Veggies

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on July 11, 2011.

 First of all, it rained today, so yay! The power actually went out at work for 3 seconds, which doesn’t happen. This is from earlier today:

So, when I was pulling weeds on Saturday, I was admiring my vegetable garden, and I thought I’d share.


That’s one side, with the 4 tomato plants, 3 of which are significantly larger because they get sun 13 hours a day, while the fourth gets it about 9 or 10.

These are my current pride and joy – my onions. I didn’t expect these to grow at all, let alone this big. I thought I’d get maybe 2 or 3 small onions, but at this point, every single one that we planted is growing, and they’re pretty big. Each leaf represents one layer of the onion, and they’re all at least 8 or 9 layers so far.

They smell amazing, too.

I’m also pretty in love with my carrots. These were planted early June from seeds, and I didn’t expect them to grow at all, let alone how many of them are growing. They’re pretty darn cute, too. Here, you can see some carrots next to our super cute

Here’s the cucumbers you can’t see in that first picture:

I hope they’re the climbing kind instead of the bushing kind. I don’t know, though, I wasn’t there when they were purchased. The climbing cucumbers did really well last year, though, so I’m hoping these do well too. They were pretty tasty.

Another thing that did amazingly well last year was zucchini. I think we actually still have zucchini bread (just don’t tell Mike and Brandon) from last year, so I hope these do well this year.

They were planted in this super rich soil from a seed after memorial day, and today, after the rain, those buds opened up and were a beautiful orange color. Which means we’ll get fruit soon.

The thing that I was MOST excited about in my garden was the spinach. I LOVE spinach. I could eat it all day every day. And ONE plant came up early and was getting big enough to be picked. Then Saturday, I went out to the garden and found this:

Some stupid rabbit ate my spinach! They didn’t eat the carrots, just the spinach (carrots are actually bad for rabbits’ digestive systems) but REALLY rabbit? was the necessary? I really need to put up rabbit fencing.

So finally, there’s the love of my life, my basil!

I planted it earlier this year from a “plant in the package” kit that was a year old. I expected one or two seeds to come up, not ALL OF THEM! I guess I’ll be buying Buzzy Seeds from now on. They’re the ones you get in the dollar bins at Target, which, if you actually read the packaging, they’re guaranteed to grow. The tomatoes are Buzzy, too. I’ll let you know the flavor when we get some tomatoes out of it, but the basil is an amazing, strong flavor, and I can’t wait to make pesto.

Speaking of Buzzy, we bought a bunch of cutesy pots with the names of the herbs on them (chives, parsley, etc) but it was impossible to get them out of these round pots. I thought I’d killed them all, but we seem to have chives growing.

Back to the basil, though. I planted this in Marchish, and then moved from school and back into my mom’s house. Well, I set the bag of basil on a box in the back of the truck so that I could organize some stuff, and it ended up being closed up in the back, driven around campus a bit, and falling to the floor of the truck! Poor, traumatized basil.

I did prune some basil today. There was a terrifying moment with a beetle, and I’m still too creeped out to look at pictures of beetles to identify exactly what kind it was. It’s sitting on my counter, looking pretty 🙂

What are you gardening?

Home Ownership

This was originially posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on August 29, 2011.

 Recently, I’ve been trying to figure how long it’s going to take me to save up enough money to buy a house. I had it figured that between the job that I hope to return to in December, my gargantuan tax return, and my savings, I would be able to put a decent down payment on a starter home by May. Too bad I forgot one thing.

Student loans.

I had it all calculated in my head this morning, and I was beating myself up for taking out $70,000 in loans, thinking that I would NEVER be able to pay it all off! I thought I had done so well, saving about $10,000 by graduating a semester early. My tuition averages (with the hikes EVERY YEAR!) to about $20,000 a year (I started at $19,000 and now I’m at $22,000) and I ended up taking out loans for every penny. I thought.

Just a few minutes ago, I realized that a HUGE chunk of my tuition was paid by Pell grants. While it doesn’t bring me down to the average of $26,000, it still brings me down to (including this year) $50,000.

This is my biggest regret in life. I didn’t apply for any scholarships (even though I was eligible for some pretty big ones and could have gotten a few)  because I was lazy. I could have spent a few hours writing essays and getting money for college, but I didn’t. And now I’m going to pay the price. Granted, it’s $20,000 less than what I thought it would be, which is a load off my mind, but I’m going to be putting 100% of my taxes, and probably around 50% of my future salary towards my student loans for the next 6 years. That means that even if I can get a great job, I’m going to look for a second, weekend job to try to pay off my loans. That means that I won’t be able to visit Chris as much after I graduate because I’m going to be putting all of my money towards my loans. That means I won’t be able to buy a house for a year or two unless I figure out a ways to make my money work. And then I won’t be able to buy as big of a house as I’d like.

It’s kind of upsetting, looking back, but obviously that means that I’ll have to work even harder over the next few months, at my job at school, and making things to sell online, at promoting my online sales, and at coming up with cheap alternatives to food. I’ve been looking at great, simple recipes on startcooking.com, which are basic recipes for beginners.

Has anyone else been recently disappointed by your prospective situation? Is anyone preparing to graduate and realize that you royally screwed up? Anyone have any ideas of how I can make $50,000 quickly and morally? I didn’t think so.

Student debt picture found here

Batter Up!

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on July 10, 2011.

I actually googled muffin jokes for that title. Embarrassing.

So yesterday, I mentioned that I got rid of an obscene amount of mail. Here’s about half of it:

I’m a little upset that I missed the rain barrel truckload sale, but oh well. It’s not like it rains anymore anyway.

So after I did that, I made muffins. Now, these aren’t ordinary muffins. I’m on weight watchers, and an ordinary muffin is too many points. These are low fat, low sugar, super muffins.

Can you tell what I forgot? Yup, the sugar is still in the cabinet above the coffee maker.

I got kind of excited, so no pics of the process, but I measured out the ingredients and mixed them together, and they were this fun grayish color. I also got a little cocky with the eggs and continued to try to separate the first one after the yolk had broken. Lame. Then I put them in the oven and went “Oh no! Pictures!”

It’s a bit blurry because I didn’t want to melt my phone, but you get the idea. Beautiful, grey muffin mix. I’d paint a room in my house that I don’t own that color. Just so I can think about these muffins all the time.

And then they cooked. For 30 minutes. It was torture. Which you now get to experience with me.

While I was choosing ingredients, I discovered that we have two different kinds of vanilla extract. One is Costco brand, and the other is from Mexico.

My vanilla choosing process went a little something like this: “Hrm… Kirkland? Xel-Ha? Doesn’t vanilla COME from Mexico? Ooo, this one was on sale!”

“I wonder how many dollars that is. I’ll google it later. Why does it say pet?” Then I turned the bottle back around and went “OO! Pretty temple. Gonna use the ZelXel-haaahahahahaaa

It’s $9.38, if you’re wondering.

Two muffins are in the oven. One turns to the other and says “Gosh darn its hot in here.” The other muffin replies “holy crap a talking muffin!”

I also love this flour scoop.

His name is scoopy. He’s going to mysteriously disappear when I move out unless I acquire a similar one.

Anywhooo, without further ado, blueberry volcanoes!

Don’t they just look amazing? This guy’s my favorite:

There’s actually a CUP of blueberries in these 6 muffins, which is a lot, but I love blueberries, so I’m a fan.

They’re a touch dry, so the next time I make them (And I will make them again soon) I’ll probably move them down a rack and cook them for 25 minutes and use more oil.

It’s like a blueberry dream. I’m probably going to try something with raspberries next. Or the basil poppyseed ones that I found the other day. We’ll see.

Here’s the recipe

Blueberry Muffins
Yield 6
4 pp. each

Ingredients:
-1 1/4 cups  flour
-1/2 tbsp baking powder
-1/2 tsp baking soda
-1/4 cup milk (I used 1%)
-1 tbsp canola oil
-3 egg whites
-1/2 tbsp vanilla extract
-1 cup blueberries
-1/8 cup sugar (I used baker’s sugar)

Instructions:
-Line muffin pan
-Preheat oven to 375
-Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda
-Combine all other ingredients (with the exception of the blueberries) in a separate bowl.
-Toss blueberries into the dry ingredients and make sure blueberries are well-covered in flour.
-Mix in the wet ingredients just until moist
-Spoon batter in muffin pan and bake at 375 for 30 minutes.

Note: if you don’t toss the blueberries in the flour mixture, the muffins will come out blue.

And here’s some nutrition facts:

Nutrition Facts
  6 Servings
Amount Per Serving
  Calories 161.9
  Total Fat 2.7 g
  Saturated Fat 0.3 g
  Polyunsaturated Fat 0.8 g
  Monounsaturated Fat 1.4 g
  Cholesterol 0.5 mg
  Sodium 260.8 mg
  Potassium 93.5 mg
  Total Carbohydrate 28.5 g
  Dietary Fiber 1.4 g
  Sugars 7.4 g
  Protein 5.7 g

I love this recipe builder at sparkpeople. It’s pretty convenient.

The Magical Garden

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on July 10, 2011.

My garden is magical. I swear. How else would it fill so quickly with weeds? It seems like yesterday that I planted my snapdragons and then BOOM now it looks like this:

Ok, so maybe it was 2 months ago and no one’s weeded since then. But really, it hasn’t rained in like 2 weeks and everything that’s not a weed is dying. We had an ozone action day on Friday. I’m still trying to figure out why, since it’s not like anyone who hasn’t been watering their grass even has grass to cut anymore (note the sad grass in the background of these pictures.) Even the succulent was like “WTFFFFFF mannn??”


Poor succulent. It just doesn’t understand.

And the Japanese Maple out front is none to pleased.

Kirby was just annoyed that he had to be outside.

Before going out back, I opened up all of the windows in the house and turned on the water out front that has a buried soaker hose. I turned on the radio and went outside to start weeding when all of a sudden I hear this weird white noise. I thought that it was the radio, but I had no idea why the radio would randomly go out so steadily and for such a long time. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the soaker hose had EXPLODED in one area, SHOT the impatiens that it was under at the house, and was spraying water at the open window. Uhh oops?

Anyway, through the magic of television the internet, this is what my garden looked like an hour and a half later.

See those snapdragons? We bought them for a grand total of $1.50 on 75% off clearance because they’d been through a late frost and they thought they weren’t salvageable. Turns out, they were. They’ve bloomed 4 or 5 times so far this year, a different shade of pink each time, and hopefully they’re going to drop seeds at some point so we have these again next year. I planted hyacinth and allium, but they never came up. Basically, we forgot to put them in the ground in November, so we put them in the freezer and hoped it might work. Clearly it didn’t, but that was another sale purchase so it didn’t matter that much.

After that garden, I moved onto the coreopsis area, where the garden gnome was hiding behind some thistle.

It cleaned up quite nicely

Free gnomeo!

There was also the parts that I didn’t take before pictures of

Just pretend that behind the ornamental grass and the other thing that I don’t know the name of and can’t believe I didn’t kill last year, there’s a TON of weeds.

It took be about 2 hours to get everything done. I packed a basket full of weeds (Which I also didn’t take a picture of) and I’m feeling pretty accomplished. I also cleaned my whole kitchen and got rid of an obscene amount of mail, including some quality coupon clipping time, AND made muffins from scratch (I’ll show you that tomorrow)

For now, here’s some pretty pictures of flowers.

I love lillies.

I don’t love the hoop things that we bought for them.

Doesn’t it look like a magazine? I don’t think there’d be so many weeds in a magazine.

Oh, and here’s what happens when you plant leeks and then ignore them for 2 years.

Whoopsie?

Women and Computer Science

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on April 17, 2011.

I just found this article: SCIENCE: Women Don’t Like Male Dominated Computer Geek Stuff and it was really interesting to me. Basically, a study was performed where they put men and women in different rooms, one furnished with stereotypical geek stuff, and the other with art and nature stuff. They were then asked to fill out a questionnaire about  computer science. The women’s opinions were significantly higher in the room with art and nature stuff than the room with stereotypical geek stuff.

Maybe it’s just me, but who were these women?? I love computers and computery stuff… not to mention Star Trek and computer games (Portal whaaaat??) I even took a JAVA programming class when I was in high school. Not that I remember any of it, but I still took it! In my defense, the class wasn’t that great and totally turned me off to ITT Tech. I just don’t understand why more women aren’t more interested in science. Maybe I just like to know things, but knowing how the world works is probably one of the most interesting things to me.

I wish more women liked math and science (I’m not saying I like math!)

Get Excited!

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on October 20, 2011.

Ok, maybe you shouldn’t but I am! I’ve spent the past few days trying to write meal plans for this summer. I’m almost done with one week. I’m starting Weight Watchers (again) this summer, and the plan is to stick with it in the fall when I finally get my apartment and don’t have to eat cafeteria food (which is incredibly bad for you, FYI.) I’ve fallen in love with Skinny Taste, which has a TON a recipes that I’m going to try this summer.

Anyway, the reason why I’m getting so excited is because this weekend, I found out that I can paint my apartment as long as I paint it back at the end of the semester! I’m also excited because an apartment means I need plates and silverware, which means I get to shop for housewares, which is one of my favorite hobbies.

Of course, shopping for housewares makes me do things like try to rationalize buying things like this $60 ($40 on sale!) 10 piece punch bowl set… which I know is completely ridiculous because why do I need a glass punch bowl in college, but it’s SO CUTEEEEEEEE!!


I really do love these dishes, though, and they’re on sale for $50 at the moment, so they might get a buy from me. I just wish the JCPenney website worked a little better.

I also really really like the simplicity of this flatware. It has this satin finish that I just can’t get over, and the way the spoons are shaped is beautiful. I can get obsessive over shapes. I just wish the forks were three pronged instead of four. That would just make everything feel a little bit more classy.

Wall Mount Rabbit Bottle Opener | PLASTICLAND

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on April 7, 2011.

Wall Mount Rabbit Bottle Opener | PLASTICLAND.

This might be the cutest, coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I want it!!

To-do Lists

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on April 03, 2011.

I don’t make to-do lists. To me, a to-do list is a list of things that you could get done at some point in time. There are no “to-do by” dates, it’s just a list of tasks, that you need to do, at some point. I tried to keep a to-do list last year. It was one page, with a number of tasks written on it – things I needed to buy, places I needed to go, and assignments I needed to get done. As I finished each task, I crossed it off the list. Things would be crossed off as time progressed, and eventually, I moved on to a second page.

The problem was, there were a few things on my list that just sat there, waiting to be crossed off. By the time I stopped writing the list, I still had “write a chapter” at the third spot on the list, along with a smattering of other to-dos that never got to-done. At a loss for what to do, I spent some time without a list, forgetting assignments and spending a lot of time running back and forth to the store, getting things that I forgot to get. I realized that I needed something, but a to-do list wasn’t it.

My self-motivating solution was goal lists. “You have to do this” sounds a lot like an order to me, but a goal is just that – a goal. It’s something that I want to do by a certain time in order to not feel like a failure. I have a daily goal list, a weekly goal list, yearly goals, life goals, and a bucket list.

I almost always put my daily goal list on my facebook (I should probably start using my twitter for more than just Foursquare updates). Right now it says “writing a blog and working in Indesign.” Those are my daily goals. I’m going to finish this blog, and I’m going to work on some of the things for my portfolio (so I can actually get something up here). This usually includes assignments that are due the next day, or things that I just want to do.

My weekly goals are mostly just things that I want to finish by the end of the week. When I was working on getting this blog set up, I was in the middle of a busy week, so I decided that if I was ever going to finish it, I would need to put all of the trivial things out of my mind – like playing games and going out – buckle down, and get it done. I was done with it two days early because of my goal list. This week, I made it a goal to finish my resume before Sunday. At 2 AM, I finished my resume. Two versions, actually. It gives me a sense of pride to accomplish my goals.

Yearly goals are things more like “get this internship” or “graduate in December” or “move out by March of next year”. Obviously, yearly goals are dependent on what happens to be going on at the moment they are happening. Obviously I won’t be able to move out in March if I don’t have a full-time job by January, but that’s part of the goal. Yearly goals are also obviously different because they aren’t hinged on December 31st like weekly goals are hinged on Sunday, they’re more abstract.

But not as abstract as life goals. Life goals are things like “get married by 26” and “have kids by 30” and “work in this position at this company”. These are completely different from my bucket list goals, which have nothing to do with a time limit, other than my life. My bucket list is more like a to-do list than anything else. It’s things like “go to Paris” and “write a book”. It’s things I want to do eventually, but I’m not going to put a time limit on it.

That’s how I reach my goals. I know a to-do list works for a lot of people, but if you’re not one of them, try a goals list. It really is a complete change.

Mini Apple Streusel

One of the suggestions on the back of the Sanders caramel sauce is to use it as an apple dip… and we happened to have apples. Then it mentioned a topping for apple pie. We didn’t have nearly enough apples for apple pie, but I remembered a pin that I saw once on Pinterest about mini apple pies. I wasn’t about to make a whole recipe of crust for two tiny pies, so I looked around the internet a bit and found this, which included a recipe for two pies.

And then my mom convinced me that I really wanted to make apple streusel, not apple pie. So I made the whole recipe for the crust, and just made four pies instead of two. This crust is one of the flakiest crusts I’ve ever tasted. And it slides out of the ramekin without being greased.

I ended up using two and a half apples instead of the one that the recipe calls for, though I didn’t add more of anything else to the mixture.

I put them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees on a baking sheet (it was easier to get them in and out) and started the streusel.

It looked a little like this. It was from this recipe… and it wasn’t very good. Next time, I’m using a real streusel recipe, like the one I found here. But, it adds a sort of dryness to the pie that I’m a big fan of.

I topped the pies with the streusel and baked them another 15 minutes. Then we ate dinner and let them cool…

And then we devoured them.

Here’s the recipe:

Crust

1 cup all-purpose flour
5 tablespoons shortening
a pinch of salt
2-3 tablespoons cold water

Pie Filling

2 1/2 apples
4 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoon butter softened
a pinch of salt

Streusel

1/2 c. all-purpose or self-rising flour
1/4 c. firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 c. butter

Cut shortening into flour and add salt. Combine until mixture is crumbly and even sizes pieces. Add water until dough forms into a ball. Cut into 4 equal pieces.

Peel and core apples, cut into thin slices. Add remaining pie filling ingredients and toss to combine.

Mix streusel ingredients in a bowl.

Press the dough into four 3″ ramekins. Place half the apple mixture in each ramekin, then bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Photos: Fall

This was originally posted on kimschoenherr.wordpress.com on November 7, 2011.

 Here’s some photos of fall that I’ve been taking recently. Fall makes me smile.

Have a great day/night/week!