Out With The Old - In With The New!

Sadly, a week ago, our dryer gave up the ghost.  It was taking like 3 hours to dry a load of sheets.  So, we had to go out and make that big purchase.  I did a little research and then went to a few stores and found that, definitely, Sears had the best prices.  We wound up with another Whirlpool.  We went all High Efficiancy and I was determined to get that steam feature as I'm anti-iron.  Its literally got all the bells and whistles!  Who knew drying things could be so fun.  Oh - and I was going to get plain old white because it was cheaper, but they wouldn't have any whites available for a week or so, so they gave me the stainless steel one for the price of the white.  Cool all the way around -- welcome to our home, new dryer!

The other thing that I spent the weekend doing is playing around with cupcakes.  Pat had a nice little farewell party for Joe as he leaves for Korea for the year on Tuesday.  I decided to experiment and make a bunch of cupcakes.  I did a vanilla bean one (HATE the recipe and now I need to go back and just tweak the one I had come up with), a retweaked my pumpkin and cinnamon cream cheese one and think I came up with a winner.  

And then I created a whole new one for Joe as my going away gift.  I know that at Dairy Queen and other places, he usually gets cookies and cream flavor so I made up a cookies and cream cupcake that I've named the "Little Joey" in honor of him :)  I did one for the party and then I tweaked it on Sunday afternoon and think I came up with a better one.  Its actually got an Oreo on the bottom and then a cookies and cream frosting.  I thought it was pretty dog gone good.

Joes party was on Saturday, but then Sunday afternoon, Pat had the family over for dinner.  Uncle Raine brought Joes "favorite soup", Pasta Fazioli -- here he's enjoying a delicious bowl :)