When the Heavens Line Up Just Right

Once in a great while, Father God and Lord Jesus just really bless my socks off, and this was a week of such blessings!

My Etsy.com store items are starting to sell, which is great!  It's always humbling and satisfying when you take the time to make great jams and jellies, and someone buys them.  My Facebook page with other items Etsy won't allow (not homemade enough) got a new fan, which is good news, too!

I got a new bowl with a handle on it for my Kitchen Aid, and the description states it should not fit my particular model, but it fits as perfect as the factory bowl does.  It was also on sale at $10.00 off the normal price, so I lucked out.  It's exactly what I wanted for an early Christmas present!  Now when I start kneading bread in the bowl, I can actually get the bowl off the stand without having to call for Fred to help me remove it.  LOL...

The downside was that someone bought the bowl, replaced it with their non-handled bowl, and obviously returned it to the store.  When I say "obvious", I mean the used bowl had scratches and was dirty!  So someone ripped the store off by returning their old bowl and kept the new bowl.  That's just wrong on so many levels, but I'll leave it for you to ponder.

I landed the contract job I'd been praying for, and it's doing exactly what I love and what I'm best at inside the insurance field.  I can't tell you just how happy I am to be working again after having been off 8 full months.  Granted, it seems when I'm "unemployed", I'm working my hardest!

This year from March through July, I helped my friend:

1. redo his backyard deck (added a few feet to it), tore out the old plastic lattice around the base and installed nice pressure treated wood lattice that's been stained and weather protected a second time with Australian timber oil, set up a new canopy system that covers the entire deck, and bought him a double barbeque (one side's gas, the other's charcoal).  
2. We also reclaimed a furnace room and built him a tool room with a workbench and pegboard for his tools.  
3. Then we build a huge bookcase that acts as a divider and storage (around a metal support pipe) and created a workspace and office for me.  It has a handmade built in desk with two support cubicles, and tons of space behind it on the floor to store stuff rarely used.  In the future, there will be ceramic tile put down.  The same tile that stars in the main office/lab will go throughout the basement (except for the workbench area), and has already been purchased along with tons of mortar and grout. 
4. We've laid down ceramic tile in what's going to be his office, and we framed over concrete block walls and hung sheetrock on it to create a space where he can now hang shelves on the walls.  
5. We stripped the staircase down of its old sheetrock and hung a fresh ceiling and new wall, installed new mini spotlight cans so the stairs are well lit, ripped off the old nasty carpeting and stripped the stairs down to bare wood, stained the stairs, and installed really great 1"X1" mixed colored "bling" tiles on the vertical surfaces of the staircase.  

After all this work, we decided to take a break, and only recently have I been doing some finishing work again on the sheet rock.  If all that wasn't enough, Fred and I have been refinishing and redesigning the kitchen cabinet that was given to us, and I KNOW it's going to look phenomenal when it's complete.  We also have a huge walk in pantry (9'x18') that's going to be incredible!  There's going to be a huge food dehydrator and a wine rack (maybe a climate controlled wine cooler), lots of shelves and great food storage in baskets, bins, and under the staircase will also be reclaimed space.  The floor will also have ceramic tile.

God also gave me some great ideas to dress up and finish the kitchen cabinet restore.  He also showed me how to deconstruct it so I could build another for myself, or maybe sell a few.  It's really satisfying when you can see how something's put together and understand enough how to build it from scratch.  When that's completed, it's going back to my friend for her Christmas present, and I'm sure she'll be shocked.  "IS THAT THE CABINET I WAS GOING TO TOSS IN THE TRASH IF YOU DIDN'T WANT IT!?!?"  Yup.  :)   She's going to LOVE the cabinet with its new modifications.

And if all my good fortune wasn't enough....I got a brand new creme brulee kit at a yard sale today.  It was listed at $29.95 on the box, marked down to $10.00, and the woman sold it to me for $3.00!!  Now that's a STEAL of a deal!  I still had one more bonus coming my way, though.  My friend gave me a bunch of stuff when she moved, and just two days ago I was going through a box when I saw a can of butane.  I had NO IDEA what on earth I was going to do with a full can of butane as I had no devices that took it.  Well, now I do!  So for $3.00 I got the torch, a cookbook, a 8"x8"x2" pan, 4 ramekins, and a rack - everything brand new!

God has been VERY GOOD to me this week!

I guess maybe the meringue cookies won't be on the list "to cook" next after all...the possibilities with this torch are almost endless!