Annual Dressing Making Day

     Every year around this time, my grandmama picks a day for us to come over and spend the day making dressing. Its pretty much an all-day event - we make the entire year's worth all in one day and put it up in the ice cream and cool whip tubs we've been saving all year just for this occasion.

     Now i have no idea what the recipe for dressing is. I'm not a fan of the stuff (yeah, I know, unAmerican), and it's a ginormous recipe for anybody to try to take on.
  
     Last night we started cooking the chickens (4, whole) in crockpots. My grandmama also cooked 4.

Three of our fat chicks :)

Rule #1: Save your broth! You'll be needing it later.

     After we woke up this morning and cooked a couple pans of cornbread, Mama and I loaded all that and our empty containers up in the car and headed to grandmama's.

We make dressing out in my granddaddy's shop. It's kind of the Cadillac version of a 'shop', heat and a/c, knicknacks on the walls, full kitchen, plenty of room to spread out our stuff. If we have more than our immediate family at my grandparents' house to eat, there are tables and chairs set up in there so we can eat out in the shop.

Our mixing 'bowl'. 

Mama and Grandmama 

Our 'scoop'. Yeah, we're not too picky about our cookware around here...

One 'making' of dressing. We save up ice cream buckets and cool whip containers all year for this reason.

You have to use your hands to do this properly. (For anybody who happens to eat our dressing, we promise we wash our hands very very well and very very often!)

All our dressing for this year, about 15 gallons!

Me, Mama, and Grandmama :) 

 

These are pics from around the shop. Granddaddy and Grandmama have a ton of really awesome stuff they've inherited from their parents or older family members, and most of it's out here.

Singer sewing machine

Old radio

Tea kettles

I'm pretty sure this is a candle holder, but it's really neat

A yoke, painted with my great-grandparents' names - Hazel and Euree Hale

Super old telephone, complete with green lei. It actually still rings too.

This is a pretty amazing idea of my Granddaddy's - a recliner swing. It's pretty awesome. I'm definitely installing one in my future baby's room.

Propellers - my Granddaddy was a pilot. The first time I flew was with him on my second birthday. I asked him why there were ants on the window, and he said 'Honey, those aren't ants, those are cows waaay down there.' haha

Upcycled Terra Cotta Pot Project

     This has been the hardest post ever to get up! I've had my pots painted and in my bathroom for weeks, but for some reason, every picture I've tried to load has fought me tooth and nail for weeks not wanting to be posted. No clue what the deal has been, but here it is, FINALLY!

     So, this is my first project attempt from Pinterest! Yay! Here's the original picture. I tried to imbed from Pinterest itself, but it screwed my blog up, so if you're looking for a source you can add me and check out my boards!

Terra cotta pot q-tip, cotton ball, and soap holders

     Materials:

Terra cotta pots in the sizes you want

      (I got two small ones, one each for q-tips and cottonballs)

Terra cotta water tray

      (I got a small one for soap, you can get some to go under pots if you like)

White/black paint for base coat

Colored paint - I used a pearlescent green and then a teal glitter topcoat.

Clear spray paint

Any decorative elements (Rhinestones, ribbon, etc.)

Sidenote: If you want to do this project, now is a great time. Walmart has their terra cotta pots marked down to something like 50 cents per pot and you can get all kinds of decorating stuff in the Christmas section super cheap.

    

     Step one: Area prep! Lay some newspapers or plastic down where you'll be painting, or go outside. Get a little paint palette or paper plate ready for your paints and some brushes handy. I used some cheap plastic bristle, inch wide craft brushes.

     Step two: Make sure your pots are clean. No price stickers or dirt. They don't have to be washed or anything, just ready to paint.

     Step three: Base coat. I used white because my final color was fairly bright. Use black if you're going for a dark color. It doesn't have to be a perfect coat, and doesn't need to be thick. Just barely cover, but make sure you cover ALL the terra cotta. Let this dry.

     Step four: Color coat. These are the colors I used.

Folk Art Metallic Emerald and Teal Glitter Glue

     First, you want to paint your pots and tray with the flat color. I did two coats, one relatively smooth and the second to smooth over and cover any imperfections from the first one. If you do the coats pretty thin, they don't take any time at all to dry.

This is two coats of Metallic Emerald, fully dry.

This is my soap dish with its glitter coat.

Add your clear spray paint coat. This is one of my all time favorite art supplies. Great sealant, great for making stuff pretty and shiny.

Pots with their clear coats

One pot holds cotton balls and q-tips...because we all secretly hate fishing around under the cabinet and in drawers for them.

The tray holds our hand soap.

And the other pot holds our toothbrushes, toothpaste, and scissors (gotta have those for trimming bangs, cutting tags off, whatnot). Best toothbrush holder ever by the way, you can actually stand your toothpaste in it instead of having it laying out on the counter.

This is the finished products! The tray they're sitting on is one of my favorite thrift finds...its a mosaic printed leaf in all different teal shades that I found on clearance at TJMaxx.

Go Vote, Mississippi

     This coming Tuesday, November 8th, is election day. It's not particularly my favorite day of the year, but I haven't missed a vote since I turned 18, and I'm not planning on changing my habit this year.

     I am not a Republican or a Democrat. I like to say I was raised to vote for the person, not the party. Who cares what sticker the guy has on his bumper, if he doesn't have the right morals or ideas?
     Now, I don't always know what we're voting over, or which candidate of two I prefer, or even who the candidates are. I don't read the paper much (in Pontotoc, the word 'news' is debatable when referring to the Progress), and the campaign commercials are completely unreliable for basing one's opinions on. For real, what candidate won't tell the absolute best lie about himself possible, and the worst possible dirt about his opponents? I've yet to hear one yet that says 'My opponents are great guys' or 'These are the mistakes I've made, and I'm sorry.'
     Most of the time, I talk with my parents the week or so before an election. My dad especially keeps up with politics, as lots of the time whoever gets elected to various position in town affects the work he does. I'm smart enough to know that if I don't understand something as important as a new law, I need to ask someone who does before voting blind. Usually, my parents explain the laws or tell me the different people running, and then they'll tell me how they're voting and why.

     This election, I'm having a hard time not getting ill with Mississippi. Oh, lets just come out with it and say I'm already ill at Mississippi, because I am. This election, we'll be voting on three new amendments - 26, 27, and 31. This is the waaaay watered down version but 26 is going to be determining how Mississippi defines personhood, or what stage of conception/pregnancy/birth a baby is considered a person. 27 is for adding a law stating we have to show ID to vote. 31 is for amending the state's eminent domain laws.
    
     This is my beef. I think that Mississippi's laws are written in a way as to deliberately confuse us. For example, part of Amendment 31 was read aloud in church Wednesday night. At first, and actually second and third read throughs, I couldn't tell you which way voting yes would say you were going, and neither could most of the congregation. 31 was written so confusingly that nobody knows whether to vote yes or no, and what that's going to mean for them. The KISS principle could have been liberally applied here to great effect. 99% of Mississippians do not speak Advanced Lawyerish.
     26 is even worse. The personhood part I get. I belive that you're a valid, legitimate, whole person from the instant you're a fertilized egg, from the moment of conception. But everyone has gone ape-wild reading into Amendment 26. 'It's going to outlaw birth control!' 'If you vote no, you're pro-abortion!' and so on and so forth. I'm not telling you how I'm voting or how you should, I'm not stating my views on what I think Amendment 26 entails, and I don't want to hear yours. I'm so tired of every other post on Facebook being a ten paragraph spill of someone preaching their views and condemning everyone else's. Honestly, my view is that Amendment 26 shouldn't be written where you could read ANYTHING into it. As it 'Do you believe that a baby is a person from the moment of conception? Yes or no.' Simple.


     This is what I WILL say. Be responsible. Don't vote yes or no because you saw it on Facebook. Actually do some legit research, because these are some pretty big things you're voting on. And if you're old enough to vote, you're old enough to know what you're voting on and why. Use the internet, for Pete sake. The government has it too.
     Candidates I can't really help you on. I'm planning on having a long talk with my Dad Sunday or Monday. I suggest you do the same if you aren't a Poly-Sci major or just some politics guru. Don't vote for somebody just because you remember their sign from the 4-way stop that morning or because he's your cousin's husband's daddy.

Yeah. Don't vote just because he's Pedro.

     And seriously, if you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain about what you didn't vote on.

Piano



     I had forgotten until tonight just how great a stress reliever playing the piano is. Just you, the piano, and an empty echoing room. I think I'd rather have that than a vacation sometimes.
     I had an extraordinarily stressful and frustrating evening today...just family difficulties and things not turning out the way I had expected, but that's a story for another day. So after all that I needed some quality alone time, something I don't get a lot of these days, being at home with mama most days and not having a car to myself to go places whenever I want. I had to practice some pieces anyway - I'm playing piano for the prelude of my sister Meagan's wedding tomorrow - so I just threw my notebook in the car, grabbed the church keys, and headed out.

     I love playing the piano. I've played for almost fifteen years now. It's one of the few things I can always count on to be relaxing and enjoyable, and I can just get lost in it for hours. Bad day, good day, bored, it works for whatever. But I know for a fact I don't want to make it a career. People have suggested it, I've thought about it before, but here's my reasoning. For one, it's not something that pays particularly well. Actually, not very much at all. There's something to doing what you love, but you still have bills. Two, I could teach, but that's the very last thing I'm cut out to do. Trust me. And most of all, something that's that much of a blissful freeing experience...I think if I did it everyday, all day, it would lose that special quality that makes it so much of a haven for me. Kind of like how you get burnt out on a food if you eat it every day for a month, I would hate to play piano so much I just loathed the experience. So, I'm still looking for that career, and I keep piano for myself.    

My date for prom was an hour late, I was mad enough to spit...so I'm playing piano. And about to yell at the person who took this picture to scat out of the room.

     I started playing when I was eight. My parents bought me a Sam's Club special keyboard for Christmas, you know - the one with the songs and different sounds built in? Yeah, that was something. I starting taking lessons that August from Ms. Cindy Coker. (I did get a real piano that year as well, thank the Lord!) I loved it so much, even practicing, I think I went through two lesson books that year. I stayed with Ms. Cindy a year, then Ms. Cindy decided to go for National Boards so I had to find a new teacher. My parents knew a lady in Pontotoc that had taught for a long time, so the next August I found myself with Ms. Terrena Kyle and never left.
     Ms. Terrena was amazing. By the time I graduated I thought of her as pretty much family. You see someone every single week and then some for ten or so years, and you get pretty close. She was an amazing piano teacher. Always challenging me to play that harder piece, to want to be a better musician, and a better person as well. I think she probably had to hold back my OCDness a little a few times haha. Perfectionists and music are well suited, but it sure makes for stressful days before recitals!
     I mostly appreciate that her teaching style was different than most piano teachers. I didn't just learn out of a lesson book and classical pieces. I always, always had a hymn of some kind working, from little simple ones when I started to big three-years-of-work arrangements for competition when I finished. I learned more from a hymnbook I think than in those lessonbooks, what I'm most comfortable and relaxed playing, and that's what I'm going to be using through most of my adult life.
     Ms. Terrena also let me have a big say in what I chose to play. If I brought in some arrangement of a song from a movie, we'd work on that. If I had a church thing I wanted to do, we'd work towards that. However I wanted to gear myself, that's where we would aim. Like the Chopin piece I had heard in one of my favorite movies when I was little. Took me forever to track down the right piece, then find the music. It was the hardest piece EVER to learn! And it took me about a year, but she didn't stop pushing me.
     My senior year, piano was one of my biggest things I did. I even had my photographer meet me at our church (twice) so I could take some of my senior pictures with the baby grand piano.

This was my fave out of the piano shots. I thought I color coordinated rather well :)

     I worked all year for a senior recital in May. That wasn't something that was required or anything. Ms. Terrena always had an end-of-the-year recital, but this was something I wanted to do, just to show how hard I had worked all these years.
     My biggest regret in college was that I didn't have more opportunity to play. Dorms are just not spacious places, and pianos are just not one of the things you take. I brought my keyboard the first year, but it just wasn't the same after playing on the real thing for so long. I also tried taking piano lesson a few times, but I never found a teacher I liked well enough to stick with. None had that personal touch like I'd had growing up, and my non-traditional teaching didn't mix well with the classical style everyone else used. Personally I like the way I grew up learning better...but that's my opinion!

     My recommendation to all you bloggers and blogger readers...start your kids, if you have them, in a hobby. Eight, nine is a great age. Piano, tennis, 4H, just something they think they'll like. Nothing dramatic, once a week is great. Don't overkill them with it, they'll hate it in a month. And if they don't like it (not like 'I don't like to practice', but like 'I'm going to puke if you make me go') don't kill them for it. I tried 4H for awhile, hated judging cow udders, so after a few months I stopped. No big drama. But if your kid finds something like I did with piano and sticks with it, when they're my age or older and have what I do in it, they'll be so happy they have it.

     If you're an adult, and you have something like my playing piano that you love, isn't it amazing!?! Everybody needs that one thing they have for a release. So what's your 'thing'? What do y'all love?

One day, when I get married, I'm absolutely taking this picture with our rings! I'd almost - that's ALMOST now, ya hear :) - be happy if my future hubby just gave me one of those baby grands instead of an engagement ring...but then again, I'd have to build an addition to my house just to put it in, and engagement rings are so much easier to carry around and show off haha.