This year we are having two Thanksgivings, one with family and one with friends! The one with family (yesterday) was great, we had a delicious Turkey feast, and visited with family at Todd’s moms house. I made clam dip, some delicious cranberry sauce, and a Hershey’s Boston Cream Pie (with the help of my 7 year old that loves to bake) that turned out better than I thought it would. Our friend holiday party will be tomorrow and I plan to make some carrot cake, + round two of cranberry sauce, as well as a yummy apple cider, maple glazed turkey, YUM!! So I am going to share and link to recipes in this blog post.
Homemade Cranberry Sauce:
One Cup Orange Juice
One Cup Sugar
12oz pkg of fresh cranberries.
Dissolve sugar in orange juice over medium heat, add cranberries, and cook or about 10 min. until they start to pop (skin breaks). At this point, you can add any optional ingredients. I added blueberries, pecans and a little bit of allspice. Chill in fridge, sauce should thicken. Serve with turkey, mmmm! Optional: Pecans, orange zest, raisins, currants, blueberries, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice.
I used 3 parts Apple Juice (I like fresh home made apple juice)
1 part water
Lemon Zest
Small slice fresh Ginger
Several cloves (too many will make it taste bitter)
Cinnamon sticks
Simmer apple juice, water, and spices (except for the cinnamon stick) for 15 min. Pour through a small strainer, or pick out chunks of spices.
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Candied Pecans:
Pecans, 1 egg white, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 TBSP Cinnamon, pinch of allspice, 1 tsp salt
Add egg white into bowl. Mix sugar, cinnamon, allspice and salt in a separate bowl. Roll pecans in egg white, and then sugar mixture. Place onto greased pan, and back at 250 F for 55 min stirring every 15-20 minutes.
This banana nut bread recipe is the best! I am pretty sure my grandmother picked it up while living in Hawaii(?) in the 60′s. Not sure who gave it to her or how she got it, but my mom made this for us growing up and it is definitely one of my fav’s. I always put a little extra sour cream, so when it says spoon full’s, make it heaping spoon full’s, hehe. Enjoy!!
I remember wanting to play the violin when I was a little kid, but joined choir instead of band in school. My parents had me take piano in elementary school, played a few recitals… but I didn’t like it much, fought my way out of it and forgot everything. In my teen years, my goal was to play the drums, guitar and bass… I wanted to do it all, hahaha… so I ended up learning one song on the guitar, one song on the bass, and I could play a beat on a drum set. Now that Rockband is out, my 7 year old could probably play better than me, lol. So it has been a long time since I have played any instruments. I don’t know why or how… but one morning about a week ago, I woke up and decided that I would like to play the violin!! Fortunately I had an excellent week financially and had just enough extra money to get a pretty nice violin and some lessons. I started today, and I love it!! To me, the violin is magical… I love the sound. It was one of my favorite moments in Italy on our Honeymoon last year, hearing a violin echo down the streets in Florence.
Here is a video of me playing what I learned today:
Update: A few days after lesson #4 (one month of playing!)…. BTW, I am taking one class a week for a half hour, and practicing about 30-45 min a day. After watching this, I realized that on the first song, my bow is slipping all over the place. There are so many things to remember while playing, like bending my thumb, trying to keep the bow in the middle, certain amount of pressure on the bow, the notes to the songs, etc, etc. Can’t wait until it is all 2nd nature! We set goals at my last lesson, I am going to try to use my pinky which is short and stubborn. I didn’t even try using it in this video because I didn’t want to put you through that, haha.
Update: Its been about 3 1/2 months now and I think I have slowed down on learning a little due to being really busy over the summer. Here is me playing Perpetual Motion from Suzuki book one. I am having a super hard time playing it all the way through with out making mistakes, including on this video, lol.
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Update: 12-2011 – We had our first recital. I totally botched my solos, lol, my nerves got to me! So here is me with two others playing Carol of the Bells, which is full of mistakes… but more pleasant to listen to than my other videos, haha.
We got this recipe from some neighbor friends when we first moved to Utah back in 1985. It was one of my favorites growing up, and is one of my daughters favorites as well. I usually double the sauce recipe, and pour some over my rice… mmmmm!
I go this recipe from my ex mother in law, not sure where she got it. It’s another one of our family favorites! Rather than typing it all out, I just scanned it in. Enjoy!
I found this event while looking at Chip Coffey’s website and thought it would be fun to go to. Todd was going to be in Tokyo and there is no way I would go by myself, so I sent the link to my good friend Russ and told him we should go! He thought it looked like fun, so we made it happen. Neither of us are ghost hunters at all, but Russ is a psychic with medium potential, and I grew up feeling energies, etc. So anyways, this blog post is all about our experience at the TAPS (ghost hunters) event at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park Colorado from Nov. 5th-8th 2010.
The Stanley Hotel
The drive from SLC to Estes Park, Colorado was only about 7 to 8 hours. Most of the drive is through a ton of untouched desert with a few cities here and there. We talked about all kinds of stuff, listened to music, and also The Four Agreements by Don Miguel on the way. I think we left at 10am in the morning and got there around 7pmish. Estes Park is a gorgeous little town located up in the mountains. You have to go up a windy canyon road to get there and the scenery is just breathtaking. Fortunately we also had some really great weather pretty much the whole time we were there.
pic of me in room 217
Our cold’s got the best of us the first few days… we were drugged on our cold medicine and slept through the night the first few nights we were there. We did manage to go on a hotel ghost tour (pic to the right), the history is quite interesting… and also the fact that Stephen King stayed in room 217 where he was inspired to write “The Shinning”. We also learned all about all of the ghosts that are still known to haunt the hotel. Our mornings were slow, and we might have missed the first paranormal discussion while eating breakfast, but mostly made it to the rest of them. Some of the topics were Psychology of the Paranormal, Religious Demonology, Nephilim, Spirit Communication, etc. The TAPS team really does have a cool group of people/investigators involved like Adam Blai (a real life Exorcist for the Catholic Church), Jeff Belanger (Author and Legendtripper), Scotty Roberts (Editor of TAPS magazine), and Mike Brody (Comedian) just to name a few. They were all really nice, and definitely
TAPS people
mixed and mingled with the crowd which was really cool. I really wanted some sort of personalized experience from the whole event (not counting on any ghost experiences, lol) so I got a tarot reading from Scotty Roberts. I had a few drinks just beforehand, and can’t remember all of the details, but I do remember him talking about my creativity. Since he is the editor of TAPS magazine, I figured this would be the perfect time to pull out all of my business cards and show him what I do, LOL… Oh, and I told him I would take the best portrait of him that he has ever had, haha. After that, Russ and I went on to give our version of a ghost tour of the Stanley hotel posted below.
iPhone Movies starring Russ Lyman! Our ghost tour version of the Stanley Hotel…
During one part of the presentation, I could see a huge white glow around Adam Blai… but I am not sure if it was an Aura thing or somehow my eyes were doing something weird. The glow was extremely bright! I am a huge skeptic of seeing Aura’s, but definitely believe in them. So that was a weird experience.
So the last day we were there, we paid extra to see Chip Coffey… I didn’t really know what to expect. He came in, talked about himself, talked about his show (Psychic Kids) and then opened the floor to questions and then psychic questions. It seems like he was spot on with some people there. It would have been cool to have a personal experience with him, but it was only those few random people out of the crowd that were lucky. One of them was a girl who wanted to desperately find her one and only (this would be husband #4 for her). He said a name that came to him, and she turned to the crowd looking for him, or any guy that might be available, hahaha. Anyways, he ended up telling her to just “shut up!”. I think the crowd clapped… it was funny. Before he started the questions he asked if anyone hadn’t seen a horror movie… ever. One guy raised his hand, and Chip probably embarrassed him pretty badly telling him he’s the only one with a “we we” (or something like that) who has ever said that and he should get his email so he can send it to the seven other women he has ever met that is like that. It was to the point where none of us wanted to turn around and look who the guy was, because we didn’t want to embarrass him even more. I can see how some people would leave feeling pretty offended by Chip Coffey, and glad it wasn’t me. Overall, he was very blunt… and would tell you he could care less if you don’t like it (not very compassionate… at least to this crowd). I thought it was great to watch though, I really find medium capabilities extremely interesting. I would have appreciated a personal experience, but overall, would never pay to go see him again. Afterward, Russ and I got our picture taken with him. We were in a long line and rushed through… so it kind of felt like sitting by Santa Claus for a picture. I was so weirded out, that I forgot to make eye contact, say hello and thank you.
Later that night, our group was scheduled for a ghost hunt with the TAPS crew. To make a long story short, we ended up sitting in the dark for four hours (rotating rooms every hour) with about 15 strangers asking questions to thin air. And I say thin air because the ghosty’s were definitely avoiding our group for some reason (haha). I downloaded an iPhone app that is supposedly just another electronic device for a spirit to manipulate called iOVILUS. We only used this in one of the rooms, where one of the many words said happened to be “moist”.. Russ and I could not stop laughing!! hahahaha! If you don’t know us personally, the word moist happens to be one that Russ doesn’t like much, so it was already an inside joke. I actually recorded a bunch of audio trying to get evp’s, but am still trying to find motivation to go back and listen to it. Overall conclusion… I would never be a ghost hunter. I really don’t care to capture any evidence, or sit around dark rooms waiting for it. However, I do love having personal experiences with spirits or energies when they do happen. I would do it again for fun with friends, but not seriously.
Its been several months since I have had a good solid dream that I can remember. There might have been a few loosy goosy ones, that I thought… that was lame, and I am not going to write it down, haha. Anyways, when I have a good one that I like, I make sure to wake up Todd because if I tell him right away, I can remember it better. This one is another spirit/ghost dream. Really, it is only the second one I remember having, and the first is posted just before this one in my Dream Journal section.
In my dream, I was not at my current house, it was one of those that don’t really exist, one that I made up in my mind. I must have been a teenager because I lived with my parents (which I would never really want to do willingly). I remember one night, I got a feeling that there were spirits around the house. You know, the kind where people get a feeling that something is there, but they don’t see or hear anything. There is more to this section of my dream (I think), but I cant really remember it all.
I’m not sure exactly when or how this happened, but all of the sudden I could see spirits … and there was a lot of them. They practically filled my house! They looked no different than normal people, I knew they were spirits because I was in my home and I knew who lived there. I remember looking at them and watching them to see if I could see a difference, and the only way I could really tell (besides not recognizing them) is that they would act a little different. When in a crowd with the living, if they need to talk, they would whisper and not really even be paying attention to what was going on even though their world co-existed with our world and they were very aware of it. They saw the living like we see the living. When I realized that, I was thinking… man that would kind of suck because you can’t get involved or do anything!
Even though I pictured other people’s point of views of myself talking to mid air while talking to spirits, I did it anyways. I didn’t care that I looked crazy! They were around, and capable of having conversations with me… so there was no way I was going to ignore that, lol. So back to the beginning of my dream, where I had a feeling of spirits being around, but couldn’t see them. After having this wild ability to see spirits, and seeing their normal behaviors, I realized that the ones I had felt earlier were a little different. It wasn’t actually common for that kind of thing to happen. Maybe common for people, but not common for spirits. It was only a few of them that were purposely messing around by trying to taunt the living. I would compare it to a personality of someone in normal life who would steal a candy bar, and not feel guilty about it. Other spirits were actually quite respectful of the living and would even hang out in different areas of my house where it was less used.
There was a demon in my dream… but I wasn’t really scared of it. It tried to kill me with an axe. Even though I could see normal spirits like normal people… I couldn’t see or hear the evil spirit. But I knew it was there, and what it was trying to do. I think the demon was a “ghost” even to the spirits… but don’t remember it after them at all. I don’t know why it was after me, but I wasn’t experiencing fear in my sleep, so it wasn’t a nightmare or anything. I think I was way to interested in the other parts of my dream, lol.
One person died in my dream, it was a young man… not sure if I was still in my house, or who this person was. But hey, you’ve got to love dreams and how they don’t make any sense, hehe. So anyways, he dies and he is laying on the floor. All of the sudden I see 3 or 4 (ghost) men come in to get him or his spirit anyways. It wasn’t like a happy reunion. The men there to pick him up were very quiet and serious about the whole ordeal. Later, while talking to a girl spirit (probably in her early 20′s, and very normal), I asked, who comes to get you when you die. And she said, your father (I think depending on the ways he dies). Again, now that I am awake and can’t remember everything, I can’t quite make sense of it. When she said that, I was thinking, oh no, lol… I don’t want anything to do with my parents. There were a few other questions I asked about death, but my memory of this dream is already slipping, so I can’t remember.
Anyways, that’s about it. I love crazy intense dreams like that
Homemade Cranberry Sauce:
I didn’t get a picture of the Boston Cream Pie, There is a good one on their website along with the recipe at the following link: http://www.hersheys.com/recipes/5005/All-Chocolate-Boston-Cream-Pie.aspx
It is super rich, so small servings go a long way.
1-2 Cups Cottage Cheese
Maple Roast Turkey and Gravy
I used 3 parts Apple Juice (I like fresh home made apple juice)
Candied Pecans:
