It was a beautifully sunny day the other day, the kind that makes you feel glad to be alive. I couldn’t help taking a picture of it:
The snow is gone now, and so is the sun. It’s beginning to feel a lot like February, weather-wise, instead of nearly Christmas. I can do without the snow, but I dearly miss the sun.
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Cricket loves the green monster hat that Santa brought him last year. He loves it so much that he wore it out and Grandma had to fix it. Now that he’s got it back, he refuses to take it off:
He wants to eat with it on (but we have a no hats at the table rule), bathe with it on, and sleep with it on. It reminds me of the year his godmother bought him a UNI Panthers hat for Christmas; he literally wore it to pieces.
Here’s hoping the monster hat fares better. 🙂
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So how did my meringue cookies turn out? Well…
…om nom nom!
I hopped out of bed bright and early this morning to retrieve them from the oven before Thumper had a chance to go exploring. They looked good, they had a bit of crispness to them as I scraped them from the cookie sheet, and they tasted great. But…
I remember my aunt’s cookies being crispy all the way through. Mine are a little crispy on the outside, and soft on the inside. They taste like marshmallows.
This is not a bad thing, mind you – I adore marshmallows, and have been known to eat them straight out of the bag. But I wanted crispy, meringuey deliciousness, not marshmallows.
*sigh*
I guess that means I need to take another crack at those ice cream cookies next week for the 4-H cookie walk so that I can justify making more meringue cookies with the leftover egg whites. 🙂
Do you do Christmas cookies each year? What are some of your favorite recipes?
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Who doesn’t love Christmas cookies? Well, me. At least at the beginning of December, anyway.
My church and my kids’ 4-H club like scheduling their Christmas cookie walks right next to each other. I think last year, they might have been the same weekend, but this year, they’re separated by a week. I’m sure this is completely unintentional, but it makes for a very long day of baking. After all, 27 dozen is a heck of a lot of cookies.
Anyway.
I kind of forgot about the church cookie walk this year, so by the time I found the letter about it, it was too late to just give money and let someone else do the baking. The cookie walk is this Saturday and, since today is the only free day I have between now and then, I decided to get those cookies knocked out bright and early.
Don’t let these sleepy expressions fool you:
These guys are double trouble. What one doesn’t think of, the other one does.
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If the following picture seems familiar, it’s because you’ve likely seen it before in sepia:
I took this picture back in 2007. I was doing someone’s senior pictures, and I couldn’t help taking a few shots of this bridge for myself. It’s an old railroad bridge spanning the Iowa River, but it hasn’t been used for trains in I don’t know how long. I have a deep and abiding love for the relics of my state’s history, a bit of which you can read about here.
How about you – what are some of your old loves?
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Seymour has given me some lovely gifts in the time that we’ve known each other. This is a detail photo of one of those gifts:
For our second anniversary, he bought me a beautiful glass bowl from a local shop, and its beauty never fails to impress me. The glass contains ash from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which appeals to my love of history. It’s just a beautiful bowl, and one of the prettiest pieces of glass I’ve seen outside of a church.
I spent probably a good half hour taking pictures of this bowl back in May as we were packing up to move. I played with angles, lighting, zooming in and out…In short, I spent way too much time photographing this bowl when I should have been packing. Let’s face it – no one likes packing, and taking pretty pictures is much more fun. I love the texture and color of this photograph almost as much as I love the bowl itself, and the thought that Seymour puts into gift-giving (regardless of who the recipient is).
It’s a perfect reminder of the things I treasure in life. Do you have something like that, a reminder of things you hold precious? Tell me all about it in the comments!
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Because it’s that time of year, and because I can’t find half the kids’ winter things after moving this past spring, we bought the boys some new mittens last week. Thumper’s mittens came with a hat.
He’s the cutest. Reindeer. Ever. And no, I’m not biased. Not in the least. 🙂
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I love landscapes. I think the majority of pictures I take are either of my kids or landscapes (49% landscapes, 49% kids, 2% other). Iowa is such a beautiful place that I can’t help whipping out my camera (either of them) and capturing the glories of nature.
As previously mentioned, I also love sunsets. The arrival of snow is seriously hindering my ability to capture them through the break in the trees that form the western borderline of our property.
I may or may not have mentioned, however, that I’m not fond of the wind farms that are springing up all over the area (seriously, I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it or not). There’s one that stretches for a good ten miles south of where I live, and the blinking red line on the night horizon is one I find quite annoying. Now there’s another one that mars the northern horizon on my way to work. If this keeps up, I’ll be living in the middle of a wind farm inside of ten years.
Still, I do like the silhouettes these particular turbines made against the darkening night sky. And I love the hint of blurriness evident near the horizon and the edges of the turbine blades; it makes the whole scene feel a bit dreamy and surreal. When I took this picture, I was reminded of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and I love it when nature makes me think of books.
What do your favorite landscape photos depict?
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Life is but a series of moments. Each day I find myself recording moments for posterity, though sometimes my recordings are strictly internal (which means they usually disappear within 24 hours, as my memory is terrible). Still, those little moments are what make life worth living, are they not?
These two images are from the first night we spent in our new house. We had no furniture, other than a collapsible picnic table and an air mattress. What we did have were great friends and happy kids, and we made a boatload of memories that night. We’ve made more memories in our new house in the year since these pictures were taken, and the thought of all the memories we’ve yet to make thrills me to pieces.
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Suddenly they all died. The end. 