A Virtuous Woman Cooks--Low Carb Pizza Crust

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She bringeth her food from afar
• She giveth meat to her household

Check out the new recipe I tried out on my food blog for low-carb pizza crust--made out of cauliflower! I thought I didn't like cauliflower, but I found out that I just don't like it boiled to death.  It's a fairly mild vegetable, so it basically takes on the flavor of whatever you use to season it.  

Try it, you might like it!

Until next time...

Dollar Store and Thrifty Decorating for Fall

• Who can find a virtuous woman?  her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She worketh willingly with her hands

It's finally starting to feel a little like fall around my house.  Yesterday we were able to turn off the air conditioning and open windows for the first time this season.  I'm sitting in front of an open window now, wearing jeans and a long sleeved shirt, and when the breeze picks up I feel almost chilly.  If you knew me in real life, you'd know how unusual that is for me!

As I've already shared, I'm not much of a decorator, and I'm limited somewhat by budget, the style and small scale of our house, but I do like to have a few simple, seasonal decorations around.

This year when I pulled out my Thrifty Fall Wreath that I made a few years ago, I was afraid it was too beat up to use.  The tissue & wire fake fall leaves are definitely a bit worse for the wear...

...especially compared to when I first made this from Dollar Tree goodies and an old, repurposed grapevine wreath. ($2 for the garland and leaves, less than $3 originally for the wreath)

I decided it looked just fine from a distance, more like real leaves, anyway.  Which I could/would use, except we don't have fall colors here yet, and most of our leaves around here just turn brown and then fall off anyway!



You may remember this from a couple of years ago, too.  The charger was originally $1.99, and has been used over and over again, as has the glass vase and dried frou-frou, both from Dollar Tree for $1 each.

This year I used the same charger and vase, some slightly different Dollar Tree dried frou-frou, and a big splurge--a $5 candle from Walmart, which was the only place I could find one tall enough that was still in budget (meaning cheap inexpensive).  edited to add: Besides a just-for-looks candle like this one, I buy a few from the dollar store in fall scents for burning--maple, hazelnut, and pumpkin spice--especially when we're having guests.

I still have a vintage Mason jar filled with nuts, and one from Ball that I fill with a fall pick with leaves and berries and some loose silk leaves at this time of the year--all dollar store purchases from years past....


....as well as one filled with vintage and antique buttons of all different shapes, sizes, and colors.

What do you do to decorate for fall?  Do you go "all out", or keep it simple?

Until next time...


This post is linked to:

Make Your Home Sing at Mom's the Word
Make it Pretty Monday at The Dedicated House
In & Out of the Kitchen at Feeding Big
Inspire Me Tuesday at A Stroll Through Life

A Virtuous Woman Cooks--Quick and Easy Fruit Dip

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She is like the merchants ships, she bringeth her food from afar
• She provideth meat to her household...

We pulled this Quick and Easy Fruit Dip out of our family archives for a bridal shower for one of my nieces, and I made it again for a study group that we've started hosting at our house on Friday nights.  It's quick, it's easy, it makes two or three times the amount of dip for the same price as "store-bought" pre-made fruit dips, and tastes wonderfully delicious.  Besides serving with fruit, I think it would make a wondeful sauce over bread pudding or sliced pound cake.  

Enjoy!

Until next time...

Dollar Store Decorating--Make a Grouping of Small Items

• Who can find a virtuous woman?  her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She maketh herself (and her house?) coverings of tapestry...

As you can tell from the pictures I've posted over the years, I'm not much of a decorator.  When we first moved into this house sixteen years ago, I didn't hang much on the walls--as a matter of fact, I went several years with blank walls.  When you put a hole in paneling, it's there to stay, and I didn't want to add more holes to this 1962-era paneling than were already there, unless I knew I really wanted something hung! 

On top of that, I'm a bit of a cheapskate, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, so I always try to be really really sure that I like something and am willing to live with it a while before I invest my hard-earned dollars.  

One mistake that I've made in the past, and have to remind myself not to do even today, is buying something the wrong scale. I tend to go too big with furniture and too small with decor.  I can't really do too much with too-big furniture, but I've learned a fix for too-small decor, and one that doesn't have to be expensive, either, and that's to group small like items together.    



Several years ago I found this pretty mirror at Dollar General for around $10-15.  It came in this sort of pewter and bronze color, and then the same pattern in a really hideous gaudy goldish gilt. The width of the frame gave it a good weight and scale, but once I got it home, I realized it was still too small for the space I wanted to fill. I got the bright idea to buy another and hang two of them side-by-side.  Unfortunately, search though I did, at every Dollar General within a 25-mile radius, all they had left were the ugly gold ones. I thought about buying a gold one and spraying painting them both a third color, but I really liked the pewter/bronze color.

So it sat in a bag in the bottom of a closet seemingly forever. Periodically, I'd search through the mirrors and frames at different store locations in hopes of finding a matching piece.

And then finally--voila'!  Not the same mirror, not an exact match of color or size, but one day, searching through the frames and mirrors as always, I found a little mirror with a metallic-ish frame that I thought just might work. And this time, having learned my lesson, I bought two!  I don't remember exactly what these cost, but it was less than $10 for the two of them.  

And they worked! Close enough in color, two are enough to help fill the blank spot, and the whole arrangement was inexpensive enough to change at a moment's whim.  

Not that I do "a moment's whim" for decor changes.  But I could if I wanted to. 

Until next time...

This post is linked to:

Penny Pinching Party at the Thrifty Home

Works for Me Wednesday at We are THAT Family

The HomeMaking Party at Hope in Every Season

Make Your Home Sing at Mom's the Word

My "Ugly Room Challenge" Update

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She worketh willingly with her hands

Did you see my post last week with the "before" pictures of my "Ugly Room" self-challenge?

No? Well, you need to go look at them.  I'll wait.

Rough, right?

Now let me show you what this room looks like today.  (Pardon the lighting, it was an early morning pre-dawn hour when I took these, and my flash and the lighting in the room aren't the best way to view this room.)

This is the first glimpse you get when you head down the hall.  Better, yes?

Here is the desk area.

Bookcases and cleaned and straightened.  I purged at least 100 books, believe it or not, but replaced them with books from boxes and piles.  This is probably about half of the books we own. There are still others stashed in boxes, our son has at least two bookcases worth of his personal books in his room, and I have probably another book case worth, at least, in my office at church.

The lovely couch is now ready for a nap or a sit, as is the "reading nook" chair.  

And just to show you the reality, we had company coming over, so, while I did do a lot of cleaning, organizing, and purging, I also did some "stash-and-dash" cleaning--put things in a box or bag, and stash it someplace out-of-sight until later!

Another, smaller "stash-and-dash" pile.  

I still to do some work around the desk, too.

And whatever do you do with old journals and sentimental things?  I read somewhere that Beth Moore has instructed her daughters that if anything ever happens to her, they are to take her journals and burn them immediately!  That's how I feel, I would really hate for anyone else to ever read these, and yet I'm not quite ready to torch them myself yet!

I noticed over on Mom's the Word that her post is about having a cut-off-time for chores--this is especially true when you tackle something huge like my "ugly room".  There is no way this could all have been done in a day--even a week, to be honest, unless every thing else is neglected.  But laundry and cooking and dishes still needed doing.  I had a funeral to attend, and church and grocery shopping and company coming over--I needed to attend to the rest of the house, too.  And besides that, you can only work on clutter and cleaning and organizing for so long before you start to make poor decisions about what to keep and where to put it--as soon as I started getting to the point of just mindlessly wanting to through it all away, or alternatively, box it all up and avoid dealing with it, I knew I needed to take a break.

My "ugly room" is still far from finished.  I need to do another sweep through the bookcases and purge a little more.  I need to go through the "stash-and-dash" boxes one at a time. (Oh, and did I mention that I stashed a few boxes in the closet, too?) But at this stage, it's at least clean--you can't imagine the dust I've inhaled in the last week or two! And it's do-able, and approachable.

My "ugly room" is no more.  Now it's just a room---not good or bad, it just is what it is, and I'm up for the challenge to make it into a peaceful retreat for this family of book nerds. I want to change the curtains, add something to a couple of the walls, maybe a throw rug to cover the worn-out wood floors, who knows?  It's still far from pretty, but it's definitely a change in the right direction!

Until next time...

This post is linked to:
Make Your Home Sing at Mom's the Word
Make it Pretty Monday at the Dedicated House
The HomeMaking Party at Hope in Every Season

My "Ugly Room" Challenge

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She eateth not the bread of idleness

Do you have an "ugly room"?

You know, the room that starts off as one thing--a spare bedroom, or an office--and then transitions into a multi-use room--a spare bedroom/office/library/extra closet space room. And before you know it, it becomes the "I have no place to put this, put this in the "                         room" room. Or, "Put this in the                         room, I'll put it away later" room.  Maybe even the "Quick, someone is coming over, put everything out of sight in the                               room" room.

Feel free to fill in the blank with whatever yours is called.

Whatever name you use, it becomes the dumping ground for whatever you don't have space/time/energy to deal with.

I have one of those rooms.  Mine is euphemistically called "the front bedroom", even though there isn't a bed in it anymore, and it's actually on the back side of our house.  Our house belonged to my grandparents at one time, and that's what they called it, so that's what we call it, too--although, in their day, it was actually a bedroom! And it was the "front" bedroom, because it's the first bedroom you come to when you start down the hall from the "front" or more public portion of the house. But I digress.  Or as we say in the south "chase a rabbit".

Lately, though, I've been calling mine the "ugly room", because that's what it is to me.

And I'm determined to change it.

In April, when I was posting on the "Clean in 30 Days" house cleaning challenge, I thought I would get the rest of the house clean first, and then tackle this sore spot.  And then in May, when I was doing the "Clutter Busting Challenge", I kept thinking that I would get to this room eventually.  In both cases, I got sidetracked by life from my ultimate goal of Getting This House Clean From Top to Bottom--including my junk room.

Sidetracked by life, and also, I admit it, personal dread of even tackling it.

I am making a resolve, though, to quit running and hiding from challenges, and instead to tackle them--head on, if I can get the courage, or on the blind side just a little at a time if that's all I can manage.

I really enjoyed blogging about the Clean in 30 and Clutter Busting challenge, so I decided to make my own challenge, I'm calling it  My "Ugly Room" Challenge.

Step one on any 12-step program is to admit you have a problem.

Well, I'm going to do one better--I'm going to take you on a little tour and show you my problem room, in all of it's ugliness.

When you walk into my ugly room squarely from the door, this is the sight that greets you.  This is my office corner, which, as you can see, has the requisite equipment--desk, chair, printer/scanner, filing cabinet, paper shredder, and even task lighting--note the reading lamp clipped to the edge of a file drawer.  Lighting is atrocious in this room, all we have is a ceiling fan light in the middle of the room, so when you sit at the desk, you create your own shadowed work space, and with the paneling, it feels slightly cave-like.  

And, as you can see, we have no lack of paper clutter.  This is my "to-be-filed" stack. I told my husband that I didn't file because, although, there was a filing cabinet and desk, there was no place to sit at the desk unless I waggled in a kitchen chair.  So I requested a new office chair as a gift, which I received--in December.  Hmmm.

Slightly to the left is the old desk chair, which actually belongs to my son, and as you can see, has issues.  Ha!  My husband thinks he can fix it, so we haven't gotten rid of it, but once it's fixed, it'll take it's place in another room.  Behind that is an old easy chair, part of a past effort to make a cozy reading nook beside the bookcases.  (See "lack of good lighting" above.)

And that brings us to--the bookcases. These were my pride and joy at one time--stacked and organized and arranged just so--but somewhere along the line we got more books than they could hold, and as we pulled and read and put back, and meanwhile, kept acquiring more books--it's become so difficult to find what we're looking for, I think we've actually bought a couple of books more than once, because we couldn't find the original, or even worse, forgot we already had it. And this is not to mention the books we bought when we were living elsewhere that are still in boxes, because, obviously, there was no place to put them when we moved back home.

And now to the lovely hand-me-down sofa that lives under this pile of clothes and books and baskets and bags and who-knows-what-else.  It's really a pretty sofa, and very comfortable for both sitting and napping, which you can't say about just any sofa.  And yet, here it is, un-sat-or-napped-upon because it's to much trouble to un-load it, and where would you put the stuff on it, anyway.

As you can see, I have all of the bones to make a really nice office/library/sitting room, it's just buried under so much stuff, that you can't even see the bones, much less flesh them out and build on them.

Can anyone relate?

I've actually already been working in my ugly room a little at a time this past week.  It has to be a little at a time, because any more time than that and I find myself so overwhelmed or wracked with indecision about what to do with some of the items in there, that it becomes a waste.  There are moments that I've gotten on a roll and done more than I intended, there have also been times that I find myself sitting on the broken chair and reading, or looking at old photos that I've unearthed, or even speculating on just how long some object has been hidden away in a box without me even remembering it was there. I've chased a lot of rabbits when I needed to be purging and decluttering and cleaning.

A lot of the "stuff" that I'm finding is perfectly good "stuff".  It just isn't relevant to who I am any more--like books on parenting small children, or hobbies that I don't do any more.  Tax forms from more years ago than I care to remember.  Double and triple prints of photos where I was obviously just trying to use up the end of the roll. Collections of things that I don't really collect any more.

So I'm working on it.

Sometimes we just get busy, and things suffer for it.  But sometimes I think having an "ugly room" can be a symptom of larger issues for some of us.  At times I find myself bogged down in life, just like I get bogged down in my "ugly room".  I have the bones--the basics--for a very fulfilling life, and yet I  manage to fill it so full of stuff--not bad stuff, just stuff that may not be relevant to who I am anymore--so that instead of feeling fulfilled, I just start to feel ugly, inside and out.

Like my ugly room.

When that happens, I need to stop and re-evaluate, what is relevant and useful and pretty, and what is not.  
My ugly room is changing, little by little, and so am I.

Line upon line, line upon line.  Precept upon precept, here a little and there a little.

I'll keep you updated.

Until next time.

This post is linked to:
Show and Tell Saturday at Be Different...Act Normal
Make Your Home Sing Monday at Mom's the Word

Product Review--VIPRE Internet Security Software

• Who is like a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household

These days, I don't really have a really blogger-friendly lifestyle.  We don't have internet at home, so if I want to post something on my blog, I have to haul my bulky, seven-year-old laptop either to my parent's house, the library, or my office on the days I work at church.  

And did I mention that I have a bulky, not to mention heavy, seven-year-laptop?  

I have given up trying to keep it updated, and, not only that, unwilling to put any more money into it, I've been living dangerously and running it without internet protection or anti-virus.  

Gasp!

Yes, yes I have.  

So when I had an opportunity to try a new internet security software from VIPRE for free, I jumped at the chance!

The first step I did was to disable and uninstall my old anti-virus, and then I clicked on the link and started to download the new VIPRE software.

It was a very quick and easy download...

...as you can see, it only took a couple of minutes, even on my slow old computer.

The installation took a little longer...

...but nothing out of the ordinary.  

I could do other things while it was downloading and installing.

 As with most software, the next step was a restart...

...and was congratulated on a successful install!

The software seemed very user-friendly and self-explanatory...

...and checking for updates is easy, as well.

I've only been using this software for a little over a week, but so far, so good. One of the things I like about the VIPRE software is that it doesn't seem to bog my computer down, even as old as this one is, the way some of my previous anti-virus software has done in the past.

You can visit their website and check it out yourself, the prices are comparable to other antivirus and internet security software, and there's even a free 30-day trial version you can download and try-before-you-buy.

This post was sponsored by Vipre software, who provided the software to me for free, but I did the download, install, and update all myself, very easily, and the opinions expressed are my very own.  

Until next time...