Busy day!

I had a very productive day today! I made 8 loaves of bread. A couple of weeks ago, our lovely neighbor Debbie gave us a loaf of bread with a bag of starter for Amish bread. I took care of my little bag of dough for ten days and made two loaves of bread. That one bag of starter dough made the two loaves and 4 more bags of starter. No one wanted any of the starter and I couldn't bring myself to throw away the starter. It had all organic flour, sugar and milk. So for ten days I tended to four bags of starter. Today I made 8 loaves and now I have 16 bags of starter. I can see this spiraling out of control here. I googled and found out that you can freeze the starter and then take it out and start from day one again. So, now I have 5 loaves of bread in the freezer with 16 bags of starter dough.

Before.

After. Two loaves of each: apple/walnut/cinnamon, chocolate/nut/coconut, lemon/poppy seed, and plain 'ol cinnamon. Delish!!

The other big thing that I'm proud of is that I FINALLY taught myself how to crochet a granny square. I see on Flickr all the time this one lady who is always crocheting these amazing granny squares in the most brilliant colors. I was jealous. I have tried several times with no luck, but found a decent site yesterday that walked me through it step by step and now I'm a granny square making machine. I see a large yarn purchase in the near future.

Not too bad for a newbie.

We have been having the most unbelievable weather here for July. Today it was 75 degrees at like 3 in the afternoon. It has been so nice. We had a perfect weekend to drive over and hang out with Michael and Carrie at Reptiland and then had an awesome meal at the Bullfrog Brewery. The kids enjoyed it because Carrie's nephew Noah was with them and they had fun tromping around looking at the snakes and alligators. I just enjoyed the beer at dinner...well, and hanging out with Michael and Carrie. We invited them to go to Knoebels with us in a couple of weeks. I hope that is ok with you Brian.

What else? I got a great book last night. I can't put it down. The Backyard Homestead. It's awesome. It says that on a quarter of an acre you can harvest 1,4oo eggs, 50 lbs of wheat, 60 lbs of fruit, 2,000 lbs of veggies, 280 lb pork, and 75 lbs of nuts. What more could you want or need? For some reason I had in my head that we needed 5 acres to grow enough for us to live on, but this is showing how to use what space you have to the best ability. I will be reading this over and over.

Not too much else going on. Oh, I did want to brag about our power bill. I paid it last week and compared it to the same time last year and our usage was way down. Our bill was 40 dollars cheaper than it was last year even though our rates have gone up. The ONLY thing that I've changed is that I am hanging out all of our laundry now. I think I had to run the dryer only one day last month when we had like three weeks of rain and we were out of clean clothes. Otherwise, it all goes out on our rigged clothesline.

It's funny how much I've changed in the last couple of years. I was telling Tim this morning that I am totally content hanging out the laundry, spending the day in the kitchen baking breads, knitting and crocheting...I think my grandmother would be proud of me. She did all of that and ran a farm. She was a pretty fantastic lady.

Well, I'll leave you a couple of picture from Reptiland. I have a ton of pics that I have to run through photoshop and then I'll post to Flickr. It gets to be a pain with posting pics all over the place...which is why I procrastinate all the time. I will work on my pictures tomorrow. For now, I'm going to curl up with my book and read until I fall asleep. Night all!

I loved the little poisonous frogs. I told Aidan that I wanted one, and he rolled his eyes at me and said, "They are poisonous Mama." I guess that is a no.

This guy was hilarious. The kids tried to feed him but he pecked their hands so hard they ended up throwing the food at him.

The perfect end to a great day with friends. Oh yeah, it was good!