Happy Chocolate Cake Day

At first thought, you might wonder why Chocolate Cake should have a specific Day, I mean surely every day is Chocolate Cake Day; yeah?

But it’s CHOCOLATE CAKE, so let’s roll with it….

 

So what’s the point of Chocolate Cake Day?

Well, that’s pretty simple:

Essentially, it is a day to celebrate that sweet gooey tasty morsel in all it’s forms!

 

So, how are YOU going to celebrate?

 

Here are some ideas:

 

Bake a Chocolate Cake!

You can find a super quick, super tasty, 3-ingredient recipe right here!

 

Buy some Chocolate Cake shoes!

Chris Campbell of The Shoe Bakery designs these mouthwateringly fabulous sweet feet treats.

 

Treat yourself to a lipsmacking gloss!

Similar glosses are available all over, but I found these on Amazon.

 

Read up on how the experts do it!

The amazing ChoccywoccyDooDah book;   Chocolate, Cake and Curs is full of gorgeous photographs, fabulous recipes and interesting tales.

 

Dress up your phone!

Claire’s Accessories have this snazzy iPhone 6 case.

 

 

I hope I’ve given you a few ideas for celebrating this auspicious occasion 😜As always, please share your own ideas!

Thanks for stopping by,

Crafty xxx

 

 

 

Great Chieftain O’ The Puddin’-Race

It’s just one of those things….

Knowing full well we are only feeding a family of four, I still find myself buying a haggis the size of a small nation every Burns night.

You’d think we’d learn our lesson with Christmas Turkeys, but oh no! Same mistake every year!

So, tonight we toast the bard in traditional fashion; a plate of steaming haggis, carrot, chappit neeps an’ tatties (that’s mashed turnip and potatoes to the sassenachs among you) washed down with lashings of Irn Bru – obviously!

Guess what we’ll be eating for the rest of the week….

The Kid votes for Haggis Nachos tomorrow.

Wednesday will probably be Balmoral Chicken, a firm favourite of The Teen.

Which leaves Haggis Pizza as OH’s dish of choice on Thursday.

What’s YOUR favourite way to serve haggis?

Happy Chocolate Cupcake Day!!

Chocolate Cupcake Day? Now that’s one day of celebration that we can all get behind, right?

Teen1 treated me to coffee & cake today, so of course, it had to be chocolate.

Did you indulge in chocolate cupcakes today?

It’s….International Taco Day!!

Yep, you read right, it’s International Taco Day! So in celebration of this delicious offering of deliciousness, here are 5 taco-inspired treats…

1. Taco Stationery

A set of 12 die-cut notecards; featuring a choice of beef, carnitas, veggie, or shrimp tacos; envelopes and a sticker sheet of garnishes make it easy to send tasty tidings to friends, family and fellow taco lovers.
Qué bueno!

Available from various stationery suppliers for between £10-£14

2. Taco Tees

How cute is that?
Cats & Tacos, the perfect pairing!

3. Taco Jewellery

Sites like Etsy are full of Taco jewellery, some of my personal favourites are:

These taco earrings by UK-based Sour Cherry

And this cute bracelet from Canadian BiteSize Minatures

4. Taco Handbag

For those of you who thought that Tacos were a cheap & cheerful snack, think again! This Charlotte Olympia clutch was on offer during the summer, bearing a rather hefty $1,295 price tag.
5. TACOS!!

They include a pack of soft tacos, sachet of pork seasoning and sachet of pineapple seasoning.
All you add is some pork fillets, fresh or canned pineapple, onion & coriander.

Kits can be purchased from most major supermarkets for around £2.50-£3.50, although we recently stumbled upon some offered at £1.50 as a limited time special offer.

So, did YOU celebrate International Taco Day? If so, please share below!

Back to Nerd School

Today, Teen2 and I did a spot of back to school shopping.

I had a dental check-up first, so I left him in the waiting room with the task of writing a list of what he needed.
I’m not sure whether the doodle was just that, or whether that’s what I’ve to show the barber when we go for a tidy-up later in the week…

It was all perfectly straightforward, almost too easy in fact! I find myself wondering what we missed….

He quickly picked out some smart shirts & trousers, in the regulation black and white, and a rather dapper pair of shoes; before getting down to the business of getting the ‘fun’ stuff…

First things first, you need a school bag:

MARVEL COMICS Messenger Bag Primark £8

This Marvel messenger bag is nice & roomy, has a few handy zipped pockets; inside and out; and a useful variable length strap. It’s pretty sturdily constructed and definitely belies it’s very inexpensive price point!

Continuing on with the MARVEL theme, we also picked up this great notebook:

MARVEL COMICS Hardcover A4 Notebook Home Bargains £1.29

Again, I was really impressed with the cost of this; it’s unusual to get ANY hardcover notebook this size at such a price, so getting a branded one was quite cool!

 

Swapping Fandoms, it was time to buy some pens:

LIGHT SABER Pens
Tesco £1.50, twin-pack

We also picked up a gift for Teen1’s Back To Uni supplies:

TASH TOPPER Pencil
Hawkin’s Bazaar Was £2.50, reduced to 20p!

I couldn’t resist this fab Moustache-topped pencil. It’s ridiculous and I don’t know if she’ll even use it, but it was too funny not to.

Have you done any cool Back To School shopping? (whether you’re going or not!!) I love browsing all the Back To School stationery aisles!! 😁 Any geeky purchases? Please share in the comments below. 

FANDRY: (n) Like regular laundry, but with way more Fandom

If you’ve been following the washing machine saga, you’ll have some inkling of just how much laundry we’d accumulated, and therefore how much ironing I have to do today….

It was while making a (small) dent in that mountain of ironing that I realized just how nerdy our household is!

It appears that, collectively, we own a huge amount of geeky clothing & accessories. Some of us have more than others (Take a bow, Teen2 )

In the past couple of hours, I’ve ironed the following T-shirts:

• Walking Dead
• Call of Duty
• The Incredible Hulk
• Hogwarts – x2
• Thundercats
• Dundee Mifflin (The Office)
• Fairy Tail
• Angry Birds
• Del Boy (Only Fools & Horses)
• Black Butler – x2
• He-Man

Then there was a bunch of band Tees:

• 30 Seconds To Mars
• Area 11 – x2 (& there’s another out on the line!)
• Westlife (!?!)
• MC Frontalot

I dread to think how much we’ve spent on the T-Shirts Teen2 has acquired at gigs over the past year or so

Amongst the ‘smaller’ items which didn’t need ironed, I came across:

• Star Wars
• Bambi
• Wonder Woman
• Batman

Even their handkerchiefs are Marvel-lous

Seeing how many fun items there were and remembering where & why they were bought certainly stopped the task in hand being quite so boring!

I must confess, my own geeky wearables tend to be accessories rather than clothing (most merch. doesn’t come in my size) but I have a fairly large selection of nerdy jewellery, bags & shoes.

Do you have some favourite geeky clothing? Please share in the comments! 

An impromptu escape…

Today was a lazy Sunday. Well, as lazy as it can be when the alarm goes off at 7; so the OH can drop Teen1 at the bus station to get to work and you know your new washing machine could be delivered pretty much any time…

As it was, it arrived around 11; so after we got it plumbed in, my day mostly revolved around making some sort of dent in the mountain of laundry that had accumulated!

After Teen1 got home and we sat down for dinner (maple roast pork, potatoes, broccoli & carrots; in case you were wondering…); Teen2 started getting ready to go to *Yet another social event* about 40 minutes drive away.

Realizing that the Dad-taxi would have to do the roundtrip twice, I suggested tagging along to keep him company.

It was quite a nice night so we had a wander around town.

I had forgotten how many interesting little buildings there are dotted around St Andrews.

I especially love this stationers & bookshop. I always think it wouldn’t look out of place in Diagon Alley!

It started to get a little rainy, so we stopped off for a drink. Have you tried one of Starbucks’ new Caramel Coffee Jelly drinks yet? Yeah, I know! It sounds weird! But, it was really good.

I also had time to work on today’s list for the #listersgottalist challenge.

The rain had stopped by closing time, so we took a stroll round past the castle & cathedral ruins, along by the water and down to the harbour.

We’re not sure WHAT this is/was!
We think perhaps an old public paddling pool?

I love taking pictures where something is ‘framed’ with something else, like through windows, doorways & gates. I guess it’s one of my ‘things’.

We had a giggle at the blatant yet tenuous link employed as a marketing tool here…

It was really fun to just hang out together for a couple of hours and having been reminded how nice a town St Andrews is, we’re planning on heading back across during the week; when everything is open. It’s actually been a while since we’ve had a family visit to the castle & cathedral, and there are tons of places to choose from if we decide to stick around for something to eat.

Have you had any opportunity for a few hours impromptu escape recently?

As always, thanks for reading xx

Fixing stuff

Today I was suppose to share a happy mail post with you but something else got in the way and I didn’t get round to taking pictures, so I’ll save it for another day!

THIS….

…is what got in the way.

The timing was, of course, impeccable :-\
It’s been pouring with rain all week so the laundry had piled up, and all of a sudden the washing machine decided to stop spinning.

Which was just dandy since after replacing the oven last month, the last thing we needed was buying another large kitchen appliance!

Anyway, we pulled it out and had a look and I think we can fix it!!

So, tomorrow we go to pick up some new carbon brushes & attempt to fit them – wish us luck!! 😀

Normal post services will be resumed tomorrow (unless I make a particularly good job of it and decide to become a washing machine mechanic 😛  )

I’m going into space….

Well, OK; I’M not physically going into space, but my name is.

Around a year ago, I heard about an initiative called Messages to Bennu , run by The Planetary Society, whereby you could sign up to have your name sent into space on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.

The Launch.

Set to launch sometime within a 39 day long window, starting 3rd September 2016, OSIRIS-REx will be the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth.

The Mission.

It will take the spacecraft a little under two years to reach Bennu, the asteroid in question, at which time work will begin on its primary objective of collecting samples of what is believed to be pristine carbonaceous material from the early Solar System. Once collected and returned to Earth, it is hoped that the analysis of this material will provide important clues to the origin of life on Earth and the likelihood that life may have originated elsewhere in our solar system.

The Return.

Again, there is no concrete time for return, but the window for departure opens in March 2021; putting OSIRIS-REx on a trajectory that will intersect the Earth’s orbit in September 2023.

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So yeah, thanks to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission and The Planetary Society, my name will hitch a ride to asteroid Bennu and spend 500 days there before returning to Earth in the Sample Return Capsule; a seven year round-trip!
There are also plans to store the same data elsewhere on the spacecraft, so “I” will also continue to remain in space long after the sample return capsule returns to Earth.

They even supplied me with a rather nifty little certificate:

My fancy-schmancy certifimicate

You can find out more about becoming involved with The Planetary Society here and more about the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission here.

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With a September 2014 deadline, you’ve missed the opportunity to add your name to this mission, but by signing up here, you can receive notifications from The Planetary Society and you’ll be able to find out about next time they are sending names into space!

What you haven’t missed is the deadline for my Stationery Giveaway, so if you haven’t entered yet : DO IT NOW!!

I fell off the planet…

Okay, so ya know how sometimes the world is spinning but it seems to be going too fast & you let go and end up flying off in the wrong direction?

Well, that was me.

I’ve been AWOL online (and to a certain extent IRL too) due to illness, overtime, secondment, workplace accidents, kids lives going at a million miles an hour, my mum’s surgery & subsequent complications…. I think you get the picture, so there’s no need to bog you down with details!

Anyway, I have a plan…
And maybe, just maybe it might work & I might get totally back on track before heading back to work next month.

In the meantime, how do YOU deal with it when everything gets too much? Stress-busting tips, organisational ideas, chocolate cake recipes, whatever; please share in the comments.