She's Here!!

Weighing in at a dainty 5 pounds 12 ounces, Lucy Claire arrived February 18, 2010, at 1:40 p.m. She's our third grandchild and second granddaughter, which means the Pink Team has officially caught up with the Blue Team.

When I left Birmingham on Wednesday heading for Little Rock, I worried that I wouldn't get there before Lucy's arrival. No sweat! Miss Lucy was determined to take her own sweet time. I got to the hospital at about 9:30 Wednesday night, and she didn't make her appearance until Thursday afternoon!

To top it all off, Grandmother Marie and I got to be in the delivery room. It was awesome! All I can say is that childbirth is definitely a miracle.

Happy Pink Saturday. Be sure to visit Beverly at How Sweet the Sound for more links to Pink Saturday posts.

Y'all Come!!

Thanks to my friend and Kappa sister Debbie, who spends much of her time posting yummy recipes at Dining With Debbie, for letting me help her with the Arkansas Bloggers website.

When Debbie created the website a few months ago, I volunteered to help with the header design and background.  I love playing around with Photo Shop, and this gave me another outlet to see what I could come up with.

I want to thank Carl Long for letting me use his beautiful photo of the Arkansas River at sunset.  Although I've never met Carl, we both are frequent visitors to the Hawgs Illustrated message board, and I've see some of the photos he's posted there.  So without hesitation, I emailed him to see if he had anything I might be able to use.  If you've ever crossed the Arkansas River on I-430, you'll recognize this view of Pinnacle Mountain.

Although I've lived in Alabama for almost 20 years, I still consider myself an Arkansan, and I'm happy to have a small part in Debbie's efforts to bring Arkansas bloggers and those of us with Arkansas roots together.

Y'all come pay us a visit.

Sweets for the Sweet and Valentine Treats

In honor of Valentine’s Day, my sister-in-law Susie passed on this vintage card from Laughing Elephant. Even though this is Pink Saturday, I think it’s so appropriate that she’s even wearing a blue dress.

Susie also sent pictures of her Valentine’s Day no-bake cupcake creations. If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that they’re really made from felt.

I think these are just the cutest things I’ve seen in a long time. Susie emailed her instructions for making these "non-fat" cupcakes, and I shared them on Laurie's Valentine Party. You can click HERE if you want to learn how to make your own.

Now for more Valentine treats, be sure to visit Beverly at How Sweet the Sound. She’s hosting Pink Saturday on this Valentine’s Day Eve.

Beverly also encourages us to introduce a new blog that we’ve never visited before, so this week, I’d like y’all to meet The Happy Homemaker in High Heels. Last week, her first time to participate in Pink Saturday, she posted some beautiful photos of lovely vintage things that she has around her home in North Carolina. By the way, I’m convinced that the only way she’s able to keep house in high heels is that she’s a lot younger than I.

Gran's No Fat, No Calorie Valentine Cupcakes

When my sister-in-law Susie (Gran) sent pictures of her Valentine cupcakes, I knew I had to share them on Laurie's Valentine Blog Party. Susie says that they're easy to make, especially when you're watching TV all night, and she was kind enough to provide instructions.

"I do my most productive work after a disaster," she said. "I made about 30 felt sewn hearts with button designs after the tsunami. These were a result of Haiti coverage."

If you want to make some of your own, you'll need to gather felt, buttons, beads, embroidery thread, pompoms, cupcake papers, polyfil and a glue gun. Susie glued two cupcake holders together to make a sturdier base and then added polyfil, securing it with the glue gun.

For the topper, she cut two circles of felt and stitched them together with embroidery thread in a contrasting color, leaving a small opening so that they could be stuffed with polyfil. Once they were stuffed, she closed the opening and glued the topper to the top of the cupcake.

Susie said that she cut the icing freehand in an irregular shape. She added embellishments, using buttons, pompoms, buttons, beads and French knots and glued the icing to the top of the cupcake.

If you've never used a glue gun before, Susie offered a word of advice.

"I must warn crafters about the dangers of a hot glue gun," she cautioned. "I took an inch of top skin off my pointer finger when I peeled the hot glue off immediately. You are to run it under cold water for five minutes, then see if it will peel without the skin layer."

Here are Susie's granddaughters Molly and Morgan showing off their "baked" goods.

Be sure to head over to Laurie's place for more Valentine Party fun. You are certain to be not only entertained but to find all sorts of great ideas for you file.

I'm Baaaaaaack!!

I want you to meet my new best friend.  Just don't look at my messy desk.

Morgan arrived Tuesday afternoon in this.

And in a little over two hours he had rescued my computer from the dead without losing a single bit of data!  He brought with him a handy disc containing a special Geek Squad diagnostic program called MRI.  This let him scan my computer for viruses and also allowed him to take a peek at my files where he was able to manually get rid of all sorts of nasty stuff.

Additionally, he put more memory on my PC as well as my laptop, and now they're both zipping along.  Frankly, my laptop had gotten so slow that I had avoided some of my favorite blogs just because they took soooooooooo long to load.

All of this got done in the nick of time.  Now I've not only got a post ready for Laurie's Valentine Party but for Pink Saturday as well.  Life is good!!

Calling in the Reinforcements

When my anti-virus techs informed me that it would be necessary to “go to BIOS and switch AHCI/RAID to native IDE” but couldn’t tell me how to do that because “each BIOS has unique menus, submenus and settings,” I decided that it was time to call in the big guns.  So the Geek Squad will be at my house Tuesday afternoon, and hopefully they will be able to resolve my computer issues.

I have been battling the effects of a nasty computer virus for about two weeks.  It has severely hampered my blogging, since I have my photo editing software as well as all of my photos stored on my PC.  The good news is that everything is backed up to an external hard drive.  Unfortunately, the external hard drive is connected to my PC, and to move it to another computer would required loading software onto LBeau’s computer.  I’m not ready to go that far yet.

I just need my PC back.  Not only does it contain all of my fun stuff—digital scrapbooking software, photos, Photo Shop—but it also has the accounting software for my construction and remodeling business.  The longer I’m out of commission, the more catching up I’ll have to do.

I can’t wait for Tuesday to get here!  In the meantime, if anything pops up on your computer telling you that it’s been infected with all sorts of vile stuff and you need to “click here” to allow Windows to download software that will clean up your computer, don’t click anything.  Just shut down your computer and try rebooting it.  Hopefully, you won’t get infected like I did.