Vanilla

Well the weather is cooling down to right around freezing I think. Possibly a few degrees below and there's even a chance we might see some snow on Sunday. Maybe we'll see a white Christmas after all. I had a very busy day doing visiting teaching, errands, mailing photos to the grandparents of the kids and just a bunch of other little things that seem to have taken the whole day. Steve and I popped over to the movie theater for a movie (3 musketeers) and found that if you buy a pass it costs about $5.50 per movie so if you skip the popcorn it's actually a cheap date! And convenient since it's less than 5 minutes fro our house.

I met the local Watkins lady while picking up a package for Harvey today. She seems nice and I can stock up on liniment and vanilla (Watkins makes great vanilla). Mmmm...vanilla. When I was little I though there were only two real flavours. Strawberry, Chocolate, and plain. I though that 'vanilla' just meant plain. Now I know that real vanilla is delicious. Love those beans! All the best things come from beans. Green beans, vanilla beans, cocoa beans. Yum! This is what vanilla beans look like before drying which turns them the familiar brown colour. These beans are from Costa Rica and are actually the seed pods from a type of orchid.

Christopher tested for his sash in Kung Fu tonight and passed. Now all 4 kids are officially members of the club. Class is tomorrow and I'm not sure what else we have planned but I have lots of baking to get done and some cleaning to do too. Maybe I can do the latter when Steve takes the kids to Kung Fu.

It's late so I'm going to go. Hope you are all safe and warm. I'm going to light a small fire in the furnace for a couple of hours to warm up the house again so we're good. Haven't used a 1/4 cord of wood yet which is good. The wood supply always looks huge but then you start using it and it dwindles quickly!