the peaceful peacock

So the baby is teething, mama’s strained from the Four­teen Days of Mad­ness, the fuel pump in our car has decided that it’s had enough, and the neighbor’s cat just fig­ured out how to get into our house to visit with us.

Which is a pretty big con­cern because Kyle, our anti-social para­keet, just decided that it’s really fun to fly around the house to explore and bang into things.

All of this and not an ounce of choco­late in the entire house. Crap.

Kind of like that scene from ET, isn’t it? Try to ignore the freaky plas­tic bunny.

Need­less to say he is on lock­down until we do a lit­tle trim­ming of the flight feath­ers. We’ve been wait­ing for him to real­ize that birds around here don’t have to live behind locked doors, so it’s a very happy day to see him begin to accept his new envi­ron­ment. Finally. Like every­thing, time is the answer. And a bit of kind­heart­ed­ness and patience goes quite a ways of course. We almost ended up res­cu­ing a Macaw too but thank­fully there is some­one who is an even big­ger softie than the peo­ple who live in this house. Whew.

We have once again reaf­firmed our deci­sion hold out for an African Grey and the lit­tle guy will find us when the time is right.

Any­hoo, I have the tuto­r­ial ready for “How to Make a Sim­ple Apron from a Repur­posed Skirt” that will be posted bright and early tomor­row morning.

Learn how you too can resem­ble Madonna, circa 1983, in this lovely apron.

For now I have dosed the boy with some of this very orange, very berry fla­vored magic potion:

and I’m putting my Mate­r­ial Girl Apron on to make some of these lit­tle babies, which were obvi­ously cre­ated for days like this:

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Choco­late Crin­kle Cookies

1 cup cocoa (ok, I found some choco­late in the house)

1/2 cup saf­flower oil (I used butter)

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

2 cups flour

2 tsp bak­ing powder

2 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

Cream sugar and oil, mix in cocoa. Blend in eggs, one at a time. Add flour, bak­ing pow­der, vanilla, and salt. Chill dough for a cou­ple of hours. Spoon onto cookie sheet, press into disks, and sprin­kle with pow­dered sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for six min­utes, rotate pan and bake for an addi­tional 4 minutes.

(Watch the bak­ing time on these–we’re at high alti­tude and use a con­vec­tion oven.)

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Kind of like a brownie did it with a cookie. All I know is that if there is a heaven these are there in abundance.

Oh yeah, and I’ve decided to give away one of the baby car­ri­ers that is made dur­ing the Four­teen Days of Mad­ness. I’ll post some details later after I’ve had some cook­ies. And maybe a beer.

apron tutorial, cookie recipe, free stuff, parakeet, sewing tutorial