Quesadilla

Ingredients:
Tortilla - I like multi-grain or corn
Veggies or meat or a combination of the two
A bit of cheese

Use a baking pan or a large non-stick pan.  Place tortillas on a baking pan that will eventually go into a pre-heated oven.  If you're making lunch just for yourself place a tortilla into a non-stick pan on top of the stove.  Add veggies and/or meat.  Add a bit of cheese.  Cover with a second tortilla and heat.

If I make this on the top of the stove I generally use a low heat and cover the pan.  Cooking for a group I use a 350-degree oven for about 20 minutes.  Sometimes I warm the filling to make the process go just a bit quicker.

Some of my favorite fillings include veggies with a splash of salsa or roasted root vegetables and tofu in spaghetti sauce.  Try your own favorite ingredients or flavors.  Serve with a simple salad.  I love this recipe because it's easy, versatile, and allows for variety, which we know is the spice of life.  Mom taught me that. 

Enjoy!

Attitude

This has been a busy month of traveling throughout the Midwest to conferences.  My last venture was my longest trip, a nine-hour drive that I had to make alone.  For those who travel for a living this may not seem daunting, but as someone who generally sticks close to home, I was obsessing over this trip. 

The day before I had to leave I dropped in on my hundred-year-old friend at the nursing home to see how she was doing and to share the story of my trip and my concerns.  Without missing a beat she said, "Oh, you're going to have an adventure.  You're going to see new things and meet new people and it will be wonderful."  Reality check.  I thought that the elderly were set in their ways and against change.  Who is the elderly person in this scenario, I wondered.

So I set my GPS and my attitude and took off, ready for an adventure.  I saw new places and I met some wonderful new people and all in all it was a great trip.  The day after I returned home I went to thank my friend for her encouragement and her words that nudged me to look at life in this new way.  "It's all attitude," she said.  "If you look for the good it will be there."

I've been sharing this story with friends and looking at incidents from my life as an opportunity to experience new things and meet new people.  I'm looking for the good.  I read a book that urges people to start their day with the words, "Something wonderful is going to happen today and I can't wait to see what it is."  I just might have to turn in my drama queen crown. 

A Rose By Any Other Name

We are doing the proverbial switching horses in mid-stream.  As you can see, the label for this entry is "Resources".  This will now replace the former label, "Book Reviews," which is obviously too narrow to cover all the different ways we get information about the work of Activities.  So we will move forward from this point on with the label, "Resources."

First on the resource agenda is that Book Two from Second Childhood Creations is now hot off the press and in our hot little hands, ready to get into your hot little hands if you click on the Second Childhood Creations link. 

Book Two, like Book One, has twelve, hands-on creative activities, including where to buy and how to dye silk scarves using colored tissue paper.  The scarves are awesome!  There's also a recipe for making bowls out of paper egg cartons, a puffy paint recipe, happy face pots with bad hair days, shaving cream prints, and a water slide decal project that will give you all sorts of ideas of things to create with them.  And that's just the beginning.

And as long as we're on resources ...  I recently stumbled on a book by Brook Noel titled "The Change Your Life Challenge, a 70 day life makeover program for women."  I found the 2005 edition in a used bookstore.  There is a more recent edition available on half.com, my favorite place for purchasing used books.

So what's happened in my life as I plowed along to day 9, doing one day at a time as advised by the author?  So far so good!  Do I envision a miraculous change in my life?  Maybe.  I like to keep my options open.  And I believe that if I read enough positive works from a variety of authors my life has simply got to get better.  As for now, I've been able to find my to-do list every morning without any hassle.  Onward!

Pretty Pumpkins

This is an easy activity and a wonderful alternative to handing out knives in order to carve pumpkins for Halloween.  This is also the second year we've done this activity and the residents jumped right in knowing that pumpkins don't need to have faces. Stripes, dots and swirls brought life to our pumpkins that now decorate the tables in the dining room.

As usual, we used our favorite paint from Blick Art Materials, blickacrylic.  Not pictured, but also painted, were a group of butternut squash, which took on the appearance of nesting dolls.  Try your hand at painting the gourds of the season.  Enjoy!