I have something you must do immediately. It requires an ice cream maker of some variety. Got one? Good. Now collect:
* 1/4 cup hot espresso
* 2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 cup half-and-half
* 1 cup heavy cream
* 6 oz frozen raspberries, half thawed
Dissolve cocoa and sugar in espresso. Let mixture cool. Stir in vanilla, half-and-half, heavy cream, and syrup from thawed raspberries. Place mix into ice cream maker and freeze, according to maker's directions. If you are lucky enough to have a husband who asked for an ice cream attachment for your brand new KitchenAid mixer for his birthday, this means put it all into the frozen bowl and mix for 18 minutes. Add the raspberries and mix for three minutes. Scrape the soft serve into a bowl and freeze until it reaches the desired consistency. Taste, preferably in secret away from anyone who might want to share. Feel free to thank me if you can bring yourself to take the spoon out of your mouth long enough.
I try not to shop at Walmart much, but mainly out of preference for other stores rather than real effort to avoid it. Recently, though it has just become too awful, and today I reached a breaking point. I therefore have been moved to take this solemn vow with all of you as my witnesses. Based on their crimes of stocking only complete crap, being staffed entirely by raving incompetents, and of course being a corporation whose every action is pure evil but treating me like a criminal if I want to leave the store I, Molly, do hereby swear to never purchase another item from Walmart, regardless of the additional inconvenience or cost. I will remember that the lower prices are the result of terrible quality and the blood of children and abused workers.
So in addition to late blogging, I have been doing some late holiday celebrating. Observe the Father's Day gift modelled by a helpful husband before mailing:
This was knit from Trekking yarn (with quite a bit left over) from a pattern available at the
Fiber Gallery. It wasn't nearly as painful to knit as I had expected. Even when it got down to the wire and I couldn't just work on it as I was riding the bus, it went fast enough not to drive me mad.
I believe I failed to mention in all of the flight trauma that it made me miss Mark's birthday. It took me a while to get my act together again, but after one disasterous attempt at a cake involving unsweetened cocoa and a horrid flourless cake recipe, we finally celebrated Mark's birthday this week with a cake
and a present and everything.
Check out what I found while antiquing!
I've never seen any that resize like this before. It was also fun being able to tell the lady working the register what they were. The sock you can see better here:
It is one of the socks from Nancy Bush's
Knitting on the Road. I'm having a small problem locating my copy at the moment, so I can't say exactly which one (this may become problematic in another inch or so). I believe it is the only one that calls for this yarn, Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock. I think the pattern is really cute and the yarn is really ugly. Not Shepherd Sock in general, of course, just this color way. It was so pretty and springlike in the hank! Then it got grosser when I wound it and knit up I think it just looks dirty. Ah well, thus is the beauty of the shop sample; I don't have to wear it.
This sock has some bad vibes associated with it, though. I began it on the flight here from Minneapolis and then dropped the ball of yarn as I was bolting frantically through the airport in Memphis trying to make my connection to Tupelo. Being completely unaware of this in my panic (well, I felt my front pocket suddenly become less tight but desperately tried to convince myself that things had just shifted and to just... keep... running...), I left a trail of yarn down the entire A concourse before dropping the sock itself. Of course I missed my flight. Why, when there are ten people on the same late connection coming to your plane that only seats 40 and often flies with 7, would you ever hold the plane an extra 10 minutes? It's Tupelo, for crying out loud! It's everyone's final destination, so you're not going to cause a chain of delays, just hold the damn plane! Since of course they couldn't rebook me at that desk, I had to lug my 70 lb duffle bag all the way back to the main concourse, where I discovered my lost little ball of yarn (seems the single strand blends in very well with dirty, non-descript linolium). I picked it up and turned around to see a very kind gentleman walking slowly at the other end of the terminal winding my yarn as he went around his arm so it wouldn't tangle. As I was cursing my way through rewinding the ball, I learned that the Memphis airport closes, so even though it was
7:30 I was stuck there for the night. I then had to fly into Birmingham in order to be able to be picked up from the airport (they should really refund me the $100 ticket difference), and the rest of what you see here was knit on the two hour drive back to Columbus with a friend who had just dropped off his wife. I know my refrain of "I'm in the middle of f-ing nowhere, and nothing works" has come to mind several times down here, but I had really expected more of Memphis.
I haven't been blogging because I haven't been doing all that much knitting lately, and every time I sit down at the computer I make myself do all of my other computer stuff first and then I never have time. Right now I am embroiled in a battle to the death with Quicken so I decided to take a little break and try to get back in blogging mode. Since I have fallen alseep twice now mid sentance, however, I think I need to admit Quicken has won and I won't be able to do any real content tonight either. Sigh...
