a NEW photo and NEW recipes to try

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pastacurtains.jpg

Happy Tuesday!

How do you you like these pasta “curtains” from this pastry shop in Portovenere Italy? I thought it was clever! I loved snapping photos of the every-day nuances of each of the countries we visited.  I should have remembered to take more pics of PEOPLE in our group though!

So now I’m in the mood for pasta! Here’s some recipes I want to try soon:

Chicken and Broccoli Alfredo Stuffed Shells because we LOVE broccoli at our house!

shells

Cream Cucumber Pasta Salad because a co-worker gave us some fresh cuks that we need to use up, and this looks so fresh and yummy!

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AND, I need to make some manicotti because it freezes well for those nights I need a quick dinner.  But I think I’ll try cooking it in the crock pot.  What if I had some in the freezer and then just stuck them in the crock pot in the a.m. before work?  I’ll let you know how that turns out! 🙂

Crockpot No-Boil Manicotti

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Have a great day!  Do or COOK something NEW!

Miscellaneous Monday – NEW stuff i gotta share

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focus ducks

Happy Monday! One thing that I love about blogging, is the ability to record my thought processes and brain dump here in my posts! Haha! Lucky you guys! But really, now that I’ve finished my huge work-related project that took me away for 9 months, I’m trying to figure out what I should focus on next.

I enjoyed reading this post about “How to choose the ONE thing to focus on” at The Creative Introvert (Great name…that’s me! – Too bad I didn’t think of it first!). The post had some good tips – very analytical/quantitative-type tips!

Also, I thought my ducky photo paired well with this topic! (Of course, I had to edit it a bit to focus on just the ONE ducky :o). When hubby and I were in New York in April, we had some time to kill before we could get into our hotel room, and hubby knew I’d love to spend that time shooting….and really the only place close by was a duck pond.  But hey! It beat sitting in the hotel lobby!

Here’s some other miscellany for this week:

What I have been reading:

 

I read booth books for our book club and I liked them both.  I’m not really into posting reviews, because there are other sites that would do a much better job at that!  But they were both quite good, in my opinion. 🙂

Here’s a NEW podcast that I really like listening to on my commute to work:

Lexicon Valley

The podcaster, John H. McWhorter, teaches linguistics, philosophy, and music at Columbia University.  He interjects music soundbites in between his linguistics explanations. I really like his style, and it just makes my commute seem like 5 minutes instead of 30! Yeah!

And that’s all the miscellaneous stuff I guess I should share this week.  Have a great day and do or learn something NEW!

a NEW photo and a short Sunday sermon

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italianchurch

This last Sunday, I was in a meeting with about 50 college-age girls and one of them referenced THIS TALK and explained that she was extremely happy that “WE GET CREDIT FOR TRYING“.   Ditto!

Here’s the synopsis of the talk, in case you don’t have time to go read it:

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland – Keep loving. Keep trying. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. Heaven is cheering you on today, tomorrow, and forever.

AND…I spotted this church in a little town in Italy.  I always thought these stripes might be painted on to the buildings, but our guide explained that they are really two different colors of marble.  Cool huh? I learned something NEW!

Have a great day!

The NEWness Explorer is BACK…

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HELLO again, Blogland!  I took an unplanned 9-month break from blogging, but I’m back!  Things have settled down (at least for the moment), and I’m excited to document the upcoming NEW things I plan to be doing or learning about!

I started this site on 5 September 2012, so I gave myself a deadline to ‘get-back-at-it’ as of TODAY, 5 September 2017!

The main reason I was MIA was because of a huge work-related project I had to work on, but “regular life” got in the way too.  Some fun stuff though…

We went on a trip of a life-time to Europe this summer (pic above of one of the hotel’s we stayed at).  We cruised around the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, France) and then hopped back over to England to visit our ancestral stomping grounds. The entire trip was fabulous! I’ll probably share some more pics from the trip in upcoming posts.

We worked on a couple of NEW house projects…we tore out a wall in our workout room and stuck a sauna in there so the door would face the bathroom (and therefore be accessible to the shower), and re-did the workout room including a ballet barre.  My hubby teases me and asks if I use the “bar-A” for my workouts.  Well, YES, today I did a HIP HOP BARRE WORKOUT! Thank you very much! :o)  The plan is to finish up the room with mirrors behind the ‘Bar-A’, …still need to get a bid for those.

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A LOT of time went into planning a summer camp for teenage girls from our church.  It was time-consuming, but also fun and rewarding…and the girls will probably always remember getting totally rained AND hailed on!

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And I FINALLY started on my “Secret Garden” that I posted plans about way back in May of 2014!   My hubby made this arbor that I LOVE, and little by little, I’m adding plants – but it still has a long, long, LONG way to go!

garden

So! That’s {some} of what I’ve been up to.  I’m looking forward to catching up with many of the blogs I follow as well as get great ideas for NEW things to do or learn from YOU!

Have a great day! Try to do or learn something NEW today!

a NEW awareness of gratitude – Day 30

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grateful

Happy November 30th! I am very grateful for the skill of knowing how to use a microwave, the skill of knowing how to eat chocolate, and the skill of making my face go bright red when I do something embarrassing!  Acceptable? No?  Well, ok….I’m grateful for the skill of reading music.  How’s that?

Have a great day! Find something NEW to be grateful for!