Biscotti and Not Much Else

55°f, about 13°C this morning, quite a change from 21°f yesterday. Rain overnight but skies are clearing now.

I have been cleaning for the past two days. Dusting, mopping, sorting, changing wall art from winter to more Spring-like pieces, etc. It feels good to feeshen the place up. In my workroom, I cut down boxes, lots of boxes, and stacked them out of the way. I keep almost all boxes we get from our online buying; they will be used later for shipping ebay sales. I will continue cleaning today, as there is much more to be done. 

My biscotti came out pretty well. This recipe if for chocolate orange hazelnut biscotti. You make the dough, divide it and add melted chocolate to one half and orange zest to the other, then twist them together. Now, I have made this for the past 10 years, I think, and that twisting together thing does not work for me-- the biscotti just falls apart after baking into the chocolate half and the orange half. So I don't bother twisting them, I just bake each rope separately and end up with some chocolate and some orange and that suits me just fine.

Recipe:

The cookbook: as you can see, it's a favorite.

Other than that, not much to talk about! Larry changed the oil in the truck, yay. Of course it meant an extra trip to town because as usual the filter we bought was the wrong one. So he took it back and got the right one, dropping off a large bag of stuff to Goodwill while he was out. He has been repairing a stake-side child's wagon and has it ready to wax. He had to replace the wood bottom of the wagon, which was rotted out, and do some general tightening up. It looks pretty good now.

I spent a few hours pricing for the booths,  an ongoing job but a necessary one. I am finding stuff in the house that needs to go, like a couple lamps, and some small framed mirrors and art prints--things I thought I would use, or that I exchanged for other decor while cleaning. So far I have 4 full totes, and probably enough to fill another, ready to go. That should be enough for a couple weeks.

I did not watch the speech last night. Larry and I had agreed not to mention that man all day, a good break. I knew the speech would be full of lies, which apparently it was. I did have to laugh about his comment on the 2019 trade deal with Canada and Mexico, in which he excoriated the fool who signed it....himself. Seriously.

Reading: I started two books last week. One by Rita Mae Brown, which I thought I would try even though I have never liked her books. Two chapters in on The Hounds and the Fury and I just can't.  It's her animals having conversations that I can't tolerate. This book has so many characters and so much foxhunting jargon that I felt my mind go numb. I don't like foxhunting anyway, think it's a cruel "sport", so this book will go to my booth bookshelf.

I am having better luck with Jodi Picoult's The Book of Two Ways. It too, delves deep and immediately into subjects I know little about, archeology and Egyptology.  This, however, is interesting to me, so I will continue reading, I think. This author certainly has done her research.

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Well, after starting this post I went on a tear and decided we need to finally paint the bedroom. We have been talking about it for, ummm, 2 years, and it desperately needs to be done. So, after all my cleaning, I am making one big mess taking everything off the walls, etc. But it will be nice to have clean, new paint.

I better get back to it. See you soon, friends.

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