Raindrops and recipes

Summer is such a tedious season--it's so hot and sweaty and lazy and the only holiday of any importance in the midst of it all pretty much requires its participants to endure the mucky outdoors for an entire day. It's not at all like the fall, which is cool, doesn't smell like a gymnasium, and is chock-a-block full of opportunities for intimate family gatherings. As such, summer doesn't do much to inspire many blog posts, and for that I am sorry. Perhaps I should start a second blog with a theme ("calorie conscious foodie" leaps to mind) so that I can update more regularly. Ponder this, dear readers, as I regale you with tales of limited significance.

I had planned on blogging about the terrible storm that hit us last week, but I got so carried away with cleaning up my room and working on long overdue thank-you cards that that post fell by the wayside. I managed to snap a few pictures of the house and the damage after the power outage left my family with nothing to do but sit in the dark living room and fall asleep at 9:30, so I hope those suffice:


Behold, the mantle in the family room from which our only source of light was emitted.


The wind tore this limb from our neighbor's oak tree and set it down smack dab in the middle of our driveway, thus rendering us unable to entertain ourselves with a drive around the battered neighborhood.

My mom and some of her friends have decided to make dinner for the directors of the Vacation Bible School program that's going on at church this week, and she volunteered to be in charge of the desserts for my sake (because the SoCo brownies and blueberry pie that I made last week did nothing to quell my urge to bake). While flipping through an old cookbook for ideas, I came across a recipe for Mock Apple Pie that doesn't actually call for apples, but instead requires a whole sleeve of Ritz crackers. What was more interesting than the ingredients list, however, was the background information that the author included on the page: who knew that the name "Nabisco" was not coined accidentally? National Biscuit Company=NaBisCo! That's genius.