TGIF!

Friday at last! It hasn't been a bad week, but I do love Fridays! I feel like a kid again, getting to stay up late on Friday nights! Oh sure - I can do that any night of the week, but then I'd be miserable and make everyone around me the same way. Instead of staying up late reading tonight, I might pick up my knitting again. A friend and neighbor showed me a beautiful scarf she had knitted and it inspired me to learn how to knit. It's slow going, but I'm making some progress - at least after four days it's starting to look recognizable as knitting! I am, however, hearing knit 1, purl 1 in my sleep.

I was on a roll baking today - pun intended! I have a recipe for soft pretzels and Andy had asked for those, so I made a batch of those today. I need to find a new recipe, though. These didn't turn out tasting very much like the kind you get at a store. They were good, but could have been better. I use my bread machine for just about every kind of dough - so much easier.

The pretzels were made after I had baked a cake at 6:30 this morning. Strange, I know, but what a great way to heat the kitchen! It was cold in the house this morning, and I wasn't going to start a fire just for a few hours. We have a practically brand-new heat pump, but I refuse to use it. Energy efficient, my eye! Well, perhaps it is, but with our electric rates it's just very expensive to use. Everyone got a letter from the electric company in January informing us that our electric rate was going up 23%. That's a LOT! We had used the heat pump for only about five days during the last billing period, and kept a fire going the rest of the time, but I almost fainted when we got our electric bill - $251.00 for one month. Everyone around here was in shock. The lady in front of us got a bill for $200.00 - and she lives alone! The neighbors next to us got a bill for $280.00. They just built an addition to their house and weren't even in that yet, so they are dreading their bill when they actually move into the new part. So anyway, to take the chill out of the kitchen before it was time for Andy to get up, I baked a cake.

The neighbor that built the addition gave me a wonderful present today. It is a half-pint milk bottle that has "Chestnut Farms, Chevy Chase Dairy, Washington, D.C." embossed on one side, and "Safe Milk For Babies" on the other. I love it! She has a daycare in her home (hence the addition!), and sometimes I get the children off the bus for her since I'm there getting Andy anyway, and this was a thank-you gift for helping. Her husband works for a company who does a lot of excavating around here, and he finds treasure troves of stuff like this. She has quite an extensive collection of wonderful old bottles. If my camera starts to behave, I will try to take a picture of the bottle.

Well, on to my Friday evening...life is good!