Lovelihood

I keep a bag of chocolate chips (non-dairy, of course) in the cupboard precisely for the sort of occasion that calls for dipping something unseemly into something even unseemlier. Fritos (no substitutions, please) were happily dunked into smelted chocolate, an activity that elicited such squealy joy from The Boy that it was impossible not to forgive his frequent "accidental" finger slips into the chocolate. I'm sure the preschool teachers these are intended for harbor no illusions of sanitary practices in the homes of their charges.

This day ends with a completed quilt top folded up on my sewing table and a batch of coconut-orange sugar scrub awaiting last-day-of-preschool teacher delivery. Not a bad way to use up the last of my half-pint jars. Also, not a bad day for making things.

While puttering around the fabric store the other day — The Boy feeling through quilt back options and I indiscriminately grabbing at fat quarters and miscellaneous craft supplies — we tripped over a sweet-hued stash of perle embroidering cottons. So, with yesterday's completion of u under my belt, I took some down-time at work to plot out the next alphabetic venture.

Finished, last night, the second installment to my sashiko stitched alphabet. This U, or is it an N, was worked itself out mostly while catching up on streamed episodes of 30 Rock.

Meeting up at an unfamiliar-to-us park today with some other families soon to be immersed in Kindergarten life, the group decided to explore one of the trails that took us down to a creek. Next to the creek, popping out amongst mulchy pine needles and similary moist underbrush, was a brightly painted manhole which everyone traipsed past as if it were perfectly natural for brightly painted sewer portals to be found creekside.

Of all the crafty fads out there right now, I'm most smitten by the faux bois stuff. You know, fake wood. So when it came to packing up a gift for our attendance at today's Angry Birds-themed birthday party, I thought I'd try my hand at faux-ly bois-ing up a simple cardboard box to house the topical plush toy we'd picked up. Seems a little much for decorating a inevitably tossed-aside box, but, really, it took so little time to make. Simply doodled out some wood-grainesque lines onto an easy-carve block and went to work on it with the tools. Handed it, along with an inkpad and a box of pastels to The Boy, and let him go to town on the box. And now another birthday party is behind us.

When I was a kid there wasn't anything much more satisfying than an a common hard-boiled egg steeped in some briny stew stuffs, mashed up into rice and sprinkled with soy sauce for good measure. It seems that generously salted eggs have a sort of universal appeal. The Mr. has a friend who, living in Sweden the past year, brought back for homecoming souvenirs little tubes of Kalles Kaviar. Spreadable fish roe in a tube. One of those cultural culinary oddities, like the Vegemite of Australia and the deep fried Oreos of carnivals that, I suppose, seem perfectly normal to their native audiences. It'd been sitting in the fridge since The Mr. brought it home, until I decided to break it out for lunch today, and decided it hit more or less the same flavor notes of my childhood stewed eggs.