Featured Etsy Shop of the Week: hippofabulous

On of my new favorite Etsy shops if Hippofabulous...purveyor of nifty vinyl wallets and bags with fun images.

Check out some of my favorites:

Sparkle Vinyl Cupcake Wallet




Happy Cloud Vinyl Wallet






Sparkle Vinyl Pirate Wallet




Find her on etsy, or check out her blog: http://hippofabulous.wordpress.com/

Geared up for life in the Promise Land

Living in the Promise Land has it's perks....rain-free summers, beautiful scenery year-round, friendly people, the list goes on. One down side, however, is that the rainy season is, well, rainy. And Jack being a poodley sort of dog gets kind of matted when he gets wet too often.

Enter Jack's new Promise Land Puppy Protection:

Jack now has a cute little rain coat that protects is top side and his tummy from getting too wet when he goes out for walks. Plus, now he's not the same color as wet pavement and I can worry less about him getting run over by a car speeding through our parking lot.

PS I could still use some help with cranberry recipes.

Cranberries anyone?

Make your own cranberry sauce 101, originally uploaded by Janice LeBlanc.

I love cranberries. They definitely make the "top three" list of my favorite things to bake with in the fall....apples, pumpkin and cranberries.

I was so excited that cranberries were now available that I went out and bought 2 large bags. I made a cranberry apple crisp to go with the amazing apples we got from The Sauvie Island Pumpkin Patch. It was yummy but didn't use enough cranberries. So now I have about a bag and a half of cranberries and I could use some inspiration.

Do you have a favorite cranberry recipe? Please share!

Rediscovering a Good Thing

I've been in a bit of a culinary slump lately.  But this week I've been doing some experiments.  Last week I made some seriously awesome tomato soup in my crock pot.  I figured I should probably go record what I did before I lost the piece of paper I scribbled in the ingredients on.  So off to BakeSpace....the Ravelry of the cooking world.

I haven't logged on to BakeSpace in a long time.  And as I was looking around I was amazed.  The site has been totally re-done.  The pages load faster (WAY faster), the way you do things is more user friendly, I was impressed.

As I was poking around, I saw that some of my recipes lost their formatting (anyone else noticing a theme in my life lately?) so I'm working on fixing those.  And as I was fixing formatting, I rediscovered some recipes I used to make a lot but haven't for a while (like super easy pumpkin spice cake or coconut thai shrimp and pineapple curry) and some I had totally forgotten about (like Crockpot Tortilla Soup).

It was fun.  I think I may need to start spending some more time over there.  If you're not on BakeSpace yet, check out any of my links....the site is free.  And like I said, it's like the Ravelry of the cooking world.  Go check out my recipes or sign up and add me as your friend.

Almost Fixed!

For the last week, my blog has been broken.

One day at work I thought to myself "My blog is boring. And my pictures don't fit very well in the little column Blogger gives me. I need a new template!"

So bright eyed and hopeful, off I went in search of a new template. And I found lots of really cool ones. But no matter how meticulously I followed the directions for installing them, they never worked. Ever. I kept getting error messages from Blogger or a screen of garbely gook. I just couldn't figure it out. In the meantime, while I was trying to figure it out all my little gizmo gadgets in my side bar disappeared.

So everyday for about a week I would spend time trying to fix it.

Was it the blogger server? Wait for a day. Nope. Not it.
Was it the computer I was on? Change computers. Nope.
Browser? Maybe it doesn't like IE? Firefox? Chrome? Oh come on!
Maybe it's the template? (try maybe 15 different templates from different sources). No
XML? No
HTML only? Sorry.
Google the error codes showing up. Nothing. Except 2 hits in French. I don't speak French.
Crap

BLOG! WHY ARE YOU BROKEN!?! STOP TORTURING ME!

**sigh**

Seriosuly. I was thisclose to just deleting my blog and starting over again.

So today while putting in some blog fixing time and researching transfering posts to a new blog, I decided I'd try changing the template on a different blog I own. It worked! It was cake! Hmmmm.

So after puttering around for a bit I figured out at least one of my gizmos (which had never given me any problems before) was broken. So I deleted it (and a bunch of other gizmos that weren't broken in an effort to find the broken one). And you know what happened?

It worked! No error message. No computer code vomit. A blog! With cupcakes! Yay!

I even got ambitious and tweaked the code a bit to fix the size of my main posting column. Changed some colors, etc.

I do still have quite a bit of re-configuring left....especially with the right column gizmos and links but I'm pleased to say that my blog works, you can read it, AND the pictures fit in the main column (which was the thing that started this mess to begin with).

Any suggestions for things you'd like to see on my blog? Let me know in the comments! With the exception of actual entries, I'm kind of starting from scratch again so I'd love ideas for fun things to do with my new space. It's kind of like moving into a new apartment...same stuff but new digs and a new chance to re-decorate and re-organize in a (potentially) more useful way.

Maybe it's a good sign for things to come.