I love these waxed paper cups from Paper Treat’s Etsy Store. Although, no longer available they look too cute not to share!
What is it about ice-cream in a waxed paper cup that screams: Summertime, happiness and childhood? It makes me dream for a waxed paper Dennis the Menace cup from Diary Queen, a dipped one of course!
I adore their cones, but if you get your frosty treat in a cup, there is always more of your dipped flavour of choice pooled around and frozen in the bottom of the cup, little mountains of chocolate chunks, waiting for you!
I loved going there when we were little. On hot Summer nights, my parents would load us up in the car and we would head out for an evening ride, usually ending up at Dairy Queen for a dip cone. It was such a hard choice to decide between the chocolate dip or the cherry one.
Did you dip vanilla ice-cream or chocolate? Oh, the tough choices you had to make when you were little! The choice of dessert was usually the most important decision you possibly made all day, except of course a peanut butter & jelly or a ham & cheese sandwich for lunch!
But, Dairy Queen does not exist in England, so in this hot day today, it will have to exist simply in my dreams….
**UPDATE: Thanks to SuzieButton for letting me know, these are back in-stock in Paper Treat’s Etsy store!
Now, that Mr. Michie and I are both off together, we headed out Tuesday afternoon to run some errands. While running them, we decided to go to the movies, it was bargain Tuesday after all and all movies are £4 all day long! Woo-Hoo!
A quick trip into the candy store armed us with chocolate and strawberry liquorice. He grabbed the tickets to “The A-Team” and I grabbed the Coke and popcorn. It was a great movie, just a good ol’ Summertime movie!
We held hands, and stuffed ourselves with popcorn and just enjoyed being with each other. After the movie we headed to Nando’s for an early dinner and then back to reality with a little grocery shopping, but not without stealing a kiss or two on the aisles.
There are no pictures to show for our date, but should there be? We were lost in each other and perfectly content!
Ha Ha Ha, I want furniture that “laughs in the face of weather”. My Grandparents had some lawn chairs like this and every year they were taken out of the garage, with the smell of salt & sea on them from the previous year and packed up in the back of the car as we headed to the beach.
We usually headed down in two cars to the beach house, a trip that seemed to take forever before you could smell the pluff mud in your nostrils, and start to see the water through the pine trees.
Our fishing gear was always tucked away in my Grandpa’s car underneath the chairs that he would use to sit on and direct us with some fishing advice from the back porch.
There was a creek that was fed from the ocean behind the house and if we weren’t swimming in it, we were fishing in it. My Grandpa would hold fishing competitions between us and inevitably, someone would catch a puffer-fish and he would come down and help up us take it off our line and toss it back.
Summers at the beach with my grandparents, held a magic to them, a place where time stopped, where even after a year in between visits to the house, we fell into the same routines of swimming, playing good old-fashioned board games, reading musty smelling books left on an old bookshelf, listening to beach music and just enjoying each other’s company.
To be little again and enjoy the company of the ones you love away from all the hustle and bustle of the real world, to just get lost in the magic of the beach…
I am so excited, that means the occasional morning sleeping in with Mr. Michie, eating lunch together, running errands together before I head to work, dinner at a more normal hour. I love when he is off from school and we can spend time with each other.
Next school year, I will be going to school too, so we will have the same holidays off, to just sit and stare at each other over the tops of our computers, like a couple of nerds.
The Fourth of July is on the horizon and I have my whole menu planned for the weekend festivities, except for the most important part: dessert! That, for me, is the hardest thing to plan, there are just too many choices. I could make my Strawberry Shortcake Cake, or good old fashioned ice cream sandwiches made from fresh chocolate chip, oatmeal or sugar cookies and filled with vanilla or strawberry ice-cream.
I spotted these goodies on the Martha Stewart site. I love the cookie spoons, although I would probably break them on purpose so I could munch away on my edible utensil and then get another one.
I also loved these jam stars. However, I would feel wasteful to not use all of my dough when I have smeared it so lovingly with jam, I would probably use my scraps up by cutting out some little circles or mini stars to go alongside the bigger ones.
It would also be tempting to make a mile high Pollyanna Cake, like the ones they baked for the Church bazaar. That is an old Disney favorite of mine. It is one of those movies that you better make sure you have something sweet in the house to eat when you watch it, although, unless you have one of Tillie’s (the Harrington’s cook in the movie) cakes you will be sadly disappointed with whatever exists behind the doors of your cupboards.
That does it! I think I will make my Nana’s marble cake with chocolate frosting! I just might have to make two, one for me and one for everyone else…
*Click on the Martha Stewart Images to be taken to the recipes for those mouth-watering cookies!
(Images: Sugar Cookie Spoons & Jam Stars: copyright Martha Stewart; Pollyanna: images found on Flickr; Pink Flags & Circle Labels: a Pugly Pixel Freebie)
It’s hot here! This is the hottest weekend of the year so far. As a girl raised in the South, I am used to heat. Heat, mixed with humidity that seems to dew on your skin the moment you step outside. Heat, mixed with humidity that takes your breath away when you open the door. Heat, mixed with humidity that feels as if you are breathing through a wet cloth.
Summer, in the South, symbolizes the beginning of so many things. It means fresh fried chicken with sliced tomatoes straight off the vine, cucumber salad and cantaloupe dripping its melon nectar to mingle with the vinegar of the salad on your plate. All purchased that afternoon from the Farmer’s Market. A large shed that held inside its walls the best of Summer: fresh vegetables, watermelons, boiled peanuts. Bushel baskets by the door to place your selected items in as you shopped. The smell of the sun and warmth, on the vegetables, that had not long come in from the fields.
Not all Sundays, but on some occasions after church we would head to the local family restaurant in town. A place that served Southern food at its finest! No calorie counting here! Turkey & Dressing is always served on Sundays with a choice of vegetables and fresh yeast rolls. That was usually my choice over ham or fried chicken. That lunch mixed with the Summertime heat would often make you sleepy and an afternoon nap on the hammock would ensue.
When my grandmother was a child in the South the big meal of the day was eaten at lunch, or as people called it then, “Dinner” and “Supper” was a lighter evening meal of cold lunchtime leftovers, sandwiches or biscuits, grits and frizzled ham. They lived at the top of a big hill and when my great-grandfather Red would come home for lunch, each child would have a turn during the week riding up the hill with him.
He would place his arm out of the window and help the “rider” onto the foot board, holding onto them with his big worn hands as they gripped the open window frame, they would ride up the hill with their daddy, squealing and laughing all the way as the wind blew through their hair.
For that is the South. Sweat rolling down your back; ice clinking in glasses as it slowly diffuses into sweet tea. The laughter of gossip carrying over the yard as children swing higher on their swing hung on the boughs of an oak to feel the breeze cool their faces.
Harper Lee described Summertime in the South best, in one of my favorite books, “To Kill A Mockingbird”:
Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum…A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.
I love that line: A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. The days did always seem so much longer when you were little, with one day slipping into the next an endless parade of Summer days. Now, time seems to fly, there are never enough hours in the day to accomplish everything. But, that I suppose is how it should be, there is a time to everything and so there should be a time to rest as the sun comes to its end and our pace slows to match the softness of the moon.
(Peach Truck Image: Re-vamped Allman Bros. Album Cover, Pink Tag & Tape on “To Kill A Mockingbird” Image, The Pugly Pixel, Background on same image: The Graphics Fairy, Farmer’s Market & Palm Tree Images, copyright J. Michie)
It is warm here today, the sun is coming and going as giant puffs of cotton candy clouds pass by. It is the perfect day to find a cool place in the shade and just be. Just be with a book, with music, with yourself. This looks like a good place to just be, but looks can be deceiving. This place to be is actually inside here:
This is one of many adorable pieces created by The Rifle Paper Company. I discovered them a little while ago, while searching for something on Martha Stewart. I went to their website and followed that to their blog and I was enraptured! Look at this stationary:
If this doesn’t make you want to sit right down and write a letter to someone, I don’t know what would! I still believe in snail mail you see. For as much as I write online and e-mail, there is still a magic in sitting down and writing a good old-fashioned letter and posting it off into a shiny red postbox as it begins its journey to be popped into someone’s mailbox on the other side of the pond.
And, I look forward to them as well. Getting a letter from my Mom, my Sister or my Nana in the mail is like a mini Christmas. To touch what they have touched and see what they have written in their beautiful handwriting. Now, that to me, is worth more than gold!
To see this beautiful stationary for yourself, click on the link below:
In lieu of the traditional shirt and tie for Father’s Day, I thought this card was quite cute and could hold tickets to a Summer concert or coupons, good for a day out with Dad.
One more day to go, so if you haven’t gotten something yet, this was just too cute not to share. I am loving the Japanese origami techniques…
Directions:
A shirt and tie are a traditional gift for Dad — a card to match is something new. Use legal-size (8 1/2-by-14-inch) decorative paper.
1. Place paper facedown. Fold in half vertically; unfold. Line up left edge with centerline fold, and crease; repeat with right edge. Unfold, and lay flat.
2. Fold top-left corner in to line up with outermost crease, forming a triangle; repeat on top-right corner. Using index fingers and thumbs, pinch together outside points of each triangle so they meet, and crease.
3. While still pinching triangles, fold down top edge (this will make sleeves).
4. Turn paper upside down, and flip it over. Fold down top edge 3/4 inch.
5. Flip paper over. Fold top left and right corners so tips meet at centerline.
6. Tuck bottom edge under collar, and flatten by creasing. For the tie, cut out an 8-by-1/2-inch strip of decorative paper. Knot paper. Snip close to knot on one side; trim other to a point. Glue to shirt.
