Southern Living Yankee

Fried Ice Cream + Sombrero = Somebody's Birthday! Chris has his eye on it! Birthday Girl! The end of a sweet day Maple Syrup Test Tom and I enjoyed celebrating Brooke's birthday with her and Chris, and Chris's family at our favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner. Earlier in the day we toured Bissell's Maple Farm, riding the horse cart up to the sugar shack, seeing the process in action, and snacking on the goodies! I came home with a dozen leaf-shaped bottles, like the one in the picture above. "Made In Ohio," they'll make nice little gifts for new friends I'll meet wherever the road may lead us during these next weeks. All that maple syrup made me hungry for some pancakes when we got back home today, and I had three types of syrup to sample and see if we could tell the difference. So I made pancakes and sausage for supper and we had a maple syrup "tasting." Pictured above are two Ohio syrups-- Grade B (the dark one in the ba...

Moment then: On Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012 Tom and I met each other after work at a printshop to look into the costs and process of printing the book I've been writing/bleeding the last six years. Cheers! Applause! This really seemed like the way to go, and we were pretty pumped! Tom was waiting for me in the parking lot, and as I approached his car he shocked me with, "Do you want the bad news now or later?" What a fine time to hear he'd be out of a job in six weeks! And then I got sick with a colossal cold virus and stayed home from work on Friday. Lucky me. Sick at home on Friday, and on Saturday morning I discovered that Fud, who'd been confined to the downstairs bathroom all night because he was puking---was puking blood. It shows up remarkably well on white bathroom fixtures. Slimy pink paw prints. So Tom and I took him to the vet for inconclusive diagnoses and a few scratches. For although the cat can't keep anything down, he can still scratch and s...