Whew! What a whirlwind. Holidays…I’m on the fence about them. Seriously.

So, we’ve had company for a while, and we’ve been unpacking, and of course there was Christmas and New Years and my kid’s 5th birthday and my birthday and Thanksgiving…I’m pretty sure it’s naptime.

Anyway, I got this month’s issue of Everyday Food at the grocery store, and there was the easiest little recipe for cream puffs! I seriously love cream puffs. So I made them. I didn’t have the ingredients for the filling, or for pastry cream, so I just made a box of vanilla pudding and piped that inside. YUM!

Everyone should try this recipe. SO EASY.

I also made eclairs! (Same recipe, but instead of piping the dough into round blobs, you pipe rectangles…too easy.

I also unpacked almost all the fabric bins and organized all my fabric. In the bins, it was all by fabric line…but I’m not really into using pieces of a line all together anymore, so by color is going to allow me to mix and match a little easier. Pretty eye opening to see all the fabric I own…a little overboard, really. It was much easier to be in denial of my hoarding when I had the majority of my ‘collection’ in bins in the garage.

Bins before (under the table):

Bins unloaded, colors sorted:

Mostly put away…still a few colors to go:

It’s awesome to have such easy access to all my fabric!

I have to say, too, that the Martha Stewart communities are in too few locations. We looked it up and they’re really only in about 10 places, none of which we are really in a position to move to. One thing I did notice was that the two communities in North Carolina are way more expensive than the communities in Southern California! That was very surprising. I wonder how much other stuff costs there - like gas or groceries or NC health insurance. I would think that we have the highest home prices in the nation - even in a desert area like Perris.

We’ve had a big weekend of house shopping. Well, window shopping for houses. Meaning that, as usual, we really have no intention of buying a house. BUT I found my dream neighborhood yesterday. Historic Riverside. I LOVE the houses. Today, I dragged my husband there - it’s a pretty good drive - and we saw one house for sale that was built in 1904. It was so gorgeous. I needed a lot of work, but wouldn’t that be fun? You know, if you had unlimited funds and perhaps some architectural and interior design expertise :) We have none, of course. The dreamy part about this neighborhood is really the trees. Just imagine, the trees have been growing in that neighborhood for 100 years also! I just love it. There’s even a kind of creepy cemetery right in the middle of the downtown area. It’s awesome.

Then, in the opposite extreme, we found a KB Home Martha Stewart community in Perris. Suprisingly, Perris is one of the most undesirable areas around here. (No offense, Perris.) It’s just not that great to us. It certainly doesn’t scream Martha Stewart. But the houses are really nice. They’re pretty standard KB homes, but the models were all furnished with Martha furniture, the walls were painted a pale Martha blue, the kitchens were pristine. I loved them. I even loved the plasma tv mount. I would buy a Martha model house in the dismal town of Perris if it came as is!