Soggy Morning

The forecast for Wednesday was WET with a good possibility of strong storms in the evening hours depending on if the sun ever came out that day and how much the temperature rose. 

Morning was definitely spot on; with pouring rain and thunder rumbling like the sound of a tractor pulling an empty gravity wagon back and forth on the road in front of my house.  Horses were going to have to stay in the barn, as the air temperature was hovering just above the freezing mark and it was going to be impossible to put the horses outside without them getting drenched to the skin in the rain.  I didn't want anyone to get chilled.

So, rather than turning them out after their breakfast had been eaten, I decided I would stay in the house and do some house chores in the morning, then go to the barn after lunch and (hopefully) turnout horses during the break in the rain we were supposed to get midday.  It's always easier to clean stalls while the horses are outside, so I just flip-flopped my typical stalls-in-the-morning, house-in-the-afternoon schedule.

DH had been hinting on Tuesday about wanting some macadamia nut cookies, and this rainy morning was a perfect time to make some.  Thankfully, Tuesday I had planned ahead and taken a stick of butter out of the fridge to warm up and soften.

The first step in making the cookies was to gather the ingredients.  So, I began by retrieving that stick of butter from the barn-shaped cookie jar on the counter.

"What?!?" you say.  Butter in the cookie jar? Huh?

Yeah, when I want to set out a stick of butter to soften, I've learned to put it in the barn cookie jar (which, as my overflow cookie jar, rarely gets used because I don't often make double batches of cookies since the kids grew up and moved to houses of their own).  Otherwise The Yarn Thief will jump up on the counter, no matter which counter I put the butter on (or try to hide it under a dish towel), and lick/eat it.  She didn't used to jump on counters at all, but in the last handful of years she has developed the bad habit of doing it when I'm outside, or at night when DH and I are sleeping.  Always when there's nobody nearby to discipline her for it.

Getting the container of macadamia nuts out of the pantry, I looked at the level of the contents and suspected I was going to be short on the needed amount of nuts.  Bummer.  What could I sub in for the lacking macadamias?  

Walnuts!  Walnuts I have plenty of on hand, and they sounded like they would go well with macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips.  So I altered my recipe a tad and made Macadamia Walnut Cookies instead.

In the process of making the cookie dough, I used up the last of the vanilla in the little bottle I use for measuring out of when cooking and baking.  And, oops, the cabinet where I keep my steeping jar of vanilla revealed that I forgot to start another batch a month or so ago when I bought the vodka to use to soak vanilla beans in thus making vanilla extract.

Well, while the cookies were baking, I would just make use of that time to get another jar of vanilla beans steeping.  And, heck, while I was at it, and because the bottle of vodka is enough to make two batches of vanilla and I had plenty of vanilla beans on hand, why not just get two jars going?

Which is how I, all by myself, went through an entire bottle of vodka that morning.  I'm practically a teetotaler, so DH of course had to tease me about that empty bottle sitting on the kitchen island. . . 

The sun never did come out on Wednesday, although the rain stopped for a couple of hours.  It resumed again around 8:00 p.m. in the form of thunderstorms and kept up most of the night.  Based on how much fuller the horses' water trough were Thursday morning than on Tuesday evening when horses last had access to them, I'm guessing we got somewhere in the range of 5-6 inches of rain in about 36 hours.

Macadamia Walnut Cookies

(For macadamia nut cookies I use the basic Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip recipe, but instead of chocolate chips I use white chocolate chips and add 1 cup macadamia nuts.)

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened

1/2 cup shortening or lard (I use lard since I'm very sensitive to soy as I get older and soy is now in just about all brands of shortening)

3/4 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup white (granulated) sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/4 cup all purpose flour (I use unbleached)

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup white chocolate (vanilla) chips

1/2 cup chopped mac nuts 

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Mix together sugars, butter and shortening/lard until creamy.  Stir in the eggs and vanilla.  Add in the flour, baking soda and salt, then stir until combined.  Next add the nuts and white chocolate chips and stir enough to evenly distribute through dough.  Place on to ungreased cookie sheets by rounded spoonfuls.

Bake at 375 degrees for approx. 9-11 min until edges are browned. (Baking time varies by oven; my old one was 10-11 minutes, the newer one seems to get it done in 9 minutes.)  Remove from cookie sheets and cool on wire racks.

Gotta Love Free Books!

 Two years ago, a friend of mine organized a community book swap.  It was held in the resource room at her local library.  The premise was that people brought books to swap--minimum of one book required for admission, attendees could take home as many books as they wanted, and at the end of the swap all 'homeless' books were donated to the library for their annual used book sale.

I ended up being unable to make it to the swap, because K2's funeral ended up being scheduled for the same day.  My dear, dear friend, when she heard of this conflict, told me that she'd had numerous people give her boxes of books they no longer wanted and wished to donate to the swap without attending, and invited me to her house to check out the donations.  I found about a dozen books in those pre-swap boxes and being able to take them home even though I wouldn't be able to be at the swap itself helped brighten up a really dark time.

Her book swap was such an overwhelming success, and she had so many requests for another book swap in the not too distant future, that she did!  It needed a larger venue, so that had to be obtained before setting a firm event date.  Ended up being in the Fall of that year.

That one I did attend.  It was another, even larger, impressive turnout of people and books.  Such a big turnout that there wasn't enough table space for all the books brought to be swapped.  And thus was born a semi annual event: the community book swap.

Last year, there was a Spring swap (which I attended and stood in line for almost an hour to get into as there was so many people wanting to swap that the room was at maximum human capacity and people had to be let in only as other people left) and a Fall swap.  The Fall swap had some changes made, such as you could buy an early admittance for $5 and get in an hour early for 'private shopping' before the masses were let in.  That helped a bit with shortening the line, but the turnout was still bigger than the event venue.

This year, the Spring swap was at another new, even larger, location.  The 'early bird special $5 admission' was again offered.  Frugal me, I went for the (free) general admission time and had no trouble getting right in.  I went with only six books to donate (apparently I didn't read much at all between October and March), but came home with sixteen.

Some are for the grandkids to read, some are in brand new condition that I will probably give as gifts, but mostly they are for me!  I was especially excited to spot this book:

Back in 2013 & 2014, when I was learning to knit, I learn to how to knit socks on double pointed needles, and also the Magic Loop method using a circular needle.  At that time, I found that I prefer double points.  2015 or so,  I first heard about the Two at a Time (TAAT) method, and it intrigued me but not enough to seek out more information and give it a try.  I even heard of this exact book, but there was so much stuff going on in my life at that point that I was far from trying anything new that I suspected might require my complete attention to learn.

But now, it's 2025 and I'd actually recently been thinking about maybe adding this book to my list of things I wanted to request from the library. To see it sitting there, in front of me, on the "Crafting" table at the book swap surely was a sign from above!  So I grabbed it and stuffed it into my bag.

Imagine my complete and utter delight when I got it home, was showing off my prizes (new books) to DH, opened the book and there, tucked inside by the previous (now unknown) owner were two sizes of needles needed for some of the patterns in the book!  Woo hoo!  A book teaching the method, 17 patterns and two sets of needles for knitting with!  WINNER WINNER!!

Gotta love free books!