Pumpkins.

These were $4. For all six. I'm overflowing with ideas about how to cook them.
Plus, they're just pretty.

Tiramisu

Actually, this should be more like modified tiramisu... I'm not sure it's anything close to traditional - no Marsala wine or Kahlua, for one thing - except for the ladyfingers.

Anyway, it was still yummy.

INGREDIENTS:

1 pkg soft ladyfingers (I found them in the freezer/bakery section)

1/2 c. strong coffee or espresso

1 t. vanilla

1 1/2 c. plain yogurt

1 pkg. cream cheese, softened (I used Neufchatel; couldn't find light cream cheese)

1/2 c. confectioner's sugar

2 T. cocoa powder

1/2 square semisweet baking chocolate, grated

DIRECTIONS:

Place plain yogurt in a coffee filter in a mesh strainer over a bowl. Cover and let stand in refrigerator at least 2 hours. The whey will drain out and leave the yogurt really thick and wonderful - this is yogurt cheese.

Combine yogurt cheese, softened cream cheese, and sugar. Mix well.

Combine coffee and vanilla.

Combine cocoa powder and grated chocolate.

Line bottom of ungreased loaf pan with single layer of ladyfingers. Spoon 1/2 to 1 tsp. coffee onto each ladyfinger (you could also dip each ladyfinger in the coffee before placing it in the pan).

Spoon 1/3 of cream cheese mixture over ladyfingers and spread evenly.

Sift 1/3 of cocoa mixture on top of cream cheese mixture.

Repeat layers - ladyfingers, coffee, cream cheese, cocoa, ladyfingers, coffee, cream cheese mixture.

Cover and chill overnight. Dust with remaining cocoa mixture just before serving.

Serves 5-6.

Cake.

Yearbook Yourself

This is just silly, but rather fun.

Here is what I would look like in yearbooks from the 1950s to 2000.

You can upload your own photo and experiment at http://www.yearbookyourself.com/.

My personal favorite is 1968.

Fancy Nancy

It's birthday cake season again... and Gracie's 5th birthday party will be, yes, you guessed it... Fancy Nancy.

I'm now on the hunt for cake ideas.

Books.

I have no idea how I found this list. I may come back and edit again, especially since I've only read 31 of these. Not that this list constitutes the top 100 books ever, of course.

*******

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Morning.

This morning, while I was walking around the track near our house, I was treated to a sunrise sky like a Maxfield Parrish painting, and little snippets of rainbow in the west (Genesis 9:12-17).

You can't beat that.

Fun New Toy

I just discovered a new site called Wordle.

Then I made this:


The resolution's not great, because it's just a screen snip, but I just pasted in the text from an old post and it made this for me!

Try it. It's super cool.

Lunch.

The Cast of Characters:

Tuna + Baby Spinach = yummy salad!

Rosemary & Olive Oil Triscuits

Mom's Super-Secret Fruit Salad

this incarnation had pear, mango, & strawberry, with...

the super-secret ingredient...
pie filling!

(I think I may have used the Wal-Mart brand)
I usually use peach, but needed sugar-free - so we went for apple instead.

and, for a frou-frou touch,

Chopped Toasted Pecans.

YUM. It. Was. Good.

What's Your Theological Worldview?

Interesting quiz. (Thanks, Beth and Mike!) I always wish there were more options, as it's hard to choose one answer without qualifying it; but my computer never lets me explain. :)

What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavily by John Wesley and the Methodists. Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 75% Neo orthodox 54% Emergent/Postmodern 46% Fundamentalist 43% Charismatic/Pentecostal 43% Reformed Evangelical 39% Classical Liberal 39% Roman Catholic 36% Modern Liberal 32%

Temptation Office

The red dish currently holds Hershey Bliss, dark.

This is what I look at all day, every day.

Just out of arm's reach.

Unless I stand up.

This week's discovery.

iTunes has free podcasts. I know, it's hard to believe that counts as a discovery.

But now I can load them onto my pack-of-gum-sized Shuffle and listen to them while I do housework.

Mental exercise *and* fulfilling domestic activity, all in one.

I knew it had to be possible.

Last night I organized all of David's baseball caps on the closet wall while listening to Rob Bell talk about a British graffiti artist named Banksy and the mystery of God.

SNOW!

Even this much is a big deal in Texas.

Hah.

Word of the Day (from Dictionary.com)
Friday February 15, 2008

ennui \on-WEE\, noun:
A feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction arising from lack of interest; boredom.

He glanced at his heavily laden bookshelves. Nothing there appealed to him. The ennui seemed to have settled into his very bones.
-- Amanda Quick, With This Ring

He was often off sick or playing hooky and suffered from a kind of ennui, a mixture of listlessness and willful melancholy.
-- Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (translated by Barbara Bray)

Yet if she felt anything it was ennui, . . . the grey sky and the cold wind obliterating every impulse she might have felt to seek comfort in another climate, another landscape.
-- Anita Brookner, Falling Slowly

He was ashamed and unhappy, adrift with a senseless ennui.
-- Brian Moynahan, Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned

Ennui is from the French, from Old French enui, "annoyance," from enuier, "to annoy, to bore," from the Latin phrase in odium, "in hatred or dislike."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for ennui