Category Archives: House Beautiful

This post is about how I managed to successfully do some of the projects on my list and also finally made a decent smoothie, but any title I could come up with sounded like a tag line in a laxative ad. So.

I managed to successfully do some of the projects on my list! I cleaned off both my craft desk AND my computer desk, but I didn’t stop there: I moved my whole computer to the kitchen so I can finally repaint the top of my desk (something I’ve been putting off for literally months).

Once it’s all done I’ll be able to set up my new computer, hooray! Less exciting, but I also got completely caught up on the dishes, and since Taylor is starting to feel better he took out all the garbage and recycling, so that’s like, FIVE things off my list.

I finally made a decent smoothie! Last year I was really into making smoothies, or TRYING to make smoothies. Unfortunately I had a terrible blender that sucked and I hated it and everything it made was more lumpies than smoothies. Whatever.

Anyway a few months ago I had some sort of blender-induced rage blackout and threw it away, so since then we’ve been blenderless. In January I started ordering the smoothie fruit assortments from Spud* so Taylor bought us a new, better blender. This one still leaves some lumps but I solved that problem by buying GIANT JUMBO BOBA TEA STRAWS. I got like, 100 of them for $1.20.

The straw & angle make it look tiny but it was 16 ounces of blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, a cherry popsicle (homemade, I added it for sweetness), chia seeds, coconut oil and orange juice. Everything but the juice was organic as well. The coconut oil made the giant straws especially great because I could chug the whole thing down before I got grossed out (it’s not bad, but it’s a solid when it’s cold and there’ve been lumps). I’d never tried putting chia seeds in a smoothie before but I did some research and gleaned these tips:

1. Use 1 tbsp of seeds per 8 oz of liquid. Apparently the seeds can absorb a ton of liquid and they’ll form a gel if you use too many O___o
2. Soak the seeds in the liquid for an hour before making the smoothie (easy, if like me you have a blender that can’t deal with frozen fruit and you need to defrost them first. Defrost and soak at the same time!).
3. Don’t leave it sitting around for too long or the seeds will cause it to gel, even if you’ve followed tip #1! Again, this is where the giant straws came in handy.

*idk about these smoothie fruit assortments. The first time I ordered it I got an INTENSE amount of fruit: a pound and a half of blueberries, four mangoes and twenty-one bananas. For $10! It was way too much for us (since only Taylor likes bananas and mangoes) so I made arrangements to go halvsies with Sym’s dad, but then the next time I ordered it I just got 6 ounces of raspberries, one mango and six bananas. WHAT GIVES???? I even checked my old invoice to see if it was a mistake that I got so much the first time but it wasn’t.