ve learned about so many different kinds since we’ve lived here. You can plant, pull, grind, dig, cut, till, rake, mow, split, scoop, blow, water, spray, sweep, chip, vacuum, cultivate, mix, backhoe, level, spread, and so much more as long as you’ve got the right attachment.

The snow-covered plant life looks so pretty. Can you believe that those are just weeds? Maybe I should just get some of that spray-on snow for the non-snowy months to cover our weeds with instead of having to deal with removing them.

Our tree strip full of snow.

The girls are going to have fun with this snow bank once it’s complete.

Life moves so fast around here. It’s just not possible that next week will introduce March. Time has floated by so quickly that I almost forgot to share some of the projects that I’ve completed in the past few months. I’ve been feeling inadequate lately about all the projects I have supplies for but never get around to doing. Reminding myself that I have completed a few projects recently makes me feel a little better. Just a little.

For years I’ve been trying to think of a way I could revamp the headboard for our guest bed. With the influx of upholstered headboards I’ve been seeing everywhere, it occurred to me that I could just cover that ugly picket fence thing up with fabric. Right about the time the weather was turning cold I managed to wrap up (literally, ha) this project outside. I was surprised at how easy and quick I was able to do it. It really only took me about 30 minutes from start to finish.

Now that I have to do dishes by hand each evening it was starting to bother me that all I had to stare at was an unsightly, beige wall. After I saw this pin on Pinterest I finally found a solution that would I be thrilled to stare at all day. Here’s my version.

And from afar.

You may also notice some wall hangings to the left. I spotted those prints on Etsy a long time ago and knew it would be something I could make easily on my own in Photoshop. I finally had a place I thought would be perfect for them. Now my family and I have a little reminder of the gospel and what it means to our eternal family each time we walk in the door.

I have some ideas for the other side of the kitchen but have not yet begun to plan them out, so I will not be revealing the ugliness that is the other 2/3 of my kitchen. You did notice the beige walls and olive countertop from picture #4 above. Yeah, I just refer to it as my camouflage kitchen.

Mike surprised me a while back with tickets to an American Idol type competition in Watertown called RiSING Stars. This is apparently the 3rd year they’ve done it and award one lucky singer at the end of the night. The winning duo from last year is actually already signed for a record deal. I have no idea if all the winners have this kind of success or recognition, but it was neat to hear that news and get to see last year’s winner perform.

I actually found a video of them performing last year at RiSING Stars.

The event finally took place this past weekend, and it was a nice date night for us. The show included dinner and took place in the Goss Opera House. It was interesting seeing the original architectural details restored. I’m glad that we have such a nice place to go to once in a while. There is also an upscale restaurant on the first floor called Charley’s and also a coffee shop connected to it. The other half of the first floor is an art gallery.

Mike is dreaming that he’ll be up on that stage next year.

The border is hand-painted and is also original to the ballroom.

I’m hoping my future living room will have a huge dome like this for a chandelier.

There’s a balcony to the right and those archways are individual “rooms” that groups could have reserved to watch the show. Mike said it a bit too expensive to do that. We were more than satisfied to hobnob with the common folk on the main floor.

Ahh, the happy couple.

Mike can certainly be romantic at times and think of different stuff for us to do together. I’m glad we went even if there were some “rising stars” who chose country music as for their songs of choice. We both agreed that the winner from the evening deserved the title. It was a high school senior who sang “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. I’ve never really heard any Adele songs, but I’d say after hearing the same song by the real Adele that the winner was as good and sang just like real Adele. She was dang good.

Here’s the video for the song, in case you’ve not heard it.