Heading Into Fall

Karen's spent the week in VA visiting with her sister, Brenda. Today she's headed into PA to take part in a baby & baby shower for her niece-in-law(?) Lina, married to Matt, Brenda's son. Matt & Lina are having TWINS! Karen's already made their baby blankets and crocheted them little baby baseball caps.

So I'm at home, shopping, busy doing laundry, and baking cookies (break & bake CC). I discovered one of our favorite regional ice creams on sale for half price at Bakers IGA, our locally owned grocery store!

Tucker and Tanner are sleeping in their beds. Tucker REALLY misses Karen. With the two Alpha Males (one human, one canine) running the show, she appears to be a bit intimidated.

Tucker

Tanner

But we're not doing too bad. I followed the instructions on the cookie dough, "cook for 10-11 minutes OR until golden brown" and kept putting them back in the oven for two additional minutes at a time because, they weren't "golden brown" yet. Well, believe it or not, cooking chocolate chip cookies twice as long as it says on the package STILL doesn't turn them "golden brown". They just immediately turn BROWN, DARK BROWN when you finally take them out of the oven. The second batch I cooked for 11 minutes and didn't pay any attention to the color. You know, the second batch looks like chocolate chip cookies. The first batch just looks like chocolate cookies...

And the laundry? I know enough to put the whites in one batch, the dark colors in another. Warm on the whites, cool on the colors...but the batch of whites was really small so I put the water level on "low." Good idea. But then on the second load, which was a FULL load of my shirts, I loaded up the soap and the clothes and the load...still on the "low" water setting.

When I went to move them to the dryer...they still really smelled of soap and just didn't feel right to an experienced laundry monger like myself. I threw them in dryer anyway and set the temperature to TOAST. I like my dry laundry DRY.

It was when I started the next full load of clothes that I realized the low water level setting...moving it to HIGH for this load I pulled everything out of the dryer and set it aside for a re-wash. No harm, no foul, just a few more gallons of water into the rinse cycle of life.

Thanks for your prayers as we fend for ourselves...Lord willing, Karen will be home on Monday!