Wreath bread

I ran across this super-easy and beautiful recipe on the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day website, and, using my adaptation of their basic bread dough, made a few of these loaves as gifts.

For this first one I added thyme, onion powder, and grated parmesan.



Corin found it easy enough to tear off pieces for eating.



This one was the plain dough (which rose better), with colored red and green sesame seeds on top.

"This is you, Apa. You have short legs."

Goodbye, Luna

After eight great years with us, entertaining us with her dazzling hunting prowess as a young energetic thing and stealing our laps as an older and cuddly thing, today Luna succumbed to her kidney disease and left us a little sadder but much richer in love.

Rainy Halloween

26 books, 27 weeks

Back in April I challenged myself to read 25 books by my birthday, which was 28 weeks away. I ended up exceeding that goal, completing 26 books a week early.

Was it a success? Mostly. I read a lot of things I'd had on my list for years that I'd get around to "someday," and to actually get to them felt like bonus weeks of life. On the other hand, I didn't really fall in love with any author that I wasn't already a big fan of (Danny Wallace, Anne Lamott, Frederick Buechner); I'd sort of been hoping to find another rich vein of books to lose myself in. Another failure: I put off reading several books that were particularly long or complex in an effort to keep pace, so I'll remove that pressure from my reading list for the next six months and not worry about quantity. However, all in all I was happy to have done it rather than not. It felt good to be intentional.

Here's the final tally:

"Pride and Prejudice," Jane Austen

"Survivor," Chuck Palahniuk

"The Year of Magical Thinking," Joan Didion

"Prayer and Temperament," Chester P. Michael & Marie C. Norrisey

"Patience with God," Frank Schaeffer

"You Shall Know our Velocity," Dave Eggers

"Breakfast of Champions," Kurt Vonnegut

"Time Out of Joint," Philip K. Dick

"Suck it, Wonder Woman," Olivia Munn

"From Eternity to Here," Frank Viola

"The Yellow Leaves," Frederick Buechner

"A Princess of Mars," Edgar Rice Burroughs

"The Fallacy of Creative Thinking," Alan Abel (as Dr. Bruce Spencer)

"Round Ireland with a Fridge," Tony Hawks

"The Gun Seller," Hugh Laurie

"The Mysterious Affair at Styles," Agatha Christie

"Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut

"Ubik," Philip K. Dick

"The Guinea Pig Diaries," A.J. Jacobs

"The Untold Story of the New Testament Church," Frank Viola

"Imperfect Birds," Anne Lamott

"S*** My Dad Says," Justin Halpern

"Join Me," Danny Wallace

"Friends Like These," Danny Wallace

"Revolution," George Barna

Summer photos

Now up at SteveandAmanda.com:


Corin, June 2010


Corin turns 3!


Planting the garden


Friends on beaches


Corin, July 2010


Franklin Falls, part one: the woods


Franklin Falls, part two: the waterfall


Arrrr… the fourth annual mingling of the pirates


The total ZooTunes experience


Popcorn on the stove

English lessons

Corin was asking for a second slice of bread & butter, and our friend Lindsey was in the kitchen helping him get it. After getting the bread for him, she asked, "Do you want to put the butter on yourself?"

To which he answered, "No, I want the butter on the bread."

Autumn, pt. 2

1000 words

I promise this will be the only time on my blog I show you a picture of something that's been peed on.

Autumn

Unclear on the concept

Corin received a thank-you note in the mail today for a friend's birthday party gift. The four-year-old had drawn a picture in purple marker of two curly-haired stick figures, which we assumed to be the birthday girl and Corin, both who have curly hair. But when we suggested this to Corin, he burst out in tears, seriously upset.

Once we got him calmed down enough to speak, he finally told us what was wrong:

"I'm not purple! I'm not purple!"

Cut short

There's a story you tell yourself,
a narrative of your life
that is braided together out of single, tenuous strands.

As you grow, learn, and age,
the thread gets stronger, reinforced —

to the point where you see not only where you've been
but also where you're going, the story's end.

Except — you'll never get there.

The rope will snap, the story unravel,
the fiction shown up as fraud. Left with nothing
but a handful of lies —

grasping, gripping, hoping, flailing, drowning in freefall.