Day: August 22, 2008

I drew a comic strip about Betty Blonde and blueberry muffins a few days ago. That comic strip was not drawn on some random whim. Oh no, no, no. That comic strip was based on my recent experiences with making the most scrumptious blueberry muffin ever.

About two weeks ago, I discovered this “Blueberry Cream Muffin” recipe on Taste of Home magazine’s marvelous website. I measured, mixed, and added several large spoonfuls of sour cream and sugar to the batter. Needless to say, the muffins came out moist, rich, and delightfully dangerous to Dad’s diet.

I thought they could use a little improvement though, so I chose a different recipe. This one was entitled “Nutmeg Blueberry Muffins”. Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of nutmeg in a muffin, right? Right. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow the recipe correctly and added a half teaspoon of powdered nutmeg directly to the batter when I should have sprinkled a little on top of each muffin while it was baking. A whole half teaspoon of powdered nutmeg does not do wonders to baked goods.

I want a blueberry muffin akin to Panera’s Wild Blueberry muffin. Sweet and chock full of berries inside, and crunchy on top. I suppose my muffins are not destined to be a culinary masterpiece, but there is still a ray of hope! Third time’s the charm they say! Right?

Right.

This weekend looks like it is going to be a programming weekend. We have gotten a good start on school, but we have too many upcoming events (read expenses) to stray too far from home, so we have decided to just stick close to home for the whole weekend, go to the library, cook something interesting (Kelly and Christian, you be thinking about that), and just be together. I want to get Christian set up to start programming in C++. At the same time, I want to continue work on a couple of my programming projects. The most pressing project now is the one I am writing in python to help me manage Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic strip a little more automatically. In addition to that, I have need to get some code written to automatically read the data coming in from the Garmin GPS to the volcano computer. Both of them are pretty fun. I would like to take a long walk this weekend, too. I have started to plateau again on the diet thing which is not any fun at all. Still, when I hear those bagels calling my name, it is hard to resist, so my strategy this weekend is to keep as busy as possible, drink some of the great coffee Lorena makes for me and stay away from those evil, simple carbohydrates.

Last night, I sat with Lorena and showed her how to scan an image into our Linux computer from the HP Printer/Copier/Scanner using GIMP and XSane. It was a lot of fun. I am going to give her some more lessons on how to work with GIMP. We decided it would be great if I could help her to learn how to do some other stuff, too. We are paying a lot of attention to budgeting these days, so I think it might be a great thing for the entire family to spend some time learning OpenOffice.org calc. I had talked with Ruthie about this earlier and have decided it might be a good idea to walk through the excellent tutorials at LearnOpenOffice.org. We will probably start that this weekend, too.

Special note: Betty Blonde is going to black and white next week. I had mentioned this earlier, but the day has now come. The reason is that Kelly’s homeschool is taking too much time for her to be able to get everything done. Something had to be dropped. She is getting faster at drawing the comic and our hope is that she will be able to add a colored weekend strip after we are sure she has her schoolwork under control. Right now, there are now weekend strips.

May 12, 2004 – Flatland
May 12, 2004 – Working on the yard