You don't say?!

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You're all going to be noticing some changes around here on MHICTy..maybe you already have.For the past four years my family and I have had traumatic event after horrific devastation.  On a "good day" it's just a massive ordeal.  We've had deaths and losses that will never heal along with salt and battery acid being rubbed in the wounds.  And I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was. I can tell you this, that old adage of "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a load of BS.  I plugged forward with my MHiCTY posts anyway thinking that working on creative projects would be helpful and be a good distraction.  I have presented some well photographed and creative presentations but the writing was lackluster because I'm not in a comical mood.  Over the past several months I have been spending a good amount of time outside in nature (well, my yard while working on the exterior of the house) and thinking things through.  I now am realizing I have not allowed myself time to attempt to heal or at the very least the grace of understanding just how much I have been through.
Right now I am doing my best to cut back on anything that adds extra work. maintenance, financial commitments, or mental stress. I have also been doing the "inner work" of positive thought (that's hard for a sour ball such as myself) , focusing on the current day, gratitude and Stoic teachings of letting go and caring less.  I've cut out keeping up with all the drama and bad news of the world.  All of this has been helping however we are now into Summer which causes me seasonal depression since it's impossible to go out and enjoy outdoors, even at night.  I have gratitude for air conditioning and early releases of Halloween stuff during this season.
So like I mentioned earlier, changes around here are going to be...I don't even know.  Less posts or less posts that involve multiple layers of work.  I may start leaning more into life essays and opinions.  Rants and venting only if I think they will be comical because I'm staying away from negativity.  I don't need to purposefully bring it into my life, it's got no problem seeking me out on its' own (that was a joke?!).
I do expect to be all systems firing for Halloween though! 

Preheating

photo credit: Camerique/Getty Images

Mr. Husband said something to me that I found quite hilarious and sadly true.  Right now Florida is just "preheating"... and it's already miserable out there with us hitting the low 90s. We'll be really feeling the burn, and I mean that literally, July thru September.  I noticed it was like a switch got flipped from cool and comfortable on April 30 to humid and horrid on May 1.  However I have been seeing reports of northern states that typically get to enjoy decent spring type weather are having temps higher than we have in Florida.  I say good!  Those northern states are the ones that whine about Winter and how much they love Summer so here you go..... Have some Summer, enjoy your climb into a 500 degree oven!

 

Tormented

For Nightmare Theatre's season 4 finale with the film offering of 1960's Tormented I made us a themed cake for the viewing.  Since a certain friend is still going hard at his diet of no sugar, I made a sugar free cake with sugar free icing.  It's all from a mix/tub so no recipe is needed. 

I tried to make it look like a sandy beach with seaweed.  The sand is the domed top of the cake cut away and crumbled.  I made a lighthouse cake topper from trash (plastic cups, foam board, scrap paper), put a print of the movie poster on it along with floating disembodied heads of the Mittens, Sapo, and the Baron. 

Sugar free cake isn't all that bad and it saves you about 60 calories per slice.

Of coarse the main person that this cake was made for had to be sure to let me know afterwards that sugar free cake gives him gas.....

Here is a brief synopsis of the episode:

A jazz pianist is haunted by the ghost of his ex-girlfriend, whom he watched fall to her death on the eve of his wedding to another woman in this Bert I. Gordon sleezeball from 1960. Back at the NMTV studios, cable access investigative journalist Dr Lester W. Sinclair is convinced that Sapo is an escaped convict, and launches a campaign to bring him to justice.

 And here is Nightmare Theatre, season four's finale, Tormented!

2024 Celebrations

As seen in  the previous post I spent a lot of time and effort working on the exterior of our house during the first few months of the year since that is the only time in Florida that it's comfortable to be outside for hours and not need medical assistance for heat exhaustion.  The issue with this is that a bunch of our family celebrations are during this time frame with 2024 being a bunch of milestone ones.  This year is PB's 20th birthday, Mr. Husband's 55th Birthday, and our 10th wedding anny.  Trying to tend to the exterior and make celebration magic happen, well, just couldn't happen.  I couldn't do it all.  So this year I had to do something a bit different.  I had PB do Mr. Husband's B-day theme and vice versa.  (I did help them each with the decorating but I didn't go wild with allspice over it.)  For our anny we went out for an expensive dinner.  And for all of the events I made a simple cake for each.

Here's how everything came together:

So first up is PB's birthday.  Mr. Husband choose to do "20 Faces of PB" .  We went through all of the photos we had and picked our favorite one from each year of his life then printed a bunch out and placed them around the dining room.

I made a box mix cake and put the images on skewers.

For Mr. Husband's birthday theme PB picked a show that Mr. Husband loves...Walker Texas Ranger.

We printed out Walker photos and decorated with all the western type items we own.

For our 10th anny I made us our favorite Hummingbird cake in the shape of a horseshoe for good luck:

We then dressed up in our wedding clothes and made fools of our selves at a nice restaurant:

House scraping, sanding, repairing, wood puttying, priming, painting.....ugh.

 

I thought I would show some of the long, hard, and laborious work I have been doing over the past few months.  These images are showing most of the work up to the priming stage.  I have since gotten all of this painted but I haven't taken photos of it yet since I still need to paint all the window trims and a set of shutters need to be painted and rehung.

Most all of this has had to be done up on a ten foot ladder or even climbing on the roof, which I do not enjoy doing.

Since the heat is horrible right now I am trying to squeeze in all of the last bits here and there in the afternoons if it hasn't rained or isn't going to rain.  I still have a big chuck of the back side of the house that needs everything done to it but that's going to have to wait til next season.

Here is what the house looks like when it doesn't appear to be covered in zinc:

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!

"It might be my last Christmas...."

To end out this season of Stressmas I bring you a little craft I did early on in December as an "Art Therapy" project to help me face the upcoming bullshit.

I told you all a bit about my MIL a couple of years back as part of  2021 Stressmas Wrap Up.  Every year she pulls the same BS about it being her last Christmas and that's why we should all bend to her will and whims.  This year she has started in with every holiday is her last now.  It may be her last Thanksgiving..  It may be her last Mother's Day....It may be her last Arbor Day. 

The thing is that it could be any of our last New Year's Day.  And I'm not going into details but no one knows this more than Mr. Husband, PB, and I.  We have had 3 years of fairly constant tragedies, loss, and deaths...and she knows this.

So since she seems to love to proclaim it's her last Christmas so much I decided she needed a sweatshirt for the special occasion...kinda like Baby's First Christmas but for an adult sized whiny self centered baby.

I included on the back of the sweatshirt several years marked out since the "last" doesn't ever play out.  I only started with 2018 because of the size of my stencils but this "last" shit has been going on far longer than 2018.

 

My plan was once she said her "it may be my last Christmas" line I was going to say "Oh! Speaking of that, I forgot I have another gift for you." and present her with this sweatshirt.  

She doesn't have much of a sense of humor when someone calls out her BS so everyone else would have enjoyed the laugh and benefited from the therapy of it.

On Christmas Day after having to sit there and have her talk at us for several hours I was all zoned out as we were packing up and I apparently missed THE LINE.  Mr. Husband says to me in the car she was right there in the kitchen as we were leaving saying it!  Well damn. 

This whole situation would be "funny" if it wasn't happening to us.   It's the stuff theatre plays are made from.  A domineering alpha female that sees herself as the matriarch of her dumpster barking demands at everyone, that will call your phone 6 times in a row and not for an emergency but just because you didn't pick up the first time (this is why she doesn't have my phone number) and likes to leave rude, self pity comments on all of your facebook posts (again, this is why I don't have a facebook). Maybe years down the way when it has actually been her last Christmas we can begin the healing process from the nasty attitude, self absorbed, woe-is-me nonsense she puts us through. But for now I have this sweatshirt that gives me a chuckle.  Honesty she doesn't deserve this sweatshirt.  She would just ruin it by dumping a bunch of dog piss pads on it.  It's safe with me.  

The good news is that in a way it is her last Christmas, all of our last Christmases hopefully with her.  She is... knock-on-wood... going to be moving across the country by the summer to live with her daughter who must have a good hook up for the vast variety of drugs (legal and not) to deal with her on a daily basis.

Fruit Cake Cookies

For gifts this year I made everyone Fruit Cake Cookies, far better than the cake!

I packaged them in boxes that I collaged with prints showing vintage ads and mail order images of all things fruit cake. 

The recipe is actually a non-vintage one.  I didn't do much different other than I used sugared crystalized pineapple other than the candied.  I'm going to have to start sourcing my candied fruit through highly dubious ways to get around it's ungodly high prices. One thing I noticed with these cookies is that even though it is directed to drop them by the scoop onto the cookie sheet before baking I would additionally add for you to give each cookie a smash because they do not spread.

 I was pretty impressed with how the boxes turned out so here is a flat shot (above) of the tops.

These cookies are super good.  I liked that I was able to bake them several days before Christmas since they keep well.  The original recipe has that they can be frozen too so that would be handy for getting a head start a month or so before the deadline of holiday doom.

I'll eventually update this post with the entire recipe since original sources disappear from internetland  but for now you can find it here.

Christmas Tree Bread

I made a couple of these Christmas Tree Breads for get togethers this season.

Inspired by this vintage 1958 ad for Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix:

I was surprised to find out they still make Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix so I was able to keep close to the original recipe, brand name and all.  The box made enough for 2 trees FYI.    There is a serving suggestion for a home made apricot filling which I shortcutted and did my own way .  For one I used apricot jam and walnuts and the other I used strawberry jalapeno jelly with walnuts.

Both turned out pretty good!

I iced the trees with a very runny powdered sugar glaze icing along with green candied cherries and maraschino cherries.

Here is a close up of the recipe:

And for fun I found an image of the same box of Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix (NOS) front and back seen in the vintage ad:

The shape of these pastries remind me of things other than trees though.  It really looks like an upside down large intestine or along those same lines a turd pile...kinda like the Mr. Hankey Christmas Shits Cinnamon Rolls I made several years ago.

This would be a great pastry to make to celebrate someone's colonoscopy!