Don’t forget to celebrate in the traditional way!

Happy solstice!

New poll in the sidebar: what’s your favorite Christmas Carol.

This doesn’t include hymns, which you might sing while caroling. Of course, the last time I remember caroling, was for French club in high school. We went around my French teachers neighborhood, singing French Christmas carols, to her neighbors. Then we went back to her house and had a party.

Anyway, your favorite Christmas carols?

Saturday I cut out sugar cookies and baked them. They still need iced, but that’s for another day.

WVU Alert 12:41 PM

WVU Closed beginning 1:30 pm today until further notice. Updates: wvu.edu

I love snow!

Since the semester is over, and more than half the population of the town is gone, I have a feeling there will be no rush to clear the roads.

Going up the hill…

Going down the hill…

Many furry thanks to Diana who provided fresh, homemade, catnip toys to Kit and Kat!

So. Depression, blah blah blah, upped my meds, blah blah blah.

Same old song and dance there.

What’s new is that Thursday I have an appointment to see if we can figure out what the hell happened to put me in the ER Monday night.

Yes, I feel fine. I felt fine Monday night actually. But I’d like to make sure that this incident was an aberration and not something that is going to need further inquiry.

Also, after following the various medical trials and tribulations of my friend Shawn, I am very glad that I have excellent health care providers, and live in an area where there are a variety of doctors–both general practice and specialists–that I can see.

Sure you don’t wanna move to Morgantown Shawn?

It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for word association.

In honor of my adventures Monday night, today’s word is: emergency

I was looking for a new cookies recipe to try, and when I ran across this one, I remembered that I’d frozen some blueberries this summer, so that meant I had to make the recipe, right?

The recipe was straightforward, however, the cookies took longer than expected to bake, and although they are delicious, they’re sticky and fall apart when you pick them up. But they are really really good, so I’m going to play with the cookie size and baking times to see if I can get things to turn out better.

And definitely use the lemon oil–the lemon flavor makes these cookies.

Blueberry Hill Oatmeal Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp lemon oil
2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup toasted coconut
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
1 cup semi-frozen blueberries

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Blend butter and sugars. Add egg, vanilla, and lemon oil. Add baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Fold in oats, then coconut, then flour.

By hand, fold in blueberries.

Scoop 2 tbsp balls of dough on baking sheets, at least 3 inches apart (the cookies spread a lot).

Bake 14 minutes.

Cool on the cookie sheets for 10 minutes, then finish cooling on a wire rack.

As I said, they were very delicious, but extremely sticky, and completely fell apart. I’ll have to play with the recipe to see if I can get the next batch to hold together better.

From A Passion for Baking by Marcy Goldman

Spent the weekend making Christmas cookies (most of which are frozen/refrigerated in dough form).

Any requests before I finish up next weekend?

For those who may use and RSS feed for this place (there are legions of you I’m sure), I’ve been tweaking the layout for the site.

I’ve added a temporary snowfall, which was a lot of fun to create I must admit, and I created a new set of banner headers. Refresh and you’ll see a new header (Michael created that php file for me a couple years ago, and is willing to share it if anyone is interested in it.)

All the photos in the headers are mine, and all the manipulations are mine.

This is one of those songs.

Yes, Kit really is that much smaller than Kat.