Settling in With a Book

Now that the computer is back from the Exorcist, you would think I would be posting lots of entries. Yeah. I thought so, too. But I've been spending every free moment zipping through some John Grisham novels.

A new television series started this month, called The Firm. It's sort of a postscript to the Grisham novel of the same name. Mike, Brooks and I watched the pilot, which was very good, and we have looked forward to each subsequent episode. Brooks has read a couple of the Grisham books that we had in our personal library, but The Firm was not one of them. I checked it out of the library and read it aloud after the girls are in bed. Does it sound wierd that I read aloud to my 15-year-old son? It's something we do fairly often - on car trips and whenever we get a hankering to experience a book together. And I do voices and everything. It's a One Woman Show. *grin*

We finished The Firm in about a week and now we've moved on to A Time to Kill, my favorite book by that author. The experience is taking me back to my early married/early motherhood life when I first read these books.

I am a character-driven reader in most instances. I'll read books over and over again if they have characters who I want to hang out with. But I'm realizing that the books I'm drawn back to also almost universally take place in the south. Maybe I'm drawn to settings as much as characters? Or maybe there's a prototypical Southern Character that tends to appear in those books who draws me in.

Either way. Enjoying the time with my boy. And the southerners.

I'm back. The computer, however, is still not back. It spent a week and a half at the Computer Healer, who threw up his hands and banished it from his shop. We sent it on to the Computer Exorcist to see what he can do. So I snagged Brooks' girlfriend (Just kidding - it's his laptop. We call it his girlfriend because the two of them are inseparable.) to do some posting.

We had a bit of a snowstorm in my neck of the woods. The girls had been dying to make Snow Ice Cream, which they'd heard of but never sampled. For a couple of years, they'd had this recipe in the backs of their minds, but the timing and the catching of clean snow never worked out.

Until this week. The minute Ava heard about the impending snow storm, she put a clean washtub out on the stoop to catch the pristine flakes. (She also put spoons in the freezer and ice cubes in the toilet.... Have you ever heard of those Snow Day Supersticions?)

So Saturday night - the measuring and mixing.

2 cups milk
1 cup confectioners' sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon powdered instant coffee
1 gallon clean fresh snow

1. In a bowl, whisk together the milk, confectioners' sugar, vanilla extract, cocoa powder, and instant coffee until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is smooth.
2. Place the snow into a large bowl, and pour the chocolate mixture over the snow. With a large spoon, stir until the snow ice cream is thoroughly combined. Serve immediately.

This was a fun recipe to make and it felt good to check it off of our Recipe Bucket List, but it wasn't delicious or anything. After a couple of bites, the kids realized that it was ice cream without the... you know.... CREAM. In our mouths, it tasted like a sweetish and chocolatey water, really. A bit unsatisfying.

A few bites were enough.

I Write this From My Bed...

On this, the last weekday of Christmas break. We've eaten rich food, we've played, we've relaxed, and we've slept in. Oh, how we've slept in!

And if you're one of my girls, you've also downloaded a few free computer games from a website, inviting in the biggest, baddest computer virus we've ever seen. Mike looked it up online while at work and learned that it could be accessed remotely, summoning all our passwords and such.

Our computer has been sent to a healer.

It's been there a week.

It feels like a year.

All of my Internet activity has to be done on the iPad, which is a nice crutch, but no real substitution. Through it, I cannot put pictures on the blog, so I have posts piling up waiting to be shared.

In food news,Late Vacation Boredom has begun to creep into my Sophia and she went hunting for interesting baking recipes yesterday. The result: Peant Butter Cookie Dough Brownies with a Chocolate Ganauche.