Photo Round-up Extravaganza

Kevin and I have been doing a lot and taking pictures over the last month. These are just a few dog/house/cooking/physical activity events we've dealt with. Here's our lovely garage after Christmas break when Kevin had more time off (since he's a fancy pants faculty member; Love you again!). Beautiful, just beautiful!

Here's Kent and Kaiya's first night together after 6 hours of rough-housing, err, I mean "socializing."

The "Yeah for Me and You" bar stools on our newly claimed bar off the kitchen.

Excellent thumbprint cookies via Food Allergy Momma. I replaced the wheat flour with Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free All Purpose Flour and the mix was a little (a lot) too runny to retain the thumbprint, so I added a little more flour and some powdered sugar (because I ran out of the regular sugar) and they turned out to be a lot like shortbread. Very good shortbread with all-fruit jelly in the middle (and a few had some pink and white nerds on top). If I did this recipe again, I'd, first of all, buy more regular sugar, and then probably use Bob's Red mill's recipe for sugar cookies perhaps. I don't know... We'll see...

Here's a momento from our septic tank extravaganza! Over Thanksgiving, Kaiya dug us a wonderful hole right over our septic tank. On closer inspection, this hole turned into a cave when she discovered that the top of our cement septic tank was disinntegrating. Smart puppy, Kaiya! Anyway, it took us a couple of months to schedule someone to come out and fix the problem and pump the tanks (two of 'em). They did a great job and now we're smell free in the back yard! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Perhaps someone is telling us that we need to cut back on the fiber...In the words of my dad, we've got our "poop-shoot" working properly again.

Kevin and I went to help Kayla and Terrell remodel (or should I say model) their master bathroom. Had lots of fun and learned a lot. After kicking up powder-like cement dust while sawing through their slab, Kevin aged 40 years (in appearance only, of course).

Oh my! I'm excited about this news. I made homemade mayonnaise (and got it right on the first try too)! Thanks to a recipe I found on Just Hungry.com, I was able to eat mayonnaise/miracle whip recipe for the first time since high school. I substituted wine vinegar for lemon juice and I used vegitable oil (soy oil). Had to add three eggs though because evidently, I'm even more impatient than the blogger. In my opinion, I would definitely only add that second egg after you have all of the oil dripped into the first egg. Goohood stuff, man! Kevin helped boil some eggs and made side dishes so that I could try deviled eggs for the first time.

See how I eat them:

See how happy I am!

Poor Kevin had to put up with about a billion comments from me like...

Katherine: "Do you know what I did today?"

Kevin: "No, what?"

Katherine: "I had mayonnaise!"

Kevin: "Oh."

[5 seconds later]

Katherine: "Guess what I ate today?"

Kevin: "Gee biligans..."

...And that's about all I talked about the rest of the evening.

So that about raps up this week's PHOTO ROUND-UP EXTRAVAGANZA [said in deep announcer's voice]. Stay tuned for the next PHOTO ROUND-UP [cough, cough] EXTRAVA [cough, cough] GANZA! Whoohoo! Just in time too! Too much announcer voice and I'll cough up a lung. Uh huh.