Emily Bloss

Maybe my next job will be to make and sell stepping stones. There are so many interesting designs! One of my favorites is the sand dollar. Wouldn’t those be cool to have in the yard of your beach house? Oh, I suppose I’ll need one of those, too… to go with the stepping stones.  Except, if I have a beach house, I don’t know how I could ever get any work done, at least for the first few years of liiving there. I would sure like to try, though!

Trav found this really cool program for me - it’s called TuxGuitar. You can load in a guitar tab and it will play the song and show exactly where your fingers go, what strings to pluck and the music, all at once. Way cool! I found and downloaded the tab for one of my favorite songs of all time - Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd. It’s the first song I’m going to learn on my guitar!! Perhaps when I learn it, I’ll post a video, bad singing and all. :>

Today, with my nifty new grabby thing, we got to pick up a whole grocery bag’s worth of trash from our walking route in the park! I was thrilled. What a great way to directly help the environment. Thanks, Bleys, for the gift! And thanks, eagle-eye Trav, for spotting the trash, helping to pick up and showing me how to use it better. I’ve never been so happy picking up trash!!

What a wonderful day. We went over to Gramma’s house and ate waaaaaay too much delicious food and shared good company. This was the year of the kitchen gadget for my family, and the year of the tie-dye t-shirt for Trav’s family and our friends. Hopefully everybody enjoyed their gifts as much as we enjoyed ours!! Right now we’re listening to Trav’s collection of John Volby and other assorted funny Christmas songs.

I took lots of pictures today, too. Here’s a self-portrait… it turns out I love the camera so much I have a hard time giving it up, so I don’t get to be in many pictures. I think I can learn to take more like this one, but with me and whoever else in it.

Oh, and did anybody notice… I put the wrong freakin’ year in all but one of the Christmas cards I did this year. For some reason, I’ve been in a time warp for the last few months, putting 2008 on everything. I guess that’ll work out well pretty soon - I’m used to the new year already!

So it turns out I’m not a huge sci-fi geek… my results said I must own several action figures, and I do! Bashful, Grumpy and Happy.

	I received 35 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Guess the Sci-Fi Movie Sounds hereCanon powershot

MmmMmMMMMMmm!! Last night we had the Spicy Lamburgers and they were delicious. We all agreed to rate it a 5 on Allrecipes, because we would be satisfied if we got it in a restaurant. And for breakfast this morning, we had Curried Rice Pilaf, and everybody liked it! Definitely a keeper recipe to go into the book. Thanks, Mom!

Oh and speaking of restaurants… it turns out Taco Bell is not intended to be Mexican food (like we all didn’t know that already, hah!).

We have at least one new recipe to try out this week… yummy! Plus I’ll be making the macaroons for a treat.

• Lamburgers
• Steak Marsala
• Skillet Lasagna Florentine
• Pizza with Pepperoni, Mushrooms and Onion
• Japanese Stir Fry
• Mixed Greens Salad with Italian Herb-Crusted Chicken
• Chicken & Shrimp Fried Rice

Mmmmmmm, I found what looks like a really good cookie in Aunt Susie’s “Cooky” recipe book (I think my parents have this book, too). Hopefully I can try them soon. Of course, it being so close to Christmas, we have a ton of treats in the house. But these don’t have any flour in them and almonds are good for you. Plus I’ll use either fresh or dried cherries with no added sugar. The recipe calls for blanched almonds but I’m not going to do that because the skin is good for you and nobody but me really cares about how the cookie looks, as long as it tastes good! Here’s the recipe:

Cherry Almond Macaroons

5 oz. slivered almonds (blanched, if preferred; about 1 1/4 cups)
3/4 C. sugar
3 egg whites
1/4 C. chopped maraschino cherries (or fresh or dried?)

Grind dry, crisp almonds through finest blade of food grinder/processor. Mix nuts, sugar and egg whites in sauce pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, 8-10 minutes or until a path stays clean when spoon is drawn through. Remove from heat, stir in cherries. Drop level teaspoonsful of dough on 2 greased and lightly floured baking sheets. Let stand at room temperature until cool (this insures rounded macaroons).

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Bake about 20 minutes or until delicately golden on exterior but soft and moist inside. Remove from sheets immediately. Makes 2 dozen.

Last night we got 4 inches of rain! It was an amazing storm… woke me up a couple of times. An EF-1 tornado touched down about 10 miles south of us but it only did a little damage (a couple of overturned cars and a flimsy structure destroyed at the county jail). The water was running so hard it washed our neighbor’s phone book into the middle of the road in front of our house. It made for a nice walk this morning, with everything all washed and clean. We really needed the rain, it had been months.

My colleague up in Canada has been having quite the winter. She lives waaaay up there, though, where I suppose you would expect such conditions. After seeing her pics, I’m glad to be in Florida! As my dad says, “You don’t have to shovel sunshine!”

I truly believe we are making ourselves sick by producing unnatural products… we’re poisoning our environment. I wonder how many kids have autism or something like that because of the amount of lead in our lives? It seems every day there’s a new story about lead or some other terrible thing in this or that product. How many of us have Christmas lights from who knows when that are full of it? I read the other day that you should wash your hands after handling strings of lights because lead will get on them from touching the lights. Aieeee!!!

Anyways, this rambling was due to seeing an article about Soapberry - I want to try this on my clothes:

Laundry soap grows on trees

I’ll let you know how it is if I try it. I hope I get a seed!