Three Pictures

Down the street from our house:

(Long story to this pic...thanks to a friend from church for taking this same pic and posting it on FB.  The fall colors are gorgeous right now.)

The sunset on our way to visit family in Fogelsville:

This is delicious!  And I made it :)  It's key lime pie and the easiest thing I've ever made!  Recipe below.

Key Lime Pie

1 can sweetened condensed milk (regular, 1% or fat free)

1 8-oz package of cream cheese (regular or low fat)

4 oz key lime juice or regular lime juice

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 package pre made graham cracker crust pie shell

Optional- lime zest and whipped cream

1.  Place softened cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk in a mixing bowl.

2.  Using electric hand mixer, starting on low, begin mixing cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk.

3.  Continue to increase speed of mixer until cream cheese and milk is smooth and creamy.

4.  Add the vanilla and whip together.

5.  Lastly, add the key lime juice.  Start on low setting; increase speed until everything is thoroughly mixed and it looks all creamy and luscious :)

6.  Pour the mixture into the ready made pie shell.

7.  Place in refrigerator for at least 3-4 hours.  Overnight is better, even best if possible (didn't work for us!). Pie can be place in freezer for 30-45 minutes if crunched for time.

8.  Zest a lime for additional color and/or add a dollop of whipped cream.

You can make this recipe 'all fat' or 'no fat'.  I used low fat cream cheese, but regular sweetened condensed milk.  I also used a shortbread crust, as I'm not a big fan of graham cracker crusts.

Saturday!

So this was Saturday.  Alyssa spent the weekend in Lancaster celebrating Kristin's 25th birthday, they spent the day visiting wineries.  Not sure what was exactly going on here, other than maybe they'd had too many samples of wine ;-)

Eh.  These aren't really Saturday happenings, but Adam sent them to me on Saturday ;-), so here they are!  These are a few scenery pics from his trip to Nevada.  He's been there for a week and comes home this coming Friday.

This was the excitement of my day!!  I went and picked up our nephew, Mike, who agreed to weed whack our out of control 'creek.'  It really was quite a daunting task, but I think he was actually having fun with it!  Unfortunately, about 2/3 of the way, a hose broke on the weed whacker, and he couldn't finish it up :-(

Mike was a mess!!

And while Mike was in the creek, Kurt was finishing up some odds and ends on the deck that Adam hadn't gotten to yet.

And I had some company while all that work was going on!

We played Sorry (I won)

And then we moved on to Trouble (Kievah won!)

Mike had a snack in between all that hard work ;)

Here's a pic of the 2/3 finished creek.  The plan is for Kurt to fix the weed whacker this week and then hopefully we can get Mike back up here to finish it up!

And then we were off to the Chinese Buffet in Dorneyville for supper!

It's been a while since I've posted a sunset.  Here you go!!

Sunset

East And West

Driving home on Friday night, looking to my west:

In the same spot, looking to my east:

Driving home from work tonight:

On our way to visit family in Fogelsville last evening:

Night Time

Onion Snow?

Gorgeous!

Ice Storm 2011

Sunsets

That's A Lot of Rain!

The official rainfall total at the Lehigh Valley International Airport was 8.05 inches. The radio station I listen to has a group of people called the Rain Gaugers that call in the amount of rain they had in their back yard. This morning I heard anything from 7 inches to over 9 inches in the last 24-36 hours. We have a creek (and I use that term loosely) that often dries up in the summer. With the lack of rain over the last several months, it dried up much earlier than usual. As you can see in the pictures, it now looks like a roaring river :)



I took the back way to work this morning not even thinking that I would be driving along the Bushkill Creek that tends to overflow its banks very easily. It's not unusual that the road is actually closed; I was certain as I saw a long line of traffic coming towards me that they had turned around because the road was closed! I was quite surprised to find that the road was actually not closed!

There were plenty of photo ops, but I really didn't have the time to stop for long, plus there was traffic all over the place. I took these pictures right by the entrance to the now closed Bushkill Park. If you enlarge the first picture, you can actually see the Bushkill Park sign....that's not usually under water!

The last picture was taken from the bridge I was on...there was actually rapids right at the bridge, as the water was all the way up to the bridge and couldn't all pass under it. Again, had I had more time, I could have taken better pictures.

Sunset

OK, it's been a while:)

Weather

I no sooner got home from work on Wednesday night, when we lost our electricity most likely from the storm. Minutes later, while we were eating our dinner (fortunately, Alyssa had been home and could make dinner, which was done by the time the power went out), Alyssa let out a gasp! Here, out of the corner of her eye, she saw this huge branch fall to the ground:


Since we had no electricity, I made the suggestion we take a ride to Wegman's to order the cake for Adam's graduation party. I took the following pics in their parking lot: