First seedlings

Butterfly weed.

The Wedding Maps

We have wedding maps.

 

Please disregard the wilted flowers.

I love maps. I could look at them for hours. So when planning our wedding for August 2012, I thought it would be neat to have our guests look at maps too, and contribute a few of their thoughts onto the map:

• Where they were born - green
• Where they live now - red
• A neat place they have been with the bride and the groom - blue
• Where they could go if they could go anywhere - yellow

I can verify that some of these dots have been misplaced.

I have been looking at these maps as I am trying to straighten things up lately. They have been hanging around our office for the last two years, constantly getting in the way, never getting hung on the wall. Because even though Europe, all of Canada, and a world view fit into a nice, rectangular frame shape, how to manage the map of Southern Ontario eluded me.

It's wacky shape is what you see hanging off the top of the picture frame on the top left (above). I know I should have been able to make it a more manageable shape, but I love Ontario - cutting any part out of it is painful, so I wanted to retain as much it as I could. After consulting with someone more artistic than I, I decided to laminate it and cut it out, to display all its irregularly-shaped wonder.

Off the to do list. Almost on the wall.

How not to make yogurt

1. Drink small coffee. You haven't drank a coffee in a couple of days, so enjoy it.

2. Put milk in Dutch oven. Snap a pic for your blog! Who cares if the Dutch oven is kind of dirty looking.

3. Start doing other stuff around your house. You should drink coffee more often!

4. When you are moving the 3rd load of dirty laundry downstairs,  notice your milk is boiling over, and that it is 20 degrees hotter than it was supposed to be. Turn it off. Curse quietly so your baby doesn't hear.

5. Know that you probably already messed up your yogurt but decide to keep going. Just in case.

6. Put Dutch oven in ice water bath. Check in between loads of laundry. When it only has a few degrees left to cool decide you won't forget about it if you only do ONE thing and come back to it.

7. Dust off your television screen. Then play with the baby. Then fold the blankets and organize the pillows on the couch. Then - crap. The yogurt.

8. Check on the milk cooling in the ice water bath and see that it has cooled 10 degrees cooler than it was supposed to.

9. You don't really have time to think about it. Let's just keep going with the yogurt. You are getting a lot done today.

10. Barely remember to add yogurt to the milk before you put it in the slightly warm oven. Don't measure, this obviously isn't going well anyways.

11. Check milky substance after the required 4 hours and confirm that you have not made yogurt, as you suspected. Toilet it.

The Kitchn has great instructions for how to actually make yogurt. And it isn't that hard.