Friday Favorites: a Puzzle and Winners
Yesterday afternoon I cleared off the dining room table and spread out a puzzle. I’m a big fan of puzzles, Mr Chiots and I usually work one around Christmas and maybe a couple more during the winter months if we have enough time. We usually spread it out on the table and work on it a little each day until it’s finished, we got the edges finished last night.
I don’t buy new puzzles very often, we have a few that we rotate through. This Monet one is one of my favorites, it’s quite a challenge. I prefer to get Ravensburger as they’re great quality, the pieces fit together very well, and you can work them over and over. Someday I’d LOVE to do this 10000 piece puzzle. Of course I would need to build a special table just to fit the finished puzzle, not to mention all the pieces.
It seems like people either love doing puzzles or they don’t. I’m definitely a puzzle person, I LOVE it.
Do you enjoy doing puzzles or do they frustrate you?
I also picked the winners for Miranda’s soap and the Ethel Gloves. Winners randomly chose by Random.org. Drum roll……..
Kim won the soap from The Relic Jar.
And our winners for the Ethel Gloves are:
#7 – Karen
#37 – Dawn from Gardening in Slippers
#66 – Michelle
#82 – Carla
#110 – Emily from A Pinch of Something Nice
If you didn’t receive my e-mail last night send me a note through the contact form in the sidebar.
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Friday Favorites + Free Ethel Gloves
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ve most likely heard about my love for Ethel Gloves. If you haven’t heard me talk about how wonderful and comfortable they are, you’ve probably noticed them in my photos, they are truly beautiful gloves. Ethels are the perfect gardening glove, offering a great fit that gives you dexterity while gardening. You can do everything from heavy digging to pulling out teeny tiny seedlings in them.
My Ethel’s get plenty of wear, in the summer they are used a couple hours a day. I’ve already worn through 2 pairs in the last 2 years. I now have a pair of their leather gloves that I’ll be using for the tougher tasks in the garden, like building all those rock walls.
One of my favorite features of Ethel Gloves is their washability. I’m sure all of you gardeners know the pain of gardening gloves that get wet and then are stiff as boards, never again allowing the dexterity that they had when new. This is not the case with Ethel Gloves, they get slightly stiff after getting wet and drying, but all you have to do is throw them in the washer and when you get them out they’re soft as new.
In October I got a pair of the new Ethel Utility Gloves. I’ve never been a fan of rubberized gloves for gardening and I thought they wouldn’t allow the dexterity that regular Ethel’s offer. The dexterity is slightly less, but the warmth is much better, which for us northern gardeners is a huge deal. I used these gloves for all of my fall gardening chores and they were perfect since fall chores here in the North tend to be wet. I also used them when decorating the front of the house for Christmas, which is a task they work beautifully for as well. I now love the utility gloves as much as the Signature Ethel Gloves.
Ethel also is developing an insulated gardening gloves in the works, which I’m testing at the moment. How perfect is this for us Northern gardeners, especially those of us that want to do more winter gardening.
Ethel Gloves make a wonderful Christmas gift for that gardener in your life, I was so excited to receive my first pair from Mr Chiots 2 years ago. Use coupon code: HOLIDAY25 to save 25% off your order. Ethel was kind enough to send me a pair of Traditional Gloves to give away on my blog. Comment below and you’ll be entered in the drawing for a free pair of Ethel Gloves. I’ll announce the winner on next weeks Friday Favorite.
What’s your favorite kind of gardening glove?
UPDATE: Just got a call from the friendly folks at Ethel and they’re going to give away 4 more pairs of gloves in this contest. So now there are 5 pairs in the giveaway…your odds just got much better!
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Friday Favorite: Christmas Music
Mr Chiots and I are HUGE fans of Christmas music. We have an extensive collection with 492 songs on our playlist, yeah that’s right 492 different Christmas songs on our iPod. Our tastes vary quite a bit, we have everything from traditional blue grass, and George Strait, to Elvis, Johnny Mathis, and other classics. We also have some rock versions and of course no Christmas music collection is complete without Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas. I have some very talented friends that came out with a small Christmas album last year that we love as well, check it out Ellery Christmas.
I think my all time favorite Christmas song is O Come All Ye Faithful by Sara Evans with Suzy Snowflake by Rosemary Clooney (listen to it on YouTube) and Blue Christmas by Elvis coming in a close second. We have an old Bluegrass Christmas CD that you can’t find any more that’s our all-time favorite when it comes to entire albums. Here are a few of our other most favorite albums:
There are few kinds of Christmas music we don’t really enjoy, things like Manheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra are just not our thing.
Does Christmas music play in your car and home during the holiday season, what are some of your favorites?
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Friday Favorites and Free Coffee
I’m going to start a few new special feature on my blog: Friday Favorites. There’s nothing I love more than hearing from people about products that they love so I can purchase something that I know is great. I don’t like to buy things blindly without hearing a first hand account of what the product is like and why someone likes it. I figured this would be a great place for us to help each other out. I’ll be sharing things that I LOVE on Friday Favorite posts, you can share things you love in the comments.
Today I’ll start with probably my most favorite thing: COFFEE. Mr Chiots and I are coffee lovers, I should specify that we’re “good” coffee lovers, we don’t just drink any coffee. We enjoy 2 cups of coffee each and every day, occasionally we’ll celebrate with a third. We are partial to brewing our coffee in the form of espresso. Coffee is the one thing in the kitchen that I don’t do, this is Mr Chiots’ domain and he does it very well!
We also enjoy trying to find good little coffee shops when we travel and found some wonderful ones while we were up in New England. We especially enjoyed our coffee from Espresso Bueno in Barre, Vermont (the barista looked like Lizbeth Salander). Probably the best latte we’ve ever had away from home was from The Daily Grind in Front Royal, Virginia. Muggswigz is a great little local place in Canton, OH that we love, but we don’t get there often since we brew our coffee at home.
For many years we tried different roasts of coffee from various places, searching for the perfect espresso beans. About 6 months ago we noticed some micro roasted coffee from Al’s Beanery at Local Roots Market in Wooster, OH. We bought a bag to give it a shot. We were amazed with the results, it made the best espresso we’ve ever brewed at home. It is perfect: smooth and creamy, strong but not bitter or acidic. (It was the closest I’ve ever come to a “God Shot”, said Mr Chiots). You can tell the beans are fresh by the way the coffee brews. They’re shade grown, organic fair trade beans, which is also important to us, and it’s a small local business, which we like to support as well. We’ve been buying Al’s beans every since and have been telling everyone we know who drinks coffee about Al’s micro-roasted coffee heaven.
Al roasts coffee in small 3 pound batches at this house. He takes care in each roasting and you can tell, the quality is amazing. Al really knows what he’s doing. When you go to the Local Roots Market you may have a hard time finding his coffee, they’re often sold out. Looks like a lot people have found the same coffee love we have! It’s a good thing you can order on-line. We meet Al at his home and he fills our glass coffee canisters with 3 pounds of beans once a month (another thing we love – no bags to throw away). Al and his wife are also in the process of opening a new restaurant in Wooster, OH called The Bake Haus, which is scheduled to open in January for any of you locals.
Here’s what Al says about his coffee: Al’s Beanery was started not only out of the motivation to bring our passion – artisan micro roasted coffee – to others, but also because we wanted to turn coffee, coffee roasting and coffee brewing back into the art it once was, before automatic drip and even Starbucks. Coffee is best enjoyed when it is micro-roasted freshly in small batches, then ground as it is about to be used and brewed in a french press or with a hand-poured cone filter.
At Al’s Beanery, we take pride in the fact that all our coffees get special individualized attention as they are roasted and blended. Al’s Beanery sells only artisanally micro-roasted fresh coffees. We purchase only fair trade coffee beans, shade-grown using organic farming methods. Our beans come from providers who support small farmers and cooperatives, largely made up of indigenous people in the tropics. We do not source beans from large estates and farms.
Al was kind enough to donate 2 half pound bags of his newest blend, the Indian Ocean Blend, for me to give away on the blog. So comment below and you’ll be entered to win a half pound of fair trade organic coffee from Al’s Beanery. If you’d like to order any of Al’s coffee (and believe me you won’t be disappointed), you can through his website, his prices are great for organic fair trade coffee! **WINNER chosen – Kat from Food, Literature, Philosophy and Susan. If you don’t get my e-mail contact me through the contact button in my sidebar.
What’s your favorite brand of coffee or tea? Do you have any great coffee/tea shops to recommend that you’ve found locally or in your travels?
NOTE: Al did not and does not give me free coffee to sing his praises, he only offered to give some to two lucky readers. We are more than happy to pay Al for each and every bean we get from him and many bags to give to family and friends to share the love of fresh micro-roasted coffee. As he says, “You are my best customer!”
