The best days start with having cookies and coffee for breakfast 🙂 Today will be one of those good days. Magic is definitely in the air… or at least the essence of it. Today will hopefully breath some life and energy back into me. A few days ago I felt nearly dead inside. I haven’t been able to make pots outside for about a week now, and I haven’t felt motivated to keep up with sculpting for the herbarium (I did finish a tulip last night, but I need some tough glue to put it together with. The petals are really fragile and they won’t stay connected to the stem– I had to “fire” them separately). The point is, the tulip seems mediocre as far as my other sculptures have been. My family was impressed with it, and my dad couldn’t tell the difference between the petals I made and the real thing, but if I can’t put it together successfully it will be a failure.

I made some dark porter malt the other day, and yesterday I decided to brew a batch of porter with a hint of orange flavor. It smelled delicious while I was making it, but hopefully it’s not too bitter. I might have to balance it with a lighter malt if it doesn’t work out. It smelled a lot like coffee, with toasty after-notes. The orange blended well with the toastiness of it. The first time I tried porter, I didn’t quite know what to think of it. It came across as a little bitter, but I liked it more and more as I kept drinking (and not because of the alcohol taking effect, because I only had one glass). It was dark and chocolaty and mysterious.

The weather is crazy here. It has been snowing on and off for the last 3 days. I am sick of it being so cold… we have been keeping heaters on all over in the house. The weather forecast changes every few hours… I looked at it on Friday and it told me that it would only be partly cloudy today and warming up, and yesterday it forecasted snow for today. Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t lie about snow. I did get a couple of nice pictures of the yard before the snow 🙂

This is the flowering crab apple tree 🙂 every time it’s in bloom, we expect drastic weather– rain, hail, snow, and lots of wind. It never fails.