Blog Silence

. . . Also known as being unemployed and home for the summer so little to nothing happens unless you count field trips to Stop & Shop, which my blog readers mother probably doesn't need to read about because she was right there with me when we spotted that great deal on strawberries. When I’m not chasing down sale-price pasta sauce and day-old garlic bread, I've been at home reading, sleeping, eating, ant catching. You know, the usual summer activities.

What I haven’t been doing: keeping on top of emails (like I do that normally . . . only happens if it’s from the guy of my dreams work related or urgent), multivariable calculus, quantum physics, anything vaguely academic. I have, however, learned all about the 2006 Everest season (thanks to Nick Heil’s Dark Summit and Lincoln Hall’s Dead Lucky) and watched a lot of Jeopardy!. You can never know too much almost useless trivia. As proof that hands (and bodies?) on learning really does work, there was a clue about a phalanx (a Greek military formation) that I knew because my seventh grade social studies teacher had the class form a phalanx, complete with pencil spears and folder shields, and march down the hall. And then there was the time we learned about Roman bathhouses. . . .

I've also done a little cooking baking experimentation in the kitchen. When a batch of bananas started turning brown black, we first made some banana chocolate chip muffins, which I have to say were better than the blueberry muffins I made from a mix a few days later. There was also one last black banana that I ended up throwing in the blender with some strawberries, vanilla yogurt, and a couple ice cubes. Note: don’t forget to peel the banana and take the leaves off the strawberries . . . these instructions were actually in a recipe I was looking up online. Because normally I eat banana peels. The ones that are still yellow with just a few brown spots are my favorites.

My latest foray into the kitchen resulted in corn dog muffins, which I originally saw on some blog somewhere and came about because of a surplus of hot dogs.  We made a batch of cornbread batter, spooned it into a mini muffin pan, and shoved placed a hacked up piece of hot dog into each muffin. Here’s how they turned out:

Personally, I like these even though I don’t like the idea of actual corn dogs. Five points for the internet. Next up: baklava, maybe? Hey, stop laughing. It didn't look that hard when the woman on the website did it. . . . So if I’m not posting it’s probably because I’m busy coupon cutting reading about obscure topics in books from my library’s nonfiction section and/or spilling sugar on the kitchen floor.