herbs, garlic, bread, books, school, draft, and fieldguide.

I know all my posts have been about food lately... but I love it, so...

I took the advise from ... well, everybody... and bought me some of those fresh herbs in a cup of dirt from the grocery store. You know, the kind you put in your window sill to make it look like you've been growing them yourself the whole time? Yeah those. They've been wonderful! You also know how you can buy those little teeny tiny packs of fresh herbs in the produce section, and how they're like $4 for 8 basil leaves? Well, the cup of herbs is like a bagillion leaves for $3. Plus they last longer since you keep them growing. All you have to do is put water in them every day (which, I still sort of failed at, since apparently I'm a plant murderer).

I also FINALLY got around to picking up some of that minced garlic in a jar. I've been chopping and mincing and crushing my garlic for years, and I'm really just so tired of sticky, garlicy hands just to get a teenie weenie bit of garlic. I know. "It's not fresh." Bla bla. Opening a jar of garlic and using a spoon to get it out is seriously so convenient. My food has been a million times tastier the last 2 weeks because I finally gave in. I use the right amounts of garlic, and I don't dirty a cutting board just for garlic anymore. SO NICE.

I guess since I'm on the topic of food we've loved lately... We also tried those Rhodes frozen bread loaves a few weeks ago and have been hooked. They're just like the frozen dinner rolls only they're in loaf form. They come out to costing about $1.25 per loaf, and they are ridiculously good. We eat them constantly (and we're constantly running out and forgetting to let rise new loaves). We just weren't eating all our bread before. We'd get a loaf and half of it would go moldy before we'd get around to finishing it. But it's not like you can just NOT have a loaf of bread around the house; what if you want midnight toast, or an after work pb and j? And you know those times you're so disappointed after an attempt to recreate your favorite deli sandwich at home that you find yourself vowing to never buy deli meat again? These loaves have solved all those problems. It's deli sandwiches, pb&j, buttered bread with dinner, and toast at midnight for us all the time now. We just have to remember to give yourself 5 hours of rising time.

I DO have other things going on in my life right now besides food. Not much, but there's some stuff in between meals. Trevor started the next semester yesterday. We spent the "summer break" (that means the last 3 weeks) (and by "we" I mean "I") registering Trevor for his new classes and ordering his books while waiting for Trevor's loan money to show up at the last minute.

Somehow I also read 3 books last week. What the? I read the first two books in the Pretties series and The Help. All of which you can see how much I loved/liked over there ------> on my goodreads widget.

AND Trevor and I got through the second draft of his book. I read through and marked up a bunch of conceptual changes, inconsistencies, that sort of thing. And then he had to go through and write it all, be the mastermind, you know? He ended up writing like 35,000 extra words or something like that. Now he's taking a break while he gets used to school again, while his reading group (me and his family) read through what he's done so far.

I'm very close to being able to purchase this photography workshop/field guide I've been waiting for. It's almost $300, and I've been saving up. Now that the time has come, I'm really nervous about spending the money. I need so many things relating to photography... I almost just said, "I wish I had more money." But that would have just been so obvious and laughable! Don't we all. The hard thing about buying intangible items is that if you don't like them, you can't just return them. I guess I need to take a page out of my clients' books and trust that I'm going to get a good product.

AND here's the end of my 10th post in a row without any pictures of us doing anything spectacular. I took some photos at the Peter Orullian/Brandon Sanderson book signing... but they aren't really fantastic so...