Work in progress
In between copious amounts of baking and projects, we’ve been trying to renovate and reorganize our apartment. One of the ideas that I’m in the middle of is updating the large book case in our living room. It has always been filled with stuff, masks, bike gear and various odds and ends. I wanted to make it a little more presentable and hide some of the storage aspects. I embarked on a crazy mission to not only fill it with our books that were placed randomly around the house, but also to cover them all in colored paper.
First of all, I had no idea how many books we had hidden away in various drawers and closets that now had a place to be. Second, covering books takes quite a bit longer than I thought. Third, nice colored paper is expensive and doesn’t cover nearly as many books as I would like. It seemed like a good idea in the first place, but now it seems like a daunting task to finish.
As you can see, I’m about half way done. I’ve covered the storage boxes with mat board as well. Soon hopefully we’ll get some handles for them so they actually open without the use of a fork or some other implement.
before
In any case, I think it is much improved from before. Please excuse all the strange things hanging out in our place. You accumulate a great deal of oddities when you make movies. Hopefully I’ll have a finished update soon enough, along with some other cool renovations in the apartment.
Growing things
I’ve devoted the past week to home renovation. This involves simple spring organization like cleaning out my closet as well as a lot of other projects that have been waiting for the right season. For one, I plastered and painted our bathroom which was quite an arduous task. Luckily, I was able to offset the toxic paint fumes and dust with a bit of time outdoors creating a balcony garden.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not at all gifted when it comes to growing things. The only plant that I’ve been able to keep alive thus far is a single stalk of lucky bamboo that has now traveled with me from my past four residences to my current place. On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that you can be good at pretty much anything if you practice, so I’m trying again and going all out with a very small vegetable and herb garden and a few succulents.
If all goes as planned, soon I will have heirloom tomatoes, strawberries and cayenne peppers grown fresh to add to dishes. I’m even more excited for the herbs as the basil was so fragrant, it took a great deal of willpower to not just eat it right then.
I came into possession of some recycled pots of various sizes and filled them with some succulents and small cacti. There are some really strange looking succulents, like the lithop, that are just so cool. I honestly don’t even know what some of the plants I got were, but they look awesome. Also, some of the pots were extremely small so the tiny cacti worked out perfectly. I’m also particularly fond of an adorable little cacti with a name something like Red-headed Irish that has a few little clovers on the bottom.
Just a few hours spent planting and we now have our own garden oasis. Here’s to hoping everything survives. I can’t wait for the time when we have some real space to plant things.
I’ve also discovered the joy of baking mini-cheesecakes. I have been putting off trying these because of a lack of options for vegan graham crackers to use in the crust. I finally settled on some to try and went with a basic cheesecake recipe. I topped it off with an attempt at a vegan lemon jello. Unfortunately, even though it tasted amazing, the jello didn’t solidify and it was really more of a lemon sauce.
Since the mini-cheesecakes are obviously much smaller than regular cheesecakes, I ended up only using half the recipe with another half left over to be made. I got a little experimental and made a spiced molassas cheesecakes which were yummy but didn’t quite cut it for my standards. In any case, I will definitely be making more mini-cheesecakes as they are the perfect size for a little treat. They can be fancied up for special occasions or just eaten as a sweet little finger food. I predict mini-cheesecakes are gonna be the next cupcake.
handmade coffee table
