other things

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The trick to good muffins is stirring the batter just barely enough to get everything blended.

Strawberry Muffins

1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped strawberries

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Prepare an 8 cup muffin tin, or use paper liners.

In a small bowl, combine oil, milk, egg and vanilla. Beat lightly. In a large bowl, mix flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar. Toss in chopped strawberries and stir to coat with flour. Pour in milk mixture and stir together only to moisten.

Don't over-mix.

Fill muffin cups. Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 25 minutes, or until the tops bounce back from the touch. Cool 10 minutes and remove from pans.

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Another woman's husband asked her what she was doing with so many butterflies. She didn't know, but aren't they cute? She took about 700 pictures of them, from every conceivable angle, and posted them all on her blog.

She cut up a DICTIONARY toward this end.

There is a definite protocol to this. You may post bright colors if you have small children. If you're a grandmother, everything in your life is a variation on white. Lavender sprigs allowed. If you live in the country you can have piles of gewgaws in any color scheme or none, but you cannot leave out bits of straw and lots of shots of you and your posse at the flea market. You call Size 14 women "skinny".

A terrifying number of them have the identical template, and an only slightly less frightening number of them have music blaring at you shortly after you've clicked in, but every last one of them has at least one instance of this and it hurts me to see so many women with nary an original thought in their heads laboring away to rejoice in this stuff. Maybe you begin to catch why I was never in the kitchen talking babies and shopping at dinner parties, but out in the living room talking about everything in the cosmos with their husbands.

But, once in a while, you run across someone with something truly amazing to impart... well.... That's not fair. Each has something, but mostly it's interchangeable. I'm nearly expert by now.... Anyway, I knit like this guy does, so I don't.

Just hopeless.

A great many of these women try hard to make their houses look like barns. I want to make a barn my house.

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love, 99
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