Healthy Thursday

Exercise

Yes I said it the dreaded word.

We all know we should do it, but dread the actual doing of it.

One thing I have found that is really helpful is a great free app called Cardio Trainer.

It lets you set up goals, make a timeline and keeps track of how your doing. If you want to lose weight it even lets you know how many calories you will burn with your current exercise plan and how many fewer calories you will need to eat on a daily basis in order to achieve your goal.

I use it for everything but ecspecially when I go walking. I simply push the start workout button and it keeps track of everything.

Pretty simple, huh? It also maintains your history of what you've done on every day of the month that you've logged in.

Just an FYI your screen may not look the same exactly, I pulled this image off the web and on my phone it looks a little different. But the basics are there.

So if you are planning to start a exercise routine or need some motivation to do so, I highly recommend this app. It is free and works wonderfully. 

We all know we should be exercising that it is good for us in every way, so might I challenge you that if you are currently not doing anything to do something in the coming week!

Corner of my home Monday

Mondays I am going to share a little corner of my home. Today I have my china cabinet all decked out for Halloween. (Another day I will do a before and after of it, it used to look totally different before I painted it and took the doors off.) So here is a pic of it as a whole minus the top.

None of the "ingredients" for this cost more than a few dollars and it has grown over time.

Our city does not recycle glass so I save all glass jars and repurpose them elsewhere, for these to give them a cohesive look I first gave all the lids a coat of gesso then painted them all black. The silver trays are all from thrift stores and I tend to use them year round.

The jar with the white stuff in it has a label that reads spider silk, to make the silk i just rolled and stretched cotton balls into long strands.

The small cheese doom or cake saver I inherited from my Grandmother. The jars with labels and candy are ecspecially fun for the kids. The labels i printed from Martha Stewarts website and have fun names like "Dreadful Edibles." To give them a more aged look I wiped them with a cottenball sprayed with walnut ink.

The green pumpkin was in the dollar section this year at Target.

The potion bottle with the red lid used to contain red wine vinegar.

Top shelf holds a Martha Stewart cake stand with a glass pumpkin full of orange tissue paper that was another grandmothers, the two black cats my husband had before we got married and the big cake saver was a grandmothers as well.

Another Shot of the top.

Inside the glass dome is a fake spider sitting on some moss covered rocks that came from the dollar store.

The tombstone was a dollar store find last year. I just surrounded it by moss also from the dollar store last year.

Inside some of the jars are such simple things as dried sage leaves from the garden and a snake skin that my son found while on a hike.

Hope you enjoyed this small peek into my home.

Healthy Thursday

So in the same vein as last week I am heading back to the wonders of toothpaste as a replacement cleaner for harsh chemicals. 

This next item I picked up for a few dollars at the Goodwill store. 

This is what it looked like when I brought it home. Pretty dirty and looking unsalvageable, but after five minutes with the toothpaste this is what I produced.

All nice and shiny, no its not perfect but that is okay it is a huge improvement over what it was when I first brought it home, and it looks just fine sitting in the middle of my dining room table with a pile of shells or fruit on it.

Foodie Friday

For my first Foodie Friday I would like to share my cornbread recipe. I am going to share the basic one that I use, I am thinking of trying to tweek it some but have not yet. This is where the recipe is from.

I'm not sure of the date on this due to it missing the first couple of pages, but I would guess the 70's. I acquired it for $3.99 at a thrift store. The recipe itself is called Perfect Corn Bread.

Now, someone has written in changes to the basic recipe next to it and next time I make it I intend to follow their changes and see if it makes a difference. The basic recipe itself works very well, tastes good and is moist, my only complaint is that the outside is a little crumbly, but maybe I should just shorten my cooking time. 

So here are the step-by-step instructions.

First, you are going to need a sifter and bowl;

into the sifter goes 1 cup all purpose flour,

1/4 cup sugar,

4 teaspoons baking powder,

3/4 teaspoon salt (I use sea salt for everything),

sift all of it together;

then stir in 1 cup yellow cornmeal.

Add 2 eggs,

1 cup milk,

and 1/4 cup shortening.

Beat with mixer until just smooth (I'm thinking maybe I over mixed, I've made this recipe several times and don't remember the crumbly part.)

Pour into greased (I use Bakers Joy spray) 9x9 pan (I don't have a 9x9 so I used a 10x6). Bake at 425 for 20 to 25 minutes.

Sorry about the bad photos, I need to do some serious editing next time. As a side note on the page there is a hand written recipe along the bottom and side for Fried Mush. I have not tried it yet but intend to do so one day, and I will let you know when I do.

Hope you enjoy the cornbread and let me know how it works for you.

Healthy Thursday

So as you can see by the heading Thursday will be Healthy Thursday.

For the first healthy Thursday I want to share with you something I tried yesterday.

First of all I hate harsh chemicals and cleaning supplies so am always looking for ways to replace them.

Yesterday I was cleaning my kitchen and took down the vent cover above the stove and it was nasty, as you can see from this pic.

Now its not as nasty as it could be or has been but it still needed cleaning. I had just cleaned a silver trivet with (you guessed it) toothpaste and there was still some left in the tube so I figured why not give it a try. Now I keep an old toothbrush under my kitchen sink for cleaning all sorts of things and had used it on this before so I knew it would work. And I have to say it didn't do to bad, here is the after shot.

It did take the rest of the tube I was using plus one more but this is the size of the "tubes."

Sorry about the quality but the flash kept washing it out entirely. I got these little gems in a big bag of samples from the thrift store for about $2.00. There are at least five more toothpaste samples in the bag plus quite a few shampoo, conditioner and body wash samples. I would say there were probably 30 samples in all. Not bad for $2.00. 

So I would say the toothpaste definitly worked, it got all the grease and nastiness out of there, I try and clean the screen once a month but to be honest it had probably been at least six months since I last did it. So I would definitly try this again. 

If you have a great way to clean these without all the harsh fumes please let me know about it in the comments below.

Here I am

So yes I am back, life had gotten a little crazy there for awhile. Since January I have gone back to school and completed the classes required for real estate license and gotten my license, found a broker to work for, sold and listed a house (yea me), found new schools for two out of three of my kids, been overly involved in Boy Scouts, stepped down from several of my positions in scouts that I held for years and am now trying to learn to balance work and family and a home while still trying to squeeze out some time for myself.

I had a great plan that I wanted to implement at the beginning of the year before life got away from me so I am going to go ahead with that and try and get back on track with the blog.

Its something that I always wanted to do but never got it to where I wanted it to be, so I am rededicating myself to it and hopefully someone will find me along the way and be willing to join me on the journey.

Wednesdays will be anti-procrastination wednesdays so it is only fitting that today is the day I jump back in with both feet.

In the future it could entail anything from a UFO (unfinished object) or any other task that I have been putting off doing. 

So here I am and off I go again delving into sharing my life online in hopes of finding others who may join the ride. I read and follow several great blogs done by amazing women that I can always aspire to be more like.

the pic at the top is an atc i did years ago.