Things that don't work so well

1.Smoothies without a blender.

Our blender broke the other day, so I don't have any way to make smoothies for our breakfast. Not good. I've gotten used to smoothies for breakfast. I have to have breakfast in the morning because I'm usually starving when I wake up, but if it's something too heavy I feel stuffed all morning. Smoothies are just right, filling enough to last all morning, but fairly light.

So I tried making a smoothie this morning without the blender. I chopped up the frozen strawberries and banana and put them in the mixer bowl:









I mixed that until it smooshed up really well:









Then I mixed in the yogurt, honey, and vanilla:









At this point, I should have put it in the freezer to freeze, that probably would have worked. But instead I added some ice I had crushed. I took the bag of ice wrapped in a towel out on the patio, but my crushing of it was somewhat impeded by having the neighborhood cat winding around me. It's kind of hard to crush ice when you're afraid of beaning a cat on the head!

Anyway, the ice didn't get crushed very small, or rather, I thought it was small until I tried to drink my smoothie. It was like the bottom of a badly-mixed Starbucks frappuccino. Liquid, with big chunks of ice in it. A not-so-smooth-ie, if you will.

So that didn't really work....there was some left over so I let the ice melt and then popped it back in the freezer. We'll see tomorrow if that works.

2. Homemade crochet patterns.

I started working on my shrug/bolero/jacket (I'm just going to call it a shrug) yesterday. It was nice and warm out, so I took my crocheting outside and sat in the sun and crocheted. While Lucy the cat sat on the arm of my chair and bumped her head into me (that cat is really getting annoying!!)

Well, the stitch pattern I picked isn't going to work. The yarn is fairly thin, so the pattern just stretched out. So now I have to find a different stitch to use, and redo all the measurements and stuff. I'd figured out how many stitches of the other pattern I needed for a properly-sized shrug.

I decided on a basic square-shaped shrug, as most people (all two of them) thought that was a good idea. That's fine with me, a square is easier to design.

So...I guess I need to work on crocheting...since that's probably going to take longer than finishing my dress.