doors and windows 7

Steinbach, Germany

Steinbach, Germany

Steinbach, Germany

Steinbach, Germany

Steinbach, Germany

favorite shop friday: mister rob

Today I bring you the delightfully wonderful work of Mister Rob!

Mr. Rob Ryan has a wonderful little shop filled with the most wonderful tiles, screenprints and lasercuts from his UK studio.

The skill involved in his work is impressive enough, but it's the simple imagination that goes into his designs that make him unique...

These are words and images I would like to invite into my world! Invite them into yours at http://misterrob.etsy.com/.

spam-a-lot

On one of our days in Minnesota we took a trip to one of the funnest places I've ever been...the Spam Museum. Yes, that's right...Spam!

In the little community of Austin, Minnesota, the Hormel plant is in full swing making so many food products Americans love and one that if you don't love it, you have to have a least have a sense of humour about it (because Hormel certainly does!).

So, yeah, Hormel built this whole museum dedicated to Spam. The museum is, of course, very educational: you learn about the history of Spam, the role Spam played during World War II, and how Spam is made and canned. And it's all a ton of fun: race each other in canning Spam, play a game show testing your Spam knowledge, and, of course, watch the entire Monty Python Spam skit. And then there's the gift shop with not just every variety of Spam you didn't know existed but over 300 objects with the word Spam on it.

And if you didn't like Spam already going into the museum...well, you're still not going to like Spam coming out. But you'll be able to give Spam some credit for providing a really fun afternoon !

old-fashion american road trip

What is it about a change of location that totally messes up your routines? My day-to-day really hasn't changed much since moving to Texas but I just can't seem to get my blogging in anymore!

I suppose I am having new distractions. My husband just found a new job in a little town just west of Houston so now we're hunting for a new car and a new home and I'm still job hunting myself. But we took a break from all of this hunting for Thanksgiving last week and drove up to Minnesota with my parents to spend the holiday with my mother's sisters and their families.

Rochester Minnesota is about an 18-hour drive (20 hours with rest stops, gas stops, and food stops) from Houston and we drove it all straight through. It was actually not a bad drive at all. And I have actually been craving a good road trip for a while.

I realized while I was living in Germany that road trips are truly an American thing. No one loves their cars so much, has such a lack of a train system, and has created an entire highway/interstate culture like Americans.

I noticed driving long-distance in Germany that you just don't get those long stretches of roads with nothing. There is always something. European towns are so compact with relatively little distance between that you're always within sight of at least a village and the major cities are never more than an hour or so away from each other. You never get "away" from anything.

As you drive cross-country in America, as many of you know, most of your trip is going to be empty fields of grain or cattle with the occasional farm house and truck stop and last-stop-shopping for American Indian artifacts and hand-painted billboards advertising the state's best BBQ. I missed those long stretches of flat plains and the endless winding through mountains without seeing a bit of civilization.

So this road trip to Minnesota really made feel that I arrived home.

And our Thanksgiving was really good, too!

favorite shop friday: la belle fairy

I've just finished reading some books written in a Victorian fashion with much talk of cravats and petticoats and waistcoats and corsets and so I've been in a lady-like Victorian kind of mood and began eyeing what corsets could be found on Etsy. I've found the funnest shop filled with pretty corsets prefect for when I'm in these period piece kind of moods!

La Belle Fairy is your one-stop shopping for all your cinching, boning, lacing, flattering figure needs!



Such pretty shapes...



Such soft satins...



Such romance and femininity...



So much fun!

And don't worry about fit...these corsets are custom made in Canada to fit your figure!

Of course you need a corset! Find your perfect figure at http://labellefairy.etsy.com/!

my sister, the cupcake baker

Man, have I ever been neglectful!

Sorry for the lack of posts the past couple of weeks...I've been getting settled here: getting over jet-lag, sprucing up my resume for job-hunting, hanging out with family and trying to get used to being in America again. I'm missing Germany something awful but I'm seeing a lot of perks to being back in Texas...like the yummy Texas food and spending more time with my family than I've had for the past two years (or more!).

One thing I've been especially enjoying that combines food I can't get in Germany and my family is my sister's new cupcake business! She started up a cupcake baking business, Seriously Cupcakes, this past year and I've been dying to taste her work for months, espeically since Germans don't make cupcakes...but now I'm cursing her evilness because I'm surrounded with cupcakes I can't stop eating!

Susan seriously makes a good cupcake! I'm deeply impressed at how good she can make a simple vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting (but it's probably the vanilla sugar, vanilla bean and Madegascar vanilla extract she uses in both the cake and cream cheese frosting...not to mention the obscene amount of butter). Just when I thought I was starting to get tired of eating such rich little cakes, she brings over some coconut cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting (a total of 6 sticks of butter went into these little bits of heaven) and I'm hooked again.

If you're in the Houston area and are interested in getting addicted to some amazingly good cupcakes, you can contact my sister, Susan, through her cupcake-y blog, No Seriously, No...Seriously.

americans!

And so...we are back in America.

Our long traveling went smoothly. But we're feeling a little more European than American right now with all the streets feeling too wide, the cars too big, the city too sprawling, and the east Texas air too humid. We're going to have to do some adjusting! So let's make this an All-American post today! And what's more American than Chuck Norris!?

Are you familiar with Chuck Norris' 1986 cartoon, Chuck Norris Karate Kommando? It is horribly made, kind of strange, and hilarious.

This is one of my favorite clips from the few episodes that got made. I find it strangely poignant.

Is Chuck trying to tell us something about American culture? Discuss.