A depressing day to start, but an exciting end!

Wednesday night after we got home from church and had our family devotions, I had an overwhelming urge to bake cookies. But considering that (1) Dad had already gone to bed, (2) it was after 10pm and (3) I really needed to get to bed, I ignored that baking urge. Tough, but I did.

This morning when I got up, I still had that baking urge. So I hunted up my good old stand-by basic cookie recipe and decided to doctor it up a bit with the Honey Bunches of Oats cereal Jena bought for only $0.64 a box.

Plus it was the perfect morning for baking since it was so foggy, cold and dreary. This is what it looked like out the dining room window:

Then in addition to the foggy, dreary day, Jena called while I was baking cookies and said that she found Rascal dead on the porch this morning. We're not quite sure what happened. He was sitting on the picnic table bench on the porch as he always does when Jena found him. We hadn't noticed anything wrong or him being sick, so it must have happened suddenly.

But he was Jena's cat and Dad's favorite cat. We will miss him and Skittles will too. They were best buddies playing together. When Skittles was just a little baby, Rascal felt sorry for that little ball of fur that Jena brought home and "mothered" her. He was always getting "into" something like a skunk or coming inside with his thick fur full of stickers. But he was a wonderful cat!

Ok, after I heard that news, I wasn't in the best of moods, but finished up my cookies and then took off downstairs to get started working on my computer and get things finished up for my quilt guild meeting that was tonight.

btw, when you add this cereal to a basic cookie recipe:

This is the result:

Looks yummy, doesn't it?! And of course the best part of baking cookies is the cookie dough. Don't you know that the cookie dough tastes much better than the actual baked cookies? :) Especially fresh oatmeal cookie dough...sooooo gooooood!

This afternoon I got all my quilting stuff together for our quilt guild meeting that I was in charge of. I had decided on doing a make and take it project that we could do in a matter of a few minutes from start to finish. But I was a little worried about keeping 30-40 ladies cutting their pieces, stitching them together and finishing up the details!

But it went wonderfully well!!! Plus I had lots of help from my fellow officers which was so helpful!!! They started cutting at one table, moved to sew at another table, pressed their pieces at the third station and finally inserted the sandbag and plastic tie at the fourth and final station! When I explained what we were doing, I told everyone that they only had to know 2 things to stitch this little gadget - (1) ability to count to 4 and (2) stitch a 1/4" seam. There was plenty of laughter at that statement!! :)

It went much better than I expected and everyone enjoyed it, including me!! Although I was rushing from one to the next, keeping everyone stitching what they should! But we had a ball - something we will have to do more often!

So my day started out on the depressing side, but ended on an exciting note!