Senior Year

Well, Senior Year is here!  Seems like just yesterday we brought a beautiful baby home from the hospital and soon she's going to sprout wings and fly!  And that first day of Preschool?  That was only late in yesterday's evening and now...  Tiana and I had fun looking through lots of photos yesterday in the hunt for the pieces of this collage.  I can hardly wait to get the print I have on order at Costco!

Well Hello There!!!!

How fabulous to see your smiling face here!  SOOO much has happened since we last met here.  Let see, right after that last post, Tiana flew to Alaska for 3 weeks and I started my summer quarter.  Now, then, we have a 17 year-old in the house and it is officially my summer vacation.  While Tiana was in Alaska, Kent and I took a road trip over to Eastern Washington.  We took in a Western Themed town, did some hiking up to some caves and stuck our feet in Soap Lake.  We went to Meeting with my cousins in Tri-Cities and saw a number of young people at a birthday get together for another cousin.  We drove home by way of Mt. Rainier State Park on the scariest road I've even ridden on!  We are both VERY sure we know why they close that road in the winter!  In case you haven't see them, and if you are at all interested, here are the links to the pictures from that trip:

• Day 1 - Over the North Cascades Highway to Winthrop
• Day 2 - Winthrop, Grand Coulee Dam, Steamboat Rock
• Day 3 - Leftovers from Day 2, Hiking Lenore Caves and Dry Falls
• Day 4 - Heading Home

We also spent one more Saturday on the road where we went to Mima Mounds State Park, the Capitol Forest and stopped at Nisqually for some serious photo ops.  Those pictures are here.

After Tiana got home we went to Oregon and spent the weekend with my parents.  We took a nice hike to Silver Falls and stopped on the way home to pick blueberries and raspberries.  Was SUPER fun and a great day!  Our raspberries sort of smashed so we made freezer jam that was so good!  The rest are in the freezers! ☺

Since being home, now we've done even more berry picking.  There seems to be a bumper crop of blackberries this year and I've picked more than just a few.  Those have an awesome price tag, too!  FREE!!!!  Ivona and co, Tiana and Bug and I all went blueberry picking the other day.  Ivona ended up with 8 pounds and we had 10.  I froze most of them and plan to make a blueberry sour cream pie.  Today I made a blackberry cobbler that was FABULOUS!  I found the recipe at Pioneer Woman.

We've also been to convention and enjoyed good days there.  We got to see some long-time friends of Kent's and so that was fun to catch up with them a bit.

So, I think that's it in a very large nutshell.  Hopefully it won't be so long until we meet again!  Soon it will be time for me to fly away to the East Coast where I will spend a few days with some friends and paper!  Just like a couple of years ago I will go to Pennsylvania to do some scrapbooking.  I'm quite sure that family will be glad not to be there! :)

Happy Break?

So, it's kind of my first day of break between quarters and to celebrate, I went to the dentist.  I swear they fought a war in my mouth and I was the loser!!  My mouth hurts soo bad right now!  Anyway, my dreaded biology exam is behind me and I'm hoping for a decent score, psych is complete and my required Philosophy/Logic requirement is fulfilled!  Here's to some pleasure reading, baking, cooking and relaxation before summer quarter and nutrition start up!

Sunny Day at Play

Tiana's out of town, so Kent and I decided to do somethings that she may or may not be interested in.  First stop was to be the tulip fields in Mount Vernon.  Um...Or not!  The traffic was horrendous because EVERYONE had that idea!  It was the actual festival day, there was a street fair in town to celebrate and it was a warm sunny Saturday.  So, we moseyed on up to the former Northern State Mental Hospital grounds to take some pictures.  A classmate of mine had gone there to do some AP Photography shooting, so I thought would be fun to take a look around.  Unfortunately, the hospital itself is off limits, although I've seen some  photos from inside the building.  I think it would be SOO cool to explore it!  I think we were up there at least 2 if not 3 hours just walking around the grounds, peeking in the buildings, walking through them, conjecturing what they were used for.   A few of the buildings had signs that explained what they were, but the rest we had to pretty much just guess at.  We did "sneak" onto the main grounds and took an external hospital picture or two, but without "official" business there, we decided not to risk sticking around.  Then we had  a little Dairy Queen pick me up and decided that we weren't so far from the Canadian border so we might as well head on up for dinner.  We ate at our favorite Fish and Chips place, grabbed a bag of Ketchup flavored potato chips as well as a bag of Dill Pickle flavored, stopped at Starbucks and headed back home!  We were in Canada all of about 2 or 3 hours! ☺ The weather was fantastic and the day relaxing.  I even managed to read two of my three chapters for biology!  Feel free to take a look at the photos I took.  A lot of them were playing with depth of field and light!

Sunny days

Sunny Days in Seattle are a wonderful time to live here!  We thoroughly enjoyed the sun as we wandered around downtown and took in the rays, the views, the experience of downtown!  It's spring break so there were A LOT of people around, many holding bouquets from the Market.  There was the Trayvon Martin demonstration and blue trees, the "characters" for Sakura-Con - an anime and Asian cartoon/culture convention.  Not something I really understand! For more pictures, click the flowers.

This is a recipe I ran across one day and have loved forever since then!!  It was in the New York Times and it's fabulous!
Crispy Onions
Start with at least a medium onion per person; slice it. Put a splash of oil – doesn’t have to be olive – in a pan. Turn heat medium-high so the onions sizzle when they get in there; salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they begin to brown. Lower the heat a bit, but not much. Cook, stirring more frequently, until they are really quite shriveled and dry. Then cook a little more — until black spots begin to appear. Then stop. Total time, around 15 minutes, maybe 20.
Salt them a little more if you like and serve on top of anything

Super Duper Yumminess!!

Found here and HERE!
OREO TRUFFLES
1 package Oreos (NOT double stuf!)
1 8oz. package cream cheese
2 8oz. packages semi-sweet baking chocolate, melted

Keep out about 6 Oreos to crush and sprinkle on top of the finished truffles.  Beat the cream cheese until fluffy.  Add finely crushed Oreo cookies, mixing well.  Form into 1" balls and dip into melted chocolate.  Sprinkle with leftover crumbs.  Refrigerate for 1 hour before enjoying.  Store leftovers in the refrigerator.  
Some people in their reviews on the website said that their truffle balls crumbled when they dipped them.  I used two forks to lift the truffles out of the chocolate and I had no problems! I also used a double boiler so my chocolate could continue to stay very liquid-y.  Another reviewer suggested using other sandwich creme cookies, including Nutter Butter!  Now, honestly, how bad could THAT be?!?!  Well, other than what it would do to my scale!!
Oh, and I also sprinkled them with my Chocolate/Coffee/Sugar from Trader Joe's -- it comes in a grinder!!