Pies don’t get much easier than this one! Peanut Butter Pie, courtesy of Southern Living’s 1985 recipe compilation (I was feeling nostalgic) is just the thing to throw together in between carpool, scouts, and volleyball practice. Grab it out of the freezer in time to take to Bunco Night with the church ladies. (Yes, we do have fun at our fellowship nights! And the food is scrumptious too.)

Peanut Butter Pie

2 ready-made graham cracker pie crusts
1 c. crunchy peanut butter
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 c. sifted powdered sugar
16 oz. container of cool whip, thawed
chocolate shavings and whipped cream for garnish

In a mixer, beat cream cheese and peanut butter until blended. Add powdered sugar and beat. Fold in cool whip and beat on low. Pour into pie crusts. Top with whipped cream (I used Reddi-Whip. I was in a hurry!) and grated Hershey bar.

Note on garnishing: It’s easier to pull a vegetable peeler across a large candy bar than a normal sized one. Of course this means you’ll have candy left over. What you do with it is your secret.

Note on pie crusts: Keebler now sells some “super sized” crusts. If you buy these you will not have enough filling for both of them. You will end up putting 3/4 of the filling in the pie you plan on taking to the Bunco Night, and your family will feel short-changed because they get the smaller pie. Kids, deal with it.

Yes, it’s October. No, this is not a Halloween post.  Meet our newest family member: Radley!

(Extra credit points for you if you can figure out which book his name comes from.)

After Nestle died, we began talking about when  and what kind of dog we wanted to get next. Our family in VA has 2 golden retrievers who we thoroughly enjoyed this summer. We’ve always had a soft spot for goldens ever since we adopted our first one – Sundance – back in 1990. We began the hunt for an available puppy in earnest. Last Sunday the pieces fell into place. Little Radley is 10 weeks old and shares a birthday with our own middle daughter. For those of you wondering about the lack of chocolate in his name (I was voted down this time), how’s this for a neat surprise: His sire’s name is Rocky Road. There you go!

At the moment he’s sleeping at my feet, but as soon as he wakes up I imagine he’ll bound across the floor, ears flapping, while he searches for his little pumpkin squeaky toy. Oh the patter of little paws!

(45. Whew! I’m above average. I’m not sure who “The Big Read” is, but I’m game for filling out the list. Care to join me? Feel free to post your numbers in the comments.)

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

The Rules:

1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

**1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
%2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
**3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling (I’ve read a couple of them.)
**5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Can I give this one more stars?)
**6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
*8 1984 – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
*10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (started)
*15 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
%20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
*21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – too existentially nihilistic for me!
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – saw the film; it was great!
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
*29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
%30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
%32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
**33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis
%34 Emma – Jane Austen (Does the movie count?)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis – this shouldn’t be here – it’s a duplicate from #33
*37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
*41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – I have read The Moonstone
**46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
*48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
#49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
%54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
%57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
*59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
*68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
*73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
*76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
**81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
*89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Nope, but I answered a question about it on Jeopardy!)
*92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – in French
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
**96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – also in French
**98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Believe it or not, this is not a post about the evils of HP, nor its literary merit (or lack thereof). It is, however, a tale of mystery and suspense, fraught with late-night terrors and speculations of ghosts and vampires. Or just bats. Or maybe rotting rats? Read on…

About three weeks ago my youngest daughter (KakeAce for those of you keeping track of the cast of characters) mentioned the fact that her room had a strange odor making it difficult for her to sleep. I was a little surprised to find out it had been there for the last month, ever since she came home from camp, but then again – she isn’t one to complain. “Let me know the next time it shows up” I instructed. Sure enough, the next night around 10:30 I stepped into her bedroom and had my nose assaulted with the epitome of “foul stench.” Politeness prevents me from going into great detail, but let’s just say that if you’ve ever walked by an outdoor trash can in the heat of August, one that has had a few dirty diapers tossed inside….you get the idea.

Yessirree we had a bona fide mystery on our hands, err..noses. Said odor only appeared at night, and then only on random nights. There seemed to be no correlation whether the AC was on or off, whether faucets were running or not, or whether it had recently rained. Only the one bedroom was affected. The surrounding rooms and hallway were (thankfully) odor free. Dead animal in the walls? If so the smell should have been constant, peaked, and then gone away after a couple of weeks. Dead animal in the gutters? Nope, clean and shiny. AC drain pan moldy? Nope, but we had our guy come out and the system checked out fine.  Bat in the attic? That upstairs attic floor is spotless. (Before we go any further, let me assure you that this girl-child is very neat and her volleyball shoes do not smell!)
While my husband muttered about calling Ghostbusters, I turned to Google. Did you know there are quite a few people out there with strange odors? (Ok, you knew that. I mean strange odors in their homes!) The really horrifying part is all the thousands of dollars they’ve spent on plumbers and other professionals to try to hunt down the source.

While we were without power for 3 days last week, the smell went away. Then, last night, there it was again! I woke the UrbanCowboy up from a sound sleep at 12:30 so we could play detective one more time. We prowled around outside with our flashlights (either our neighbors are sound sleepers or we have a future as cat burglars). We unscrewed sewer pipe caps, sniffed around the AC unit, checked out the lawn mower shed, crawled up in the attic one more time, took the duct work apart in the bedroom, and… no luck. Was my poor youngest child doomed to sleep on the couch from now on?

During church today I had a hard time concentrating. I so appreciated the sermon on being grateful, but all I could think about were those lepers, diseased lepers, and what on earth kind of germy putrid thing was residing in our second floor bedroom? That and I was trying to stay awake. Midnight prowling isn’t conducive to Sunday morning worship. (Yes you could probably take that sentence a few different ways!) Afterwards we went to lunch, and had yet another family discussion about our resident evil.

Hmm…musing over the internet smell stories…Hey! One person said they had a melting lamp in their living room and it smelled. Nahh…we checked that out last night. None of the outlets were hot and there was certainly no melting plastic up there. Wait a minute… “Dear daughter, didn’t you bring Harry Potter to summer camp with you?” Yes she did. “And which volume was it?” Number one. “And when did you begin reading this book?” (This is fun. I think I want to be Perry Mason!) “So this book was picked up at the end of July when you came home. You have since been on a Harry Potter reading marathon in which you have read the first 5 books in the series, all….at…..night…. in YOUR ROOM! AH HA! And what do you turn on when you head upstairs at 10 PM? You turn on the LAMP!”

She can’t read every night, which would explain the random occurrences. She didn’t use the lamp during the hurricane, which explains why the smell disappeared. We couldn’t wait to get home so we could run upstairs and flip that switch. Sure enough. A piece of plastic had come unscrewed and was resting directly on the bulb. Before the offending odor could get worse, we shut the power off and rejoiced at our discovery.

The Case of the Reeking Room: Solved.
The culprit, guilty as charged:

(Ever since Kathy D. gave me my very own pop-up post-it note dispenser, I’ve been hooked. Who knew they could be so entertaining?)

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