Evil Has A Face

Oh, isn't he sooooo cute!? What a darling baby squirrel. Or so I thought when I spied this little munchkin on the lawn as I was heading in to my apartment after work. Of course, I stopped and started cooing at the wee babe. I was greeted with these horrific snorts and the crazy thing started charging at me and chasing me all over the lawn.

I barely made it in to my building with the little devil hot on my heels.

He looks so sweet on the other side of the glass. Kind of like little Oliver Twist - "Please ser, may I have a wee bit 'o porridge?"


My sister, hearing my yells came out and was as surprised as I was to see the tiny demon trying to charge the door and chirping horrible oaths. He didn't stop trying to find a way in until he couldn't see us on the other side of the glass. He eventually scampered under the bushes. No doubt hatching evil plans for an ambush. I am going to be extra cautious tomorrow morning as I walk to my car.

Monthly Theme: Flowers

Alright, already - it's not a flower. None of the pictures I took this past weekend turned out very well except for this photo I took of a Japanese maple. So...it's in the plant family. Isn't that red just the best color? You'd think it was Fall.

A Cake By Any Other Name...

It was my mother's 60th birthday last weekend. Having become the resident birthday cake maker, my mom requested carrot cake for the festivities this weekend. Now, I can actually bake a good cake. I cannot, however, decorate it to save my life. Queue, cream cheese icing that tastes great but is not quite stiff enough to stick to the sides of the cake. Add a parent's house whose air conditioning was on the fritz and you have a cake that litterally melts down the sides. Lovely.

It still tasted awesome though.

What lies beneath

That would be the world's laziest cat. "Nonsense" Darcy says when I am adding a warm blanket to my bed and any other normal cat would leap off. "It's just fine under here."

Fruit Galette

If there is one thing I like to do, it is having friends over for dinner. I love coming up with the menu, shopping for the ingredients and cooking it all up. On a cold, yucky Saturday in March, I had friends over for parmesan chicken and pasta with artichokes and capers. The highlight of the evening was to be homemade apple pie and ice cream. Imagine my chagrin, then, when I discovered that although I had all the ingredients for an apple pie, I had no pie plate bake it in. Apparently, I had somehow managed to leave both of them at my mother's house. Enter, my dear Martha Stewart. I opened up Martha Stewart's Cooking School, and quickly found a recipe for a pie without a plate.

This was my first time making pastry dough from scratch and I would say that it turned out okay. I think the dough was definitely too dry and explaines why I had such a horrendous time trying to roll it all out. Nevertheless, any apple pie-like concoction tastes better with ice cream on top. This is the closest online recipe to what I found in the cookbook. I'm more determined than ever, though, to bake a pie if it kills me.

Artapalooza

The gallery that sells some of my mother's work had a show this weekend.

My mom typically works in oils, but she's been experimenting with collage lately. She submitted several of her collages for this show and here are two of my favorites (above and below)!

What is so neat is that my mom is able to share her love of art with a close friend and amazing artist herself, Gail Schenk. Below is my favorite work of hers from the art show this weekend as well.

Isn't it gorgeous?!

I didn't meet the artist who hand painted and upholstered this chair, but I just thought it was lovely!!

Spring Outing

The weather was beautiful last week. What made it even better was being on spring break and actually being able to enjoy it. My sister, Aili, called me (woke me) last Thursday morning to invite me and Caroline on a trek through Powder Valley. Since we can never spend enough time with the little ones, we readily agreed.

Missouri trees aren't quite bursting in to bloom just yet. Although it is going to happen any minute now.

What has started growing is the vines and shrubs underneath the trees. I love that new, young green that is all over the place in spring.

Maybe not new or young, but definitely green, don't you just love moss? Also this photo is my posting for our March Theme of the color green.

Is that just the neatest twisty vine, or what?!

Everything is new and exciting when seen through the eyes of a 3 year old.

Mississippi Bound

I had a great time visiting my best friend, Shalyn, in Mississippi where she teaches Victorian Literature at the university. For the last three or so years, our spring breaks have coincided. We've always planned small mini vacations during that time and went to Mexico last year and New Orleans the year before. Since we are going to Paris this year we planned on just relaxing in Starkville. And that we did - the above photo is of Mugshots one of the nicer bars in town - where we spent some time with friends celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Shalyn, I had a lovely time!

Early Spring Breeze

It's almost here...

This is the first flower of the spring season that I came across. It just makes me so happy to see everything coming back to life!

Ephemeral Snow

We had a light dusting of snow last weekend. It was gone about 15 minutes later!

Weekly Theme: Imagination

I love books! I have recently begun a small cookbook library and get no end of fun imagining the dinners I can cook up for friends. I can easily spend a couple of hours curled up on my couch reading what Martha has to say about how butter temperature affects pie crust. Seriously. JAPRA - you may notice a certain Tex-Mex cookbook I picked up after poking around Homesick Texan's blog! It was randomly on sale at my grocery store and I had to buy it! It is truly a lovely cookbook and will be taking it with me later next month when I go to visit a friend of mine in Mississippi. So here's to good dinners, both real and imagined!

Weekly Theme: Love

Or at least they're friends! I've been derilect in my posting lately - sorry! I believe it's my turn this week to come up with the weekly theme...so this week it's Imagination!

Wordle - Thank You Tim!

I checked out Tim's blog yesterday and saw his wonderful Wordle! Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Of course, I had to see how mine would turn out so I gave it the url for my blog and came up with this! Fun!

Winter