pop goes the sunset

For tea today Quinn made us popovers. It was another recipe from Baking Illustrated and they were very good. Popovers aren't sweet, they are kind of like cream puffs without the cream. However, they were delicious with some butter and jelly. Also, popovers are supposed to "pop over," as it was, kind of pop up like hot air balloons (that's what the book said)... only one brave popover "popped" in our pan, but whatever. They were still good.

Sara was with us as well, which was very lovely. :)






This was the bottom of the one that actually popped. It was completely hollow inside. :D




This is a funny coincidence, however... Speaking of cold toilet seats in my last post, I noticed that there was a draft post from last year, called "chilly loo." I thought this was kind of funny so I checked it out, and below is what it reads. I wrote this around the EXACT same time last year and it applies just as forcefully this year. Yay!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hallo, everybody and you crazy autumn fall season-thing, you.

At first I was really excited that autumn was on; what's cooler than the trees turning color and bringing out new jeans and shirts and sweatshirts and feather comforters and stuff? I'm sure a load people are or were hyped to find that, apparently overnight, the air had cooled down, along with the sun. Certainly I had been looking forward to those chilly days with a little wind and watery sunlight, after a long, muggy summer. That is, I was until...until...

Until I got a shock from sitting on a cold toilet seat.

And that pretty much ruined everything. All my memories of chilly loo seats, the shocks of cold air after getting out of a hot shower, cold feet on a freezing tiles, getting out of bed in the morning to a cold room, having cold ears and a cold nose...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Amen.

There was a lovely sunset again, tonight.



Isn't that breathtaking?

apples, beauty, tea & the chilly loo

Today I have four things to say, all of which are rather different.

1) Honeycrisp apples are.... AMAZING.




2) I think my hair (color, mostly) is gorgeous -- and I don't really think that that is being conceited or immodest, because I had no hand whatsoever in the color of my hair. To love your natural looks is like to give your creator props. Why is it, then, that if a person is to say that "I think my hair is gorgeous," then they are often looked at like they are being so immodest, and yet, if someone is to color their hair and then say that they think their hair is gorgeous... people generally think nothing of it, because, well, duh, of course they do?! Society is such a weird, weird thing.

Anyway, I had this random idea to set the camera on macro and just take pictures of my hair. So I practically put the camera lens to my head and snapped away. These are my favorite.








3) Mom has decided that we will have a designated tea-time. I am very, very excited about this, because there is always this time, after lunch and before dinner, when we get just starving and have no idea what to eat. So we're going to bake goodies ahead of time and then eat them around 3:00 pm with some tea or milk.

Yesterday was the first official tea-time, but today was the second official, which is sometimes almost better than the first. We ate the last of the scones, which were just as delicious room-temperature (which means COLD in our house... at the moment... see (4) for more details...) as they were straight from the oven. Okay, a little less delicious, but still fantastic.




And in case you are wondering with more than a little consternation: "Why is there any CRUMBS left on her plate from those DELICIOUS scones?!? If I had a scone I would eat the whole thing?!" Well, you may rest easy, because I just left them there for the dramatic purpose of the picture. *grin* They quickly disappeared after the shot.


4) The toilet seats were cold today. Need I say more? *fear*

youth shirt design

I finally finished the Youth Shirt Design for Jeremy and the youth group. I think I like how the end product turned out. :)

(click to enlarge. this little JPEG looks absolutely hideous. I do abhore web-resized images.)

"scone" is pronounced "sk-AH-N"

Today I woke up to find Mom standing in my room, wearing her retro green apron and telling me that "Caroline, I have my apron on, you know what that means..." I sort of just rolled over and grumbled and then I remembered what she had said yesterday. She was going to make SCONES for breakfast.

You may think that I then jumped out of bed, but I didn't... typical me. However, I did mosey downstairs quickly enough to catch the mixing of the lovely scones. They turned out PERFECTLY.

Props to Mom!


We used the recipe from Baking Illustrated (whose taste in design, by the way, I TOTALLY dig)




I think these pics are kind of cool, with the motion and texture.








It's really clever... they have you "smoosh" the dough into a cake pan to get a perfectly round circle, then cut it.








And they browned up perfectly. We put dried cranberries, blueberries, and cherries in them, which really fit nicely. My GOSH were they delicious...They were light and fluffy, semi-sweet and just like heaven.

And it was amazing: each one of us only ate ONE scone and we were so full.

I hope you're jealous, Griffin... we made scones w/ heads! :)

playing in the park

Today Quinn had to go to Taiji lessons in Winterville, so me and Mom went with and we sat in the nearby park while he was in class. It's a lovely park and I absolutely love Winterville... course, the park kind of became a screaming yard full of the people that frighten you away from Wal-Mart. They were easily drowned out by a few My Chemical Romance songs -- the cigar smoke coming from a slightly terrifying male in his twenties, however, was not.


But there was this very cute (in temperament, if not exactly looks), scrawny homeless kitten that seemed to like us, for it sat on our picnic table with us for a while and generally hung out. It was timid though, poor mite.


A cliched picture of fall... still brilliant, though, crazy color.


This was posted on a dumpster. I hope you never get the urge to occupy it for any reason, because it is simply against the law.


Cool reflections experiment.


Social Civics, despite the ancient book from which I am learning, is proving interesting.


I liked this little illustration. I would totally cross my legs when voting, how about you?


And THIS was taken as we turned the bend, but look at it. It's a gas station sign, surrounded by picnic tables.... So, after you go inside and take your pick of delicious deep-fried, packaged food, stuffed with soy lecithin and preservatives, go ahead and just lounge by the sign and eat. Or, if you are feeling really ambitious, you could just get some good ol' barbecue from the place across the street and make a picnic of it...by the gas station sign. Right.

Ttyl.

random excursion into pictureland

These pics are from a few days ago, when I decided to get out the camera. I was also cleaning my room, so this is what I produced...


this was kind of fun, 10 second delay, a view from my desk...


I love my pearl necklace.


This is the leaf from a flower that was a boutonniere from Sara's wedding... it's an old leaf.


Bubblegum. Took me nearly twenty minutes to get this shot, and it could be better. :P


I like fans.

:)

it's genius

I'm writing this post to simply announce that I am in LOVE with the new Genius feature on iTunes. Apple, you did good.

Making ten different playlists for different moods filled with different songs was tiresome, especially when I'm really picky about music and I like some songs sometimes and I don't like them other times and it all just gets icky and time-consuming and if I had to quickly minimize iTunes while song searching because Mom walked by in her secret, lets-see-if-Caroline-is-slacking walk... I thought I would collapse. *yay for drama!*

Anyways, Genius is fantastic. All you do is choose a song that you feel like...



Click the Genius button at the bottom of the page....



And then you can listen to a whole soundtrack of songs that are like the first one you chose. Then you can save the playlist you made, like I did for those four songs, or you can clear and start over, or hit refresh to make a new selection if you don't dig what it gave you.

*sigh.*

(and I had no idea how easy it was to take pictures of you screen... kind of fun, really.)

holy moly

i would like to just say how absolutely

weird

it is

that i thought about my old blog TODAY, September 29, 2008

because September 29, 2007 was the last time i posted....

how freaky.
but ultimately cool.

cool little dude

this little dude's been hanging out with us on the porch. he's really tiny for a preying mantis.

mom said he would spit tobacco on me if i took a macro pic of him.
he didn't spit tobacco on me.

however, if he did spit tobacco, i wonder if it would be this:



hmmm....

sunsets and watercolor

You'd think, being a graphic artist of sorts (or at least an aspiring graphic artist) that my blog would at least have bit of spark to it, maybe some graphics... you would think.

I took pictures today, for the first time in mooonths. Sara has completely spoiled me with her delicious cameras and my (or technically Mother's) little FinePix 6 megapixel point-and-shoot really made me kind of sick. However, I was inspired by the Photoshop Seminar I went to a few weeks ago to collect pictures of textures, so that I can use them on pictures and so forth and so on. So I came up with quite a few.

And then there was a gorgeous sunset.







Then it stormed and so Mother (Mother does know best...) made me unplug my computer. I was left to wander rather pathetically around the house and snap unnecessarily at my blood relations until I thought of maybe making a watercolor painting.

So I did.




i really like this pic. drink up.