Baby Boomers News, Reviews, & Observations

Get Help Searching for Your Yearbook at GetMyYearbook.com

Good news for those of you landing on my post, Lost Your High School Yearbook?”! Thanks to Ron Bogdan of Princeton, New Jersey, you can now get help searching for your yearbook at GetMyYearbook.com. You can read more about Ron’s story in these news articles.

Thank you, Ron, for doing all you can to help others preserve their memories and family history!

Reposting Divinity Candy Recipe

From the KitchenAid Stand Mixer Instructions and Recipes booklet. This is the ONLY Divinity Candy recipe that has ever worked for me. Do not even attempt to make this unless the humidity level is less than 50 to 60%. The humidity level will make or break your Divinity Candy.

DIVINITY CANDY

3 cups sugar
¾ cup light corn syrup
½ cup water
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon almond extract (or vanilla, whichever you prefer)
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Place sugar, corn syrup, and water in heavy saucepan. Cook and stir over medium heat to hard ball stage (248° to 250°F). Remove from heat and let stand until temperature drops to 220°F, without stirring.

Place egg whites in mixer bowl. Attach bowl and wire whip to mixer. Turn to Speed 8 and whip about 1 minute, or until soft peaks form. Gradually add syrup in a fine stream and whip about 2 ½ minutes longer.

Turn to Speed 4. Add almond extract and whip 20 to 25 minutes, or until mixture starts to become dry. Turn to Stir Speed and add walnuts, mixing just until blended.

Drop mixture from measuring tablespoon onto waxed paper or greased baking sheet to form patties.

Yield: 20 servings (2 pieces per serving)

Per serving: About 192 cal, 2 g pro, 40 g carb, 4 g fat, 0 mg chol, 15 mg sod.

*****NOTE***** Whenever I made this for Christmas 2004, I took the cooking temp to 260°F at the suggestion of another recipe online. However, I wasn’t happy with the end result. It didn’t have the “melt-in-your-mouth consistency” that I prefer, so I suggest following the temperature recommendations in this recipe.

ABSOLUTELY the BEST iPod/Cell Phone Carry Method!!!

Cliphanger is ABSOLUTELY the BEST iPod/Cell Phone Carry Method Eh-VAH!!!

I LOVE my new Cliphanger! It’s so easy to quickly and effortlessly clip my Blackberry to my purse handle, belt loop, or even my key ring!

One of my favorite things about it is that it comes in a clear model because I have a red Blackberry that I don’t want to hide. I want to show off my gorgeous red Blackberry! That’s WHY I bought a red one.

Click on the banner below and go get you one now! I promise you’ll LOVE yours, too!

Sourdough Bread

I LOVE sourdough bread but can’t seem to find any in the grocery stores that REALLY satisfies. So, recently I set out to find the recipe and, WOW! I discovered there isn’t JUST a recipe to be had for this baking endeavor. You pretty much get a science/chemistry lesson just learning how to get the starter started for an authentic, true-to-form loaf of sourdough bread.

The information I finally decided to follow to educate myself is located at Sourdough Home. There’s a lot to know and understand about sourdough starter and bread making so I highly recommend you visit that site and explore all the info.

It took me a week to build up my sourdough starter. Patience is a virtue. To put all that info from the link above simply, here’s what I did:

Sourdough Starter Recipe
1 cup Unbleached Flour
1 cup lukewarm water

I mixed the flour and water well in one of those old glass jars with the glass lid that just sits on top and has the wire that holds the lid secure. I did NOT use the wire to secure the glass lid because I wanted air to be able to get in the jar a little easier.

For the next week, every 12 hours (9 am & 9 pm in my case) I fed my little sour pet to keep it growing. To do that, I first stirred it all back up again after it had sit for 12 hrs and then poured out 1 cup of it (you can either use this cup to work up another starter or discard it).There should be at least a little liquid still in the jar.

To that bit left in the jar I added another 1/2 - 1 cup of flour and an equal amount of lukewarm water (make sure the jar has enough room for the starter to double in size once it gets going), mixed well again, and set it back in it’s warm (80 something degrees) spot for another 12 hours. In my case, that warm spot was next to a heater vent on the floor in my RV bedroom.

Once my pet started producing “organisms” (I don’t remember which day that was) I began to see it bubble up and increase in size in the jar. See the link above for much, much more info on that part of it. Too much to try to convey here in this note.

Recipe for Baking the Sourdough Bread

On the 7th day of growing my sourdough starter pet I used S. John Ross’ sourdough bread recipe MINUS the oil or butter (scroll about 1/2 way down the page for the actual recipe). And, YES, it was SOUR and YUMMY!:-D):

I saved some of my starter and have it stored in the fridge until I’m ready to use it again, too.

For now…I’m going to make me some sourdough bread toast and sausage for breakfast.

Camping Season Has Officially Begun!

No, it’s not yet Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2009, but I’m sitting here under our RV canopy watching RV after RV pull in and setup for the holiday weekend. There are big ones, little ones, new ones, old ones, pop-ups, 5th wheels, coaches, Moms & Dads with all their kids, grandparents without theirs, you name it…they’re coming in.

Even more interesting is that there are some here because of their jobs, and they’re packing up and leaving for the weekend. Not us. We’re sticking around for part of the weekend, and when we do go for a quick overnight trip we aren’t taking our 5th wheel.

I’ve enjoyed observing the comings and goings. It’s interesting to see where people are coming from…or at least where they’re based anyway according to their vehicle and RV tags. Sometimes it seems strange though to see an RV come in one day and be gone the next. Those are the folks in route to another destination who just need to stop in for an overnight rest.

Before I get back to RV watching I’ve GOT to share this video with you. Trust me…you’ll see RVers do it cooler.

Fulltime RV’ing and Loving It!

Now THIS is the life! Fulltime RVing it these days and LOVIN’ it! Especially when the weather is finally as gorgeous as it is today and I’m able to sit outside with DH’s ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook with a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 10 GB Eee Storage, Bluetooth, XP Home, and a 9.5 hour battery life.

Living in our 5th wheel RV is like living in an efficiency apartment on wheels, but you at least get a little bit of a yard with it. Best part is being able to change your scenery on a whim.

Then there’s the issue of neighbors. Just give it a few days and you’ll have new ones if you’re not quite compatible with the current neighbors, or just move yourself. We’ve been fortunate the last couple of weeks to have two neighbors who are fun. Some evenings we gather around the picnic table and enjoy an evening meal and pleasant conversation.

Like us, our current neighbors are RVing it due to job situations. We all agree it’s nice to be paid to be on vacation. We’re going to be here for awhile, but they live a little bit more on the edge than we do as they’re in construction. They may park somewhere and be there for months or have to up and move to another location at the drop of a hat one day.

I’m fascinated by the many different RV floorplans and setups. Absolutely amazing to me what the RV manufacturers have come up with in recent years. If you haven’t already, take a look at ours to get a little bit of an idea. Later this week I’ll write a post about some of the RVs I’ve seen since embarking on this lifestyle so stick around.

Somebody’s Ghost Sending My Blog Posts via Aweber

Promise! It wasn’t ME! I’ve checked and fixed what I THINK may be the problem. However, if duplicate posts keep dropping in your email box without me doing anything to make it happen then I’ll just drop Aweber’s service and go back to using Feedburner’s email service.

Please accept my apologies. I promise I’m not trying to pester anybody.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Capture the Magic of Santa!

Oops! Hope your chimney is wider than my blog!

Santa Claus is Real!

I found this cool site. It’s called CaptureTheMagic.com

The site has been developed to enable users to “Capture Santa” in a photo right inside your own home. Parents can produce a compelling photo of Santa in their house which will amaze and delight the “believers” in their families (all for less than $10).

The site is very compelling visually, yet SIMPLE AS 1-2-3 to use, and takes just a couple of minutes. Users simply 1. Upload a photo, 2. Pick a Santa from a large gallery, 3. Adjust the Photo & Save to Disk.

The resulting photo helps parents enhance their child’s once in a lifetime belief in Santa, and provides visual evidence that Santa is indeed real. This is a modern twist to the popular Letter from Santa concept.

Boogie Bloggin’ Again

Hey! Ye-e-e-a-a-aaahhh! Back to the bloggin’ boogie board. Hey y’all! Been missin’ everybody out there in the last few months, and when I checked my blog for comments a little bit ago a commenter by the name of Jack gave me the impetus to jump in here and listen to the music again. Woohoo! Glad I did, too! Just as Jack does, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE all the old songs I have on my player.

I do need to update the player soon. Maybe now that things have kind of settled down a bit I’ll have a little time to get that done. Gonna have to see if Hope is up to blartying again sometime soon, too.

Speaking of music, have you been over to the Rock Relic’s blog lately? Wow!!! I LOVE the updated look! Go there! Now! You gotta see this! Talk about a Sharp Dressed blog!