Some Miscellaneous thoughts and my love of ICE CREAM

WHOO-HOOO! Two blogs in the space of an hour! Who would'a thunk it?! And THIS one is going to have PICTURES!!!!!!

I wish I had taken a picture of the rainy days we had a week or so ago. It's amazing to me -- we went from those crazy snowstorms to RAIN in the middle of January no less. Whew. No wonder the poor trees don't know whether to bud or not. :-) Recently though we had a bit more snow (wonderful, heavy, wet, snowball/snowman snow) and in the dusk towards near-dark, I took the following picture of the little tree in our front yard:

It's pretty blurry (I didn't use a flash) and it WAS twilight (oooooh that word makes me think of the book series, which I really enjoyed, like half (most of?) the country). But oh my, the tree was so pretty with that beautiful coating of heavy snow, I took another picture with the flash on:

It wasn't full night yet, but a camera flash at twilight will give you that effect. Still it captured the tree a little better and caught some of the snowflakes as well. I just loved how thick and frosting-like the snow looked on the branches. And I admire how brave our little tree was! Brrrr, it was COLD.

Thinking of things cold, I wanted to say a word or two about one of my greatest loves: ICE CREAM. I love it. I'll eat it whenever I can get it. I almost always have a box of it in my freezer. For that matter, so do all my brothers and sisters (well at least I know for a fact that my sisters do! hahahahaha). We can thank our parents (and especially our dad) for that. Ice cream was one of our most favorite family desserts, and our dad used to fondly recount stories of ice cream -- like the time he had a major brain freeze and fell over in a dead faint (or was that my uncle who fainted?), or the time he and his two brothers each ate a 7-scoop cone (that was a 7-scoop cone EACH, I repeat). Who could not love ice cream with such fine examples?

Well I have to admit, it's also been my weight downfall. If it wasn't for eating ice cream before bed every night I'd be a size two (HAH. THAT'll never happen on this medium-framed body). Oh okay, I eat other things too that put me at my current weight range. "Sigh." I've been trying to give up my extensive ice cream habit and haven't had any luck until lately. And how, pray tell, did I manage that, you ask?! Cost. Irritation. I hate it that they are now selling ice cream in an almost-quart-sized-box for the price of what should be a half-gallon-sized-box. Does that make sense?

Just look at it. Puny. Tiny. Almost half the size it used to be. Oh okay, you can't really tell from the picture. (I love Dreyer's by the way ... creamy, smooth, rich ... mmmmmm). But honestly, don't you agree? I understand the reasoning behind it: people won't buy ice cream if it gets too expensive, and there's no way to keep making it at the prices we're used to (so they say). So here's a brilliant idea: shrink the boxes down and keep the prices what we're used to! Yeah, that'll work. And it does ... well we the Buying Public don't have much of a choice, do we? I just wonder, do these companies really think they're deceiving us? I saw this happen with my favorite boxed cone: they used to be nice big things. Then the company shrank the size of the cone. Then they shrank the size of the ice cream blob, and thinned out the chocolate coating. It's now child-sized and the quality has decreased. So ... of all things, I find it's harder to buy my ice cream in those puny boxes than it is to go without. I will buy it ONLY on sale and ONLY when I can't stand it anymore and have to indulge. Who woulda thought the economy would help me out, eh? And have you noticed? They are now shrinking the cereal boxes. I wonder what's next?

Well on a completely different tract (and just for fun) here's a picture of Cowboy in Heaven. Nothing like a guuudddd neecckkk wrruuubbbb, eh?

I wish I could've caught him at the height of his joyfulness ... he turns his head completely sideways and pushes against you hard, to get into the rub. Mmmmmmmmm.