Wyatt made a bunch of signs yesterday and taped them to every door in our house. They all “say” “No one is allowed inside.”

I didn’t mean to post two pictures of my Trader Joe’s shopping cart, but this is the only picture I have for today. This is pretty representative of my life though because I go to Trader Joe’s a lot. In this batch of groceries you can see: lemon pepper pappardelle, turkey, bananas, Barbara’s Oat Squares, ground flax seed, sparkling water, cherry tomatoes, organic white grape juice and cheese puffs. I don’t like buying the cheese puffs, but Zach and Wyatt really love them so I get them when I go shopping.

I made home made granola bars on this fine Sunday morning. The recipe is one I got from Joyful Abode and this is the second time I made it. I didn’t blog about it the first time though because

1. I forgot to take pictures and
2. I didn’t love how they turned out.

To be fair, I got overly creative the first time and made some changes to the recipe and I think that’s why I wasn’t completely thrilled with the results. My big mistake that time was that I decided to mix some chocolate chips into the bars. I wasn’t doing my best thinking though, because I tossed the chips in with the mixture before I poured the boiling hot honey mixture over the top. For some reason I thought they would remain whole, but of course they melted. (Duh.) This made an already sweet recipe very, very sweet. I have a serious sweet tooth, so when I say that something is overyly sweet, you can be assured that it’s not for the faint of heart. I still think I might try adding chocolate chips to the recipe in the future, but if I do I’ll press them into the top of the bars after I’ve put them into the baking pan and let them cool down a bit. In any case, they were still good enough to eat, but I felt there was room for improvement.

This batch came out much better than the first and I credit that to following the recipe more closely. There were no melted chocolate chips this time and for the nuts I used about 1/3 cup peanuts and 2/3 cup almonds. This was a nice combo because you still get some of the crunch from the peanuts, but the almond flavor is a little nicer (in my opinion). One other variation I made is that instead of using all vanilla extract I used half vanilla and half almond extract, another flavor I’m particularly fond of. For the dried fruit, I used Trader Joe’s dried cherries, blueberries and strawberries mixture. Num! Num!

This photo is the stirring step:

Here is where I would be pressing chocolate chips in if I decided to try adding those again:

Cooled granola turned out onto the cutting board:

Here’s the granola cut into bars. I cut them into different sizes because sometimes I only want a little and sometimes I want a lot.

The granola bars are chewy, but the nuts give them a nice bit of crunch. They seem to keep for a pretty long time (several weeks) if you wrap them up in plastic, but they are definitely best the first week. They get a bit more chewy than I prefer as time goes on. Another thing to note is that my three-year-old son doesn’t really like them and when my cousin made them her three-year-old daughter, she didn’t like them either. So if you’re thinking of making these for a preschooler, do with that information what you will. Adults all seem to like them though.

Some other variations I’m thinking of trying are:

• substituting some ground flax seed for some of the wheat germ
• substituting whole flax seeds for some of the sunflower seeds
• shaking up the fruit a bit with dried apples or apricots

If you decide to try these and you like them, you should head on over to Joyful Abode and leave a nice comment for the blogger. Which is just what I’m about to do….

Our backyard is crazy with roses right now. We are really lucky to have about a dozen beautiful, old rose bushes in our yard and right now I think we have 5 bushes in full bloom, including the two hugest ones. They are breath-taking.

My new camera is so damn cute, I just had to make it it’s own little camera cozy. I used to think these things were called “camera cases” but a quick look around Google showed me I was just wrong. They are in fact called camera cozies. The idea behind this camera is that it’s small enough that I can carry it anywhere, but I don’t want it to get all banged up in my bag so that’s why it needs its own little case cozy.

I got this awesome polka-dot fabric and some fleece to match at the fabric store the other day, so I was all ready to dive into this project today. I started off by drafting a pattern based on my camera’s dimensions. I kept forgetting to add in one side of the camera or another though, so I had to make a gazillion drafts. Then I had to figure out the seam allowances which was hard because I didn’t know how much the fleece was going to bulk up the case. I ended up just guessing, but it turns out I guessed wrong. More on that later.

Cutting the fabric out went pretty smoothly.

Next up came the sewing. I don’t even remember the last time I had my sewing machine out and I was making this project up as I went along. This picture pretty much sums up the process because I spent the next two hours sewing impulsively, realizing I’d screwed up, ripping seams out, thinking really hard, sewing again, finding another screw-up, ripping a seam out, and so on and so forth.

But then finally I was done and it had all worked out! Here is a picture with my camera in the cozy:

And here it is all fastened shut:

My camera is all tucked away inside, well-padded and no longer getting scratched. Yay!

We are in the middle of a heat wave here in the Bay Area and it was crazy hot today. The temperature outside got up to 97 degrees and my office had to have been over 100 degrees (no air conditioning in my office building). I spent nearly the entire day sitting at my desk with this fan pointed at my head. It helped a lot, but when it’s 100 degrees there’s only so much helping to be done by a little fan.