Junior cook

One night a week here at the NoSheep homestead, Girl of the House makes supper.

Tonight's her night. (Especially after last night she gave me the "It's good, and I like it, just not tonight..." line. Gotta say, she learned that one from her older brother - thanks so much Ben!)

We've got a mighty fine pasta dish coming to our table, full of tomatoey goodness.








I've got a good start on the second sleeve of the Kauni cardigan.

I catch myself saying "just one more repeat - when the next color starts, I'll quit for the evening."

And then knitting another round or two. Help! I'm mildly obsessed!

How many of these books have YOU read?

A thought provoking meme lifted from NuttyKnitter.

I've boldfaced the books I've read. 46 of 100 - not so good, but not too bad. I can see quite a few classics here that I need to check out of the library.

I haven't been doing so much novel reading the past few years. It's hard to read and knit/spin at the same time. (That's just not fair!)

My most recent reading has been the interwebs, newspapers and magazines. Nothing of any size or time commitment. However, I recently stormed through a Stephen King book, and it was very satisfying to be back in the reading groove.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - 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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 The 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-Exupe
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 – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Kitchen details

We found a place to put the mixer!

It involved rearranging, cleaning, and organizing the pantry closet.

Criminy - we've got alot of stuff in there.
And I tossed some really outdated goods.



Which led to rearranging, cleaning and organizing the fridge.


We put together the two bottles of Irish Cream we found hiding in the dark back corners.

Hanging out in the far back, deepest corner of the fridge was this bottle of Bartles and Jaymes berry wine cooler.

Neither Paul nor I have ever liked wine coolers. We used to keep some in the fridge for a visiting friend.

However, this particular bottle of berry cooler was purchased two houses ago - in 1994. How do they age? Do they improve like fine wine? Now we have to keep it, don't you think?

How 'bout you? Whats the oldest thing in your fridge?


Back to that mixer:

We purchased it at Kitchen Collection at the Medford, MN outlet mall. It looks like they have locations all over in outlet malls. This is the one we bought - it's refurbished and only has a six month warranty. But it was a heck of a good price, and we figure it's been looked over in detail, so it should stand up. So far, so good!

Our last mixer, a Mixmaster, lasted about a year. If this one lasts two years, we're about the same on yearly mixer expenditure - so we'll gamble on the refurb...


We were out for a walk today.

Paul's Retrofit sweater is just the right weight for this 30 degree weather.

(And I think he looks darn good in it!)

Lake 20AcresNoSheep

We headed out for a walk before making our Friday pizza. (Tonight the movie is Australia)


It was also a good opportunity to get pictures of the Lopi cardigan in action.







The snow's all melting, and we are now owners of a lake property.



It starts by running through the pasture.











Heading down to the corner, becoming the official Lake 20AcresNoSheep.








Eddying in the corner, traveling under the road in a gradually thawing culvert.









What can't make it through the culvert flowed over the road earlier in the day, leaving parts eroded away.









The remainder comes out on the arboretum side of the road.










Rushing to meet more melting snow from the arb.









And, finally, heading toward the river.









We returned, and my screwy family commenced playing Mario Cart on the Wii.

Of course, you must dress appropriately for racing!







But it makes it difficult for that Friday night adult beverage!







(Really shouldn't drink and drive. I'll bet you can guess who won the race.)


PS. Hang tight - tomorrow I'll post info about purchasing the mixer!

random wednesday

We've been baking up a storm lately.

Finally got us one of those new-fandangled mixers. We killed off the old mix-master.

We got a good tip on where to buy a nice mixer for a reasonable price (thanks Coleen!) and bit the bullet. Now we feel like we're on the Martha Stewart show!

However, for those of you who have one of these big old beasts of a mixer, a question. Where do you keep your mixer? It's too tall for my lower cabinets, and it's WAY too heavy to lift into an upper cabinet. It's too tall to fit on the countertop under the upper cabinets by a hair. The pantry? Then where do I put the food?! So, for now, it's just out on the countertop.

Girl of the House is becoming the master of it, and we're eating cookies and fresh bread. Yay for dough hooks!!


The Kauni cardigan has one whole sleeve!

I'm crocheting the other steek and picking up the stitches for the other sleeve this evening.

(We just returned from the Alpine Ski team banquet for GotH, so there's not that much time...)



The merino/alpaca/silk is plied and skeined. I didn't try to match up the two bobbins - just plied as it came.

I rather like the randomness of the color.