Good morning! I'm waiting for a bit of troubleshooting assistance on my software for a project I'm working on, so thought it a good time to pop in on my blog and make myself an iced coffee!  Last Friday I made up a batch of coffee concentrate from a recipe I found on a terrific blog, thepioneerwoman.com.

I found the recipe and tweeted it and actually stop, dropped and whipped up a batch of the mix to try. Actually, the recipe calls for a whole pound of grounds, but since I thought I would test it out, I quartered the recipe and got quite a large amount anyway! When I got to the straining and filtering the grounds part that night, I didn't have cheese cloth as the recipe suggested, but I did pull off my french press off of my shelf and filtered it through that in a few batches and it worked great.

I also don't have a pretty little decanter yet so I have my glorious pampered chef large mixing bowl holding the concentrate now which works, but I couldn't find the cover so it has plastic wrap on it now. I'm surprised a hot dog hasn't ended up in it by now. I must look for a decanter as I believe this is something I will be doing from now on. Yum! I sweetened it with Truvia sweetener and since I'm "low-carbing" it right now, treated myself to real cream in it! Highly recommend!

Since, pictures are so popular on blogs, thought I would keep it real and take a couple of the coffee concentrate experiment in process. Please don't hold these pictures as a standard for my professional photography. What I actually did to take them was pull up my picture booth camera on my Macbook Pro laptop and snapped them that way. Quick, efficient!

  <<<< oh, remind me to leave the recipe for the bars on the counter in the background tomorrow! I had to whip them up for hockey banquet pot-luck! 4 ingredients!!!!!



What I thought was fun (okay it was strategic) is that my dishwasher quote made the picture! A friend of mine Amy is a rep of custom wall sayings, I can't think of the name of the company right now or I would mention it. ha! Also, my wonderful little TileSmile tile by the sink that reminds us all to "warsh" our hands. Warsh is how my mom always says, "wash", and I give her a hard time about it. Plus it lets me plug one of my favorite etsy.com sites. Tilesmile.etsy.com who made this tile for me!

Anyway, Ree Drummond over at thepioneerwoman.com has much better pics of her perfect iced coffee. Pretend my photos look like hers when you see it and when your there, spend some time on her site. My friend Meg recommended the site to me and it is really wonderful. Doubt if there is much "random" planning that goes into that site. It is lovely! In fact, I will make a shortcut on my links list to the right of my blog for you to make it even easier! I have never met Ree, but looking at her blog I think we would get together and both talk at the same time for hours and not miss a word either one said!

Okay, odd title I know. But my dad has always called it "kahkah" which I think he got from my grandma because she always called it that too. Well, actually, she used to spell it until we finally told her we knew how to spell. She used to spell most everything when she was mad at us.

Ha! Since just the other day I was saying something out loud and spelled the word "S-H-I-T" in front of Blake, my nine year old. Observent as he is, and also a good speller by now, he said to me, "Why don't you just say it Mom?". I replied, "Because we don't swear in this house, Blake." Seemed to solve his dilemma. Although, I'm not sure if the Big Man upstairs would call it good or not.

Regardless, I didn't say KahKah in the title because I googled the word and odd stuff came up that had nothing to do with "poo". Pretty sure my grandma and dad made that word up. But it still works in most cases when you don't want to say S#17 (translation #=H, 1 = I, 7 = T) but you probably already figured that out. (Remember, the title of my blog is RANDOM creativity when you read this.)

So what does Passion and S#17, aka kahkah, have to do with anything you might ask? Well the analogy has come up for me quite a bit in the past year or so. You see, what I have noticed is, that if you are doing something you love, something you are passionate about, something that you are "called" to do, you could do it endlessly without growing tired or weary. In fact, if you were called to "shovel kahkah" and it was your job, you could do it for hours at a time, day after day, 24/7/365 and still have energy left over to do other things. You would be filled with joy while shoveling it, you would smile and be kind to others while shoveling it and you may even inspire a few other folks to shovel it with you!

On the contrary, if you say had a job, that required you to be waited on hand and foot, by say a tall handsome guy named "Biff" (who of course is your husband). And you had everything you ever wanted given to you on a silver platter and the sun always shined on you and you always had a new pedicure, even in the winter... but you weren't called to be that or weren't passionate about being waited on and catered to (I have a hard time believing that you wouldn't want a nice pedicure even in the winter, but that's just me), then it would suck the very life out of you. You most likely would become depressed, you would be a fun sucker and complain a lot, to whoever would listen by the way. It wasn't your "calling" so it would seem like labor or work to you. Even though to someone else it would seem like pure heaven. (Lot's of run on sentences in this paragraph, but thankfully I'm not being graded on my writing.)

There are many things I am passionate about that I could do endlessly without tiring, with Joy in my heart and inspire others at the same time. A few would be: taking pictures of people or most anything at all, walking in the woods, by the lake or on a mountain—any place that doesn't have concrete nearby. Holding babies, they don't even have to be a baby I know. Being ransacked by puppy kisses. Riding horses. Creating something new and solving a design challenge. Doing most anything alongside my husband and having one of my kids hold my hand in public. (Brock my 7 year old will still do this.) I think you get the picture. Thankfully I haven't been called to shovel S#17, and I'm equally thankful for the people who are called to do that.

I'm also thankful that some of these passions allow me to help provide for my family and run over to help my church and other causes. My goal from here on out is to stay in my creative calling and passion MORE than I work in kahkah. I think it will make everyone around me and myself much happier! In fact, I'm going to go and find my dog, Lucy when I'm done writing this. She will load me up with puppy kisses instantly. Then I can drive over to Osceola and walk down to Cascade Falls out to the river on a path next to a creek where their isn't any black top, while I generate super great jewelry designs in my head.
<<<<< Photo I took during a senior photo shoot at the falls.