Oatmeal Cookies

I'll warn you that this makes lots of cookies, but you can refrigerate the dough and make them as needed.

Oatmeal Cookies
recipe adapted from a Ronald McDonald House cookie recipe

2 cups butter (4 sticks!), softened or partially melted
2 cups brown sugar, packed
2 cups white sugar
2 tsp vanilla
4 eggs
2 tsp salt
3 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
6 cups quick-cooking rolled oats

Cream together butter, eggs, sugars, and vanilla until fluffy.

Sift together flour, salt and baking soda. Stir into butter mixture (I use the lightest setting on my mixer).

At this point everything has to be moved into a larger bowl.

Add oats and mix well. This is where I adapted the recipe. I don't like food in my food, so I left out the stuff, like raisins and nuts. But if you like that, you can put some in. Go ahead and ruin your cookies if you want.

The dough can be refrigerated at this point and cookies baked as needed.

Drop by teaspoonful 2 inches apart on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes. It takes about 12 minutes on my stone and 10 minutes on my regular uninsulated cookie sheet. I add 2 minutes when I bake them out of the refrigerator.

This is what they look like when I take them out. We like our cookies chewy and without other food in them.

This is what they look like after they've cooled. Yum!

I use my Pampered Chef (I think medium) scoop for these, and I get about 9-10 dozen cookies. Yes, I give some away.

Buddy's Birthday

14

Buddy turned 14 last Friday, September 24th.

I changed out the window gels, also known as the sticky things hanging on the door to keep the birds from flying into it.

Hubby took Buddy to a Tigers' baseball game.

We had Dairy Queen ice cream cake per Buddy's request. His favorite is the Oreo Blizzard cake.

When I went to pick it up, the lady wasn't happy with how it was done. She wanted to redo it and asked if I could come back in a few hours to pick it up. We weren't in a hurry since it was still before noon, so I said sure.

When we went back to pick it up, the replacement cake wasn't the Blizzard cake. She realized that, and she wasn't going to sell the first one because she was unhappy with the decorating, so she gave us both of them for the price of the one.

My family who thinks ice cream is a food group was extremely excited!

Buddy has seen all six Star Wars' movies in the last couple of months. His friends at our church here have gone on and on (incessantly) about Star Wars and how they couldn't believe he hadn't seen them. I saw the original three many years ago. Hubby fell asleep during the original movie when I tried to get him to watch it just so he knew what Star Wars was all about. That's been since we had kids, but before they were old enough to watch. He's not a sci-fi guy.

So our kids had never seen Star Wars. They know a lot about sports though.

Buddy and Caboose are hooked on Star Wars now. So I picked this DQ cake. I picked up the little rings at the local cake decorating store.

We teased him that we got a Caillou cake. He was glad we were kidding. Hubby and I are just goofy enough to do it.

Trivia time!

On September 24, 1996, Buddy's actual birth day, according to the Chicago Tribune "the average price for a gallon of gasoline at the nation's pumps rose in the last two weeks to $1.2918, up 0.17 cents since Sept. 6, according to a Lundberg Survey of 10,000 gas stations nationwide. Consumers are now paying just over 9 cents a gallon more than this time last year."

What we wouldn't give to be paying that again!

The Chicago Tribune also published an article on this date regarding the Internet, the rapid increase in the number of users, and dial-up networks/internet service providers. It stated, "the country's largest commercial dialup computer service, America Online, has won one battle but lost ground in another over recent days in the ever-running battle to keep growing as Americans continue to flock onto the Internet.

The victory came late Friday afternoon in Philadelphia, when the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals canceled an order by a lower court that barred America Online executives from blocking junk e-mail in the face of widespread customer complaints."

I'm wondering what happened there?

Later in the article, this is what it said about internet service providers: "The service was winning in the courts, but a reversal came when a major industry survey was released Monday, showing that Americans appear to be moving away from using big commercial services like America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy and the Microsoft Network in favor of smaller, often local, companies called Internet service providers.

The Odyssey study found that even as all four of the big on-line services were losing potential customers to the small service providers, America Online did much better than the others.

Between January and July, America Online grew from a 14 percent share of all households with PCs to 18 percent, while CompuServe dropped from 6 percent to 5 percent and Prodigy dropped from 5 percent to 4 percent. Microsoft Network remained at 1 percent."

I haven't heard a couple of those names in a while.

Tomorrow, spacers. Next Monday, braces. He's growing up so fast. And he is so totally taller than me.

Love ya, Bud!

Becoming a Living Organ Donor

About 16 1/2 years ago, I took Chatty to Arkansas Children's Hospital. Hubby was still in Virginia. The girls had been born at 27 weeks gestation. They got out of the hospital the day they turned three months old, and about six weeks later after I'd nagged and nagged the pediatrician, we knew something was seriously wrong with Chatty's liver (it's a lengthy post, but includes links to the girls' birth stories and the explanation of Chatty's surgeries - just don't forget to come back and finish reading this one because you don't want to miss it either).

For the better part of a day we thought she had biliary atresia, a non-correctable liver disease where the bile ducts constrict and don't go back to normal. It would require a liver transplant. At the time she was 6 1/2 pounds, 4 1/2 months old, although they adjusted her age to 1 1/2 months due to prematurity.

After an ultrasound later in the day, everyone was doing the happy dance. They found a cyst in her bile duct. Surgery, although lengthy and some cutting and pasting would be required, would correct her problem.

We know that all the places we've been God has placed us. We can see His hand in it. So now to tie everything together...

Mari was one of my first blogging friends. I've since met her now that I live in Michigan too. Of course we met at Ikea! Goody for me that I live closer to it!

Well, last year around the holidays I realized that one of Mari's other blogging friends, Cathy, lived close to me. We exchanged a few casual emails. I told her where my church was located and she said she didn't live too far from it. I was in the car shooting the emails back and forth on my blackberry. I even mentioned it to Hubby casually while he was driving. I started following Cathy's blog.

In June of this year, just one day before our 25th anniversary, Cathy posted of the need for a liver transplant for her daughter, Heather. They were looking for someone with the same blood type, O+. That's what Hubby's is.

I asked him how he felt about being a live liver donor (I think I might have told him it was local and for an only child), he said to find out what he needed to do, and that's pretty much the beginning and end of it.

On November 15, my husband and Heather will both be having separate surgeries with separate doctors in the same hospital at the same time, which of course is local because we all live right here. Who had that all planned out?

Hubby's recovery will be 4-6 weeks. He'll be in the hospital about a week. They will be taking out the larger, front lobe of the liver (65 percent) and leaving 35 percent. It will regenerate to the normal size in six weeks.

My husband is a nice guy. He's pretty laid-back. He also has a great sense of humor. It's hard sometimes to show complete personalities on a forum like this. You can see his silly picture with Caboose and Mr. Excitement at a monster truck show on my sidebar. That's him. But sometimes it's a little more subtle. For example, I had him go pick up an ice cream cake at Dairy Queen on Father's Day for himself. Well, for all of us to share. This is what we ended up with:

I'm sure he had the lady at DQ laughing with that request!

Strawberry Swirl Cake

We had company for dinner last Friday night and this is the cake I made. It's something you would probably find yourself making more in the spring or summer, but I just got the recipe from my friend and I had to make it.

This is the same cake that was served at the baby shower in May. There's a better picture on that post of my friend's cake. She wasn't lazy and put the strawberries on top.

Strawberry Swirl Cake
from Food & Family, Spring 2007

1 pkg white cake mix
1 pkg (4-oz serving size) Jell-O Strawberry Flavor Gelatin
2/3 cup sour cream
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 8-oz tub Cool Whip
1 1/2 cups sliced strawberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two round cake pans (mine stuck a little, so a dusting of flour might be helpful). Prepare cake batter as directed on package. Pour half of the batter into a medium bowl. Add dry gelatin mix; stir until well blended.

Spoon half of the white batter and half of the pink batter side by side into each prepared pan.

Swirl batters together lightly, using a teaspoon. Do not overswirl or the color of the cake will be all pink and not pink and white marbled.

Bake 30 minutes. Cool 30 minutes in pans. Remove to wire racks; cool completely.

Mix sour cream and powdered sugar in a medium bowl until well blended. Gently stir in whipped topping.

Place one of the cake layers on serving plate; spread top with 1 cup of the whipped topping mixture. Top with 1 cup of the strawberries (I just sliced them and placed them until I'd filled up the top, and I cut them a little thick since I thought I might be too lazy to put any on the top).

Top with remaining cake layer (When I stacked them, I made sure the pink side of one was opposite the pink side of the other just to get a good mix when it was cut). Spread top and side of cake with remaining whipped topping mixture. Top with remaining 1/2 cup strawberries just before serving. Store leftover cake in the refrigerator.

I totally wish I'd taken a picture of a slice so you could see it. Hubby was so impressed. He thought only bakeries could make marbled cakes by some special secret! But do you know that we ate the entire cake that night before I could even think about taking a picture. The ten of us that were here all had a piece and that took about 3/4 of the cake. When our company left, four of us finished it off with a second helping.

This is definitely one of my new favorites and one I'll make again and again.

Strange Names You Hear Around Our House

I've been a bird-brain lately, pun intended.

Just check here and here if you're not convinced.

So I thought I'd share the names my kids and I have for some birds, because we're weird that way.

1. Chip - Chickadee
2. Nutty - Nuthatch
3. Tim - Tufted Titmouse
4. Woody - Red-bellied Woodpecker
5. Woodette - Female Red-bellied Woodpecker
6. Mac - Cardinal
7. Robby - Robin
8. Donna - as in prima donna, for the juvenille female Oriole that would just as soon let others feed her from our oranges than to eat for herself
9. Phil - for the Pileated Woodpecker in our backyard in Virginia
10. Phyllis - for the female Pileated Woodpecker in our backyard in Virginia
11. Gus - Male Goldfinch
12. Goldilocks - Female Goldfinch

85

It's the year Hubby and I got married.

It's also the projected high temperature for today. That might not seem much for some of you, but considering I live in Michigan and I've only been seeing 60's and 70's and haven't had my air conditioning on for at least three weeks, it's hot for me. We have to keep our windows closed at night because it gets too cold.

Just for fun, 85 is a biprime number, meaning that it is the product of two prime numbers (specifically 5 and 17). It's the 24th biprime number not counting perfect squares, and combined with 86 and 87 forms the second cluster of three consecutive biprime numbers. I found all that information courtesy of Wikipedia.

Just for more fun, Wikipedia also says that another word for biprime is semiprime. As of September 2008, the largest known semiprime number has over 25 million digits, is calculated by taking the square of the largest known prime number, and is expressed (2ⁿ-1)² where n=43,112,609. I just couldn't find a shortcut to stick it up there.

When I was a kid, I used to like making up my own math problems and solving them. Yes, I'm a math geek, but this is a bit extreme.

Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds on flickr.

Peanut Butter Cookies

One of my all-time favorite cookies.

I remember Grandma making them for me when I was growing up. They were an especially nice treat when I was in college and would receive a tin!

You can make them with crunchy peanut butter or smooth & creamy.

My mom wrote the recipe down for me when I left home as a newlywed in 1985 when we were college sophomores.

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Cream butter, peanut butter, sugars, eggs, and vanilla. Sift together your dry ingredients and add into your creamed mixture.

Or you can be lazy like me and add in the baking soda and salt first to make sure it gets into the creamed mixture really good, then add your flour, without sifting any of it.

Shape into 1-inch balls, or something like that. Roll in more sugar. Place on your cookie sheet and criss-cross each cookie with a fork. I have to dip my fork in the sugar so it doesn't stick.

Bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes. You might need to adjust this, because when I use my dark cookie sheet they get really dark and crunchy at 10 minutes. But we like chewy cookies.

This makes about 5 dozen cookies.

I won't even tell you how many I ate the first day, except that it was less than a dozen.