smitten with mittens

so felt is all the rage. believe it. most of the trendy stores are paying homage to vintage-type ornaments and giving shout outs to natural, earthy christmas decorations (which i happen to l.o.v.e).

crate and barrel is displaying these felt mittens on their website for a whopping 23.95:

when grandma dot came to visit a month ago, we skirted around town, making sure to visit world market, where we found an inspiration piece:

at 5.00 a pop, we were determined to make our own for significantly less moolah moolah. and so we did.

grandma got started cutting out a mitten template as soon as we returned:

1. we first doubled felt fabric and cut out two mitten patterns:

2. then we cut out the accessories to adorn the top

3. realizing that we didn’t have enough buttons, we stopped until grandma returned to west virginia, raided her button collection (and it is VAST), and sent a multitude of recycled buttons in all shapes, sizes, and colors, so i could complete the project.

4. i sewed the mittens together using embroidery floss and attached the collars using accenting thread:

5. making a mess is part of the fun, right? there seriously may be a needle stuck in my rug somewhere…..

6. ta da! my mittens are complete, for a fraction of the cost of the ones we saw at world market and crate and barrel.

moral of the story: don’t be ashamed of felt. it is awesome and can be so much more than bible school crafts.

disappearing pumpkin

most of you have probably seen the news from nestle that has warned american consumers that there will be a shortage of canned pumpkin in the grocery stores. before this happens, scoot over to your nearest harris teeter, kroger, food lion, genardi’s, or target to grab a can of pumpkin to (at the very least) make these cookies, which are sure to disappear quicker than the cans on the shelves.

i took these cookies to school last tuesday and they were gone by 9:30 that morning.
while visiting cousin kristin one day last fall, she made these for me and they were also gone by 9:30 that evening.
if you’re willing to attempt this recipe, please heed to the following: they disappear quickly. and half of them will inevitably end up in your own mouth. (i’m just sayin’….)

1. cream butter, sugar, pumpkin, and crisco together
*in the recipe above, i modified by using 1/2 cup crisco and 1/2 cup smart balance butter

2. add eggs and beat until fluffy

3. add dry ingredients to the wet

4. and to be sure it tastes extra yummy, add a little more vanilla and cinnamon

5. dollop hearty servings of dough onto a cookie sheet and bake at 375 for 10-12 minutes

6. while the cookies are in the oven, melt butter, brown sugar, and milk (cream works the best) in a sauce pan over low heat (do not boil). it is advised that you taste this carmel-ly goodness to make sure the sugar is dissolved. and if you taste it again, it’s okay.

7. take off heat and add powdered sugar

8. these moist, cakey, pumpkin cookies with carmel icing will solve any thanksgiving hankering….

9. feed some to a hard-working, studious husband in the dining room (he chose to study there for obvious reasons = proximity to kitchen)

sister, hermana, ma soeur

we can’t be away from each other for too long.
we’d travel to the end of the earth for each other.
we only ever fought about clothes (and that doesn’t really count).
we love to laugh, eat, shop, talk, and watch movies.
which we did in one whirlwind weekend in san antonio.

lauren’s company offered to foot the plane ticket for a family member to fly out to san antonio (a sort of “thank you for traveling and putting up with delayed flights and living out of a suitcase for 9 months). instead of a swanky hotel, we chose to stay at the most positively-rated bed & breakfast on both google and tripadvisor.

we knew it be an “experience,” and it lived up to all of our expectations (including a four-course breakfast every morning.) allow me to introduce the brackenridge house:

bennie and sue (the owners) were nice enough to leave a well-stocked fridge of goodies, local beer, sherry (as a recommended nightcap), champagne, and chocolate:

how’s that for southern hospitality?

lauren knew all the best, authentic mexican restaurants. we visited la fogata immediately after my plane landed:

we took a walk around the king william neighborhood of san antonio on saturday morning. this neighborhood was full of beautiful, stately homes:

and these folks built an eye-catching two-story sun room. how nice would this be?

when i mentioned to friends and co-workers that i was visiting san antonio, they all had the same response, “you must visit the riverwalk.” i had heard lauren mention this place several times. we spent most of our day on saturday visiting the historic arts village, la vallita, taking a boat ride on the river, and enjoying the beautiful 80-degree weather:

mr. boat tour guide:

we briefly visited the alamo (don’t feel badly if you have to click this link to find out exactly what it was….we both had incorrect definitions – so much for u.s. history class).

before going into austin for the night, we stopped at the main plaza, which is the most recent completion of the mayor’s attempt at bringing culture into the city:

san fernando cathedral:

main plaza:

as we were walking back to the b&b, i spotted an abandoned building, which had the most beautiful tile crumbling off from age. i wanted to take a broken piece of tile, but i refrained (barely):

thank you, lauren, for a wonderful trip! miss you already!

we already started to plan the possible cities/destinations for our next weekend trip together…..suggestions?

the answers

if you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “what were the questions?” then scroll down to yesterday’s post to attempt to master common sense, logical thinking, and problem-solving before looking at the answers.

1. if you chose “c” cannot be determined, then you’re the same as over 80% of people who answer this question. sadly, you’re wrong. the correct answer is a. here is how to think through it logically: annie is the only person whose marital status is unknown. you need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. if anne is married, then the answer is a. if anne is not married, the answer is still a. this thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning, reasoning that considers all possibilities.

2. the bat and ball question was described by nobel-prize winning psychologist daniel kahneman and his colleague shane frederick. many people give the first response that comes to mind – 10 cents. but this cannot be true becasue the bat would then have to cost 1.10, a total of 1.20. have no fear, your iq is no guarantee against this error. kahneman and frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at MIT, princeton, and harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest us of (besides my mom and pastor scott, who actually got this one correct).

3. a fellow james madison university’er, richard west, presented the german car question to a group of american subjects and they presented a similar scenario using a ford explorer instead of the german car to american subjects. interestingly, 78 percently of americans though car sales should be banned of the german car, but for the subjects for whom the question was stated as whether an american car should be banned from germany, there was a statistically significant difference: only 51 percent of americans thought car sales should be banned and only 39 percent thought the car should be kept off german streets (even though they had the same poor safety record). in other words, human beings tend to evaluate a situation from our own perspective by weighing evidence and making moral judgments that leads to dysrationalia.

4. the xyz syndrome scenario: the most common answer is 95 percent. but that is wrong. go back and read the first part of the question and try again. the answer to the question si that the probability a person who tests positive for xyz actually has it is one in 51, or approximately 2 percent.

5. most people get this answer wrong. about half of folks say you should pick A and 8; another 20 percent say you should just turn over a and another 20 percent say you should turn over other incorrect combinations, totaling 90 percent of people who get it wrong (except my mother once again). if you chose the letter A, that is correct. the 5 card is essential to answering this riddle. the 5 card might have a vowel on the back. and if it does, the rule would be shown to be false because that would mean that not all vowels have even numbers on the back. when asked to prove something true or false, people tend to focus on confirming the rule rather than falsifying it. we need to teach ourselves to think scientifically.

(Keith E. Stanovich, Scientific American Mind – he’s a professor of human development and applied psychology at the university of toronto).

fyi – in terms of celebratory mode of our career weeks, the rad techs are totally kicking some serious school psych booty. they’ve scored free movie passes, a sunglasses case, an umbrella, and a free lunch from one of charlotte’s italian restaurants. maybe we should take a hint from the rad techs!

represent!

traveling along I-77 towards west virginia on friday:

i’m reading the communique, a publication that my national organization sends out monthly; an article about advocating for our role as school psychologists within our school districts and states (because n’ary a soul truly knows about school psychologists and think we run in to the school, give an iq test, then leave).

erin: “i wonder if our school system will do anything for national school psych awareness week next week…”

anton: “erin – national radiology technology week is next week, too.”

now, some of you may think this is hardly trivial. however, we both chose to believe that it was a god-given sign that we both landed in the most appropriate careers for ourselves. and most of you know the road to career fulfillment can be (and has been) bumpy with a few detours in our household.

it must be noted that the rad techs are totally beating the school psychs in celebratory mode. he scored a t-shirt and they’ve eaten cake and doritos and yummy junk. the school psychs in my district? nada. (i did insert a signature on the end of my emails this week that documented our slogan). boring.

one of my favorite magazines (which eerily relates to anton’s future-career as a rad tech taking x-rays, mri’s and ct scans of the most fascinating human organ – da brizzzain) is scientific american mind. this past issue highlighted an article entitled, “the thinking that iq tests miss” by keith e. stanovich.

it discussed a breakthrough in research that psychologists have found that people with high iq’s often suffer from “dysrationalia” (i.e. no common sense, smart people doing stupid things). you know you can name several people who suffer from this syndrome. find out of you do, too!

take a stab at the following scenarios. i’ll post the “answers” tomorrow.
1. jack is looking at anne. but anne is looking at george. jack is married, but george is not. is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
a. yes b. no c. cannot be determined

2. a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. how much does the ball cost?

3. imagine that the u.s. department of transportation has found that a particular german car is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill occupants of another car in a crash. the federal government is considering restricting sale and use of this german car. please answer the following two questions: do you think sales of the german car should be banned in the u.s.? do you think the german car should be banned from driven on american streets?

4. imagine that xyz syndrome is a serious condition that affects one person in 1,000. imagine also that the test to diagnose the disease always indicates correctly that a person who has the xyz virus actually has it. finally, suppose that this test occasionally misidentifies a healthy person as having xyz. the test has a false-positive result of 5 percent, meaning that the test wrongly indicates that the xyz virus is present in 5 percent of the cases where the person does not have the virus. next we choose a person at random and administer the test, and the person tests positive for xyz syndrome. assuming we know nothing else about that individual’s medical history, what is the probability (expressed as a percentage ranging from 0-100) that the individual really has xyz?

5. four cards are sitting on a table. each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. two of the cards are letter side up, and two of the cards are number side up. the rule to be tested is this: for these four cards, if a card has a vowel on its letter side, it has an even number on its number side. your task is to decide which card or cards must be turned over to find out whether the rule is true or false. indicate which cards must be turned over. the cards have the following letters/number:
A K 8 5

good luck!

chair for chair

i was looking back through old photos (well, “old” means from may/june 09) and was promptly reminded that anton and i purchased a chair well before our most recent arm chair purchase from consignment 1st.

we found this apple green chair at home goods one day and thought that it would be the perfect punch of color in our beige-ish home. we even went so far as to buy striped lumbar pillows that accented the chair perfectly. we pushed this chair head first into the back of our corolla and hoped for the best as we traveled 2 miles to our home.

when we got the chair home, i wasn’t completely sold. we realized that we probably bought it because a 50-something woman with dyed red hair, sweater vest, and dooney & bourke purse was eyeing it up and stalking us as we were trying to decide on the deal. anton felt completely intimidated and wasn’t going to allow a woman who probably had 205739 arm chairs shuffle through her house win this gem. so we snatched it up quicker than a brad & angelina adoption.

and just as quickly, we were shoving it back into the corolla, saying goodbye to our passport into the world of colored furniture.

we’re curious as to what you think. did we make the right choice? do you prefer the apple green high back chair with brown sunbursts that screams modern and contemporary and is fully appropriate in a 20-something home? or do you side with the upholstered patterned, more traditional chair that we chose?

holy cuteness, batWOman!

possibly the cutest halloweeners EVER:

we present two of our six nieces, clad in pink, sparkles, and plenty of superwoman-ness head to toe:

what was your best halloween costume?

i remember wanting to be cinderella when i was in 1st grade. grandma made the perfect cinderella ball gown (you know, the white and blue one where she dances with prince charming before midnight) and i was adament about having “glass slippers.” so mom bought some white slip-on shoes (from hills, i think – remember hills????) and we poured elmer’s glue on them, and sprinkled silver glitter all over to make them sparkly and glass-like. i kept them in my closet for the longest time. if only i could have put my hair up into a lovely bun; but wait, i had mushroom head at age 6. and 5. and 7. yikes.

house guests

we’ve been rearranging and shuffling our furniture to make our home comfy cozy for our weekend guests pictured below (except lauren who was in philly cheering on her boys).

i’ve searched high and low for the perfect chair to bridge together the living room. i knew i wanted an upholstered, comfortable, streamlined, and semi-traditional/semi-chic chair that i didn’t have to fork out 600 plus dollars….
enter: consignment 1st. we found this jewel, which had been dropped off the day before from a furniture show room. brand new.

notice the pier 1/goodwill candle stand in the corner? it loves its new home.

we turned our 15 dollar target bookshelf found at goodwill into a tv stand for the living room. the seagrass baskets from ikea fit beautifully on the bottom shelf, which hides magazines and cookbooks.

we injected some shiny sparkle into the powder room bathroom with some steel-esqe picture frames from ikea:

’tis the season for mums. i fell in love with this rust-colored plant, which perfectly accented the pillows.

the piano now lives downstairs. great for entertaining toddlers, teenagers, and adults alike (all of whom press the “demo” button and pretend like they’re mozart. is this a requirement for all human beings?)

we switched up some of the dishes on the shelves and added our brown iced tea glasses, which brings in some contrast to the white and tan color scheme. old wine bottles are also repurposed here for an added punch of green.

remember the goodwill lamp? it found its home here in the guest bedroom. a shade from bb&b topped this off nicely (no pun intended).

remember the goodwill table we snagged for 8.99? it fits snugly between the furniture in the man cave to hold a surround sound speaker, a light given to us from doug & virginia (when she was nesting for lily), and a wedding picture.

for those of you who have any knowledge about the following home projects, please send all ideas, dos and don’ts to us immediately:
1. kitchen backsplash
2. crown molding
3. chair rail in dining room
can’t wait to for winter break to have a few days to dig in and get started on one of these doozies…….

goodwill hunting

my apologies for the hiatus.
anton and i have been playing freeze out for the past couple of weeks and my fingers are just now beginning to thaw.
whoever said moving to charlotte would guarantee mild weather until december/january was w.r.o.n.g.

in the mean time, i had a particularly successful trip to the university goodwill store on wt harris blvd. love love love this organization.

allow me to share the following treasures, which will later be featured in an updated house tour. (we’ve been busy hanging, moving, rearranging, and organizing).

i spotted this lantern-esque lamp that oh-so-gently whispers “nautical beach house” for a whopping 5.00:

goodwill (for your shopping information), guarantees a 3-day return policy on all lamps if you take it home and does not work to your liking.

this striking candle holder makes a bold statement and has my favorite earthy accent (sea grass) wrapped around the center. it originally hailed from pier 1 – it still had the 30 dollar sticker on the underside. goodwill was selling it for 5.99. i took it home with a firm quickness:

this table put us back 8.99 and is in remarkably good condition. i couldn’t let this piece go; it’s the perfect height for saturday morning coffee mugs, anton’s xbox controllers to rest upon, and the occasional wednesday evening dinner in front of the tv to watch our new favorite show.

as i was perusing the aisles, i saw a box that appeared unopened but had a really weird and gross oily substance spilled over it. as i looked closer, i discovered that it was the exact.same.bookcase that i had been eyeing on target.com:

only it wasn’t priced at 69.99.
it
was
14.99.

although it wasn’t my first choice of espresso, this chestnut bookcase will suit my fancy any day of the week, given it’s steal of a price tag.

stay tuned for where these goodies ended up in la casa de la banks…………

me, my shelf, and i

in between february and august of 2007, anton and i chose a wedding venue, dresses, tuxes, music, vows, rings, and; of course, dishes. i find it interesting how important choosing dishes can be for couples (women). some choose formal china to accompany a nice set of everyday. some choose a practical basic white 16-piece dinnerware set, and others choose a traditional pattern with matching butter dish, salt & pepper shaker, vase, and drinking glasses.

the possibilities are endless. and somehow, in the midst of choosing between the green apple or robin’s egg blue as a wedding accent color, we decided to nix the china (we were sure we could find a gently used set at a consignment store someday if we’d eventually morph into “forming dining room” people), and move full-steam ahead with these everyday dishes in brown and cream.

when we moved into our townhouse, we were super excited to have a dining room space. we knew that the traditional attire for a dining room consisted of some sort of buffet or china cabinet. both of those sound terribly grown-up and like really important and expensive things needed to be store into them only to be exposed on really important occasions when “company comes calling.”

we opted for a more modern, cheaper, and small-space-friendly option, using these shelves from ikea. scroll down for the before and after goodness.

remember the dining room back in may?

sunday afternoon: the dining room wall was looking terribly lonely.

anton, in an effort to quicken our trip to ikea and to streamline my brain, encouraged me to create my shelf vision on the computer (um…don’t laugh.)

power drill. enough said.

we were trucking along quite nicely, having installed the top shelf. as we attempted to attach the second shelf onto the wall, we realized that the wall was bowed ever so slightly. we were trying to brainstorm ways to remedy the problem, including a more contemporary design:

boo. i was not a fan.
onto lowe’s to visit monty.
monty suggested screw-in anchors and a washer to even out the playing field. worked like a charm.

anton surprised me with all of the shelves installed when i came home from work tuesday. i love my live-in bob villa.

after several revisions within a 24-hour period, i’ve forced myself to stop rearranging. with the final addition of injecting some serious green from my wedding flower photos into white frames, i’m ready to leave it be for awhile (at least until christmas……)

where’d all this stuff come from?
1. white picture ledge shelves – ikea – 19.99
2. white matted picture frames – lillian vernan by way of consignment 1 – 9.99
3. bamboo plates – ikea – 3.99 and 6.99
4. white plates – pier 1 summer clearance – 1.99 (salad) and 2.99 (dinner)
5. platter – calvin klein khaki collection – wedding gift
6. tropical plant – ikea – 1.99

i’m going back upstairs to rearrange.