Well, I finally got around to cookies the other day. I guess I've just been in a cooking mood -- not that much of it has actually happened, but I'm thinking about it more. In addition to the cookies, which were actually made a week ago, I'm just now getting around to posting about it. I made tortilla soup too. Both were absolutely excellent!

The cookies were billed as Chewy Chocolate Cookies, and they were. They were also supposed to be four times bigger than they turned out, but that was a deliberate choice on my part (I always prefer quantity over, well, size), which reduced their chewiness and increased their crispiness. They were still very yummy, but they're gone now!

Needlepoint on a small island

So I committed to making a needlepoint stocking, in concept similar to the one at left -- my mom designed and made three: one for my brother, one for my daughter, and one for my sister. When we cleaned out her house, we probably threw away several hundred dollars worth of needlepoint (and other craft supplies). How I wish now I hadn't agreed to that action!

I believed that our local Ben Franklin would stock needlepoint stuff -- blank canvas, yarn, spare needles... Nope, none of it. Wal-Mart either. According to the internet, the closest needlepoint stores to me are out on the west side, an hour drive each way, if they're really there. Next time I have an errand out that way, I'll try to hunt them down. My concern is that they're geared more toward the vacationing needlepointers, rather than a transplant taking up a 30-year old abandoned hobby. But even vacationing needlepointers need to pick up a skein of Christmas green to finish a project, don't they?

Thank heavens for eBay! I've bought quite a bit of yarn and a bit of canvas from various sources already, but the lack of ability to stand and, for example, compare various shades of reds prior to purchase is a bit frustrating.

I narrowed down the colors to be used from the original 54 to 40-ish, so that's some sort of progress I guess. Now off to see how many of the skeins purchased sight-unseen fall into any of the categories I can use...

Another Hobby

Yeah, just what I need...another hobby. I have no idea where this blog will settle; I'll just post random stuff and see if a pattern emerges. (Or if I even continue with it or not.)

I've just started truly reading blogs -- aside from the random occasional bump against them -- and it seems like jumping on the bandwagon would be a good idea.

I'll probably post things about my hobbies: genealogy, needlepoint, cooking, volunteering, scraping pictures of my family off the 'net, travel, work (oh, wait, that's not so much a hobby, is it?), family, some tv, whatever is on my mind whenever I have time to play.

At the company Christmas Party, George won a $50 gift certificate to Macy's. The prizes most of the evening were gift certificates to restaurants that don't have an outpost on our island, and I was certain that if a prize was won by us, it would be one of those. (I was having a glass-half-empty kind of day, I guess.) But we were coming back to the table after getting our dinner from the buffet line, and they announced the prize. George said, "I'm not even going to sit down, this one is mine." and stood in the middle of the aisle. Sure enough, they called his name. Knock me over with a feather duster!

I guess I've been watching too much Food TV, because for the past several months, I've been wanting a pepper grinder. I used to have three of them, but none of them accompanied us on our move to the middle of the Pacific. After unsuccessfully trying to get George to use the gift certificate for items for himself, I went and bought a pepper grinder that's adjustable so that I can have very coarse-ground pepper, which is what I prefer. I truly can tell the difference, and I'm glad I finally have the pepper grinder. I love the fresh spicy smell that wafts up whenever I use it.

However,  the pepper grinder came with a salt grinder too. Now I can have freshly ground salt to accompany my freshly ground pepper. I can't smell any difference... (I know, I know, there won't be any difference for freshly ground salt. It's a rock, it doesn't have essences to lose when it's ground ahead of time.) I'm not sure what the long-term impact of owning a salt grinder will be, except maybe I don't need to buy two kinds of salt anymore.

THE END