An Essay & Apple Pie

     This morning I was able to write the essay for the GE-Ronald Reagan Foundation Scholarship application. The outline I prepared last night was great, except that I underestimated the length of the essay. The target size is 500-750 words and I counted something like 966 in mine... way too much English going on. I studied it for a little while, taking out bits and pieces, but then just decided to ditch my weakest point/paragraph on leadership and service in my schooling. It contained some useful information, but the majority of the paragraph was just filler stuff I cooked up to make sure the paragraph was the same length as the rest. The other paragraphs on work, community service, and my future contain the real meat of what I was trying to get across, so I just narrowed the essay a little bit in order to highlight these areas.

     This afternoon I baked a couple of apple/pear pies. Everything was made from scratch including the filling which I made back in August 2011. I got the recipe for the filling from a lady who was at our last church and who baked a lot of apple stuff at the same time I did because I gave her all the apples I had picked but couldn't use (more than a full truckload between us). The filling is amazing and came out flawless the first time I made it, incredible instructions. The pie crust wasn't so marvelous though. After four attempts during each of which something else went wrong, I finally made my first satisfactory pie crust for the Thanksgiving feast. Up until today I've always made conventional lattice-top crusts, but this time I decided to make a graham cracker bottom crust to make it kind of like apple crisp. It was good, but next time I'll cut back on the sugar in the bottom crust; the filling is sweet enough by itself.
     At homegroup tonight I was able to play the four songs on the guitar. It wasn't meticulously perfect, but we had a great time singing and I'm now looking forward to playing again next week. One of the men who usually isn't able to come because of his work schedule had today off and was able to join us, it was good to get to know him a little better through conversation. His prayers tonight proved him to be quite the man of prayer, it was a joy to listen in on his conversation with the Lord and to learn from him. While I was driving home, my youngest sister asked how many people named "Mary" were in our church, so my mom told her. After thinking for a couple seconds, her next profound question was, "What's their first names?" It took a little bit of laughing and then listening to find out that she was trying to ask for the last names but didn't quite get it straight!
     Things to be thankful for today: 1) finishing the essay, 2) a new pie idea, 3) an opportunity to play guitar, 4) another great time of fellowship, and 5) a wonderful truck that continues to run without any problems.