Starbucks Simulation

My mom gave Stuart the Totally Coffee Cookbook for his birthday. I took a mental coffee road trip as I flipped through the pages.

Six years ago, we were living in Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders love their coffee. Cars with a Rhode Island license plate come equipped with two standard features... a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary glued to the dashboard (on account of their driving) and a Dunkin Donuts coffee in the cup holder. My cup holder held a Kahlua Coolata...until we moved to Tennessee.

In Chattanooga, a Dunkin' Donuts beckoned on Hixson Pike. The first one we had seen since flying out of New York. We pulled into the parking lot to find an abandoned van parked in front the broken drive thru window. Citizens south of the Mason-Dixon line have different sensibilities. Southerners pick up their sweet tea at Chick-Fil-A. A lit Krispy Kreme light sucks cars from the street and up to the window for melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Dunkin' Donuts is superfluous.

Starbucks moved in about the time we moved out.

Here in our little town there is neither Starbucks nor Dunkin' Donuts. People keep offering us grits but this does not help. By necessity, we must brew our own java.

I came across a recipe, on page 30 of the Totally Coffee Cookbook, for a cappuccino blizzard. The recipe promised greater taste than the actual results. So I have been experimenting in my quest for the perfect frozen concoction. But...coffee makes me hyper...and tense...and shaky. Even decaf. Because I am hyper and tense I must keep creating and sampling until I get it right. Because I am shaky I cannot measure accurately. But I'm determined. I'm off to the kitchen to have another go at this!

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4-H Exhibits-Updated

Update: Blue ribbons all around! 4 of our projects will go onto the state fair. John's headboard exceeds size limitations and so we will lug it home tomorrow. We are relieved. That thing is heavy! ************* For the past few weeks we have been busy sewing, sawing, quilling and painting 4-H projects. The kids have been in 4-H for about a month and they started with a bang. The annual 4-H fair is tomorrow. So this morning we loaded these projects and four kids wearing slippers into the car. The fifth one had sense enough to wear flip-flops. (The other four complained as we pulled out of the driveway that their feet were sweating.) John reclining against the headboard that he built with Stuart. He wrote the 10 Commandments of Table Saw Safety to accompany this project. Claire's quilling project. Lauren modeling the apron that she sewed. Lauren and the dog painting she has been working on in art class for the past few months. Faith and her quilling project. So now...

The Child's Story Bible

I have recommended the following book so frequently that I think a post is in order so that I may recommend it to the world. In the early nineteen hundreds, when my grandparents were growing from children to adults, when they were meeting and marrying and making ends meet during the Depression, Catherine F. Vos was at work. She had been out shopping, looking for the perfect children’s story bible. The Christian bookstores of the day must have had the same unsatisfactory fare for young children that they carry today. Her standards were high as she was the wife of a professor of theology and she could not find what she was looking for. So she started to write. The results of her writing, The Child’s Story Bible was first published in stages between the years of 1934-1936. It’s been republished in every decade since that time. My grandparents had my parents and they met and married and had me and somewhere along the way I acquired a Bible. I read from the book of Proverbs from time to t...

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

Claire and a hen named Bob To those of you who know how much I wanted chickens when we moved out to the country: No. Bob is not ours. We're sad. No chickens allowed in our neighborhood.

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