Everytime I look outside, I hope the day will be a great one. When you see this, the beauty of the giant ball of fire, lighting up the sky, gives me hope that I can capture the beauty of it with my camera.

When I see the sky all cloudy and grey, hovering over the mountains, it gives me hope that it will snow, so I can go sledding down the mountain. It didn’t snow at my house.

I hope it will this year though.

I found a really “Simple” bread to make. Boule bread.

I watched this French cooking show on Cooking channel TV and saw a very, simple bread recipe. It is called The Miracle Boule bread. I made some and decided to tell you about it. This is the easiest bread I have ever made.

You take 3 cups/375 g, of all purpose flour.

½ tsp yeast. (I increased it, the recipe called for ¼ tsp)

1¼ tsp salt.

1½ cup water. I made the water warm, not hot.

Mix the flour, salt and yeast in a bowl. Stir in 1 ½ cups (375 ml) water. What you will have is a wet, shaggy sticky dough, but not so wet as to be batter. (Mine was not real wet.) I just stirred it up until all flour was moist. Cover the bowl with a tea towel. (I put plastic cling wrap over my bowl. Let it rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours. I did it the night  evening before.

It looks like this the next day.

I also coated the bowl with cooking spray so it would not stick so much.

Flour a work surface and dump the dough out onto it. Sprinkle over a little more flour and fold it once or twice. Cover with a tea towel and let rest 15 minutes. (I bought a cotton towel in the dish towel section at Wal-Mart, smooth feeling.)

Put some flour on your hands to keep the dough from sticking to your fingers. Get the dough out of the bowl, use a spatula. Shape the dough into a ball (ball shape, it is floppy). Coat your cotton towel with flour. You need a lot because you want to be sure the dough doesn’t stick to the towel. Put the dough ball in the middle of the towel and pull the towel ends over the dough to cover. Let rise for 2 hours. When ready the dough will double in size.

Half an hour before the dough is ready, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F or 230 degrees C. Put into a cast iron pat or dutch oven. I used a 6.5 qt one. I bought this pot because it has a metal knob, it won’t melt in a hot oven. I have used the plastic knobs in the hot oven and they do melt. Try wrapping foil around them so they don’t melt so bad if you do have a pot like that.

When the dough is ready, remove the pot from the oven, turn the dough into it, seam side up. I just plopped it from the towel into the pot. Shake the pot to settle the bread evenly. Cover with the lid and bake for 30 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake until the loaf is nicely brown anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. Cool on a rack. It is crisp on the outside and nice and soft on the inside. It tastes good too.

We were driving to the store today. I saw this park with a big lake that was mostly froze over. It got to 11 degrees here this morning. When I stopped at the park it was 28 degrees. The lake had lots of ducks and birds, sitting on the ice or in the non frozen water. There were parts that were not frozen yet. There were benches all around the lake and people were just sitting on the benches looking at the lake. I went to a table by the lake to sit and take pictures. All the birds, some were big geese type birds, started running over to me.

The two big birds ran right up to me and were talking to me. I guess people feed them and they were asking me if I was going to feed them. They told me in their honks that they didn’t want to stand there and pose for me. When they figured out that I had no food for them, they turned around and walked back to the water.

There are several parts of the lake. A pathway goes all the way around the park. It was warm sitting in the sun and very peaceful. I am going to go back tomorrow with some bread to feed the birds, take a walk around and lake and take pictures.

I was going to go outside with a bucket of water and have my son launch the water out of the bucket. But I thought “What if I can’t catch the water in the air, coming out of the bucket. What kind of mess will it make.” Maybe some other time. I went with these pictures. I took them at the balloon race while the hot air balloons were launching into the air.

Up, up and away. Launched.

Last night I looked at the window. The clouds were pink. I grabbed my camera to capture the wonderful colors. Wonderful big pink clouds that looked like cotton candy.

(click on the pictures to see them big. They look a lot nicer big.)

Then she went and changed and put on this big glistening face mask and dress in silver. The mask must have been so heavy on her face because she had a hard time seeing out of it and talking.

Justin Bieber also sang. I took a picture of him. I noticed that he is wearing eye liner and mascara. He sang Let it Be.

After midnight I typed a letter to send to my mother. She does not have a computer, so I am sending her a letter in the mail, wishing her a Happy New Year. It should be a week by the time she gets it. I keep telling her to get a computer, but she won’t.

 I drew that on the back of the envelope. Have a Happy New Year everyone.

It has not snowed where I live this year. They said that last year was so snowly that it was cold and hard to get around. Where is all that snow that I heard about. I found some good winter pictures in my files.And what is winter without a snowman….melting….looking like he is looking down.

Or how about in the world of Lego….”Take it easy guys, it looks pretty icy down there.”

Happy New Year to everyone.

There is a place you can take your old trees to here. We drove it (the tree) over and threw it (the tree) in the pile. You pay them $3 for dropping off your tree. They recycle it. Probably take the wood and make mulch out of it. The place smelled really strong of pine.

We packed up all the lights and ornaments and put it away for next year. I had found this LCD light tree topper, star-shaped, at Smiths (a Kroger) grocery store for $6 a couple of weeks ago. It was marked down from $15. The cash register only wanted to ring it up for $12 but it was marked down to $5.99. I made the cashier give it to me for the sale price. I was going to tear off the sale ticket on the shelf to prove it to her, but she didn’t make me do it. I put it on the tree and it looked great. It constantly changes colors. I will miss looking at the lights on the tree, they look really pretty all lit at night.

We got a new TV a couple of weeks ago because our big, expensive TV we bought 4 years ago broke. A red light would go on, on the front of the TV, the picture would go all black, but you could still hear the show. We went to a TV repair shop and noticed that they had lots of old TV’s sitting all around, they were all Phillips TV’s. Ours is a Phillips TV. The guy said just to look at it would probably be $400 and up to fix it. It was probably going to be the and up price. Judging from all the TV’s sitting around people probably just left their TV there and never came back for it. I set it out for the trash pickup. They didn’t touch it. I called the waste management place and you have to bring your TV to the dump and pay 35 cents a pound. That TV is big and heavy, probably easily 100 pounds. I called this other place that recycles TV’s and they charge $25. Yesterday we drove over to the TV recycle place with the TV. I got out of the truck and went to the door of the place. It was locked. I had called before I came to see if I could bring it in, but they didn’t tell me how to get inside. A guy sitting at a table outside yelled “You have to press the button.” Oh, OK, so I pressed this button, that looked like a doorbell. Nothing happened for a while. Then I heard a beep and I opened the door. You go into a room with nothing. There is blue carpet and just walls that look like it had on 1970′s wood paneling. My son went in with me. “Now what do we do?” he said. I whispered “I don’t know, there is no one here.”  Then we hear a voice come from a speaker in the ceiling. Kind of gave me the feeling I was in the Wizard of Oz.

“What do you want?” the speaker said.

“I’m here to turn in a TV.” I said.

“Go back outside and go to door number 1″

So we go back outside and I look around the corner and there are these big garage type doors with gated doors and really up high. I told my husband to back up the truck to door number one. He backed it up and I opened the tail gate. Nothing happened. We waited and waited and then someone finally lifted up the roll up door from the inside and then opened the wire mesh looking doors too. Those had a pad lock on it.

Two guys stepping into my truck and picked up the TV and put it into their building. They looked at it a while and said “We are going to have to charge you to turn it in.”

I said “I know, I called, I will pay you.” He told me to go back to the door and he would let me in. So I go back to the front door and he opens the door and I go in. He said “Follow me.” We go down this long hallway and then up some stairs to this other room. He goes over to this one guy and whispers to him that I want to pay with a credit card. I told him I called and the girl said that I could pay the $25 with a credit card. They whispered together again. They didn’t know how to do the credit card and the girl had just left for lunch, it would be an hour. Then the one guy said,

“Merry Christmas, go your done.” I said “Really, I don’t have to pay?” He again said “Merry Christmas, you can go now.”  So the one guy showed me how to get to the front door and I left. We didn’t have to pay. I tried but they didn’t make me come back.

So the tree is gone, the TV is gone, Christmas is over. Is the world going to end in 2012?

There were a lot more quail, sitting all in a long line. It was very sunny and bright and I had a hard time finding them in the camera lense. While I was snapping pictures, I captured a rabbit, that just hopped into the picture. I am surprised that the birds didn’t run, or fly away when the rabbit hopped up.

The birds then ran off and left the rabbit all alone.