DALLAS DREAMS

 Well this post is a long time coming.  I just want to write a little about our Christmas this year because I think we will want to remember how we celebrated christmas during the pandemic.   This Christmas we didn't go anywhere or see any one, it was just our family in our house.  The previous weeks we made an effort to make goodies and and carol for our neighbors, but we were pretty secluded on christmas itself.  Santa brought the kids too many treats and an Elsa castle to go with all their other princess castles.   This was the christmas of Building.  We got so many building things:  Duplos, linkin' logs, bristle blocks, magnetic building blocks (two varieties), mega blocks,etc, etc.  We want our girls to become engineers and architects, and we just were not getting there with all these princess toys, so now they can focus and building things. (We also got lego for emma's birthday !).  Instead of wrapping up all of these blo...

This was just a quick fun read.  The book is a Brandon Sanderson book which was written for more of a middle school audience.   It is the first book in a series.  The basic premise is that Librarians rule the world by controlling information, keeping common people in the dark about future technologies among other things.  A boy ( who is an orphan) is pulled into a secret world to fight against the evil librarians.  It is sort of a "harry potter" type feel, but a lot sillier.  I would probably recommend it as a fun read for middle school-ish kid.   

I read Tarzan of the Apes: By Edgar Rice Burroughs.   This was the first book in MANY Tarzan books.  I did not realize that there were so many to read.  I thought this was a fun book.  Very exciting, lots of action, and not a lot like the disney movie.  Though a lot of the book was enjoyable, I feel like the ending was very rushed.  One minute Tarzan is swinging though the african jungle, and the next, he has learned to speak french and is a common gentleman.   One thing that bothered me a little was that Tarzan was able to learn who to read and write in English all by himself with just a bunch of book his father had left.  That seemed a little too impossible.  But my greatest complaint from the book is that it has a cliffhanger ending.  It was a great rush to the end that did not actually resolve! I guess it is trying to get you to read the next book in the series.   I guess we'll see if I read the next one.

 Well, another tough week for pies in the Smith household. First I should mention, we have decided as a family to start making pies every other week.  This was a health decision.  Eating a whole pie every week turns out is not super good for you.  Plus Amy really love cookies, so it was not good when I would make a pie every week, and then Amy would ALSO make cookies. So we trade off, I get a pie one week, then Amy gets a week to make whatever she wants.  In addition to trading off, we are making a greater effort to share our pies with people we know, take some of the calories off of us. This was my week on, and we decided on a pie which seemed like a good idea, a cinnamon roll apple pie.  This pictures on the website look really cool.  But (1) When I made the pie, it didn't look that great and (2) I just though I would have been better off making a regular apple pie for taste.   As for as looks, I feel like I was on that show "Nailed it", wh...

 Made a pie, it wasn't super good. This was a big let down (this is my pie from 2 weeks ago, I'm pretty behind on my posts)  I don't know what happened.   I have actually made a lemon Merengue pie which was pretty good, but this one just didn't work.  It is a real shame, because this was one of my best looking crusts.  For some reason the inside filling didn't set so it was a little soupy... also I don't know if I cooked the meringue enough, or something.  Also, I put it in the fridge and I think that made it worse.  Anyway, they can't all be winners.  I will have to try this one again sometime

I finished the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hasse: I not very smart with philosophy, religion, etc, but I think it good for me to occasionally read books which explore how we might find peace throughout our lives from various perspectives.   This book details the life of Siddhartha, a boy who grew up with a father who taught him how to find peace through a particular set of rituals and beliefs.  At some point he decides he may be better off finding his way living in the forest, giving up all of his possessions and fasting everyday, thereby making it easier to free himself from the world and worldly-ness.  He finds times in this lifestyle where he feels like he is able to escape and find some type of spiritual transcendence, but can never seem to make it stick. Eventually he meets a Buddha who has found peace.  And even though Siddhartha knows that this Buddha has "made it" decides to not become one of his pupils.  Instead he gives up his life of starving in t...

 Today I did something new, I changed a leaky garbage disposal under my sink.  This seems like now such a big deal, but I'm always nervous to take on this type of project incase I get halfway in and then decide I'm in over my head. When I am able to accomplish anything like this I feel a lot of pride.  We had noticed that there was a lot of water under our sink for a while.  I thought the best idea was just to put a bucket underneath the leak and empty the bucket every so often.  This worked ok, except the bucket started to fill up faster and faster and the water was pretty smelly.  Amy told me to fix it or she was going to higher someone to fix it,  so I decided try and replace the whole unit myself. It only cost about $100.   Unfortunately, tonight we realized that the other side of the sink is ALSO leaking, so my next project will be to change out the other sink drain (I can see there is a metal pipe that is totally corroded.)