[ Home | All Archives ]

      Tuesday, July 01, 2025

foodstuff 04:39 PM - 07/01/2025 I'm watching The Punisher series with Jon Bernthal (he's very easy on the eyes) The current weather is hot, but not as bad as yesterday The topic: Do you remember ---------------------------------------------- We are fans of the show Yellowstone. We've probably watched it all the way through at least five times. At least. In one of the later seasons, Beth makes dinner for Rip and Carter. She made Hamburger Helper, but with tuna. She was so proud of herself. Rip did mention to her that "you know, there is Tuna Helper". No, she was not aware of this. One of the questions I had at the time is the Yellowstone is a cattle ranch. Why doesn't she have hamburger? Brian theorized that they have steaks and ribs and roasts and stuff like that. Hmmph. I find that hard to believe. A cattle ranch with no hamburger. Anyway, back when I was in high school, there were also "Skillet" dinners. Same idea as Hamburger Helper, but, in my opinion, they were WAY better than Hamburger Helper. My favorite was the Skillet Lasagna. Out of curiosity, I started checking out the current options for these types of dinners. None of the Skillet dinners, but plenty of the Helper dinners. We have Walmart+, and I scrolled through the available choices. Unlike Amazon, you can purchase one box, not a half dozen. And they're cheaper. I spent over fifty dollars on different varieties of the Helper meals. They arrived the next day. The thing that bothered me about the packaging is the pasta is loose in the box. The seasonings are in a packet. The reason this bothers me is somewhere along the line we got some bugs in the pantry, the little black things that like flour type products. Crackers, noodles, cereals... Because of this, I started to package the Knorr's Sides in zip lock bags. Preventing having to throw out everything. The day of the Helper delivery, I sat on the sofa with all the boxes, opening them one by one, dumping the noodles in a zip lock bag and putting it back in the box. Not all boxes had the loose pasta, which was nice, but I opened every single one. The Hamburger Helper is okay. I'm not real hot on it, but it's an easy meal to fix and Brian likes it. Tonight I made the Cheesy Tuna Pasta. It was good! I was surprised. I will get this again.  I wish they still had skillet dinners like back in the 70s. | Permalink

craftstuff 05:05 PM - 07/01/2025 The topic: Why does it go like this? ---------------------------------------------- Years ago, I bought a Silhouette Curio machine (I've since got the newer one). And like I always do, I get all the extras and consumables I might want to use. The Curio does etching. Like in metal. I bought a fair amount of different sizes of bracelet blanks, dog tags, and the sheets for making stencils.  Playing with the shadow box maker, the 1/4" punch didn't put the hole in the right place to work on the shadow box. I played around with it, punching many holes on paper, but nothing lined up right on the shadow box. I finally got one that was perfect placement on the shadow box cover sheet, but now what? How do I replicate this? I ordered a 1/4" hole punch from Amazon and figured I will make a guide for the hole placement. I figured that Curio stencil material would work nicely. Except I had no idea where it was. I found the metal blanks, I found the tools, but I could not find the stencil stuff. I pulled out my bag of acetate sheets, maybe they'd work, but still looked for the stencils. Probably spent an hour searching when I finally looked in the storage container under the new Curio and I opened it. Well, damn, who'd have guessed the Curio supplies would be in the Curio storage container? Not me. Anyway, I ended up going with the acetate. It wasn't as thick as the stencil material and it's clear where the stencil is translucent.  I made a couple of the guides. Now, I'm ready to actually make some different sizes of shadow boxes.  At least I found my Curio stuff.  A sad aside - the website where I bought the stencil material is no longer there. Their last post on Facebook was the end of last year. They were a super company to deal with. shadow box    craftstuff    | Permalink

      Sunday, July 13, 2025

otherstuff 08:57 AM - 07/13/2025 The current weather is so nice right now I'm hopeful The topic: Rabbit holes, rabbit holes, rabbit holes ---------------------------------------------- That's what the past week has been. I start doing one thing, and while doing that one thing, realize that this other thing would be better. Like the video for the Glimmer crafts, I couldn't get the sound to work. Downloaded an app that I didn't like. Finally figured out the sound and decided I didn't like the camera. It was a cheap one I got a long time ago, and the quality of the video left a lot to be desired, so I ordered a camera like I got for Brian's Zoom meetings with his doctor. Surprise, surprise, the video was just as crummy.  Guess what? There are these things called SETTINGS! Who knew? Anyway, got that all taken care of, then did a few test videos. Hand's look old (really? a seventy-one-year-old with old-looking hands? Get out!). I had to polish my nails, maybe that would help (it didn't - hands still looked old, but my nails were great).  While I had waited for the new camera to show up, I started playing with the W R shadow box punch board. So, there was another rabbit hole (I still don't have the folding the edges figured out, even though I've watched multiple videos). The corners just don't look clean. Meanwhile, paperwork was piling up, invoices needed to be generated, bank account reconciled, bills needed to be paid, and then there was the filing of the paperwork. Then it got hot. And a nail split at the finger, so I cut them all back. Life is easier now.  Then it cooled off.  And I thought (craft videos pushed to the back of my internal to-do list) "hey, why don't I see if I can rip some of these tv show DVDs I've had forever and see if any of my software can automatically split the episode (why, yes, this one will work and it uses AI to better the actual video) which took time. I had to redo a couple of episodes, but it's a learning process. Unfortunately, the subtitles looked awful, so I decided to go with another option for those. But first I had to rename all of the episodes. They were saved with generic names. "Disc 1 title4" instead of "Series name S0XE0X_Title of episode," which had to be done manually and was time-consuming. Once that was finished, it was time to do the subtitles. Which takes longer than I hoped it would, but, hey, what else do I have going on? Right? Last Friday, when pulling the disks from the cabinet, I realized I hadn't dusted in a while. So, I got hot on that. It was pretty bad. lol...note to self, don't put it off like that again. I need to finish in the bedroom today, then it will be okay for a while as long as I stay on top of it (HA!). And tomorrow, I'll most likely start on the craft videos again. | Permalink

All Archives

lisaviolet is seventy something, married with no kids, takes care of lots of cats, likes taking photographs, loves Southern California weather and spends altogether too much time avoiding her responsibilities.

<< July 2025 >> S M T W T F S     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

website design by

©lisaviolet 1996-2024
Photographic images are the property of the photographer,and may not be copied, printed, or otherwise reproduced on any other site or used in any other publishing medium without the written permission of each individual photographer and kennel/cattery owner. Cathouse privacy policy.