I vow to help you love life, to always hold you with tenderness and to have the patience that love demands, to speak when words are needed and to share the silence when they are not and to live within the warmth of your heart and always call it home.

Monday, October 24, 2011

DIY Vanilla Extract


With the holidays quickly approaching comes the annual brainstorming of ideas for homemade Christmas gifts! We have done homemade gifts every year since we've been together. We enjoy baking and crafting gifts more than shopping at malls and departments stores, and it's always much more kind on our budget. One idea we loved was do-it-yourself vanilla extract. The recipe is so simple that we couldn't resist, especially with all the holiday chefs in our families that could put it to great use!


To get started all you need is a kind of seal-able jar or container, cheap vodka and whole vanilla beans

We ordered ours from this website http://www.myspicesage.com/

For a pint sized jar we placed 8 whole beans in each jar, then fill with vodka

 This needs to sit for at least 2 months for the beans and vodka to do their magic. When you're ready to use the extract you can leave the beans in the jar, no need to remove them. The longer you wait the better and more potent it gets! Enjoy!




























































Sick as a Dog

3am
10 pm
We knew that living in the country we should expect to run into snakes, spiders and scorpions. We soon found out it's hard to brief our dog on the rules of not sticking your nose into big, dark holes or getting within stinging reach of scorpions. We're not 100% sure on what exactly stung him in the face, but we're thinking a scorpion. There has been a severe drought here this summer, so the scorpions are continuously on a hunt for water sources which brings them into our house on a daily basis. On this night, I came home from work about 9:15pm and Zeus was fine, greeted me as usual. Around 10pm I noticed his muzzle had these hard bumps beneath the skin, and they were popping up at a scary rate. We gave him some children's benadryl then tried to call the vet. Of course it was a Saturday night and the vet didn't have an emergency phone line. I woke up about 3am to check on him and his poor little face had swelled to the size of a cantelope! As you can tell, he was miserable. We pumped him full of more children's benadryl and other drugs to help him with the pain and swelling. Luckily around noon the following day his face began to go back to normal, and then we got that return call from the vet. He said there was really nothing they could have done except give him more expensive versions of the medicine that we gave him. Thankfully Kit's mother is a nurse and knew what drugs a dog can have and what drugs can be taken with others. Funny thing is, when Zeus comes across scorpions now he veers far away from them and no longer has an uncontrollable urge to shove his nose at them. Old dogs can learn new tricks!