Maybe it’s that I haven’t had sun in my yard since September or a number of other things, but this blog bores me so I am changing it. It just happens to be post #100.
I am busy with my new stores now that wedding season is starting up again and I don’t have time to try and come up with interesting things to say about a very uninteresting life.
So, for a while at least, posts will be random and written mostly for myself.
Rich and poor have this in common:
The Lord is the Maker of them all.
Proverbs 22:2
I woke up and put the tv on this morning to hear “fire in Antrim”.
I live in a very small town and one of the larger buildings along Main Street was destroyed by fire overnight. The broadcast was coming live from Main Street and when I first saw the building I thought it was the Inn.
The building that burned is the yellow one on the left in my photo (taken in May 2009) below. Story Here.
Main Street, Antrim, NH
This view is pretty much all of our Main Street and now one of the larger buildings is gone. I am heading down to the little store this afternoon and will see about getting some photos.
The building housed a hair salon, bakery and an apartment I think.
The picture below is from Wikipedia and is a c.1915 postcard.
I am not sure if the building on the left is the same one…?
Antrim Main Street, c. 1915
Home sweet home
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Looking at this funny art of a weird pink house reminds me of the house I photographed during my “stint” in Hopkinton. I had to rent a house over there for a year and there was a little fishing pond off of Main Street where my son liked to fish.
So I took this photo and made it into a “moving” “new address” card and got rave reviews about how cute the house was. Actually it sits right on the main road which can’t be seen in the picture and the house itself was not that great. From this angle it’s easy to imagine that the house sits on the lake.
Things are seldom what they seem.
Fall passes all too soon. Not that I dislike winter, but getting out and walking is a bit more difficult. I try to be outside every day in Fall.
Just up the street is a hill with a field full of interesting growth all year. White Daisies covered the roadside in summer and tall weeds like this one came along in Fall.
It’s an animal crossing area and I saw moose tracks in the snow this winter. Quite awesome. I’ve never seen a moose, just tracks a few times in mud and snow.
seed pod
bob houses
Ice fishing huts, called “bob houses” on New Hampshire’s Gregg Lake. Someone told me they get their name from the way they bob up and down in the water if left out when the ice gives way.
Ice fishing field trip
This was the coldest field trip I have even participated in. The wind whipped across the lake and the temp. was in the single digits – not including the wind chill.
I have fallen in love with this “recipe” for easy Cookie Pie. My 12 year old loves it and I love to make it for him because it takes about 5 minutes to throw together – no baking, very little clean up. Kids could very easily make this by themselves.
I don’t eat it, but he and his friends gobble it down!
"Cookie Pie"
- graham cracker crust
one package of chocolate chip cookies
one tub of cool whip (I buy the medium size one)
a little milk
Dip each cookie in milk and make a layer of cookies in the crust.
Plop a layer of cool whip on top.
Repeat with a layer of cookies (dipped in milk) and more cool whip.
Make 3 layers and end with cool whip and crumble a cookie on top.
Put in the fridge – or eat right away.
Yuk… I mean … YUM!
If I were poetic I would add a great poem here, but I’m not, so I hope you enjoy the photo.
I don’t know what kind of tree this is, but it had little dangly things hanging all over (like that description?) and the snow on it’s branches was so awesome looking. This photo is one of my favorites from my walk.
Winter Trees
Now the trees are bare after our rain and wind – (it’s dumb to rain in winter isn’t it?). I am looking forward to getting another snow storm.
- Making Bread
My bread maker died a few weeks ago and I decided I would begin to make my own bread. I try not to eat too much bread and I mostly used the bread-maker for making pizza dough on Friday nights.
I looked online and found a recipe for homemade bread that was supposedly WONDERFUL… It had to be kneaded for 10 minutes! Are you kidding me? So I made it and got a good arm workout. The bread wouldn’t rise.
Most likely because it’s winter and my house is only around 65 degrees – no where near the 80 degrees suggested for rising.
Even when I heated the oven and stuck the dough in there, it still didn’t do much.
I got a few loaves – the small ones were edible but the large ones were doughy inside. I tried this recipe once more and still didn’t have much luck so I made Bread Pudding – which no one ate either! So I gave up on that recipe.
I now have a new bread maker (West Bend)…and it has 2 paddles in the bottom of the pan, which I had never heard of, but this machine didn’t come with a pizza dough recipe!! Oh no….BUT at Amazon.com (where I purchased it) a lady had left a message about this machine saying she always made pizza dough too and used the bagel recipe instead.
I used it Friday to make pizza dough (which was a combination of the bagel recipe and my old pizza dough recipe) and it was delicious…even better than my old dough would come out.
So below is the recipe for my bread maker pizza dough. In case you like to make your own. Add ingredients in this order and use the dough setting. Mine takes an hour and a half to complete.
PIZZA DOUGH
1 cup water @ 80 degrees
1 1/2 Tbsp. Olive oil
3 Cups of Bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt.
2 tsp. active dry yeast
I used this to make one large pizza with semi-thick crust. Add some spices such as onion and/or garlic powder and oregano to give the crust a nice flavor. I also bake the crust first @ 425 for about 10 minutes, then add sauce and toppings and bake @ 425 for about 15 minutes – or until it looks cooked.
Take a winter break and check out some seashells!
For those who don’t know, I lived in central Florida from 1979 to 2005. Over the years I traveled to Sanibel Island and Fort Myers a couple of times (wish it could have been more) and went to New Smyrna beach hundreds of times – it was only a 30 minute drive.
The kids and I collected numerous shells and I brought a selection back to New England when I moved here.
I’ve been photographing them for a couple of years now for my Beachcombers and Sandpiper Wedding online stores, but recently I began to “study up” on them.
I have a Squidoo lens that identifies some and I am still working on others! I am by no means a scientist and could possibly have made some mistakes, but what I found once I began to search for the names of my shells was that there is not much good information out there, at least not all in one place.
The information I have found is very limited. So I am trying to consolidate sea shell pictures and info for others who are interested in seashells.
This is what I work on in my spare time. 
Some of my seashells and sand dollars
My Seashell information links:
Blog: Seashells by Millhill (This blog was started as a way to advertise my Beachcombers store, and is also the place I add seashell identification information and occasionally other beach related posts.)
My new blog for beach weddings: Sandpiper Wedding (Brand new store and blog just for weddings. I needed to separate the wedding items from everyday shell products. I will be concentrating more on this one as summer approaches)
Seashell Identification: (my Squidoo lens with pictures and info and lots of links to more shell information. This page gets lots of views and is one of my most popular lenses at Squidoo. I am in the process of creating off-shoot pages for each shell type because the lens page is becoming too full.) I recently created a short QUIZ about shells.
Now I must get downstairs to fill the wood stove.
