Glanalaw - delighting in pure song

It's a beautiful afternoon!  And by beautiful I mean mid-seventies, still, grey, and rainy.  Thunder rumbles far off in the distance and I've seen the occasional faint flash of lightning.  I'm holding out hope for an honest-to-goodness thunderstorm; autumn storms are a delight to my heart.  I love how even when the sky is clouded over, the trees stand out bright and cheerful in their changing colours.  Some people may deplore the rain, but I love it! I've spent the afternoon studying for a psychology test.  I think I might find this class interesting if I had a better teacher: as it is, the class is boring, and most of the material seems to be either just giving names to common-sense ideas, or complete nonsense.  Needless to say I don't find it very inspiring.  So I took a study break and hung some posters in my bedroom!  It's always been homey but now it looks... settled .  I'm happy with it :) In honour of the autumnal weather, I t...

My roommate and I tried a new dish for both of us tonight - fried chicken!  It was actually surprisingly easy, and it turned out SO well.  We used the recipe from  The Pioneer Woman Cooks , although we used chicken tenders instead of a cut-up fryer.  We also sort of missed the step about soaking the chicken in buttermilk overnight, but it worked just fine with only a half-hour soak.  The breading is delightful and it really wasn't a very greasy finished product.  Yum! This is the rest of our meal.  We made oven fries (new potatoes, quartered, sprinkled with Italian seasoning and parmesan cheese, drizzled with olive oil, and baked brown), asparagus, and fruit salad.  It was utterly delicious.  And quick - less than an hour and a half from the beginning of cooking till the time we sat down.  I love how we've been able to eat so well this year, but at such a low cost - much  less expensive than eating in the school cafeteria or din...

I went to Hobby Lobby today for some jewelry supplies (I make the "pearl" necklaces for all the girls in the choirs here at school, and it's coming up on time for a new batch.)  But of course, since this is me, I had to go and look at the yarn and fabric before I left.  I wasn't going to buy... just to look. Right. I should know by now that if I don't intend to buy, I should. Not. Look.  I came away from Hobby Lobby with my jewelry hardware... and eleven balls of yarn.  Eeep. I justify this purchase to myself by saying, well it was wool .  It was $1.90 a skein.  How often are you going to find a nice, soft, dove-grey wool in that quantity for that price?  It really is a fabulous price.  I'm going to make myself a sweater, I think - and I promised the friend who was with me that I'd make her mittens with red accents. Still, though.  I've been trying to stay away from impulse buys, since my budget is tight and I'm trying to learn to eve...

I've been quiet for a long time again - almost a month.  Mainly I've been trying to keep up with school and performances, but I've also been working on graduate school applications.  It's hard to believe it's time to do that already!  Sometimes it feels like I just started college, and here I am almost ready to graduate.  It's weird. I also took three CLEP tests this month - English Literature, Western Civilization II, and Biology.  Since I added my English minor so late I had to clep some core classes to fit everything in on time, but I'm actually really glad I did this.  It took very little time and much less money than taking the courses at Union would have.  I got 10 hours of credit with probably only about 10 hours of study time, and the cost was a fraction of what I would have paid.  And now I can tell people that I'm getting 28 hours of credit in one semester! ;-P I've also been cooking, and slogging away (slowly) on my quilt, and I made ...