Lori

oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Look, I never claimed to be a great food photographer, okay?

These aren’t healthy, but they’re good. And fast and easy.

  1. Throw 1 cup of butter and 1 1/4 cups of packed brown sugar into the stand mixer and let ‘er rip until smooth.
  2. Add a dash of vanilla and 2 eggs and mix some more.
  3. Dump in 3 cups of large flake oats, 1 1/3 cups of whole wheat flour, 1 tsp of baking soda and a decent pinch of salt and mix yet again. (Sure, you can combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl first and add them to the wet all at once, Martha, but I don’t bother and they turn out fine.)
  4. When it looks like cookie dough, add 1 cup of chocolate chips or raisins, if you’re weird, and mix just enough to distribute them evenly.
  5. Roll the dough into golf ball-sized balls and bake a few (at 350° for 10 minutes) to gorge upon now, but stick the rest into the freezer and bake whenever needed. Like, say, tomorrow and the next day and every day thereafter until they’re gone.

cranky cardinal

I think this look translates to ‘get your own suet, creep’.

Evie’s sixth sense

From inside the house, behind a closed window and more than a hundred feet away, I lifted my phone and Evie immediately whipped around for her photo opportunity. A born supermodel.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

An excellent book that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Rubenhold encourages us to look past the sensationalism of Jack the Ripper to the desperately hard lives (and horrific deaths) of the women he slaughtered. These were ordinary women with regrettably common problems (poverty, addiction, unstable relationships) in a time when there was no social safety net or chance at independence and self-reliance for women.

It’s infuriating that these women were immediately written off as “just prostitutes” and have continued to be in the almost century-and-a-half since by writers and so-called experts and (ugh) Ripper tour guides — most of whom are happy to lazily spout the same old tripe about the women before getting to what they consider to be the really good stuff: gushing over a murderous psychopath revered for his ability to escape detection. How screwed up is that?

Read it.

pick your battles

I can’t remember where I saw this and I have no idea who made it, but I would like to thank that person, from the bottom of my heart, for the best laugh I’ve had this year.

mourning dove

The latest in my ongoing Birdwatching From the Comfort of My Dining Room series.