This summer our family has learned what happens when this doesn’t…

The Cotton Husband is working around the clock making sure that all of the irrigation is running smoothly. He’s pulling reels and preventing these center pivots from running into the woods.

He’s leaving before breakfast, gulping down lunch and going out in the middle of the night.

We get pretty excited around here when the skies start to look like this.

First my Facebook feed begins churning out reports of rain in neighboring towns and counties…

Then I check Weather.com

Then Keith will come home and turn on the television weather report

And then we sit outside more enthralled than  if we were watching a bug light.

We wait for the wind to pick up and the leaves to turn over.

We hold our breath when the sky goes from this…

To this. 

But we hardly even dare to talk about anything. It might jinx the rain, you know.

I’m sure I’ve said it before… all of that fancy equipment is nice and we are grateful for it but even on its best day, it can’t compete with actual rain.

When it finally does start coming down, we let out just enough breath to hope we get at least an inch or two…

And then start speculating about the next storm.

I’ve taken off quite a bit of baby (and just plain Being Married To Keith) weight since this winter by avoiding all of those ingredients but yesterday my sweet tooth was not going to be tamed. I was reading a book about a bakery and a man who had something called “sweet sense” and well…

I had to bake something. Right then.

I looked through my recipe books and online for something new, something semi-complicated but in the end all I really wanted was dough so I went with chocolate chip cookies.

Nothing new. Nothing complicated. Just good ol’ cookie dough. Mine are a mix between the Nestle recipe and a recipe I found in Southern Lady magazine and since I couldn’t find my measuring spoons yesterday (they were hiding in the dish drainer, those sneaky spoons!) I would be hard-pressed to call it a “recipe”.

But we know that all good things start with butter.

I used my favorite pan from The Cake Pan Lady… the one I use to lay claim to mah may-un at community functions. Hee hee!

Here’s an important first step. Open the bag of chocolate chips and let them air out reeeaaaal good.

Test them too. You wouldn’t want to make a whole batch of cookies and then discover that the chocolate chips have turned bad, would you? Nope because that would be a tragedy.

Test thoroughly because sometimes the chips at the bottom of the bag are different than the ones at the top. So take lots of random samples to ensure freshness.   

It’s a miracle I have any of this stuff left in the house… by the way, the culprit turned out to be my oldest redhead. She got busted in front of her younger sister who was madder than a hornet that SHE didn’t think to steal the brown sugar when I wasn’t looking.

Truthfully, I could probably have stopped after the eggs and been happy.

But look what I would have missed. Yum.

Rather than make these into individual cookies, I like to pour the batter in a pan. I like the soft, gooey, chewiness of it all.

Today it’s back to the broccoli and the peanuts and the spinach and the fruit and I’m going to try really hard to stay away from books about bakeries.

Right at this moment, I’m sitting here at my desk with a cup of coffee and trying to decide what is more cringe-worthy…

Looking at old pictures I took when I had no clue what I was doing

Or

This book I have from the 2nd grade where I and all of my classmates (all 19 of them) wrote about the loves of our lives and who the cutest boys/girls were at the time.

It’s a toss-up even though Kenny Rogers makes an appearance in one of them.

My oldest asked for a photo shoot the other day, just like the one I did for my uncle in Nashville.

And when I framed it, I started looking at all the photos in that frame… all stacked behind one another in a 16×20 glimpse of the past.

I was so proud of these baseball pics…

Blah colors, zero composition, and you can hardly see her face. What’s not to like?

Or this one. There’s enough grain in this photo to feed a third-world country.

At least whatever is wrong with this photo, I ignored on purpose because I just plain like it and Maggie was cooperative.

Oh – and here we go. Ah yes, the pride and joy of my tiny little point & shoot. I thought I had something here. And don’t get me wrong, I will always love this photo but professional, it is not. Even WITH the super-cool text at the bottom.

Look – you can actually tell what color her eyes are in this one! Yay for light!

I wouldn’t be so embarrassed by these if they were truly just snapshots that I took. But I was trying.

Oh well. That’s what practice is for, right? And I still win because I will have all of those too-dark, too-grainy, too-everything photos forever and ever.

And recently, I tried to go backwards and recreate a photo I took more than two years ago…

You may remember seeing this photo of my father-in-law just before he passed away. The other day when we were pulling the irrigation reel, Shelby plopped her brother on this tractor and inspiration struck.

So now I have this one framed… a recreation of that accidental shot that I took when I didn’t know anything about aperture, ISO or white balance.

Whatever might be wrong with those old photos (and even the new ones), I’m so glad I never deleted anything.