High Maintenance

I'm going to be on hiatus for quite a bit so I can get a handle on the high maintenance of our exterior house wood rot/painting and invasive weeds before the searing sun and sweltering heat take over and make it inhabitable for human life to venture beyond air conditioning.

How I wish my house had 'Carefree Clapboard'!

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Snow Day Freezer Case

My last offering for Snow Day this year is my display case theme which is "Ice Box".

 It's comprised of vintage freezer owner manuals, recipe booklets, metal ice cube trays, freezer food boxes, paper snow flakes, mini igloos that were bases to novelty drink glasses, plastic icicles,  mini plastic penguins, fake frost, and fake ice cubes.  I made the ice cubes from a big pound block of clear glycerin soap meant for crafting small bars of soap which I picked up at an estate sale.  I just cut them into chucks.  The penguins are from a game PB has had forever called Penguin Pile Up.  The game is suppose to be for little kids where they balance the penguins on a plastic ice pyramid but it's cruel and damn near next to impossible to do as all the ledges are sloped and slippery.  We have only kept it all these years because of the agony it causes.

Snow Day Crafties

To celebrate the sadly short amount of time we have that resembles Winter here in Florida I have been doing a "Snow Day" theme here on MHiCTy for the past couple of years.

This year's offerings are gonna be short too because frankly Winter has been over for us for the past 2 weeks.  I damn that groundhog to hell... and that's the temps we are gonna be having here in the near future....hell fire degrees.  Blah. 

Anyway, the first Snow Day bit I have for you all are like 'snow globes in a box' from recycled materials.

The idea is from a children's magazine from 1948:

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The upper snowman I made is crafted close to the original idea.

I then decided to try out a few varieties:

A print of two snow people from a vintage greeting card with bits of silver glitter.

A background featuring a snowy paint-by-number print.

And The Cure building a snowman.

My clear plastic boxes originally held mini Halloween bottle brush trees that I picked up from Target on clearance last season.  I also sponged on white acrylic paint to the fronts of the boxes to encapsulate the image in Winter.

All of the images i used and then some are in my Pinterest Snow Day Board

And you can check out all the past Snow Day posts by clicking on "Snow Day" seen in the lower left corner below.

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Lightfoot Loves Petunia

For last week's Nightmare Theatre premier of the 1974 bomb 'Shriek of the Mutilated" I made a (spoiler alert) wedding cake for two of the characters, Leroy "Lightfoot" Spivey and Petunia.

 The cake topper is made from paper, pipe cleaners, and wood grain contact paper.  I used the black lids from SToK coffee cold brew bottles as the cake layer lifts.  They actually have a nice form to them and I use them all the time for random things.

Since all of us around here are still holding tight to a resemblance of a diet I tried out making a sugar free cake mix and sugar free tub icing by Pillsbury.  It's still not really diet friendly with all the other carbs from the flour and the oil and fat from the icing but hey, it cut some of the calories!  The cake was pretty good and didn't taste like it was loaded up with cancer causing sugar substitutes at all!  For extra "health" I sprinkled around the base of the cake and the tops some crumbled shredded wheat which I thought looked like something you would find out around the dirt road leading to the Spivey love shack.

Here is the episode in full and a brief synopsis:

This 1974 shlocker, which ostensibly is about a group of college students on a Yeti-hunting expedition that evolves into something far worse, inspires the Baron to dress Sapo up in an old bigfoot costume to pull off a Patterson-Gimlin scam - with sadly predictable results.

Attack of the Giant Leeches Snacks!

 

Here's another diet friendly movie snack I put together for our weekly movie night with Lucy and Ricky.  

This week is the infamous "Attack of the Giant Leeches".... Nightmare Theatre style of course.

I made some edible "leeches" out of turkey sausage links with green olive suckers with a side of "blood" siracha sauce (not shown).

Make yourself up a batch and check out the episode:

Rantin'

 

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For years now I have wanted to do a little gossip/rant/"fixin' to be some bullshit up in here" random yet reoccurring sessions here on MHiCTY.  For the intro image I wanted to find a photo of my grandmother sitting at her dining-room table, cup of coffee, cigarette all set to fill you in on the going-ons of the neighborhood, friends, family, friends of family, family of friends, and just random strangers that you will never in your life meet.  She'd sit there very calmly looking out the window and say things like "You know that Mr. Foster's wife has been running around with that new guy that moved in 2 doors down?" or "I heard your cousin's ex-husband is back in jail."  She had all the goods for someone who rarely left her house, or that table for that matter.I have yet to find that right photo of her so for now I am going to use the above image and hope I have followed all the right legal rules for presenting it, it's the closest I can get because I just have got to do my ranting.  I hate that you guys missed out on all the craziness over the years involving the flop house brothel that is on my block due to my lack of "proper intro image".  I'll have to go through the years long saga of it another time....it's a doozy.Today I want to dish over something that I have periodically mentioned on here.... my MIL.  It's good to let it out and maybe you all might find it amusing.  So to start off with, you may be surprised to know that I don't tell people about this blog if I personally know them or if they are local.  Only a few close friends and family are in the know.  Partly I do this because I don't want people stalking me (yes, I have had that happen) and it kinda would hurt my feelings if I did tell someone that I liked/cared for about MHIcTy and they didn't read it (and yes that has happened).  So it's just you and me and everyone outside the Red Neck Rivera....or so I think.  
Here's where we get in to it.  About a week after I posted about the "My Last Christmas" sweatshirt and had myself an abundance of rant therapy Mr. Husband got an odd phone call from his mom.  Now, this isn't a topic that is new, and it's one that we have addressed with her several times, which is that she doesn't have my phone number. There are numerous reasons for this and why I don't give my number out to barely anyone:  I don't answer my phone, my ringer is on silent, I rarely know where it is or look at it.  If someone wants to get in touch with me they know to call Mr. Husband about it.  He keeps his phone on him like it's an "on-probation ankle monitor"...literally he walks around the house with it in his pajama pants pocket.  I am so not doing that.  I use my phone pretty much for making outgoing calls (like to the plumber) and those are few and far between.  Mr. Husband's phone is our "home phone" is how I see it.  And then the personal reason why she specifically doesn't have my phone number is because she has no understanding of how to use a phone like a normal human being.  She calls multiple times in a row like it's an emergency but it's not.  She calls when a simple text would make far more sense.  And then she calls about nonsense bull shit like here recently.  So, back to the story.  She calls Mr. Husband and says to him "I'll buy Mary a phone so she and PB won't have to share one." HUH?  We have told her like I mentioned previously that I have a phone but I don't really use it so I don't give out the number.  Mr. Husband was stunned over this bizarre offering and just said "No, we're fine".   He didn't go into detail of the obvious that I have a phone and she knows this and thought maybe I had told her a tale about phone sharing, which I hadn't, and was covering for me.  So the next day she calls again pushing about buying me a phone.  Mr. Husband tells her again "No, we're fine, We have phones under control."  And then she just goes ape shit and screams  "I KNOW MARY HAS A PHONE!!!!! I SAW IT FALL OUT OF HER PURSE!!!!" and she hangs up.  And mind you, she called and did this to him while he was at work.
Ya'll.... WTF.  She's coo coo for cocoa puffs.  I literally showed her a photo on my phone at Christmas.  I have never told her I didn't have a phone.
So, the other part of this that is weirdly odd is I had posted my rant over her here and then days later she calls Mr. Husband up about the phone, something I had mentioned in the post.  Makes me wonder if somehow she has privy to MhiCTy.  No matter really.  Maybe if she reads this it will help her to control her pushiness and stop driving Mr. Husband to having a mental breakdown.
Next time I'll have to tell you all about her and the blue cup....good Lord.

Nachos Flanders Style!

Howdilly diddily doodily!  

It's that time of year where we all think about dropping those 30 pounds we put on over the last 3 years!

Or is that just me?

Every Saturday night Mr. Husband and I go to Lucy and Ricky's house to view the new episodes of our show Nightmare Theatre (now in season 4).  As a side note last week's offering of the abominable movie "Don't Look In The Basement" featured me shuffling around like a Nuthouse Granny.  The episode isn't loaded yet on the PBS site so I can't link it for you....Rats!!  Rats! Rats! Rats!

So not only are Mr. Husband Sir and myself cutting out all delicious foods, Lucy and Ricky are on the band wagon too.  This causes quite the dilemma when it comes to bringing a fun snack for us all to share because diet food isn't fun.  There are no appetizers or desserts I can sculpt from diet food that will taste good.  Highly annoyed by this my brain scanned my internal rolodex of snark and food and it landed on Nachos Flanders Style! 

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It's just plain cottage cheese on plain sliced cucumbers.

Oh boy.  We're having ourselves a time now.

Mr. Husband did make an alternative version of these by spicing the hell-o diddily out of the cottage cheese to the point he made it orange but it was of little help.

Here is the scene all set and how it went down for us:

On another side note I came across this super fun site The Joy of Cooking Milhouse where they make a ton of the foods seen on The Simpsons.  I'll be spending some hours perusing all of the fun, indeedily-doodily hoodily!