Hiya, cupcake!

I got three party invitations yesterday … one by snail mail and two via evite.  I feel so popular!

The first is this Saturday, a BBQ to celebrate finishing Financial Peace University (FPU), a fabulous money-management program that my honey and I have been participating with in a study group of friends from church.  FPU was created by Dave Ramsey, and if I haven’t mentioned it before, I highly recommend his work.

Anyway, our hosts are providing the main meal but the rest of us are responsible for side dishes and desserts.  My first thought was to bake my trademark chocolate chip cookies, especially since I already have all the ingredients, but now I’ve got the urge to attempt something a little more creative.  I blame it all on Alan Richardson and Karen Tack.

The book "Hello Cupcake," coauthored by Richardson and Tack, can be ordered from Amazon.com for $10.37.

Weeks ago, their book (right) caught my eye at Costco and I’ve been wanting it ever since.   The few days I had the library copy in hand just weren’t long enough to try a recipe for myself.

So now I’m afraid I’ll just have to make another Costco trip and buy that book.  Then comes the tough decision of which delicious-looking dessert to choose!

For more cuppy-cake cuteness, check out these links, too:

• Cupcakes for dinner and mashed potatoes for dessert
• Corn on the cob with Martha Stewart and Karen Tack
• April Fool’s Spaghetti and Meatballs
• Hamburger cupcakes

Wordless Wednesday

Outside a theatre in downtown PDX.

Trying out Twitter

So it’s been ages since I blogged, and I really shouldn’t be starting a post now seeing as it’s 10pm and I work at 8am tomorrow and got about, oh, 5 hours of sleep last night and when I start writing, I rarely take less than two hours to finish tweaking. But whatever … I’ll just do my best to be brief.

Good friend of mine recently told me she’d started following me on Twitter … great, I thought, except I haven’t tweeted in months and only had about 3 updates to my name in the first place. Is that a hint I should be using it? Well duh, she retorted. She told me how it’s one of the methods that her church’s youth group uses to communicate about events, and it seems to work pretty well. She also talked about how her tweets (am I using the right slang for this? I’m fluent in most web lingo but I’m too new to Twitter to know it all just yet) … anyway, she talked about how she keeps her tweets focused on her prayer time and what God’s been teaching her lately, how she’s noticed people will follow/un-follow her once they catch on to her pattern, and what kind of responses she gets.

I think it’s neat, so I’ve decided to get back into … don’t know if I can call it back into when I hardly dabbled in the first place … using Twitter if for no other reason that to be inspired by her updates. Was also kind of thinking I should do something similar … make it another way of keeping myself accountable by tweeting about the daily blessings and lessons in my own life, but I haven’t gotten on track with that yet. Then tonight I decided to add some more friends to follow … started with one of my fave authors Robin Jones Gunn using a link I got in an email from her today, and then moved onto financial guru Dave Ramsey, as my husband and I are attending a biweekly study group about his Financial Peace University, and then somehow wandered in the world of celebrities, adding Hugh Jackman, Oprah, and (gotta see what all the hype was about) Ashton Kutcher. Wow, can hardly believe I just admitted that.

Anyway … hey, I’ve only written for half an hour so far; I swear the clock is spinning faster than normal today … now I must ask, who else of you out there has Twitter?  Do you tweet often?  What about?  Should I follow you, and why or why not?  Will you follow me?

Finally, whether you’re a Twitterer or not (or is that Tweeter?), I’m adding a Twitter widget so you can lurk around and read my updates whether you want to or not