Are you tired of hearing me complain about the weather yet?  Well, I’m not done.  My last post was on Thursday.  This was Friday:

Snowy and COLD. I did some knitting and finished this Bag! You’re it! market bag for an upcoming class:

Saturday was also cold.  But, I did lots of warm, home-y baking.  Cookies for the next day’s Northeast GS/GN Club Spring Meeting (car club):

Top Rack:  Smitten Kitchen’s Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies (SO. YUMMY. My new favorite.)

Bottom Rack: Tollhouse White Chip Chocolate Cookies (also very yummy.)

And an apple pie for my mother-in-law’s birthday:

Another great pie that I was very happy with!  And my MIL liked it, which was most important.  This time I used Ina Garten’s pie crust recipe from her Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust cookbook.  I’ve come to realize that butter AND shortening are the key to a good crust.  For the filling, I used Martha’s Brown Butter Apple Pie recipe (except for the vanilla bean which I didn’t have).  It was very yummy, but to be honest, you couldn’t taste the brown butter.

While waiting for batches of cookies and the pie to bake, I made a second dishcloth (the light blue one), also for my MIL:

The first one (the darker blue) I made earlier in the week and that only took me a day, too.  They are quick! She has come to really like using these to wash dishes (She does not have a dishwasher.  Except when we are invited for dinner!).

The next day was the club meeting and we travelled to somewhere near Martha’s house.(Stewart, that is)  The meeting is held in a car repair shop/garage and there is lots of talk about… wait for it…..cars.  And looking at cars, and at new pick up trucks for towing cars.  I get to do things like bring cookies and help sell raffle tickets.  When it gets down to the actual business part of the meeting, where they talk about upcoming races and other club business, I do this:

Ha!  Finally working on that second side of my Second Story Tee.

Here was the view above me:

And this is Ray:

You’ve met him before.  He is Paul’s friend Rob’s dad, and my pit-crew-chief collegue/chatting buddy at all the racing events.  He is funny, easy to be around, and is always the voice of reason when things get a little tense at the events (i.e. cars break).  We were discussing the upcoming trip to a drag racing event in Ohio and Paul mentioned to Ray that I was already researching what yarn shops I could go to out there.  Ray said that he could relate to that because he looks for gun shops whenever he travels.  See why we get along?