Tracy Durnell

I hit 200,000 scrobbles on last.fm today! 😃🙌 I love music 🎶

My top listened track since 2007 is Miike Snow’s Genghis Khan, which also has the best music video ever IMO 😍

Truly terrible brownies from The Kitchn: sugar didn’t properly dissolve and pieces without copious chocolate chips tasted like oil 😠 Yuck! Reading more, sounds as though the recipe technique is poor and it may not have enough water. Also, mixing in the pan was ridiculous. A disappointment.

Baked Smitten Kitchen’s dreamy cream scones for dessert. Added an extra 1/4c of cream. Made 11 scones. Could go shy on the cranberries and not chop so small. Topped with cream and turbinado sugar. Baked 14 minutes at 430. Would make again.

We’ve gotten used to hearing the nearby coyote den howling every time a siren goes past, but finally saw one of the coyotes in the backyard today! It hung out for a couple minutes scratching itself then wandered off. Guess our restoration efforts have worked!

I use DuckDuckGo’s beta app tracking blocker on my phone – looking through the past week, one of the worst offenders is… my meditation app? 🤔😒

Stopped by our favorite taco truck to discover it gone 😱 We ordered burritos from the replacement truck and discovered that California burrito =/= Mission burrito, so I basically had a french fry wrap 😂 (Ordered it meatless, assuming it came with beans, my bad – I’m a norcal gal 🤷‍♀️)

Just went grocery shopping for the first time since the pandemic 😷🛒 Not an errand I have missed 😂

I have a weekly milkman delivery and had a biweekly produce box that carried pantry staples, so I got by with quarterly pickup orders from the grocery store. We cut the produce box to save $$$ for now.

Me this morning: There’s so much to do around the house, how did I ever work full-time?

Husband: We hired a house cleaner and ordered a lot of takeout.

Did it do anything in the oven? 🤔😂

Well, this recipe was a dud 🤷‍♀️ Happens sometimes. Muesli Snacking Cookies from The Kitchn – not linking because I wouldn’t recommend 😉 Too sweet (partly on me for adding butterscotch chips probably) and dough was very hard to work.

My camas is blooming! Thanks November Tracy 💪 I’m hoping it naturalizes and spreads.

Another from the Snacking Cakes cookbook: spiced pineapple upside down cake. The pineapple topping is good but the cake itself is a tad bland – I’d add some spices into the batter.

Light dinner so we needed dessert! Powdered donut cake from the cookbook Snacking Cakes 🍩 This was a winner IMO. It suggested cinnamon sugar as an alternate topping so I did one stripe to test – tasty but I preferred the powdered sugar 😋

Shoutout to this vintage sifter! I, er, don’t recall washing it till today, and joked how many years of accumulated powdered sugar I was cleaning – a quick image search has lookalikes from the 1930s. So this little pal may be 80-90 years old?! 🧁 (Surely previous owners washed it 😂🤞)

Second go at these cream scones. Made half batch with vanilla bean paste, subtle but tasty. Went wild for the rest and also added 1/2t nutmeg, 1/4c cranberries, and 1/2t fresh rosemary 😳 Unusual but not bad. Topped with vanilla glaze. Freezing didn’t make a huge difference imo.

Tried a new buttermilk cornbread recipe along with chili. I’d make it again. I only had 1-1/4c of cornmeal so I threw it all in with extra buttermilk. Took 25 minutes to bake.

I added a quarter cup of TVP to the chili, and realized I almost never see recipes call for it. Is it out of style? 🤔

Baked Smitten Kitchen’s zucchini bread for dessert. Deb says wait overnight before eating – I waited an hour before we inhaled half the loaf 😂 Quick breads are best still warm from the oven, IMO. Recipe called for 9x5” pan but worked in my 8.5x4.5” pan.

Tried a new recipe for tangy chickpeas from Smitten Kitchen. I loosely 1.5’d it and looks like we’ll get 3 meals for two people. Served with egg noodles per a suggestion in the comments, but think another’s idea of roasted potatoes would add nice texture.

I used to hang dry my clothes all the time but fell out of the habit. Trying it again to save energy. It’s a chore I don’t really mind – hardest part is stopping the cats from jumping on the drying rack and collapsing a shelf 😹

📖 Panel from “What It Is” by Lynda Barry:

There is another part of my mind which seems to not know what year it is at all. I find myself arguing in my head with people I haven’t seen in 15 years… it’s like there is a place in me where it is all alive.

I avoided reading Barry for years because I didn’t like how her character Marlee looked, then I learned that was the point 😅 The collage pages are a little overwhelming but I’m digging the comic parts.

📖 Panel from “What It Is” by Lynda Barry: > There is another part of my mind which seems to not know what year it is at all. I find myself arguing in my head with people I haven’t seen in 15 years… it’s like there is a place in me where it is all alive.

I avoided reading Barry for years because I didn’t like how her character Marlee looked, then I learned that was the point 😅 The collage pages are a little overwhelming but I’m digging the comic parts.

I realized my Kindle Unlimited subscription was ending tonight and decided to gamble on reading the final book of a trilogy before Amazon took it away. Raced the clock and finished the book exactly at midnight 🦾

Yesterday we headed up to Deception Pass for a walk along the bluffs 😍 So good to get out of the house. More pictures.

This is a pretty bullshit way to talk about protests, Feedly 😒 We like free speech, remember? This framing centers the small minority of protesters who damage property.

So I was looking at self employment taxes today and followed a daisy chain of at least 3 forms to try to fill in the one for how much I owe and have come to the conclusion these are basically impossible to complete without an accountant 😂

Bummer, my husband got laid off from Microsoft today 🙁 We’ve got savings so we’ll be fine, but I may ramp up my consulting hours 🤷‍♀️

Silver lining, for quick cost cutting I checked Comcast’s website and saved us $30 a month on the same internet 😂🤦‍♀️