Mushrooms

I finally found some mushrooms I'll eat! Martha Stewart had a segment on her holiday video about these meringue mushrooms and I thought, I can do that. The girls at the shop have a small obsession with mushrooms and gnomes, so I thought I would surprise them. So I brought the mushrooms in a big pan. The girls look at the pan, looked at me, and said "I don't eat mushrooms for breakfast Kelly." I guess they looked pretty realistic! :) You can find the recipe here, but the milk chocolate and white chocolate design on the underside of the cap was an idea from the video. You just wait for the milk chocolate layer to harden and then put a layer of white chocolate on and draw the lines with a toothpick or something. You have to wait for the white chocolate to firm up before it will work. These are YUMMY.

You may have noticed my lack of crafting and posting. I have been super busy at work. We just finished our annual strategic planning conference and I was leading. It's a big deal and made up of a lot of division chiefs and managers in positions higher than my own. So it's a lot of pressure to make the conference productive, exciting, and not a waste of their time. So that's where most of my energy has gone the last month.

We also had our annual Photography Contest awards ceremony last week and I have to give props to Mary and Cory who totally ran the whole show with minimal input from me (since I was taking care of the conference) and they did a great job. Mary ran the awards ceremony and everyone at the shop stepped up to help her out. I just want to say publicly that I have the BEST co-workers anyone could ever ask for! You guys rock!

I am also talking a break from crafting for a little while to get ready for the holidays and because I've started a new hobby. I'm learning to play the guitar! It's going very slowly, because of the points above, but I can sort of play a few chords without you wishing you were deaf. So there's hope! :) The kids get music lessons once a week. Haven is also learning guitar and Ethan gets drum lessons. They are both doing very well.

And in closing, we finally got the coffee organized at work. Thanks to Cory and Ryan who did all the hard work. The shelf above the sign holds the DVD player. Above that is a flat screen tv. This is all behind our coffee bar. The coffee buckets are on grid wall and are sorted to hold the different flavors of coffee we sell in the store. Corinnea, this is for you.