Evaluating my coffee consumption

I recently realized that I was drinking up to six cups of coffee a day and decided (for reasons that I won’t go into right now) that it was excessive and perhaps could bear some, um, reduction.

I have my favorite kinds of coffee, and one of them was Green Mountain’s Spicy Eggnog, which was discontinued years ago. I still had 2 of the k-cups left that I saved for a special occasion (one of which I used last week when I was feeling sorry for myself and needed some cheering up).

Periodically I would look online to see if they might magically appear again but sadly, they have not. Keep reading

Well, well, well

We waited for almost a year before we finally got the call:

They would (finally!) be coming to drill the well at camp!!

It turned out to be a multi-day project. The noise level was no where near what I thought it would be, which was nice, since they were drilling literally steps from our window! This was great because it gave me an up close and personal view of the action.

After the well was finished, the ground was too soft for them to extricate their equipment right away (thank you, Maine spring mud season!) so we had a lawn ornament for a few days. But I didn’t care! We finally had a well!

Now if only they would come back to put a pump on it ….

Here’s some more photos: Keep reading

Rehydrating dried fruit

I grabbed a box (admittedly, it had been on the shelf for a while) of raisins to throw in my oatmeal this morning and they were very hard, dry, and generally unappealing looking. I was about to give them to the chickens–who are far less fussy than I am–to eat when I remembered a trick my grandmother taught me years ago, when I was making cookies.

I liked to add raisins to the chocolate chip cookies and sometimes, just like in my present life, they had been on the pantry shelf for awhile.
She told me to pour boiling water over them and let them sit for a bit, and drain the water off. Keep reading