Coffee! Coffee!! Coffee!!!

Mmmm...I love me some coffee.  Granted, my earliest taste of coffee was the half-coffee/half-milk mixture my parents treated us kids to on occasion.  (I still take mine with cream and sugar.)  So I wanted to share a few things with you.

First, I'm super proud of the work my daughter is doing in Peru, working with fair trade coffee.  Here's her blog on the subject.  If you're interested in buying fair trade coffee, here's one source.  This is the brand that some of my friends buy and they say it's tasty stuff.  Pura Vida Coffee is the name.  I pick up the fair trade French Roast Sam's Choice at Walmart.

Secondly, I got to thinking about how Peru has this huge coffee export business, but no coffee culture, and that made me wonder about Spain's coffee culture.  And I happened upon this little article comparing Spain to Germany.  Nothing Earth-shattering, just an interesting look into another part of the world.

And finally, I found a recipe for homemade coffee creamer.  I did the math tonight and found that an off-brand creamer comes to 9 cents per ounce.  This recipe comes to about 6 cents per ounce.  Pretty good deal.  Plus, I can make the flavor that my local store no longer carries (for some weird reason).  Vanilla Cinnamon.  I simply added 1/2 tsp of cinnamon to the recipe.  I'm going to figure out how to make a mocha one - that will be good.

So those are some things to ponder and read over while you sip your cup of joe in the morning.  Hope you have a great day! Oh, and here's a video of my favorite singer, Robert Plant.  Enjoy!

Getting Crafty

I am a very visual person.  I love to have words of wisdom, to-do lists, calendars, photos and other things I love in plain sight.  My cork board by my desk is full of such things.  But I also have a magnetic dry erase board that I write all kinds of notes on.  I decided the other day to update the look by turning some of those quotes into art.

First, I typed up the quotes in a word processing program and changed up the fonts, colors and borders.  Like this: 

Then I cut out and stuck my phrases to adhesive backed magnets.  They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  Here are a couple of examples: 

These are a great size for photos

Avery sheets can be used in your printer!

 After peeling off the back, I just hung them up on my board and now I can use them to hold up more words of wisdom and to-do lists.  Notice the ones I made previously using pictures.  You can definitely personalize this idea to whatever type of picture you'd like to hang up.  Works great for fridge magnets too.