Photo Hunters: Delicious

This week's theme is "delicious," and since I can't afford an evening at my favorite restaurant right now, I decided instead to browse the pictures on my camera. Of course, a large number of those are from my trips to Russia.

This is one of my favorite Russian foods: Blini. Blini are basically extremely thin pancakes. We've seen them served as breakfast food, party foods, used like tortillas to make yummy lunches, or here as a part of a school cafeteria lunch. The ones in this picture are filled with apples and dusted with sugar, but they can be served with a seemingly endless list of toppings/fillings. We've been told that each Russian woman has her own style of making blini and the recipe is usually a closely guarded secret shared only with family. Too bad -- I'd love to learn to make these!

Friday Quiz: What Year Do You Belong In?

What with being the first quiz of the new year and all, I figured this quiz was mighty appropriate:

You Belong in 1954

You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in!

What Year Do You Belong In?

Please leave a comment and let me know what year you got if you take the quiz too! (Or a link to your post if you post it on your blog...)

Trees in January

Last year Grump and I purchased a membership to the Arbor Day Foundation, which then gave us 10 free trees. There were several groupings to choose from, but we picked the "Autumn Classics". Well, the trees arrived about a week ago and last weekend Grump planted them. They were tiny when they got here -- looked like a bouquet of sticks, painted different colors so we could tell them apart. Still, they're guaranteed to grow, and if you can't trust the Arbor Day folks when it comes to trees, who can you trust, right? So, for now they're all in the back yard, right near the fence to provide them some protection from the elements. I've decided I'm going to document their growth, taking pictures of two of the trees at the beginning of each month, so we can see how they grow. Right now they're not much to look at, but if we've done everything right they will be eventually. So here are their "baby pictures"...

This first is the smallest of the bunch, but also the one I'm looking forward to the most. It's a White Flowering Dogwood. You can barely even see it in the picture, but it's the long stick that's sticking up in the middle of the green circle. We're eventually planning to place it out front. I can't wait 'till it blooms!

This one's a Red Maple. It should be gorgeous in the fall, once it has had a chance to mature. It's a little easier to see, but I highlighted it with its own circle too.

New Years Resolution

Most years when New Years Day comes and goes, if I bother to make any resolutions at all, I keep them to myself. Most often, my resolutions are pretty personal-type things, so that works well. This year however, I've decided to share my resolutions...

1. I WILL blog every day. Every day. All year. If I can't blog on a certain day, because things do happen, I will make up for it by blogging extra when I can. But whenever possible, I will post at least one thing per day.

2. I will spend more time with Grumpamoose. I suppose I've been somewhat lax about all the relationship maintenance stuff of late, and that's just not fair to either of us. So there you go honey -- you have it in writing.

3. I will try to remember what the truly important things in life are. Really, number two falls into this one, but I figure it's important enough to earn its own number.

dNeero Social Surveys

With the beginning of the Blog365 challenge at hand, I know I will soon need some kind of source of content. Something that will inspire posts. I found it in dNeero Social Surveys. Yes, there are about a billion paid survey sites out there, but this one is a little different. You get paid a certain amount for taking the survey, sure. But then you also get paid a little more for posting your responses on your blog. Here's what the post looks like:



So anyway, I don't plan on blogging this often, once a week at most, but when there's a survey that inspires me to write about it a bit, you can expect to see it here.