Go figure.

Mr. Man needed a rental car, so I was following him home in our car tonight when I suddenly hear a very large “BANG, POP” come from the underside of the car. While on the highway. Going highway fast. (I must admit, I am very pleased that I managed to remain calm and pull over safely to the side of the road, instead of ending up in some “third floor of the Galleria incident” I have often envisioned while learning how to drive.)

After a moment, I realize there are three other cars pulled over to the side of the road. It turns out we all hit the same piece of firewood and now have extremely flat tires. Lucky for me, Mr. Man was only a few miles ahead and managed to put on the spare tire with a very impressive display of heroics.

It took over an hour to drive home the back way, driving very, very slowly and dreaming about this:

Someone once commented that Canadians really, really like to talk about the weather. It is totally true – we talk about the heat in the summer, the cold in the winter, and how this particular spring and fall (whatever spring and fall it may be) is failing us by either being too hot or too cold.

But this time, it isn’t just all talk. Mother Nature is just being plain spiteful at this point.

Weather like this calls for drastic measures:

Cookies!

Cookies make everything better. I wanted to make jam thumbprints, and Teagan wanted peanut butter, so we met in the middle and made Peanut Butter Cup Cookies. We used this recipe and they are mighty good.

I did have some problems with the baking time, though. The recipe says to bake them for eight minutes, and many commenters admonished that they wouldn’t look done at eight minutes, but they really were done and if you left them in a moment longer they would be overcooked. I diligently took them out after eight minutes and after anxiously waiting for them to cool so we could start eating, we found out that they really weren’t done, and the bottom half of each cookie was a half cooked mess.

So, I took a chance and heated up the oven again, and stuck them in for another eight minutes to account for having chilled them. They came out perfectly, and the peanut butter cups even remained intact. I am happy to report that they are totally wonderful.

Unlike the weather.

At least the Vikings are prepared:

There were family and friends (including my parents, who managed to completely elude getting their photos taken):

There was sangria and Mai Tais:

Which seemed to be well received:

Much fun was had with my very favorite Audrey Hepburn inspired hat and sunglasses:

The first of July is not only Canada’s birthday, but also my Mom’s, so there was cake and ice cream:

And of course, fireworks:

Instead, I will show you the cake I made last week for my stepfather’s birthday:

It is a Lemon Meringue Cake. (From Nigella Lawson, of course, did you ever doubt the depth of my love?) It is a layer of meringue, a layer of cake (or sponge, if you are reading a lot of British cookbooks), followed by whipped cream, lemon curd and more sponge and meringue.

It is wonderful, if very sweet. The table was divided, with two people finding the meringue too sweet, and two finding it just right, and a small child who never eats “fancy cake” gobbling it up. I think next time I will reduce the sugar in the meringue by either a quarter or a third and see if we can’t make the vote unanimous.

My grandmother’s harvest yellow hand mixer tragically died a couple of months ago, complete with dramatic smoke and grinding noises, so I finally broke down and bought a new one. It is shiny red and comes with dough hooks and a “turbo” function, for when your food needs to make a quick getaway:

I don’t think this one will last the forty years my old one did, but it is certainly pretty.

While there I managed to finish knitting the baby dress:

Now it just needs to have the ends woven in (I didn’t bring any darning needles with me, unfortunately) and a good soak and blocking and it will be all ready to be mailed off. I also ripped back the Sock That Ate Manhattan, and started knitting it again at a more human size. When not knitting, I was reading the perfect summer book; “The Missing Ink” by Karen E. Olson. It’s part of a mystery series revolving around a tattoo artist living in Vegas,and is just the sort of thing to read while sipping lemonade at the park.

Just try and avoid any carnivorous caterpillars.