Black Forest Trifle, parting company and trolley

- This is one of my sister's Weight Watchers recipes*, made just now at 5:30am! I needed something to take to a potluck tonight and this seemed quick and easy when I did a quick scan of recipes yesterday. It's delicious, too - no one realized it was a diet dessert last time I took it there. It was gone in a flash.

- A woman and a little girl at the grocery store, parting company. "'Bye Mrs. Smith!" "'Bye Anna - see you tomorrow!" (Said with affection.) A teacher and her student, I think, who like each other.

- A trolley car whizzing down Northside Drive in Atlanta marked "City of Danville." I think I really did see that. :)


* Black Forest Trifle

1-(16 oz) Angel Food Cake, cubed

1-(20 oz) can No Sugar Added Cherry Pie Filling

4-(3.5 oz) cups Sugar Free Chocolate Pudding

1-(8 oz) carton frozen fat free Cool Whip, thawed

1/4 cup chocolate curls **

Place half of cake cubes in a 2 quart trifle bowl; spoon half of cherry pie filling
over cake. Spread 2 pudding cups over cherry pie filling and top with half of Cool Whip.
Repeat Layers. Top with chocolate curls. Chill. Yield: 12 one cup servings. 4 points each.

**I used mini chocolate morsels.

Karin on the bus, feathers in hair and the walk

- Looking over in traffic during the commute yesterday and seeing my friend Karin Slaughter's face on the side of the MARTA bus. I met her about 12 years ago when she was running a sign shop and I purchased stadium banners from her for the corporation I worked for then. She soon left the sign biz behind and has just published her 12th book, "Fallen." If you like crime fiction, you'll love her books, beginning with the very first one, "Blindsighted."

- Feather extensions in hair must be a new trend and I'm just learning about it. Niece Rebecca had some feathers cascading from her hair when I saw her July 4 weekend. The director of my volunteer organization had a pink feather woven into her gloriously red and orange hair last week. And super blogger Heather Armstrong (@dooce) wrote about her daughter's feather extension here. I think it's cool, but I'm not doing that in case anyone wonders - it's just that it is suddenly a trend that appeared to me in threes.

- Going for my first walk in a week and running into a friend on the path, a little girl selling lemonade in a stand (mother watching close by) and listening to tunes on the iPod. Life is good.

Party over here, coolness and grilled cheese

- Every night around 8pm, five little birds fly into my back porch and descend into this container of ivy. Lots of hopping about and then one by one, they fly away. It's a little bird festival and it's always right on schedule.

- The temperature in Atlanta on Saturday reached the high 70s, giving us a break from the heat. There was some back porch reading time and a little music listening time out there on Friday night.

- A grilled cheese sandwich, using Muenster cheese and a whole wheat pita pocket drizzled with olive oil. So good and a simple Sunday night supper.

Kids songs, embarrassing the kids and cicadas

- Nancy Cassidy's Kid Songs - I love these CDs. I first gave them to oldest niece Carla when she was wee one and they ended up making their way around to all the kids. So I got them for a coworker who is a mother-to-be and another coworker who is a grandmother-to-be. I told them of my favorite two songs on it, "Shake Your Sillies Out" and "Sandwiches."

- I was having lunch with niece Abby and two of her friends (all adults now) recently and when our sandwiches came out, her friend looked at Abby and said, "Too bad your mom isn't here to sing the sandwich song for us." Not to worry - I sang the first few lines for them:

Sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine.
I like sandwiches, I eat them all the time;
I eat them for my supper and I eat them for my lunch;
If I had a hundred sandwiches, I'd eat them all at once!

- I read about this in May, when USA Today reported, "An enormous brood of cicadas that covers parts of 16 states is beginning to wake from its 13-year slumber underground." And I just saw my first bewildered cicada this morning as I was out watering plants at 5am. It landed on my back, I shrieked, no neighbors came running - so much for that neighborhood watch thing. :) (The neighbors are sleeping at that time, as they should be.) Anyway - it was funny in retrospect and I wish I could have gotten a picture of the cicada.

Have a lovely weekend, my friends!

Cosette, the Eiffel Tower and French cooking

It's Random Photo Thursday and also Bastille Day in France. So here are three photos that are kind of French in nature. :)

- My company prints posters and such for Wolf Trap - I grabbed this one of Cosette from Les Misérables as I was coming in one morning and they were printing it, and hung it in my office. I love her face, taken from the portrait "Cosette" by Emile Bayard in 1862.

- This image of the Eiffel Tower is hanging in my kitchen. It is said that plans for the Eiffel Tower were originally met with extreme skepticism. A petition against its construction read, "We, the writers, painters, sculptors, architects and lovers of the beauty of Paris, do protest with all our vigour and all our indignation, in the name of French taste and endangered French art and history, against the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower." Of course, Gustave Eiffel's Tower is now regarded as one of the most innovative structural monuments in the world. I have read that most Parisians still don't like it, but I would love to see it in person.

- And I have neither mastered the art of French cooking or made anything from Dorie Greenspan's around the French table cookbook, but there's still hope.

Riding shotgun, blueberry hoarding and curl

- Riding in the car with my very girly niece in the Florida panhandle a few days ago and chuckling at the items in her console tray, which make it very "her." Jewelry, change and shotgun shells. The shotgun was in a zipped up bag in the back seat - I guess in case an alligator tries to get her.* :)

- Loving the plethora of blueberries around right now. A man at Whole Foods gave me a tip a couple of years ago that I still use for buying up extras when they are at a low price: stick them in the freezer in the plastic container they come in without rinsing them. Wash them after they are thawed out in the refrigerator and you want to eat them.

- The soul-sucking, window-fogging humidity this morning has at least one good effect - my sleep flattened hair curled right back up when I watered outside plants at 5am.

* She, her boyfriend and her dad like to shoot skeet in the late afternoon on the farm. That is the official reason.

A song about loving cats, no harmony and find

- This is a spoof of one of those dating site videos that someone took a further step in "songifying." Just seeing the "cat band" is worth watching. What makes this a good thing? It made me laugh out loud and reminded me that the world is a great place if someone has the patience to make a cat look as if it is beating drums.

- I went through that dating site process once and the experience made me tell all my married and significant othered friends to hang onto their mates! You do end up revealing yourself so much and you run into crazy people like that guy who told me on an email (I never met him in person) that in our future relationship I would have to "keep myself clean." I told him that could be a problem and that we needed to end this right now. :)

- Discovering a forgotten cherry Tootsie Pop in my purse when searching for a pen in my cavernous purse before an evening meeting. A committee member says, "oh you are such a kid, aren't you?" when I unwrap it. At heart maybe, but really just a gal with a sweet tooth. Maybe I should make a video about loving candy and songify it. :)