No, I didn't forget about this blog again. There just hasn't been much to blog about lately. I'm mostly either working on the novel or at work. If I'm not doing one of those two things, then I'm running the kids to and from their various activities, or cooking, or walking the dog, or cleaning, or watching it snow (because that's what it does here: snow, snow, snow! In fact, there's more snow coming tonight, they say. Drat.) or any one of all the other things that make up my days. Pretty exciting stuff, let me tell you. (Actually, that's OK. I like my peaceful, boring existence. When I was in my teens and 20s, excitement was fun. Now that I'm in my late 30s, I find that excitement is generally highly overrated and comes with a hangover.) But I figured I should drop in and say "Hi!" So, Hi!

Our winter sowing experiment is a limited success so far: 2 out of the 8 "greenhouses" have sprouts despite below-freezing temps and a mix of snow, sleet, and rain. The only problem is that our labels washed away, even though we'd used a Sharpie permanent marker. That, I didn't expect. I'm a bit chagrined about this, although why I should be, I don't know. It's not like I could have easily anticipated this one. God knows, Sharpie markings don't easily come out of anything else....

It's a good thing that 1) girls had gone crazy with their drawings, so much so that they didn't wash entirely away and 2) I'd taken "before" pictures, otherwise we'd still be trying to figure out what's what. We still haven't positively IDd two of them, though, and I'm not 100% about a few of the others.





Look, it's spinach (or "spinch," as one of the children labeled it) in a milk jug! In April, in Minnesota! Who'd have thunk?



Awww, little spinach sprouts, so cute.



We don't know what this is. Petunia sprouts, maybe, or perhaps lobelia? If they keep growing, we should find out in June or so...


Yesterday, I took up yogurt making. Oh, wow, this is so much fun, I can't even tell you how much fun it is. (Yes, yes, I'm a big dork, I know.) To make the yogurt, I followed this tutorial, brilliantly titled How to make your own yogurt. Super easy. And good, oh yeah, mouth-wateringly so! And economical, too. Aside from the milk and starter (I'll come back to that in a minute) I already had almost everything I needed to make this in my kitchen (pot for the milk, glass containers, pitchers) and garage (cooler); my only investment was a candy thermometer, which I'd been meaning to get for a while anyway after my old one broke.

Pete the home-brewer pointed out after that fact that he has a fermenter which would probably work just as well if not better for incubating than the pitchers of hot water and cooler. I'll try that next time.

The tutorial has lots of photos, but of course I had to take a few of my own.

Post-inoculation, ready to go in the incubator aka cooler. Pouring was a little sloshier than I'd anticipated!



Post-incubation and in the frig. YUM.



Thank you, cows of Cedar Summit Farm!


This yogurt is GOOD. It's so good, I don't think I'll go back to buying commercially produced yogurt. And cost-wise (I said I'd come back to that, remember?)...Right, I'm not going to count the candy thermometer into this since I've been meaning to get one and will be using it for more things than just yogurt-making. So, a half gallon of milk (64 ounces), plus a 6 ounce container of Stonyfield yogurt went into this batch of yogurt.

$1.15 for 6 oz of yogurt (about 19¢/oz)
+
$4.19 for 64 oz of milk -- organic, from a local dairy, in a glass, returnable container (about 6.5¢/oz)

= not-quite 8¢ per ounce for 70 ounces of organic, mostly locally-produced yogurt, with no sugars, additives, pectins, packaging or anything to recycle except for the 6 oz container the starter yogurt came in.

If I throw in the candy thermometer and pretend that I will only use it this one time for this batch of yogurt (which is silly, but it makes for easy math) then we have

$3.99 thermometer
+
$1.15 starter yogurt
+
$4.19 milk

= $9.33 for 70 ounces of yogurt, or a smidge more than 13¢/oz., which still beats the cost of an individual container of plain Stonyfield yogurt.

And like I said, this stuff is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. In fact, it's so good, I think I'm going to go eat some more as soon as I hit "post"...

POST!

Third verse, same as the first

Still snowing. How disgusting. The landscape hasn't changed, so I'm not bothering to take any more pictures of it. Here, have one of yesterday's set.




We actually had a pretty fun day despite being stuck inside on our last day of Spring Break. We watched TV, read, played some games, painted some watercolors, wrote a few stories...We also did up some more seeds for our winter sowing experiment. (I didn't ask them to decorate the milk jugs-cum-greenhouses. They did that all on their own.)





The snow's so deep that you'd never know by looking at it, but there are another 5 greenhouses buried behind the batch we did up yesterday. The girls are really into this, so much so that they've decided this is going to be their Science Fair project. Will it work? Will seeds that have been frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed over and over again actually sprout? Tune in April 24th at the Science Fair...

Dinner last night was something wonderfully colorful. I'd like to say that I planned it this way because we're all in desperate need of some color, but no. I just happened to have some green onions that I need to use up and a bag of baby spinach in the 'frig, some frozen chicken breasts, and canned diced tomatoes. Plop a bunch of spinach into a baking dish, slap the chicken breasts on top, toss on some tomatoes and green onions, make up some curried rice while it's baking, and voila. 35 minutes later, one very pretty -- and tasty! -- dinner is the result.




The girls and I also made PB&J cookies from a recipe I found over at Blissfully Domestic.





In a word: YUM.

Abigail Taylor died yesterday.

I don't know this little girl or her family, but her story has bothered me from the first. Maybe it's because once upon a time I was a lifeguard and, I kid you not, I left work every day thankful that nothing major had gone wrong on my shift. (When I was 9, I witnessed a fairly horrific accident when another kid fell off the high diving board and landed on the cement instead of in the water. It's not an exaggeration to say that I thought of that accident every day when I went to work.) Maybe it's because my kids and I pretty much live at the pool in the summer, and I could too easily imagine this happening to one of them. Or maybe it's just because this was an absolutely horrific accident and you'd have to be awfully cold to not feel something for the poor kid. Whatever the reason, when the news broke last summer I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.

I really wanted this to somehow be OK, even though it probably wasn't going to be. When they announced the transplant, I was cheering for her. She had a long, hard road ahead of her and the odds weren't great, but she'd already survived more than a lot of other people might have. Maybe she was actually going to be all right.

When I read about the cancer a few Sunday papers ago, I looked at Pete and said, blankly, "She's not going to make it, is she."

I am so, so sorry to be right.

Second verse, same as the first

The weather forecast did not lie. For the second time this week we woke up to this:



and it's still coming down.

The good news is that it should melt fast. And at least the people driving the snowplows are making money.



Like probably everybody else around here, I'm tired of greys and whites and browns. I want some color -- and flowers! But the only things blooming are my baskets o' spring bulbs inside.


The girls and I were going to go to the Zoo today. I think we'll stay home and play games in front of the fire instead.

It's Spring!

So what's in the forecast for today?

Snow, of course. You expected something else?