When It Rains

When it rains in California, the world sort of stops.  People suddenly cannot drive with even 1/100th of an inch of rain on the roads, i.e. your cat sneezes more water than actual rainfall amounts, and in general people hunker down and stay inside.

This is not how I grew up.  Far from it!  I grew up in rural Minnesota where people went outside in -20F degree temperatures for much of the year and thought nothing of it.  It was life.  You just dealt with it and moved on.  And drank lots of beer, went ice fishing, or went snowmobiling.

In light of the rain yesterday, it was a great day to do some baking.

This is what I came up with.

#iphonephotography

I need to edit the real pictures and type up the recipe.   It’s coming soon.  Patience is a virtue.

The closest thing in my recipe archives to the cookies I made yesterday are probably these

Other things I do when it rains:

Clean my house

Catch up on emails, computer work, photo editing, and blogging.  Or try to get ahead on things, i.e. pre-blogging some posts in draft so that on really busy days, I can hit Publish rather than starting from scratch

I’d be lying if I said I sit around curled up on the couch reading magazines when it rains.  I’d like to but it’s not reality.

Not when I have a family to feed, work to do, Skylar to take care of, and just life to tend to.

I try to be extra productive by cooking, doing meal prep work like produce cleaning and vegetable chopping, and cooking things that make planned leftovers  <–cook once, eat twice

Some good comfort food like Cheesy Taco Casserole sounds good when it’s raining

Growing up in Minnesota we ate lots of casseroles.  But we called them ‘hot dishes’.  Casserole sounds much fancier than we ever were.

And we ate lots of leftovers.  As a working mom, I now understand why my working mom was a fan of leftovers.

Sometimes things are not fully evident for a couple decades, like why anyone would actually want to create leftovers.  But I get it now.

Other rainy day projects included

Laundry

Wasting time on Pinterest

Drinking a Pumpkin Spice Latte

And trying to keep this one from going stir crazy

Good thing we have lots of crayons, paper, books, and the occasional Barney episode on DVR

Questions:

1. What do you like to do on Rainy Days?

2. Do people drive differently in your area in rain or bad weather?

They sure do here.  I think it’s probably a universal phenomenon but people who are used to driving in snow and inclement weather get pretty good at it from all the practice.

In Southern California, most people have no practice with snow and since it rains so infrequently here, when it does, holy traffic accidents and traffic delays.

On my way to pick up a Princess Costume (yes, we had success on that venture), I saw some really wicked accidents.  Spin outs, crashes into guardrails, traffic backed up for miles, police and ambulances everywhere.  Gnarly stuff.

Common sense things like: slow down, increase your following distance, don’t tailgate, don’t slam on your brakes, don’t make any sudden or jerky moves, take your time on turns, common.sense.stuff, it seems to have been lost on many drivers here.

Good thing the weather is usually like this

Thanks for the Silpat Giveaway entries