It's all about Apples ~ and peeler-coorer-slicers!

When I was growing up, my mom would make fabulous homemade applesauce, apple crisp, apple muffins, apple cobbler, and baked apples. Wonderful delights! I have always loved eating apples and baking with apples - that's what happens when you are named after an apple.

Every fall my family and friends would go to Crane's Apple Orchard or Cornwell's Turkeyville USA. Later, once I'd moved away for school, I'd go to Uncle John's Cider Mill in St. John's, MI.

http://www.craneorchards.com/
http://www.turkeyville.com/
http://www.ujcidermill.com/

(one visit to these places and you'll be ready to move to Michigan!)

Baking with apples can be a lot of work and I can remember wanting an apple peeler-corer-slicer as early as 1995. My mom always supplied me with apple corers - and - frankly - they are dangerous tools.






(examples of dangerous tools - oops - this last one isn't an apple corer - although it looks equally dangerous)

After several near injuries I figured I'd head to Turkeyville, USA to get a "good" one. That one was just as dangerous as the rest.

I'm a patient person (some of the time) and I don't make snap decisions (some of the time), so I found myself in 2007 - yes, 12 years later, making the decision to purchase a Pampered Chef Apple Peeler Corer Slicer. I pulled it out yesterday so I could simply gaze at it in wonder.

I'm downright giddy about trying the thing, so . . . hold your breath and give a drum roll. . . in the next few days I anticipate there will be a different apple corer picture on my blog!

In the meantime. . . .

In the past year I've had some loss. My Dad's death and an important relationship being the two greatest. There's no good timing when you lose a parent and there are definitely relationships where a lot can be attributed to bad timing. This was one of them.

So. . . if it wasn't the right time. . . and I need to move on with life and I don't always know how based on my general feelings of sadness and loss . . . .

what do I do in the meantime?

So far my gut, a really good book (In the Meantime, Finding Yourself and the Love You Want by Iyanla Vanzant), and plenty of sadness, have led me to do the things that it would behoov me to do whether I'm in a relationship, or on my own.

~ be honest with myself and others about . . . well. . . everything
~ stay clear in my life goals and keep moving towards them
~ take time for me, for my family and friends, and for the romantic relationship in my life
~love

I'm also working on being in the moment (not stuck in memories of the past whether good or bad, or worries about the future), not thinking about what others think about me, and attempting to approach every situation from a place of love and compassion.

A long while back, my mom gave me a bookmark that had a great quote by theologian John Wesley. That quote has stuck since the day I read it.

"Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”

Perhaps a new version could read:

Be all the love you can,
Love by all the means you can,
Love in all the ways you can,
Love in all the places you can,
Love at all the times you can,
Love all the people you can,
Love as long as ever you can.

I like that version.
I'm going to try it.

Non-profit of the week - The Night Ministry

This is a great organization and there are plenty of ways to support them.

More on it later . . . check out the link!

http://www.thenightministry.org/004_about/

Hadron Super Collider says "no Big Bang this week"

On a day of remembrance and mourning, during a time of hyped-up election fervor and nationalism, it comforts me that over 8,000 scientists from around the world (mainly physicists I'm guessing) have been working together on the project below in order to find our (every person, living species, and rock) singular, unified, origin.

For anyone who missed this, it was perhaps one of the greatest physics undertakings of our time.

Yesterday in Geneva scientists began running experiments w/ the collider that could explain the existence of, well, us. Yup. How did mass get here? How did we get here? How did black holes get (or I guess since it's a hole - not get) here?

This thrills many and scares the crap out of some. I haven't figured out where I stand on the thrill vs. scared spectrum. If the Big Bang created our universe, it was a VERY big and VERY out of control deal. And the scientists who set up Hadron have created a VERY controlled environment. But. . . what if these little particles really do have more energy than we'd ever imagined? There had to be an awful lot of energy the day our universe was created.

Needless to say, check out some articles. The Big Bang didn't replicate (on a small, controlled scale) yesterday, nor were any new black holes created, and Europe wasn't blown to bits into the water.

See CNN and Wikipedia articles below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/08/lhc.collider/index.html

Non Profit of the Week - Chicago Books to Women Prisoners

harlequin romance, women prisoners, and me


I have a trunk filled with 2 large garbage bags of new Harlequin romance novels. Yup. And this Sunday I'm going to walk into the Chicago Books for Women Prisoners office, smile at the wonderful feminist volunteers and say, "Wow, it's so hard to part with this collection! These books have provided so many nights of bliss and entertainment!"

Ok. For those of you who know me, you are hopefully chuckling and not calling 911 with my address. Don't get me wrong, I'm not above reading a good romance novel. It's just more likely to be published by some other fine press.

I was given this lovely collection by a friend's 19-year-old daughter. She was encouraged (ok, outright ordered) by her mom to "weed" her collection, and who would be a better recipient than a librarian. There's a great organization in Chicagoland that provides books for women in prison. I've never been in prison, but I can only imagine that if there, I'd want every type of book I could get my hands on. Legal, spiritual, self-help, how to function out of prison, and last but not least, downright escapist entertainment.

If you have any paperbacks you can part with, take a look at the link below. If you can't drive to Chicago, you can certainly mail books inexpensively via media mail, or find groups in your area that donate to prisoners.

http://chicagobwp.org/about-us/