Minty Citrus Sweet Tea

This year I'm trying to broaden my horizons and give things I don't like another chance. Green tea is supposed to have like a zillion health benefits, so it has been on my list of things to force myself to like. I typically just don't like tea. Really, I just don't like the taste in general. In Louisiana EVERYONE is crazy about sweet tea, and I'm just not into it. But I like *this* tea. It's sweet and tangy and refreshing and not too tea-ey.  My roomate said it tasted like "beauty and flowers" in a cup. It was also described as "ambrosia," which I learned means "food of the gods" and is also a flower. Additionally, this tea is super healthy - antioxidants from the green tea, tangerines have tons of vitamin C, plus yummy fresh home-grown mint. 

I made a big batch because I wanted to fill this super cool drink dispenser I got for Christmas, so you can cut it in half or thirds or fourths if you have a smaller container. You will need:

24 cups water

20 green tea bags (I used mint-flavored green tea for extra minty goodness)

4 tangerines (or oranges, clementines, mandarins, satsumas)

A bunch of fresh mint 

Start with 24 cups water in a large pot.  Bring water to boil.

When water is boiling, add your 20 tea bags. I used Stash Organic MerryMint green tea, which has a strong spearmint scent (although strangely little spearmint flavor). It's okay - I liked the version I made with regular green tea better. This Stash tea was super cheap on Amazon though - under $14 for 100 tea bags. However, now I am stuck with 100 slightly medicinal-smelling spearmint tea bags. You can find it here. They have a variety of different flavors. I think I might try a peach mint tea next. 

Let water boil with the tea bags in for about 3 minutes, then turn off the burner and go shopping, walk your dog, watch a movie, paint a picture, or whatever, until the pot cools down to room temperature. I just left the tea bags in while it cooled. My whole house smelled like spearmint when I got back from the grocery store.

Cut up your tangerines into quarters. Squish the quarters into whatever receptacle you'll be using, so all that good juice comes out.

Add your fresh mint to your pitcher. I just cut a few stems off my sad, crooked, little mint plant (and yes, that's a dog bowl that I keep it in. Things gotta pull double duty around here). Can you tell which direction was facing the sun? I suppose I should turn it every once in a while! I squashed the leaves and stems a little before I put it in my dispenser - that lets the flavor osmose into your tea.

 

I put the tangerine quarters in my drink dispenser because we drink this pretty quickly. If you're not gonna use your whole pitcher in a week, I'd leave the quarters out so they don't get moldy and gross. Tangerines also have a TON of seeds, so if you don't have some kind of filter on your pitcher, the seeds will come out in your cup. Clementines are just as sweet as tangerines and have way fewer seeds. If you want to add more tangerine flavor, you can zest a rind or two, and throw that in as well.

If your tea has cooled down enough, just go ahead and pour it into your pitcher, and stick it in the fridge.

Ta da!  You're all done.  I like my tea a little sweeter, so I add a packet of Splenda when I have a glass. 

Cat Massage

I can't tell if this lady is serious or if she's trying to mess with me. "Use two hands to double your pleasure and double your fun!"

"You don't need a swimming pool for this breast stroking!"

Kitchen Cabinet DIY

Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR simple, inexpensive, and relatively quick kitchen DIY projects!  I first did a full re-paint and stencil to warm up the cabinets, then I added a simple, cheap kitchen backsplash, then I lined the cabinets and drawers with a pretty shelf-protector paper, and finally replaced the knobs on the cabinets and drawers. So much better!

Kitchen Before: White...so white...everything was just bleak, stark white.

That area behind the kitchen sink was disgusting - years of food splatter and gross sink water splash was stuck up there.  All the yellow paint behind the sink had turned kind of a brownish color. Blech.

What a difference some paint makes!  I used a gallon of Benjamin Moore "Canvas" to re-paint all the cabinets a much warmer, prettier neutral cream color, and used a quart of Benjamin Moore "Exotic Red" for the stenciling. The stencil was from Hobby Lobby, for $3.99.  I did have to take down all the cabinet doors to paint them.  That wasn't that bad - all I needed was a screwdriver and they came down and went back up fairly easily. I did two coats of "Canvas" on everything, and when that dried, just painted the "Exotic Red" over my plastic stencil.  I let that dry, then re-hung the doors.

The backsplash was a huge bargain - I found these chocolate, tan and cream glass tiles for $1.99 a square foot on sale at Lowe's one day. I hadn't even planned to re-do the backsplash at that point, just found these tiles for SUCH a good deal!  Keep an eye out for sales on tiles - you can get SUPER cheap ones to buy now and use for a project later.

 I also made sure to get small tiles with plastic backing - this made it SO much easier to put them up because I could just cut off one of the rows of plastic-backed tiles to get them to fit instead of having to rent or buy a tile cutter. The middle, decorative element isn't even tile. Those decorative tiles are SO expensive - like $4 for a 6'' piece, and my area here is approximately 13', so that would have been over $100 just for that little decorative strip down the middle.  Here I used an $8 piece of crown molding, and spray-painted it with a metallic bronze shade. I just stuck it to the tile grout between the two rows of tiles. ::shrugs:: It's worked out great!

 Next, my super-boring white cabinets were spruced up with some fancy black and white floral cabinet paper from Target. It took about an hour and $15 to re-paper all the cabinets and drawers. They look SO much cleaner and organized.

Lastly, I changed up the plain, round, white knobs for these bronze oval and rooster knobs that my mom had leftover from when she changed her knobs out. These things are expensive - like $2-$5 APIECE at Lowe's and Home Depot, so if you can get some new ones for free or off Craig's List, I highly suggest it. 

I didn't really think different knobs would make that much of a difference, but they really do. 

Altogether, these 4 projects together cost about $150, a massive bargain for how much better the room looks!

Fun Facts About Sloths

"Some sloths appear green because there's algae growing on their fur, which provides them with camouflage. That's the same excuse I would give if I moved so slow that algae grew on me: "It's camouflage, mofo. Mind your own business."

"If you're having a stressed out day, remember the sloth. They don't do sh*t and haven't gone extinct. You can afford to take a nap."

If You're Happy and You Know It...

That is the hilarious shirt my roommate got me for Christmas.  I started clapping like a retarded seal as soon as I opened it.

Louisiana has been bombarded with record rainfall the last two weeks. The downpour has been nearly nonstop, dumping over 10 inches of rain is as many days.  Recently, the temperature plummeted from high 60's/low 70's to 36 degrees, currently. More rain is reported for later today, with the possibility of snow showers overnight.

Louisiana is NOT set up for snow. People are trampling each other at Walmart for milk, bread and canned goods, and the gas pump lines are inhibiting traffic flow. LSU as well as the local parish schools are considering having a snow day. I'm sure someone on the highway is holding up traffic with their flashers on, "just in case".

As a mid-Atlantic native, I find this preposterous. Seriously, people! Suck it up. It's just some snow flurries!  It's not even going to stick after 10 inches of rain! The entire state of Louisiana is one big puddle at the moment, and it's been 60 degrees or more up until now. I highly doubt that the entire state is going to spontaneously freeze over the minute the thermostat drops below 32.

I see this phenomenon is also happening in California:

Hair Dryers and Fake Vomit

I have had the same hair dryer since I ever started blow drying my hair. It was my faithful, trusty workhorse all through high school and college.  It was totally adequate. I had no qualms. It recently got covered in wax while doing my crayon art project, so I decided to get a new one. It was time. The housing was cracked and the vent on the back had fallen off years ago.

So I bought a new hair dryer. A fancy, shiny, hot pink and silver one. It's the Remington Fast Finish 1875 watt ionic tourmaline ceramic dryer with twin turbo fans, 3 heats, 2 speeds and a turbo button for maximum drying power. It. Is. AWESOME. It dries my hair in less than half the time, and it blows air like a tornado to the face. It gets nice and warm to dry, and the cold button gets super cold.  I cannot believe I have been attempting to dry my hair with that poor excuse of a light-breeze machine I had before.

It also came with these nifty doodads:

On the left is a "diffuser" for curls and waves, and on the right is a "concentrator" for smooth, sleek styles. I have no idea how to use either one, but I'm gonna find out and try them.

On another note, today I had to perform a mock "patient visit" at school. We had a fake client and a fake stuffed dog "patient," and a faculty member sat in the corner and video-taped us talking to the client about their dog's fake vomiting. Now I have to go back and watch it and critique my interpersonal communication skills. Real vomit.

Louisiana is a dangerous place. This is a floating raft of FIRE ANTS found in the recent floodwaters. I really hope spiders don't do this.

The Heel-O-Matic

For those who live elsewhere, I'd like to inform you that Louisiana is under water. It's totally and completely wet, drenched, soggy, sodden and saturated.  It's normally swampy and humid, but over the past week or so it has rained over 8 inches.  The parish I live in was just declared a disaster zone, and schools have been cancelled due to flooding. My garden is a giant puddle, and most of my plants have experienced a slow drowning death. It's incredibly unpleasant, and I'm probably going to need to build an ark soon.

Luckily, my barn has an indoor arena, so I headed over there to ride. The indoor is a good walk from where my horses' stalls are, so it required me to sprint through the downpour, dragging two horses along (well, until it thundered, then they dragged me for a bit). I arrived at the arena to find a man and a little boy riding horses while attempting to lasso a plastic, gyrating mechanical calf, which was being dragged behind a four-wheeler. Wait, what? Yes. A plastic air-humping cow dragged behind a four-wheeler. And these people were trying to lasso it!

It can be found here, for $3,295 (+350 shipping), for those interested parties. Also, they call his sexual proclivities the patented "hop!" The music in this video is priceless:

My fancy show horses are scared of plastic bags, loud noises, shiny objects, cows, alpacas, goats, small children, puddles, brightly-colored things and occasionally their own shadows.  There was no way in hell I would be able to ride while Humplestiltskin was trying to pickle-tickle his way around the ring. Just looking at that thing from outside the ring made them arch their necks, bug their eyes out and snort like dragons. So, back to the barn we went, and I'll try again another (hopefully drier) day.

Melted Crayon Wall Art

Just like everyone else, I enjoy browsing Pinterest instead of doing anything more productive or important with my life. Sometimes I reward myself with 5 minutes of Pinterest time for every 30 minutes of studying, which quickly turns into 30 minutes of Pinterest time and 5 minutes of studying.

Anyway, this weekend I made melted crayon wall art.  I googled some examples, but I didn't really like anything that I saw, I mean, who wants a giant rainbow crayon thing on their wall? Not me. So, I picked out some colors that I liked to go with my "new" second-hand yellow couch.  I'm planning on having a yellow and turquoise palette for my front room, which I guess is supposed to be a formal living room, but what is currently what I call the "Random Room" because it's where I put my random stuff. 

The melted crayon picture turned out pretty well. I am pleased with it. However, it took F-O-R-E-V-E-R. I mean, it seems simple the way I've seen it explained: glue or tape crayons down, and then melt them. Super easy, right?  For me, not so much.  My background was a 30 x 40 foam board, so I needed a 40'' piece of cardboard to glue my crayons onto. All I had around the house was a bunch of Amazon boxes some packages had come in, so I ripped off parts of those and taped them together until they were long enough. This ended up working quite well.

Next, I glued down the crayons.  I used no semblance of order whatsoever, just picked out all the blue, green and yellow crayons out of 3 64-pack boxes of Crayolas, put them in a pile, and glued them down willy-nilly.  This part was not so bad, except the glue from the hot glue gun I bought ($2.99 for a mini one at Hobby Lobby!) was super stringy and kept getting caught on my hands and in my hair. 

I propped the foam board up on an angle against a table, and then tried to figure out how I was going to get the crayons pointing downwards so they would drip down the foam board.  I'm sure someone has a better way to do this, but I just propped the crayon/cardboard up with a few of those big 3-wick candles so it was kind of at an angle over the foam board.  This worked out for about 10 minutes, and then fell down, and proceeded to fall down repeatedly, each time knocking a bunch of the crayons off, so I'd have to glue them back on again. Sigh. 

Melting the crayons was the worst part by far. Blue crayons, for some reason, melt much more slowly than green and yellow, and the darker blue colors do not melt at all. It also takes a REALLY long time to hair-dryer-melt 40 inches of crayons. It took me about 3 hours with my blow dryer (in half an hour or so chunks because I kept getting bored and going to do something else) total, and only the green, yellow and about half of the blue crayons melted onto the board, and all of those only melted about 1/3 of the way down. Sigh again. So, I had to do even MORE blow-drying to melt the wax more to make it go all the way down the board. I would suggest when doing your melting to make sure you blow-dry the wax all the way down the board the FIRST time, like I did not. 

The un-melted blue crayons really stumped me. Why blue? Are they depressed and didn't feel like melting? I don't understand. So I took the un-melted ones, took the papers off, put them in a bowl and microwaved them for 2 minutes, and NOTHING!  Nothing happened! Not a single melter!  Then I microwaved them for 5 minutes and that got them good and melty, but my little glass bowl broke (I guess it wasn't microwave safe). Then I spooned on the melted blue ones in the places where I wanted darker blues. The first picture I wasn't totally happy with, so I ended up adding even more blue to the sides. 

Overall, this pretty much took me a total of about 6 hours.  The frame is just a plain black frame from Hobby Lobby, which was about $40. Total project cost was about $100. Crayons are expensive, and now I have a glut of red, orange and purple, which I'll have to find something to do with. The foam board probably wasn't the best choice since it got a little wavy and bent from the heat and moisture of the melted wax.  I think those big artist's canvases would work better, but I wanted to put mine in a frame.

Additionally, I feel I should mention that wax got EVERYWHERE: on my pants, under my fingernails, on the floor (and I put plastic underneath to catch spills!), and all over my crappy hairdryer, which gave me an excuse to go buy a new one. 

I also sprayed it with some clear-coat spray paint when I was done so it would be a little shinier.  See, isn't it pretty?

Comedic genius:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhnLk3TJWFY

Ooh, my first blog post. Is that some kind of a life moment? My goal for this blog is to chronicle things I like and find interesting.

I am a veterinary student. Obviously I like animals, so there will be lots of animals. I also really like food, so there will be lots of that too. I also like DIY projects (but not time-intensive ones because I have the patience of a 4-year-old on Ritalin), and gardening. Anyway, welcome if you're reading this!  Here are pictures of my personal animals to make your day a little better:  Prissy (left) and Tricksy (right) are my two horses.  Bandit (bottom) and Dahsu (top) are my kitties. Aren't they adorable?