Kentucky Ice Storm

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In the starting image for the news video above, the house behind the "play" arrow (with the little dormer window and the pile of branches on the roof) is where my friend Kathy lives in Louisville, KY. If you watch the video, you'll see a guy with a red shirt clearing the tree that fell on her house. Fortunately she and her family are fine, though the tree landed 12 inches from her son's head!

Oh, yeah, there's an annoying ad at the start of the video - of course.

Spring? Spring!

Temperatures in the 60s? Crocuses blooming? Grass turning green? Could it really be spring? But I've learned not to get my hopes up too early.

This past weekend I had a craft day with my friend Laura. The past two years we've gone to the International Quilt Festival outside Chicago, but this year she had to work on the Saturday, and neither of us saw any classes that really caught our eye, so we just got together and played at her house. I used her as a guinea pig for my Faux Tintype Collage class that I'm teaching on April 27, and also showed her how to solder microscope slide pendants. Her first attempt was much neater than my first, second and third! (The other photo is her cat Dexter turning his back to the camera.)

Spring in Wisconsin

I wish I had taken a photo yesterday of the little green crocus leaves pushing up, but now they're buried under a foot of snow. I saw my first robin of spring yesterday on the first day of spring. Hope it has a warm nest! (It was 50 degrees yesterday!)

Since the weather's so gloomy, here are the ATCs I made for the Gothic Alice in Wonderland swap at IllustratedATCs.com

Snow snow snow

About 2:30 p.m. with snow still falling
Originally uploaded by vintagepix

Looks like we got over a foot of snow, but it's hard to tell with the drifts! Glen got his car shoveled out and I'll have to finish shoveling mine out of the garage tomorrow. Fun, fun!

This was our driveway around 2:30 p.m. when he shoveled a path to the mailbox and decided it was too mucky to continue.

For winter comfort food, I made my version of Yellowman's Banana Lime Bread from Sundays at Moosewood:

3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 3)
3 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon lime juice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
3/4 cup grated coconut
2 cups white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat oven to 350F and spray a 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan with non-stick cooking spray (if it's not already non-stick :o). In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the egg, bananas, milk, and lime juice. Add the salt, ginger, and coconut and mix well. Measure the flour and baking powder into a separate bowl. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet and mix until smooth. Scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for one hour, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool the bread for about 10 minutes before removing from the pan. (There's a rum glaze that goes with this, but I'm too lazy to make it, and this is sweet and moist enough without it.)