Here I am!

I seem to have taken a little sub-conscious break from blogging. I must have been off enjoying my new plumbing. Not.

Actually, nothing note-worthy has really been happening. I'll take that as a good thing.

We (meaning Mark : ) have been making some progress on our very long kitchen renovation project. We (he) has been working on patching the walls - they were in a very sad state of disrepair. One wall (I'm referencing the wall that goes from the bottom of the cabinets to the top of the counter top) conveniently had the fugly faux-brick back splash LIQUID NAILED down to the wall. That wasn't fun coming off (or so I hear...).

So, once Mark finished with all the scraping that he could possibly do, he started patching over top of the whole wall to try to make a smooth surface. I forget what the material that he used is called, but it's like plaster, you know, that you patch holes with? Anyway, after that - which I must say, he did a VERY impressive job on - he moved on to patching the giant hole that we unearthed - which actually turned out to end up a lot bigger than originally pictured because they had to move the outlet over about 6 inches in order to get everything straightened out electrically. No more hole, my very handy H has now fixed that, then he moved onto the smaller stuff, the dents and nail holes and that sort of thing.

Now, I believe that he's going to sand, and then we're ready for primer! *Hopefully*, we will get these two steps done soon (tonight?) and then we can paint and THEN we can move everything back to its place (if its home is the counter)! That will be so. nice.

In other news, just call me Martha. Well... maybe not, Martha Stewart is kind of obnoxious, but you get the point. I got this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day , it was recommended to me by a friend. It's FAB! Of course I'm just getting started with the very basic recipe, which I threw together (in right around 5 minutes!) at about 8PM last night and is currently sitting in my fridge waiting to be baked off tonight. I just threw the ingredients together and used my GLORIOUS KitchenAid (pink) mixer to "knead" everything together and voila! Bread dough.

I will confess that I may have made a small error... I needed 6 1/2 cups of flour and was using a 1/2 cup scoop because it fits in my flour canister better. I lost count between the 7th and 8th scoop (because I had to walk away to grab the bag of flour for a refill and by the time I came back I had the number 7 in my head but couldn't remember whether I had just done the 7th scoop and was on the 8th, or if I was getting ready to do the 7th scoop and was currently on 6.) *sigh* So. me. Anyway, I ended up doing either 6 1/4 cups, or 6 3/4 cups (depending on what cup I was actually on). So, we'll see how this bread turns out.

Updates to come!