The first week of camp has gone quietly here at the homestead. While I’ve yet to wade into the princess lair for the annual “she won’t miss it” purge, I have done some reorganizing. Continue reading
Category: family tree
And, we’re back.
In what feels like a pretty familiar theme around here, we’ve once again returned from a few days away. This time around, it was our annual trip to Smith Mountain Lake with Will & Mollie.
Oysterfest in July
Granny’s Crab Soup
We took off to Baltimore this past weekend. Generally I’m not so hot at making time to visit with anyone outside of the particular branch of the family tree we are staying with, but one of the beauties of summer is that we have enough wiggle room in our schedule to have long weekends. Which means being able to make time to see people we really want to see.
Well hello there!
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? True to form, May has kicked my ass on every level imaginable once again this year. How is it Memorial Day weekend already? I’m still not done getting the gardens in, the only batch of strawberry jam I made was at last night’s Happy Cook class and when people ask what our summer plans are, I have no answer. None. Continue reading
Complete and utter madness abounds.
Last Wednesday afternoon I came home from running errands to discover Pat was taking off to Lynchburg at the news of a train derailment that sent tanker cars carrying crude oil into the river, setting the river itself on fire. Continue reading
Sort of in season.
Grandma’s fruitcake cookies are a holiday staple here. Which probably has you asking why I’m blogging about them in February, because everyone knows fruitcake is clearly a December holiday treat and not a February holiday treat. In the hustle & bustle & multiple cookie swaps that were December, the cookies didn’t get made. We had fourteen dozen cookies on hand – we didn’t need any more. As we don’t share these cookies well there was no way they were getting made for a swap for us to only have a few left on hand. No, we need the entire batch all to ourselves. Continue reading
Back.
Thank you all for your kind words on the loss of my cousin Henry. Last week was brutal, just plain and simple.
We are slowly getting back into the swing of things here. It’s amazing the restorative power of a pot of vegetable soup, freshly baked bread & homemade chocolate pudding can have. Did I mention the pudding was dark chocolate? If I was a better food blogger, I’d have written this post around recipes for at least one of those home cooked items, with beautiful images. But I’m not. And to be honest, the pudding was not entirely smooth. The phone rang AND there was a knock at the door as I came to a critical point in pudding making. Oh well. It was still pretty darn edible, even if it wasn’t perfect. Such is life. Not always perfect, but still pretty darn tasty if you can get past the lumps.
My cousin Henry.
My cousin Mark called this morning. I should have known something was up because my family, especially my cousins, never call unless something is up. It’s a bad habit that runs in the family. As I sat there praying it wasn’t his parents, he broke the news to me. Our cousin Henry had passed away. Continue reading
Scenes from a holiday.
Accidental Self Portrait
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 