Arin used to hate wearing hats when he was a baby. Refused to do it, would rip them off after 2 seconds. Now, I guess he thinks they’re alright… but it’s even more fun for him to put them on other people! 🙂

We had a very welcome heatwave over the past few days, and yesterday it was probably the hottest. As you can see, our thermometer claimed it hit 100 – but I think the gauge was sitting in the sun and it wasn’t quite that warm. We did a TON – massive amounts – of yardwork. Not so much on our yard as on our woods… trying to clear out the billions of saplings that have sprung up and burn all the debris from this winter’s ice storm. So, I didn’t get any outdoor pictures but Arin enjoyed his refreshing juice…

Big surprise! There’s few things better than sweet, light, delicious home-made whipped cream. Mmm. I think warm weather makes whipped cream taste even better… not to mention the added fun of licking the blender bits! Ignore how messy the mommy is… I really need an apron apparently!! As a bonus, a pretty frilly housewife apron would be a lot more attractive than old workout clothes. 🙂 “Got to go, busy nom’ing on yummies!“

Dear Ms Curcuru, Thank you for your email regarding the availability of our puds in America. We have expanded into Europe (France & Belgium). Unfortunately our delicioüs puds are not currently available in the USA and sadly, because they must be kept chilled, it is not possible to ship them or to order them online. As you saw on our website, our products are sold by a company called Shaws: however this is a small UK-based company, as distinct from the US chain of stores. Our web team had unfortunately obtained the wrong logo, which I understand must have been…

I don’t know if anyone else used to use Geocities or has heard of it… but it was basically THE place to host your free website 10-15 years ago. Yahoo bought them some time after they weren’t very relevant anymore and lamely tried to make money on it. Maybe they did, I don’t know, but I think yahoo makes everything it touches cheap and stupid.Anyway, now Yahoo has decided to take everything Geocities offline… permanantly. Which means deleting all the tons of antique webpages (and some still relevant ones I’m assuming). Isn’t there some sort of Internet Historical Preservation Society…

UPDATE: I won! I conquered the Princesstårta…. mostly. More on this later. In the meantime… anyone want to come over for cake? We cannot finish this thing. (Original Post) This is my next project: A delicate, delicious and absolutely beautiful Swedish princess cake romantically called… Princesstårta. First I have to go grocery shopping to pick up supplies. Next, I will be making homemade marshmallow fondant. Then I will be baking the sponge cake. I will spend a very long time trying to assemble the whipped cream dome. Finally, I will totally fail at spreading the fondant over the whole thing.…

During Todd’s Spring Break, Arin got to enjoy a lot of company – and had a blast. He loved hanging out with the ‘big kids’. Here he is at the breakfast table with the guys… my cousin Dan, some tall kid, and Uncle Todd. I love that Bobo is already so into computers! Now he just has to invent the new Facebook (since the current one is down the drain) and then we can live happily ever after. 🙂

This was taken not long before the snows finally melted completely away from our yard… about a month after it was gone from the rest of the town!

Here is a quick little comparison of some various techniques for converting to black and white in Photoshop (CS2). Here I’ve started with a straight out of the (point and shoot) camera shot of Mike, my great-uncle six times removed (or however that works) on the maternal Italian side. He did not want me to take a close-up, much less make it public, but that’s what he gets for being a cheeky. If you never hear from me again, just assume Big Mike sent me to sleep with the fishes. 🙂 Alright, let’s start off simple. This is a basic…