Lotsa…

Itsy bitsy spider:

and an overview:

Garden Growing more:

and more:

Almost done with Page 10! That’s halfway done!

Glorious day at the barn:

 

Gret(a)

Sara carrying a rock

Huey the bird.

He has an amazing  vocabulary. Jodi’s husband works from home sometimes; he has to shut his office door because Huey imitates the fax machine beep and causes the phone to disconnect while he’s on a call. In addition to repeating their conversations verbatim, he imitates the beeps of the microwave, the answering machine, the UPS back-up beep, and the smoke detector. (which he performed the very first night I slept over.) He also recites phone conversations taped on the answering machine, all kinds of whistles. I sit and stitch and just listen to him all day!

Wonderful Wednesday Wrecipes

I need to come up with another “w” synonym for “wonderful”, to throw you all off!

Here we go: I started with Cook’s Illustrated “Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies”, and added bran and substituted store-brand Splenda for the white sugar. They came out really nice, i think. They are a more cake-y cookie- not chewy so much as soft. The bran is there, but no worse than oatmeal in the background. I used 2 whole eggs - the original called for an egg and a yolk, but I hate wasting or trying to save the white. I figured the bran would “soak” up the additional moisture. The real brown sugar seemed to diminish the weird Splenda after-taste. I’ll definitely make these again.

Adams Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 2-1/8 cups all purpose flour
• 1/3 cup wheat bran
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 12 TBSP butter (1-1/2 sticks), melted and cooled slightly
• 1 cup brown sugar
• ½ cup Splenda sugar substitute
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1-2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, bran, salt and baking soda together in medium bowl & set aside.
2. Mix butter and sugars together until thoroughly blended. Mix in eggs and vanilla.
3. Add dry ingredients; mix until just combined. Stir in chips.
4. Line baking sheets with parchment; drop heaping teaspoon of dough, about 1-1/2” apart (I got 12 per commercial sheet).
5. Bake one sheet at a time 4-1/2 minutes, then rotate pan 180 degrees, and continue baking an additional 4-5 minutes. Edges should be pale golden brown, and tops should just be set, with only a tiny shine of moisture.
6. Cool on sheet for 5 minutes, and then remove to rack to cool completely.
7. Store in airtight container.

I’ll be LOST….

My favorite TV show is ending tonight. On one hand, i can’t wait to see what happens, on the other, I don’t want it to be over. I guess it’s kind of like Christmas for kids.

So I stitched today:

I love the orange! The moon was supposed to be the inky-green color (same as the tree) but i changed it to orange because I’m adding other highlights in orange as I go.

The little black square with 2 orange spots is supposed to be a spider body & his eyes.

This chart makes me very happy to stitch! I’m this close to yanking Gingerbread Cottage out of my bag to put this one in, and putting Gingerbread Cottage with those dratted Blackbird stockings!

Well, I have to take Chickie for a walk before I settle in for an uninterrupted 4-1/2 hours of TV!

PS:

If you scroll down the page, in the right sidebar is a categorized list of my recipes, for your convenience.

Creepy…

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

No cooking…;^(

I’ve been thinking about hummus a lot lately, though. I found a couple of good recipes on Taste spotting, including this one. I could have sworn i found one in which the garlic clove was gently heated with the olive oil, then the oil & garlic are drizzled into the processor, but now I’m having trouble finding it. Maybe i saved it at work.

I made BBQ’d spare ribs in the crock pot today. They just have to be quick grilled & brushed with more sauce. Recipe: Cut your slab o’ ribs into sections that will fit in your crock pot (that hopefully you’ve lined with a Reynolds Slow Cooker Liner). As you layer each slab in the pot, pour some BBQ sauce over. You’ll use about the whole bottle, you can reserve some for the grilling step. Cook on low for 8 hours. The meat should be melting off the bone, which, while tasty, does cause some problems for the grilling step, because the meat will tend to stick to the grill. If you have a grill basket, that might work better. So to finish, fit your ribs in a grill basket-ety thing, brush with additional sauce, and let the sauce caramelize a bit- on the heat for maybe 10 minutes? turning over once.

Axe lost a hefty chunk of hoof somehow:

I packed the void with some gauze and duct taped it; of course it rained last night & today, so it’s nice and muddy in her pen, so that won’t last long. I have a call into Ernie the Farrier God. I’m thinking he can maybe infill the gap with epoxy until it grows out, just so that the hoof innards are protected from the elements, and she doesn’t go unevenly. The shiny stuff is a protectant that should be applied at least once a week. It smells like super glue. Em hasn’t been diligent about applying it regularly, as well as the Hoof Flex.

Sometimes you just have to take care of things yourself! We actually have work-work at work, so no stitching. It’s been over 3 weeks since I last worked on Gingerbread Cottage. I don;t really miss that as much as Quake Halloween.

Off to do a sink-load of dishes. (Even though I'm not cooking much!)

Pomp & Circumstance

Em graduated today from BU- yay! It was an absolutely gorgeous day in Boston- just brilliant, sparkling sunshine.

   

I thought I was taking some video, but unfortunately, one must hold the shutter button down during the entire time- I pressed it and released it, because the little camera symbol was alit, but I only seemed to have recorded while the button was pressed. Darn the luck.

Withdrawal…

No internet at all today at work. The Boss actually accepted an upgrade offer from a telemarketer for our phone/internet/FIOS. The caller identified himself as being from Verizon, but as it turns out, he was from a third party market. He assured my boss his static IP address (we run our own exchange server)(don’t ask me what that is- I just hear it referred to so often) would remain unchanged. Yeeeaaahhhh…riiiight. At 2:00 when he realized we had no connectivity, including email, he went ballistic, and basically pleaded with Verizon to re-set us back to what we had. Except that we had to have a new IP address, which then involved another phone call to his now defunct ISP, through whom all our mail is routed. If it all works tomorrow, it’ll be a blooming miracle!

So no Face book, no Drudge report, no blog-surfing, no email, no nuthing! But as it turns out, we’ve started 2 new big projects- a whole new building and a re-do of a previous job that hasn’t started yet. (not our fault- the doctors egos got in the way).

But anyway- here is progress on Quaker Halloween:

I love this stitch! I really want to swap it for the Gingerbread Cottage (which hasn’t been touched in 3 weeks!) for my “at-work “ project.

I had to make Em a tassel for her graduation Sunday, although the one she bought finally came in the mail today. Being crafty finally came in handy! I think I may have even impressed her with my mad tassel-skillz!

Here it is attached to her hat. Good enough for being in a crowd of several thousand graduates at BU. I don’t think she’ll stand out for having a home-made tassel!