Today was a beautiful day to get started on the next chapter in my rewrite of The Price of Mercy.
It was kind of a long day, but at least I got something done while the boys napped.
What did you do today?
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Tag: Photography
Photo Friday: The Twelve Pains of Christmas
We’ve been decorating at work today. Each year, we put up two Christmas trees – one in our lobby and one in our entryway. As we were trying to string the lights on the trees this morning, Bob Rivers’ Christmas classic kept running through my head.
Go home, Christmas tree, you’re drunk.
So pretty! 🙂
Luckily, we managed to untangle all the lights, and it was totally worth all the hassle. I mean, even the drunken Christmas tree looks a lot better now than it did this morning. 🙂
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo 365 #120
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Inside, anyway. Outside, most of the snow has melted and the temperature is hovering just north of freezing.
But inside, we’ve been decorating. And it looks purty.
Do you like to decorate for Christmas?
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo 365 #119: Road trip!
Seymour and I took a little road trip today, which is why this post didn’t happen sooner. But! We got to see some great urban architecture, including this:
This is inside a Barnes & Noble in Rochester, Minnesota. It is the coolest bookstore I’ve ever been in. The building used to be a theater, and the bookstore kept the old marquee and ticket booth. It is absolutely amazing.
Also? They had some pretty amazing notebooks, and I’m in need of a new one… 🙂 Sadly, the notebooks stayed behind. But Christmas is coming… 🙂
Hope you all had an awesome day! Excuse me now while I go pass out.
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo 365 #118
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.
Photo 365 #117
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.
Cookie fail.
Mmm, meringue…
Photo 365 #115
One of my favorite pastimes is reading. I know, big surprise. 🙂 But seriously, I love books. And I love to read, to myself and to my kids. It’s the best way I know to pass on my passion for books.
The best part? It works.
Here’s Thumper reading George and Martha by James Marshall. I loved his books when I was little, and I’ve read them to each of my kids. This particular book is an omnibus edition of all the George and Martha stories, which I’d never seen before. Our last trip to the library yielded not only this treasure, but also James Marshall’s retelling of The Three Bears and a stack of Tomie dePaola books, another author I loved as a kid.
What were some of your favorite childhood books? Favorite authors? Share ’em down below!
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo 365 #114
Nothing today has been what I expected. I’d expected to get a whole bunch of laundry done and put away. I’d expected to get some more work done on my revisions. I’d even hoped to get a new photo editing program installed on my computer and maybe, if I was really lucky, go to the UNI play-off game with the family tonight.
But as the old saying goes, I plan and God laughs.
Instead, I was up half of last night with an out-of-sorts Thumper. Bubbles and Miss Tadpole assisted in trying to calm him down the first time, as they weren’t yet in bed, which left me feeling all sorts of warm and fuzzy. Then today, I spent the day waging war against a particularly stubborn migraine, which still hasn’t subsided. (Grrr.) Once again, it was Bubbles and Miss Tadpole to the rescue – they kept an eye on the boys when my medicine made me sleepy and did their chores without argument. Once again, I felt all sorts of warm and fuzzy. 🙂
Despite having searched high and low for someone to watch the boys so we could go to the game tonight, I didn’t get to go to the game. Everyone was busy, and by the time we thought to just buy the boys their own tickets, the game had sold out. But since I’m still not feeling that well, I didn’t mind too much.
As we headed up to meet Seymour so he could take the kids to the game, Thumper conked out in the car. He hasn’t napped in two days, so I worried that he’d wake up as soon as we got home and then not go back to sleep at bedtime. Surprisingly enough, he didn’t wake up when we got home. His eyes fluttered open for a minute while I took his coat off, but he went right back to sleep. I took this picture in the parking lot before we headed home – I just loved the lighting in it. He looks like he hasn’t a care in the world, and I hope he holds onto that peace for a long, long time.
All these things have left me feeling particularly blessed – after all, you can’t know joy without sadness. What things – or people – make you feel blessed?
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo Friday: The Food Coma Express
We went to my in-laws’place for Thanksgiving yesterday. It was a nice visit, complete with enough food for a small army: ham, turkey, corn, potatoes, rolls, deviled eggs, pickles, jello fluff, pumpkin pie (without the crust), and ice cream.
And there were only nine of us!
After all that food, it’s no wonder that this was the view on the way home:
There was some snoozing going on in the front seat, too; Miss Tadpole curled up next to Seymour and slept most of the way home. If the rest of us could have napped, too, I think we would have.
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, full of great food, great family, great friends, and great fun. If your celebrations are continuing this weekend, stay safe! 🙂
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Photo 365 #113: Triumph
I had a great picture in mind for this challenge. It’s a picture of Bubbles when he was little, having made it through the tube on the playground. He emerged from it feeling victorious, and reached to the sky in joy.
Or at least that’s how I remembered the picture.
I dug it out of my external hard drive this morning and discovered that his expression was a little less triumphant than I remembered. Okay, a lot less triumphant – it looked like he was about to cry.
Well, so much for feeling victorious.
“Come here you…stubborn…apple!”
“Mmm, apples!”
But then I ran across these pictures. When he was little, we used to go apple picking at a local orchard every fall. Most of the trees were too tall for him to reach, but there was this one that had some particularly low-hanging fruit. He was determined to help us pick apples, so he went over and immediately began tugging on a beautiful red apple.
It put up quite a fight, but he was victorious in the end. Triumph never tasted so sweet. 🙂
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 