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went on a wildflower walk the other day at Fort Ord. It’s so fun knowing the names of all the wildflowers in my yard! Click the photo to see more photos of the hike if you like.

I’m editing my first adult adventure/romance novel. It’s called The Storytellers and the first scene takes place in Athens, GA where four writers are about to share their first chapters with each other on a steamy August afternoon. The lemonade they drink is the Tasty Thursday recipe today. It’s my grandma & mom’s recipe. I have very fond memories of mom bringing out a cheerful pitcher of this lemonade. She and I would share precious time, just the two of us, sipping lemonade together on our screened porch in Chicago. She’d always have these beautiful silver straws to sip out of too. Mom’s birthday would usually find her drinking her lemonade and swinging in our hammock. I love the lazy days of summer.

Mom & Grandma’s Lemonade:

Scoop some Wylers or any other lemonade mix into a glass pitcher

Mound a lot of ice cubes on top of the mix

Boil a cup of sugar and a cup of water or so until sugar dissolves––pour over ice cubes in pitcher

Squeeze lemons and one orange & pour juice into pitcher. Cut slices of lemon peel and a little orange peel & put into pitcher

Stir very well with a long spoon

Add more ice cubes and chill in refrigerator until ready to use

Add whatever you want to make it good––maybe limes instead of oranges? Add what you wish

What recipe reminds of of lazy summer days?

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By Mark Peters

If I had a lemon for every time I heard “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” I’d have enough lemons to open a lemons-only Wal-Mart. If I had another lemon for every time I heard a variation like, “When life hands you lemons, run straight home and hide them because the apocalypse is upon us and soon everyone will want them,” I’d have an absolute monopoly on the lemon market, fulfilling my boyhood dreams.

This expression and its variations are everywhere, nowhere more so than on Twitter, the richest source of jokes and un-self-conscious language use we have at the moment. For the month of April, I collected the many mutations of this idiom to look for patterns among the proverbs. Thousands of lemon-y tweets prove this isn’t just a cliché or a snowclone: lemon-ology consists of clichés within clichés, snowclones within snowclones—and every once in awhile, a burst of originality. Here’s a look at the lemon landscape.

First, some lemon history. In Fred Shapiro’s wonderful Yale Book of Quotations, he spots the first example of “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade” on Oct. 4, 1972 in the Dallas Morning News. But he finds this line in 1917: “If life hands you a lemon adjust your rose colored glasses and start to selling pink lemonade.” Sure enough, the Oxford English Dictionary shows handing someone a lemon has meant “to pass off a sub-standard article as good; to swindle (a person), to do (someone) down” since at least 1906.

Over a hundred years later, one of the most common forms of lemon subversion basically says, “Screw lemonade. How about some booze?” The alcohol-related suggestions all involve using the lemons in some kind of drink, like so: “When life hands you lemons find some vodka and make margaritas!” Hundreds of tweets are almost identical, though the booze-soaked suggestions do get a little more creative: “When life hands you lemons, have a tequila shot…errr crap, can’t for a week, darn antibiotics!”

Other distortions use the lemon juice not as an alcohol-enhancer but as a potential torture device, as in “If life hands you lemons, find an annoying guy with paper-cuts and make it worthwhile.” Here’s a more self-serving, self-abusing approach: “When life hands you lemons, squirt one in your eye and go on disability. Then sue the guy that grew them. He’s got insurance for that!” And here’s one for the S&M crowd: “When life hands me lemons, I put on my leathers and squeeze the juice into the eyes of the man hogtied & ballgagged in my closet.”

Violent variations go far beyond the painful properties of lemon juice. Various tweeters say you should take the lemons and “throw them at hobos,” “hurl them at a random CEO,” “freeze them so they can knock people unconscious,” “open a lemon aide stand and use the proceeds to buy an assault rifle,” “put them in a tube sock and beat a hipster over the head with it,” “whip them at those dumb jerk kids who set up lemonade stands to show them how you feel about their price gouging,” or “shove them down the bastard’s throat and laugh maniacally as he chokes to death.” I kinda like the bluntness h

This week I’m pulling together materials gathered on our trip so far. It’s staggering how much info one can collect on so many things within so short a timeframe. We have what appear to be reams of miscellaneous info hiding in every hole and corner in the car.

Of course, the problem would have been even greater if there had been more space available in our car. When I do research, I tend to gather as much info as is possible. Sister Jo is much the same way. After all, I never know how an angle will turn. I might be able to get fifteen different angles from one location, each with a viable voice and interest.

If we’d been able to spend adequate time in all of those places and talk with more people, heaven only knows how much material we would have gathered in the end. I would suspect that it’s a good thing that we didn’t get any more to work with than we did. I already have enough to keep me busy in articles alone for the next several months.

The book that we planned sits at the apex of the pile of work waiting to commence. Our predicament is that what we set out to write and what we will actually write are two different animals completely. This trip has highlighted many aspects that we’d not anticipated.

I keep wondering if all writers who set out to do a big project like this end up with the same problem. Does the project mutate as the research progresses? Does the writer come back to the desk with piles of experience that doesn’t resemble any of her previously planned work?

If that happens to all such projects, and the books get written, published and marketed, what was the original book idea? What did it look like at the beginning?

I look at some of the non-fiction work out there on the market now and ask that one question. How much reorganization and mental reassessment gets done before word one gets down on paper?

For instance, we set out to write a book on two senior women tenting their way across the country and exploring their own birthplace. Noble goals, don’t you think? So did we. Reality wouldn’t permit such a trip.

Weather drove us down the highway faster and faster each day. It’s difficult to sightsee when you’re trying not to drown in the deluge. Tenting is only possible when you can find a campground that accepts tents or that you can afford.

We had a realistic monthly budget when we started. We’d budgeted for gasoline costs between prospective locations within each state. We’d slated the costs of campsites as researched online for two months. The only place where we would have had problems would have been in New England in the coming summer. Those states had outrageous camping fees.

We knew how much food we’d need to buy for camping and still eat well and healthily. We’d accounted for our regular medications, our personal toiletries and laundry, and phone cards for communications links. We knew what we could live on and how much we had to spend each month.

Black and white are lovely colors, except when the economy and Mother Nature bleed all over the accounting sheets and screw everything up. Our contingency fund just wasn’t big enough to absorb eating nearly every meal in a restaurant, campgrounds everywhere we turned that accepted only RVs, and temperatures below freezing in the Deep South, including Florida.

That, my friends, is how you have a year-long trip culminate in short-term disaster in two months. Sometimes the best laid plans can bring you up short really fast. The key is to make the best of what you can and regard the rest as education for any next round that you might anticipate or plan.

Now you can understand why the book will have an entirely different slant than intended. The odd thing is that by the time it’s finished, it might actually be a better book than the one planned. Different lessons were learned and opposing aspects were revealed both in ourselves and in the world around us.

It has become a case of having a bag of lemons dumped in our laps and h

"It's hot today. Maisy is having a nice cold drink. Mmmm. Lemonade."  - Maisy Makes Lemonade, Lucy Cousins


You may have noticed that lately the recipes on my blog have tied into the season--summer is the time for sweet, refreshing delights like fruit salad and strawberry shortcake. Another quintessential summer treat? Lemonade. What's more, it's easy to prepare. Even very young children can get involved.

Maisy Makes Lemonade was a library find. My four year old is in a stage where he still enjoys simple and comforting books like Cousins' Maisy books just as much as he enjoys more mature fare such as Batman versus the Joker. He was quite taken with both on a recent library trip and while neither would have necessarily been what I'd have chosen for him, I do think it's important to give my kids the ability to choose their own books at the library.

So I was going through the stack of library books to read one more time before our beach vacation and as I picked up Maisy Makes Lemonade I thought, Well, there's a good topic for the blog.

For those not familiar with Maisy (though if you have a toddler/preschooler, you should be), she's a mouse who--along with her various animal friends--experiences things that most kids are familiar with. In addition to making lemonade there are Maisy books about going to bed, going shopping, and going to places like the dentist or on vacation. They're told simply with a minimal amount of text on each page and cute, colorful illustrations. The storyline in Maisy Makes Lemonade is simple and predictable (to adults): Maisy shares her lemonade with her friend Eddie (an elephant) and they run out. They decide to make another pitcher. They pick lemons from Maisy's tree and make their lemonade, step by step. Then they enjoy their refreshing beverage. My kids wanted to make their own lemonade after reading it. If you have a small child, it's a good opportunity to suggest making lemonade "just like Maisy."

Lemonade

• 6 lemons (or, enough to yield 1 cup of lemon juice)
• 1/2 cup sugar (I used a combination of regular and raw sugar)
• 5 cups water

So it seems the book is a wee bit late in getting where it's supposed to get - which admittedly sucks.

However we're going to take this lemon and make ourselves a little lemonade!

Sound good? Of course it sounds good.

The delay give you yet another chance to get something free.

What I want you to do is keep an eye on - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/

You know, go there every few hours search for me, or the the title, or whatever and the minute the book pops up copy and paste the link then drop it in an email and send it to me at - [email protected]

The first email I get with a valid link not only gets the book for free, but gets it autographed as well.

If that's not some sugary, tangy, delicious lemonade I don't know what is.

If you're too lazy to do any of this, no worries. I will undoubtedly be bombarding you with messages of some sort the moment the book arrives.

2.5 x 3.5
Derwent Coloursoft on board
ebay

I like this! This is Coloursoft's "brown black" color. Its almost as soft as the Derwent Drawing pencil, but noooooot quiiiiite. Close though.
They're still not Polychromos, but they're pretty good.
And I like this color. I want to do a couple more then do a final "side by side" thing to compare.

I sure wish I had my CPSA lightfast book so I'd know which ones were lightfast. If anyone who does know wants to tell me, I'm all ears (thanks to Katherine I already know the Poly black is good, which is a relief). I have a feeling most or all of these muted colors will be OK. Notice though I'm not testing Graphitints because somewhere I heard they were fugitive. Again, if anyone knows for sure and feels like sharing...

To see all the Yarn pieces in this series side-by-side, please go here. Or visit my ebay store to see which are available for sale.
All images and content herein are © Paula Pertile and may not be used or reproduced without permission.