Busy Weekend

With my six-week-long break between summer and fall quarters coming up fast (last day of class: next Wednesday!), I did some work to get ready for doing some house painting. I'm going to start with the converted garage, but I needed to cut away some vegetation (daisies and lavender, mostly) and scrape away dirt and pebbles that have collected on the west side where the ground is higher.

Our inspector pointed this out to us three years ago, that there was some ground-to-earth contact there. Not a good thing. When I was out there yesterday, I could see where the lowest row of siding looked kind of chewed up. :-(

Tim and I went to Lowe's to look at some paint colors. We're leaning toward a light blue with white trim.

This morning, I finished up the latest in my continuing series of hand pillows.

This one is a little different than usual, in that it has a four-patch background, instead of the customary large square. I've done one or two of these, and they're a nice change. Sometimes, I don't have enough of a particular fabric for an entire large 17" square.

I also picked out the fabric for the next hand pillow, and fused the hands to the background.

This afternoon, after spending a couple of hours in the computer lab at school, I came home and made some banana-walnut-chocolate chip bread. (It's baking as I type!)

Just one of the many reasons why I *love* the interwebs! Whenever I want to find a recipe with a particular set of major ingredients — presto! Found this recipe, and this one. I only had two bananas, and the second recipe gave me the idea that I could substitute some buttermilk for one of the bananas.
(I usually have some in the refrigerator, because I use it to make my grandmother's cornmeal muffin recipe.)

It's still in the oven, but it sure does smell good, and that is always a good sign!