Caramel Frosting

My grandma on my mom's side is known in our family for making a yellow cake (from a box) with caramel frosting that is REALLY, really good, especially with some quality vanilla ice cream on the side.  Here's the recipe for the frosting:

-1/2 stick butter or margarine
-1/2 cup dark brown sugar
-3 Tablespoons milk
-3 oz. plain cream cheese (whipped works fine)
-3 cups powdered sugar

-Melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the brown sugar.  Boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly.  Remove from heat and stir in the milk.  Put the pan back on the heat and boil for another minute, then cool.

-Using a hand mixer, beat the cream cheese with 2 cups of the powdered sugar and add the cooled caramel sauce.  Add the other cup of powdered sugar and beat until smooth.

I made yellow cupcakes when I hosted a book club this week.  To make them easy to eat, I carved a small portion out of the middle of each one with a paring knife, then filled the hole with the frosting and made a plop on the top. (I put the frosting in a ziploc bag and cut the corner off to do this).  They turned out great!

Sweet zombie daughter

I'm going to recommend that Toys R Us consider having a separate section for The Walking Dead building sets. ("Light Up Fish Tanks!")

Chuck and 1st Brother

I took the kids on an outing to the wonderful Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa the Saturday before Father's Day. My husband and I have an understanding that the best gift either of us could get on these days is some time alone. In this case, he was able to watch hours of U.S. Open golf without interruption or feeling like he should help with something.  

We all had a great time at the museum, cafe/ice rink, and at the gift shop.  I'd been once before with my mom and 1st Brother in the spring of 2007 when he 1st Brother was around 1 1/2 years old. I remembered the picture I took and got a 2015 version. Look at my grown up baby!:

I'm so vein

My pregnancy with Sister didn't do great things for my body. I somehow escaped major stretch marks with the boys, but after Sister, I have quite a few on my belly and more of a muffin top than before. I don't mind too much--those things are physical evidence that I've lived and sacrificed for my babies--but I was feeling less charitable about the varicose veins in my legs that didn't go away. This was the status of my lower legs in early spring 2015:

Besides looking bad, the veins made my legs feel heavy and tired after short periods of standing, and they were sometimes crazy itchy after exercising. Since my mom and grandma have them, I thought I'd have to resign myself to dealing with these annoyances, but my husband encouraged me to look into treatment options through Kaiser, our medical insurance. I found out I was a good candidate for sclerotherapy, and went in for a 30-minute office procedure where the veins were injected with a solution that made them collapse and disintegrate. It was a little painful, and I had to wear compression stockings during the day for 6 weeks. I was so amused at the way I looked in them that I texted this picture to my mom and sisters after my appointment:

Here are my legs 2 months after the procedure:

Some bruising remains, but they look better, and I felt relief from the heaviness and aching almost immediately.  It was considered a cosmetic procedure and cost $600 out of pocket, but that's well worth it, and I'll do it again if/when I have problems in the future.

Weird celebrity photos

How great/strange is this picture of Michael Jackson at James Brown's funeral from December 2006?:

I've thought of framing favorite weird photos of celebrities and hanging them somewhere in my house.  This one of Elvis and Nixon would definitely make the cut (reading the backstory on this picture makes it even better):

LDS church president David O. Mckay and film director Cecil B. DeMille were apparently friends, which explains this awesome picture with the two of them, Sister Mckay, and Charlton Heston dressed as Moses:

New Orleans

My husband accepted an invitation to speak at a professional conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in May.  It was over our 14th wedding anniversary, and we hadn't been away together in about 4 years, so I worked it out to tag along. (Thanks Mom and two sisters for watching the kids!  Nana was a genius and bribed Sister with cat videos to help things go smoothly). 

New Orleans had never been on my radar, but I found SO many interesting things to do as I researched, and it ended up being one of my favorite places ever. 

We agreed the best thing we ate was the bread pudding at Oak Alley Plantation.  My husband usually isn't a fan and wasn't even going to try it!  Good thing he did.

The plantation was beautiful.  It was surreal being in a place where slavery was a way of life at one time:

The roast beef po boy from Mother's was another favorite food.  We went back a second time later in the week:  

The beignets at Cafe du Monde weren't too shabby either.  We shared a plate of these after midnight two nights in a row:

We Googled our own walking tours, which worked great for the French Quarter.  Tons of interesting history, and I was frequently reminded of Disneyland's New Orleans Square:  

The one we did for the Garden District was a little confusing, but walking in circles in a neighborhood full of houses like these was fine with me:

This house was used in the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:

The nearby cemetery closed ridiculously early, around 4:00!  I got about 10 minutes to explore and never made it back there or to any of the other options in the area.  And I call myself a lover of graveyards!

When I read the popular jazz club Preservation Hall didn't have air conditioning--even in mid-May the weather was very hot and humid--we opted to catch some music at Irvin Mayfield's Jazz Playhouse.  It was two older black guys on saxophone and guitar and a middle-aged Asian man and woman on keyboard and drums, respectively.  They were really great.

We went to the World War II Museum on our last day in town.  Historian and writer Stephen Ambrose helped found it, and it was extremely well done. 

They even had a picture of a young Kurt Vonnegut with a short explanation of his terrible experiences:

I saw these gas light fixtures on a lot of buildings.  This one was outside the Place d'Armes hotel, my favorite of the three places we stayed.  Staying in the French Quarter is a must!

Another thing I noticed, this time in the delightful Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art: they use dry pine needles in their landscape design.  They were purposefully placed all over as ground cover and around trees:

The oak trees with resurrection fern and Spanish moss on them were gorgeous:

Here I am standing on the levee built to keep the Mississippi River out.  Behind me is Jackson Square with St. Louis Cathedral in the center, and to either side, the Cabildo and Presbytere buildings that now house museums that I really enjoyed going through. The exhibit on Hurricane Katrina, which hit 10 years ago, was especially intriguing.

This print by a local artist entitled, "Godzilla vs. The Big Easy" was a perfectly quirky souvenir that I had to get.  I'm going to start looking for art to remember my trips by:  

I was so happy to get a second chance to buy an alligator head after I didn't bring one home from Florida several years ago.  This guy is on my family room mantle now:

Sweet midgets

My grandma has some very disturbing eating habits: