Friday Five: Love!

RevKarla brings today's Friday Five to RevGalBlogPals:

Happy Valentine’s Day!  I know that some (a lot) of you are digging out from snow and ice and lack of electricity.  We feel for you, and love you!     Some of you have a love-hate relationship with Valentine’s Day.  ‘Nuff said.     I happen to enjoy Valentine’s Day in spite of having exactly one date ever on VD (before I was married).   I love celebrating Love!   So, all that is to say is that our Friday Five is to tell us about five random things that you love.

I could fill up each of the five loves with all my children, grandchildren, husband, and friends I love. Instead, I will try to branch out to other aspects of my life.

1. Cards and Mail: I love to buy and send cards. (I also love to receive them, which is sadly a rare event for me.) Whenever I visit somewhere new, I have to look at card shops, as there aren't many "different" cards offered in Corpus Christi for sale. This month, I am participating in A Month of Letters Challenge for the month of February.

Recipe Here

I love to send Valentines, maybe because of being a former elementary school teacher back in the days when it was possible to celebrate Valentines Day. Also because my grandmother always sent me beautiful, glittery Valentines as I grew up.

2. Baking: I love to bake, especially cookies. This week I made Valentine pumpkin bread which was surprisingly easy. I found the recipe on Pinterest. The pin showed chocolate cake with hearts (from a Sara Lee's pound cake), but I tried pumpkin bread for the Wisdom Class on Tuesday. It was a hit with everyone in the class and was so easy! I bet you could cut out different designs, like maybe a star or a tree.

3. Words With Friends: I love playing this game on my Ipad and Iphone. It is like Scrabble with a partner. I don't often win, because I play too quickly. My oldest son DC continually beats my by hundreds of points!

4. Soups: I love making big pots of soup, a rediscovered passion with our month of cold, cold weather (for TX!). I have made five different soups from my newest soup cookbook, The New England Soup Factory Cookbook, and each one has been judged by all as excellent. In fact, I have made their recipe for Vegetarian Muligatawny four different times already--twice for Chuck and me; for my family at Christmas; and for my family in Austin at AA's request (which greatly pleased me). I've been making such big pots of soup that I can share some with friends, too, while we have it for multiple days. I am grateful that Chuck likes soup.

5. Books: I love to read, look at, discuss books!  I even have a Pinterest board About Books with over 1,000 pins! I really love children's books, so it is a joy to find books for granddaughters Avery and Emma! It is exciting to find new ones, like Good Night, Construction Site which is so appropriate for these girls because their daddy supervises construction at apartment complexes almost every day. It is arriving for them tomorrow!

For the New Year

Found on Pinterest.

Creativity and Connections

 

I have met thoughtful, interesting people through blogging. I consider them to be my friends. Now I find connections with them through Facebook and Pinterest. 

The soaring birds from the keys of a piano indicate creativity and maybe even ascending ecstasy and this was posted by Philomena Ewing, whom I first met at Blue Eyed Ennis.

This connected with an interesting article that artist Sybil Archibald posted on Facebook about creativity. I met her through her blog where she states that "making art is my spiritual path."

I also posted the article "The Creativity Crisis" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman on Facebook where Quaker Dave, one of the first bloggers I ever met when I started blogging in 2006, posted it and said he was going to share it with his fellow teachers. High praise!

I've never felt I was "creative" but didn't know how to become so. Now that I am taking piano lessons, I understand that my brain has to be exposed to and grown in new connections for growth to occur. It seems like there has to be some foundation of structure, though I think some artists emerge out of "nowhere." Mistakenly, I thought that one was BORN with creativity or not, which meant that I was NOT. Plus, I isolated creativity to the arts and not other areas.

It is wonderful learning new things and ways of being!

Here is glimpse of "The Creativity Crisis:"

"Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

"Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way."

The article is worth reading, so go to "The Creativity Crisis."

Glazed Lemon Cookies

I found this recipe on Pinterest and was very pleased with the result--Glazed lemon Cookies. I took them to church to share on Easter Sunday.I also doubled the recipe, which turned out fine.

Spooning the dough and rolling balls gets very sticky, so periodically I would rinse my hands off. Damp hands made it easier to roll the balls.

Glazed Lemon Cookies

Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 10 minutes Yield: about 2 1/2 dozen

Ingredients

• 2 cups + 2 Tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
• Zest of 2 lemons (about 1 1/2 Tbsp)
• 1 large egg
• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Lemon Glaze

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 1/2 - 2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl, whisk together flour, cornstarch, baking soda and salt, set aside. In the bowl of an electric stand mixer fit with paddle attachment, whip together butter, sugar and lemon zest on medium-high speed, until mixture is pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Blend in egg, then egg yolk. Mix in lemon juice and vanilla extract. Slowly add in dry ingredients and mix just until combined. Scoop dough out by the heaping spoonfuls, form into balls and drop onto Silpat or parchment paper lined baking sheets. Bake in preheated oven 9 - 11 minutes (for a gooier cookie closer to 9 and a more set, fluffy cookie more near 11). Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet several minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool. Drizzle cooled cookies with Lemon Glaze (you can do this while they are still slightly warm if desired). Store in a single layer in an airtight container.

For Lemon Glaze

• In a small mixing bowl, whisk together powdered sugar and enough lemon juice to reach a drizzle-able consistency. Pour mixture into a resealable bag, seal bag and cut a small tip off one corner then drizzle glaze over cookies. Allow glaze to set at room temperature. 

• Recipe Source: Cooking Classy

http://www.cookingclassy.com/2013/01/glazed-lemon-cookies/

Uh-Oh!

From the pinterest site of Deb Vaughn, I found this wonderful cartoon:

Sorry: I'm too busy reading!

I've gotten hooked again on re-reading Patricia Cornwell mysteries. I keep checking them out of the library. This all started because I read her newest book in the spring, as recommended by my friend Paige. I couldn't remember all the past history of Kay Scarpetta, so I'll have to read the last book over when I get to it sequentially.

Besides that, I am still reading Living Buddha, Living Christ for the Wisdom Class and a book about Jung's letters about the God image entitled The New God Image: a Study of Jung's Letters on the Evolution of  the Western God Image, which luckily I purchased as a used book as it is an expensive one outright.

So my blogging is suffering with all this reading. I'm sorry I am not participating more in the blogging world currently. (And I found the image on my pinterest category "About Books.")

Friday Five: No Time!

Today's Friday Five for RevGalBlogPals is about art. I can't whip that out before leaving town, as I never think of myself as creative or artsy. Though I DO like art! Thanks to Rev. Pat Raube for bringing this Friday Five!

The only "creative" thing I do is blog (sometimes). Many "used to's" like baking and writing letters could be classified as "creative," but those are not done too much these days. Not artsy, but towards the creative side--I've started taking piano lessons!

What's taking up time right now is getting ready to leave town (for only the weekend) to visit Avery and her parents in Austin! Yay! What is holding up our departure is my almost-forgotten-haircut appointment at 12:15. So before driving to that, there are preparations to be made. We are lucky that a friend is coming over to stay with our pets.

So to lighten the mood, here is a cute cartoon I found on Pinterest (which is under my favorite label "About Books"):

Nana

I liked this on pinterest because "Nana" is the name I chose to be called by my granddaughter Avery. It's interesting that in my experience mothers seem to prefer to choose their "grandmother names," but dads do not care so much.

In my immediate family, my mother chose to be called "Grannie" because she had fond memories of that particular grandmother. I wanted to be "Nana" because of the connection to my mother's mother, who was always "Nana" to me. Although the reason she was called "Nana" was more mundane, as my much older cousin George (her first grandchild)  mispronounced "Grandma" and so she became  "Nana."

Avery's other grandmother chose to be called "Mimi," so the grandmothers have gotten their choices. Not sure what the grandpas will turn out to be called, but Avery will figure it out.

Avery and Nana in Friday Harbor, WA

I'd rather read!

By Andrea Josephs

But I look more like this:

From Finland, found here.

And I found both of these charming pictures on Pinterest! You can find my Pinterest page here.