Show and Tell Saturday ~ Favorite Cups

It's Show and Tell Saturday with my friend Kim at Homesteaders Heart. She even let me choose this week's theme - your favorite cup or cups. I couldn't choose just one to show you, as I have a few that I regularly use.

To start with, here is my favorite cup for lattes or mocha concoctions! I like the design and that it holds 2 cups (plenty of room for whipped cream on top!). It's a Starbucks mug that my hubby received as a gift many years ago. I kind of claimed it for myself!

For drinking tea, I use both mugs and cups. The next cup is a pretty mug that I regularly use to drink my tea. I received it as a gift a few years ago when I helped teach a co-op Christian moms' preschool. I treasure it and the memories that go along with it.


I have many teacups that I love, but don't often use. When I do get them out, I often use this one. It's special because it is the only teacup that I have ever purchased brand new for myself. I bought it at a tea place after enjoying a lovely ladies' tea. I just think it is so pretty!


And I couldn't resist showing you my hubby's favorite coffee cup. It used to be mine back in my Career Woman days. It's a nice solid tall cup - perfect for his bold, black coffee.


I hope you have enjoyed "touring" my favorite cups! Stop by Homesteaders Heart to see what kind of cups other people are using and feel free to post about your favorite cups and link up!

Today is the last day to enter my chocolatey giveaway - don't forget!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Would You Like Chocolate With That? ~ Your Favorite Chocolate Desserts

Welcome to Chocolate Friday! I hope you had a fabulous week and made sure to enter my chocolatey giveaway (it's not too late - you still have until Saturday night)!

In my giveaway post, I asked commenters to tell me their favorite chocolate dessert. Wow - the responses were making me drool! It kind of turned into an unofficial poll. Would you like to know the results so far? Here they are:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Favorite Chocolate Dessert

1. Brownies - the overwhelming favorite!
2. Chocolate Cake - preferably moist and usually with frosting of some kind
3. Chocolate Mousse - rich and fluffy
4. Chocolate Cheesecake - several varieties

and a 3-way tie for 5th...

5. German Chocolate Cake
5. Truffles
5. Chocolate Chip Cookies

Honorable mentions: Death by Chocolate, Molten Lava Cakes, Fudge, and Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yum to all of it, I say! Now that you have chocolate on the brain, you may want to make some dessert for the weekend.

Now please do your part to chocolatize the blogosphere! Find or write or create your own chocolate post and link it up right here below with Mr. Linky! Get more info here or look at last week for ideas.

See you back here with your chocolate link!

10 Things I Love

My friend Alicia at Confessions of a Snowflake did a list of 10 things she loved and I decided to play along. She assigned me the letter D.

1. Devotion time for reading the Bible and other Christian books

2. Darling hubby and son :)

3. Daylight

4. Dark chocolate (you knew that was coming)

5. Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti

6. DESSERT!!!

7. Drinking tea and lattes

8. Double-blended Caramel Frappuccino (yes, I really ask for it double-blended so I don't get ice chunks)

9. Drafting blog posts

10. Dry humor (and all other kinds - LOL!)

Making that list was harder than I thought! Do you want to play along? Just let me know in the comments and I will assign you a letter - I promise I won't give you X or Z!

Have a wonderful Thursday!

Enter my chocolatey giveaway if you haven't yet!

Don't forget - tomorrow (Friday) is Would You Like Chocolate With That? where I have a post about chocolate and you get to link up your old or new chocolate-themed posts! You can find more info here or look at last week. See you tomorrow!

Works-For-Me Wednesday: Household Tips

If you know me well, you know that I am lacking in good household skills. I was looking over the last several months of WFMW posts and discovered that I have very few household tips. But the tips I do have are good ones and worth being shared again, so I have put them all into this one short post! Hopefully they will help you out if you didn't already know about them.

~ Easy microwave cleaning

~ Plastic wrap storage

~ Displaying kids' art

~ Homemade shower cleaner

~ Toilet cleaning tips (read the update and the comments for the tips)

That's my very short list, but these tips work for me! For more good stuff, visit Works-For-Me-Wednesday at Rocks In My Dryer!

And don't forget to enter my chocolatey giveaway if you haven't yet!

What I Learned This Week ~ Many Things

Jo-Lynne from Musings of a Housewife has a fun new carnival called What I Learned This Week (hopefully I manage to learn something every week!).

Here are a few things that I have learned...

~ I can only manage to get up extra early in the morning if I ask God for help with it - daily.

~ Chocolate really should be a part of every kind of diet plan.

~ I can cook totally un-fancy (and maybe by next week I'll have learned that un-fancy is not a word) dinners like goulash (macaroni, ground beef, tomatoes, V-8) and my family is perfectly happy.

~ I am NOT a good cook when it comes to eggs, french toast, pancakes and the like.

~ Bowling makes some of my muscles very sore and I'm not very good at it either.

~ I won a FLIP video camera - Woo Hoo! I'll post more about that soon.

~ My little ol' blog finally made it over 100 subscribers - yay!

~ Finding out that I am the Top Commentator on a blog makes me feel competitive and makes me want to make sure I stay on top - Kim, LOL!

It's a fascinating list of things, isn't it? I'm sure there is a profound lesson or two that can be found in some of those seemingly trivial items and I could start writing about them right now. Or I could go have some chocolate. Hmmmm...










Mmmmmm. Oh - I'm sorry! You're still here!

Go and get yourself some chocolate and don't forget to enter my chocolatey giveaway!



Thanks for coming by! Stop by Musings of a Housewife to see what other people learned this week!

Tea for Two-sday ~ Favorite Tea Snacks

In celebration of National Hot Tea Month, I'm joining up one last time with Knit One Tea Too to share about tea. This week is about our favorite tea snacks. I realized that I have already posted many of mine at one time or another, so I'll put them together here with links.

This is one of the yummiest - White Chocolate Apricot Cream Scones.

And I can't have enough Dried Cranberry Biscotti. I love it with tea!

I like this Pumpkin Bread any time of year.



Almond Baby Cakes are always gobbled up by my son!



And I can't believe I don't have a picture of this one: Luscious Lemon Cake. It's so yummy and very easy. Grab a lemon and you probably have the rest of the ingredients on hand.

Those are some of my favorite things to eat with tea, though I will eat these goodies anytime! What are your favorite tea time snacks? You have all week to post about it and link up with Knit One Tea Too!

P.S. Don't forget to enter my chocolatey giveaway if you haven't yet! Or if you need a more low-cal giveaway, enter to win a WW Cookbook on my other blog.

Motivate Me Monday ~ Seek Him Daily

It's Motivate Me Monday at Like a Warm Cup of Coffee. I am a member of the 5:16 AM Gals, though my habits don't show it lately. And that is why I need some motivation!

When I first started getting up early (5 AM! - amazing for me), I was successful only because I sought the Lord's help with it each morning and night. I was happy and amazed that I could get up so early and dedicate some quiet time to the Lord!

Now I have been going to bed too late and not getting up early at all. Why? I thought the Lord already took care of that for me. I forgot (being the sinner that I am!) that the Lord wants me to continually seek Him and ask for His help. I don't get to ask God once for help and sit back and ignore Him the rest of the time, assuming that He will continue blessing me while I try to take care of things on my own. Yes, I can trust in and wait on the Lord, but that doesn't mean that I should stop seeking Him.

In Psalm 105:4, it says, "Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His face evermore!"

And in Isaiah 58:2, it says, "Yet they seek Me daily, And delight to know My ways, As a nation that did righteousness, And did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of Me the ordinances of justice; They take delight in approaching God."

In my devotional Streams in the Desert, George Mueller said, "Be assured, if you walk with Him, look to Him, and expect help from Him, He will never fail you."

I know that I will succeed again in getting up early and devoting that quiet time to the Lord - because I will seek Him and ask His help. I trust that the Lord will help me to learn to do it daily.

Giveaways Are Better With Chocolate

**This giveaway is now closed.**

The Bloggy Giveaways Carnival is back! Woo Hoo! There will probably be a thousand giveaways this time - amazing, huh?

Once again, I felt it necessary to give away chocolatey things - how could I not? This time, there are 2 prizes to be randomly given away to my commenters.

1st giveaway

Cocoa mug, 2 servings homemade vanilla hot chocolate mix, mini whisk

2nd Giveaway

Hershey's Chocolate Lover's Cookbook


This giveaway is only open to US Residents. It is open to both bloggers and non-bloggers. The giveaway will be open until Saturday night 1/31. I will randomly choose winners from the comments and will announce them on Monday 2/2. I will e-mail the winners; if I don't hear back in 4 days, I will draw new winners.

To enter:
- Leave a comment on this post telling me the name of your favorite chocolate dessert.

To get extra entries (1 extra for each of these):
- Subscribe to my blog and leave a comment to let me know (or tell me that you already do).
- Let others know about my blog (by e-mail, twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, posting about it, linking to it, etc.) and leave me a comment to let me know.

Have fun! Be sure to head on over to Bloggy Giveaways!

If you're interested in a drawing for a Weight Watcher's Cookbook, stop by my other blog to enter.

Show and Tell Saturday ~ Antiques

My lovely friend Kim at Homesteaders Heart started a new meme for Saturdays called Show and Tell Saturdays. Sounds like fun to me! This week's theme is Antiques.

This is a special one for me and I am happy to have a reason to post about it.

This doll was given to me when I was a little girl (first grade maybe?). What makes it so special is that it belonged to my Mother when she was a little girl. That makes it at least 60 years old! For one of my birthdays, my Mother and my Grandmother took the doll to someone to have it fixed up - new wig, cleaned up and I don't know what else was done. I loved her! Her head, arms, and legs all move around and she came with a cute dress, shoes, coat and hat. Some of the items have been lost over the years. Now that I look at her, she could use a bit of repair.

I named her Elizabeth. I had a couple of reasons for that. The first was that I had just discovered a book at my Grandparents' house about a little girl with a pretty little doll named Elizabeth who came alive when other people weren't around. I thought it would be wonderful if my doll was just a bit magical. The second was that I really felt that my parents should have named me Elizabeth, a much more elegant sort of name than Lisa! I even asked my parents why they didn't give me a name like that. My Mother did let me know though that the name Lisa is actually a shortened form of the name Elizabeth. That led to me telling anyone who asked that my name was Lisa, short for Elizabeth! ( By the way, I am so glad they didn't name me that as I already had a long last name and I happen to love the name Lisa!)

I'm glad I was able to share her with you. She stays tucked away in a cedar chest for now. Maybe someday I'll be able to pass her on to a special little girl. And I think I might even have that book about a girl and a doll packed away in a box - I'll have to look.

Stop by Homesteaders Heart to see more antiques and link up if you have one to share!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Would You Like Chocolate With That? ~ Updated Chocolate Pics

Aaahhh, another Chocolate Friday. That means we made it through another week!

Many of my past chocolate and other recipe posts don't have any pictures. I started including pictures in the summer. As I make some of these recipes, I'm updating the posts with yummy pictures. Here are a few updated pics that you might like to drool over and links to the recipes (if you haven't seen some of these recipes, you are missing out!).

Dried Cranberry Biscotti

Vanilla Party Mix

Rich Chocolate Chip Toffee Bars

Cookies & Cream Dessert

Done drooling? Some of these recipes are quite simple - so you could be eating one of these pictures in no time - LOL!

OK, now I'm looking for some good chocolate posts! You don't even have to have a recipe - how about videos, pictures, taste tests, candy bar reviews, etc.? Link up your chocolate-themed post below with Mr. Linky. If you don't have a chocolate post, but see something chocolatey out in the blogosphere - send them here to link up - friends are supposed to share the chocolate! You can click here for more info on Chocolate Friday.

So, link up a chocolate post have a great link up a chocolate post Friday and be sure to link up a chocolate post have some link up a chocolate post chocolate!

Are you having the strangest feeling that you should link up a chocolate post?? :)

Let's Get Caught Up

Time to catch up on things a bit - awards, memes, upcoming events,etc. I think I am fully recovered from Simmering Soup Week now! Be sure to click here if you missed any of it - it has links back to all the days of soup recipes.

Let's start with an award, shall we? I really do appreciate it when I'm given an award and very humbled by everybody's generosity.

Kirstin from Loving Life gave me this adorable award! Thank you so much Kirstin!

I'm going to bend the rules today and pass it along to you, my readers. I know that if you're one of my readers, then you have a lovely personality and deserve this award!

On to a meme - my fabulous friend Kim at Homesteaders Heart tagged me for this meme.

1. Go to your 4th folder on your computer where you store photos.
2. Select your 4th picture (no exceptions).
3. Post the picture with an explanation and a link back to your tagger.
4. Tag 4 people to do the same.

My 4th picture is from Seventeen Mile Drive near Monterey, CA. It's a shot of the ocean along the Pebble Beach golf course. We went there for our 15-year Wedding Anniversary. Gorgeous, isn't it?

Bending rules again - if you haven't already done this meme and you feel like playing along, then consider yourself tagged and go for it! Let me know if you do, so I can see what picture you found!

And now for things coming up...

~ Tomorrow (Friday) is Would You Like Chocolate With That? I will post something to do with chocolate and you can link up your chocolate post. Click here for more info and come back tomorrow with some chocolate!

~ My friend Kim at Homesteaders Heart is starting a new meme for Saturdays - Show and Tell Saturdays. Here's the button:

This Saturday's theme is antiques. I plan on posting and linking up - how about you? Do you have something fun to share?

~ Hard to believe, but it's time again for the Bloggy Giveaways Carnival. It starts on Monday! Be sure to check it out - there will about a thousand fabulous bloggy giveaways.

And I will have a little something here that just might have something to do with chocolate! :)


I think I've covered everything...for now! Thanks for stopping by today and I'll see you soon!

Wordless Wednesday ~ Serious Reading

Reading the Comics is serious business.


Find more fun photos at Wordless Wednesday hosted by 5 Minutes For Mom.

Tea for Two-sday ~ Decorating With Tea Things

Welcome back to Tea for Two-sday! I don't have much to talk about regarding tea today - though I will be drinking some soon - LOL!

I tried to put some decorations in the center of my table that were very clean and simple and used some tea things. But does it look odd? I am no decorator and need all the help I can get! I can handle the constructive criticism - should I rearrange things, add some things, leave out some things, or go a different direction completely? I was drawn to those clearance plates at Target which is what started it all. My hubby thought it looked like I was preparing a Japanese tea ceremony - LOL!

What do you think? Do you ever use any of your tea things to decorate around the house?

Have a wonderful Two-sday!

Blissdom 09 Fashion Carnival, But I'm Not Going

My friend Sarah at Real Life is hosting a video/photo carnival to get ideas on what to wear to the Blissdom 09 Blogging Conference. At the very last minute, I decided to join in for fun, even though I'm not attending. I did try to do a video with my camera, but couldn't get it to work right, not to mention that I would have no idea how to load it up! My son took these pics and did a pretty good job!

So, here are some pics of things I might wear to the conference IF I were going - and might I add that you should assume that my camera adds about 50 pounds...

Outfit #1 - beige sweater with black pinstripe pants

Outfit #2 - dark jeans, pink/purple tank, black sweater

Outfit #3 - brown shirt & skirt, denim jacket

Outfit #4 - What I will actually be wearing while you are laughing, learning, networking and having a jolly old time at Blissdom! ;)

Obviously, there is no contest - my last outfit is the most attractive!

Have fun at the conference everybody and to the people not going - have fun anyway!