This weekend

I spent part of this afternoon working with M to make cookies for an exchange her Girl Scout troop is having tomorrow.  She decided she wanted to make chocolate cookies with white-chocolate chips for the exchange, and fortunately the recipe on the package of Nestlé’s white-chocolate chips was for just exactly that, so we worked up a batch and for once, the predicted number of cookies was almost on the mark.  The recipe said it made five dozen, and our final count was just three short of that mark.  Part of the troop leader’s instructions were that the girls had to come up with an original name for their cookies, and M decided hers would be called “White Treasures on Chocolate Island” cookies.  I suggested “Negative Chocolate Cookies,” since the colors were just the inverse of ordinary Toll House, but she liked her own idea better so I deferred to it.

M only needs two dozen cookies for the exchange and was worried about the recipe making five dozen, but I told her not to worry—of all the problems in the world, leftover cookies are one of the smallest, and one that almost always takes care of itself.  And sure enough, in my email this evening there was an appeal from the P-TA for cookies to serve after the kids’ winter celebrations program on Tuesday, so we’ll just send the remainder over to them.  Problem solved.

Before I helped M with the cookies, I ran the lawn mower around the front yard to mulch and suck up all the dead leaves into the grass bag, which was less work than raking and carrying them all to the pens in the back yard.  When I got through, ohmyGOD did the yard look scraped bare!  We haven’t had any rain to mention since Hermine, so the little grass that was left, plus all the chickweed, has all dried up and it’s the most pitiful, miserable, bare-stalked excuse for a lawn you ever saw.  I’ve heard reports that the weather service is predicting another drought year for us in 2011, and I’m afraid they’re right—and what I’m to do about the yard I’m sure I don’t  know.  I think I’ll just have to root-feed the pecans and try to keep them from dying back any more than they have, and let everything else take its chance.  I wish I could figure out some kind of grassy ground cover I could seed down that would be more drought tolerant, but I don’t really know what that would be, and in any case trying to re-establish a lawn during a drought is one with sweeping back the sea with a broom.

I have a whole bunch of leave hours to use up, so I’m taking off from the Empire between the sixteenth and Christmas Eve.  I expect I’ll try to do some Christmas shopping on Thursday and Friday, when I can go where I like without having to account for my time.  L and I are talking of going to the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar to see whether we can find something for my mother besides what we already have.