Month: December 2015

The last post about baking for a while

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I know I’ve been talking about baking and cookies and stuff a lot, but I promise this is the last one for a while.  It’s just I keep trying new things!  Today, I made a ton of gluten-free oatmeal raisin cookies.  I hear they turned out well, but I will have to take everyone else’s word for it.  I love oatmeal, but oatmeal cookies?  No way.  I like grapes, but raisins get stuck in my teeth, so I avoid them.  Oatmeal cookies combine those two things into pure evil.  I made them by request, and it was…a learning experience?

Corey, Dad, and Gaby all said they were good.  I’ll assume they weren’t just being nice (it makes me feel better).  I’m happy to make stuff by request, and I like baking – it’s fairly simple, I’ve never completely ruined anything (so far, I think), and it doesn’t take forever.  But for the most part, I think I’d rather make things I’ll actually eat.  On the other hand…my diet will thank me if I stick to oatmeal raisin cookies…something to think about.

No more baking!  Until Christmas.  Or until John runs out of cookies.

Gluten-free baking and other disasters

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Saturday morning, I made about 4 dozen gluten-free chocolate cookies, and they came out great.  Not great-for-gluten-free cookies.  Straight-up great.  This was one of the new things I tried, and I’m pretty darn happy with the results.  (I’m also typing this without my contacts in, so all the text is blurry and I’m relying on the inline spellcheck to catch all the mistakes.  Might not be happy with the results of this post.)  No disasters occurred during the making of those cookies. The bit about the house burning down might have been a bit prescient, though.  John kept me updated throughout the afternoon about the fire at the Annapolis Yacht Club.  Here’s an article in the local newspaper.  It mentions dozens of pedestrians watching the firefighting activity – John was one of those dozens!  (Does that technically mean he was one dozen?  John contains multitudes.)

Anyway, I also mentioned dogs eating dough.  Gaby and I made regular chocolate chip cookies for dinner, and Ginger (one of Mel’s dogs – the counter-surfer) licked three of them.  I usually under-cook my cookies, but these were a little less cooked than usual, so I think it counts as dough.  Prescient again? Or self-fulfilling prophecy, somehow?

Kitchen issues, part 436

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This week has not been a good one for me and cooking.  I had the issue with the pie (it still turned out pretty good).  I dropped the salad all over the floor.  My cookies all came out fine, but I realized when my oven started pouring out smoke that I bought waxed paper instead of parchment paper.  The kitchen was smoky and the cookie sheets ended up all waxy and gross and hard to clean.  I hate waxed paper.  I’m planning more baking for this weekend.  I’ve learned from my mistakes, but I just know I’ll find something new to destroy.

Possible disasters:

  • I’m trying two things I’ve never baked before.  They’ll be inedible.
  • There are two ovens.  I’ll preheat one oven and try to bake in the other one, wasting hours on cookies that aren’t cooking and ruining the empty oven.
  • There are four hungry dogs in the house.  They’ll eat the dough.
  • There are four curious dogs in the house.  One of them will end up in the oven.
  • I’ll get distracted quoting Martin and Lewis with Mel and the cookies will burn.
  • I’ll get distracted quoting Martin and Lewis with Mel and the house will burn down.

Yeah, those seem likely.  Who’s betting?

n00b

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We’re thinking about getting a PlayStation 4.  Like, soon.  And that means I need to pick out video games.  The problem is that I have no idea where to start.  I don’t play video games.  We had a Nintendo (the original version), but we only had maybe four games.  I remember Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros., Zelda (although I don’t remember playing that one), and Joust.  I think we borrowed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out sometimes.  Then at some point we added Tetris and Dr. Mario.  But you get the picture – that’s the era of video games I’m familiar with.  In college, Greg, Erik, and John played Goldeneye for hours and hours, but I never tried it long enough to get the hang of the controller.  John had a PS2 for a while, but I wasn’t really interested in the games he played, so I never really tried to get into it.

Now I want to get into it, but I don’t know where to start.  I’m as new as newbies get – I don’t even know what type of game I want to play.  The only thing I know is that I don’t want one with a steep learning curve.  I don’t want to get frustrated immediately.  I’m reading reviews, seeing what I can find out.  I may just have to guess.

Help?

 

I can’t even

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I made another pie on Monday.  One more pie.  That’s a crucial detail I missed when I started to put it all together.  I boiled sweet potatoes for only one pie.  I peeled them, put them in the mixing bowl.  Then I added the rest of the ingredients, according to my recipe.  Yes, according to my recipe WHICH IS WRITTEN FOR TWO PIES.  Started the mixer, noticed the resulting mixture was a bit runny….oh, shit.  Dropped head into hands.  I didn’t buy any more sweet potatoes, so I couldn’t just turn it into two pies.  Tasted the mixture – a bit sweeter than usual (because of DOUBLE the amount of sugar needed for ONE pie), but pretty good.  So at John’s suggestion, I added some flour to thicken it up, crossed my fingers, and cooked it.

I don’t know how it turned out.  It’s puffy, and it took longer to bake completely.  It was meant for my team at work – they’ll have to let me know.  I’ll just hide when they try it.  They’ve had it before!  They’ll know!

To make matters worse, also on Monday (after the pie made it into the oven), I dropped a plastic mixing bowl of caesar salad.  It landed right side up (small miracle), but half the salad bounced out of the bowl and landed on the floor.  I had to walk away.  Actually, I think I stomped away.  That’s also when I decided not to make cookies that night.  Too dangerous.

And you wonder why I don’t cook!  Maybe you don’t wonder.  THIS IS WHY.

Eating light

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I’m trying to combat the holiday season food problem (with associated weight gain) by not eating.  I haven’t been that successful.  But today!  Today, I’ve had a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea, then I went to the gym (although I wouldn’t count today’s among my hardest workouts), and now I’m eating a piece of toast with peanut butter.  I’m trying to go extra light today because I’m making cookies as soon as I’m done with work.  Lots of cookies.  And I’m not going to try to pretend I won’t be eating cookie batter and fresh warm cookies all evening.  Maybe I’ll skip dinner.  Cookies for dinner sounds great, right?

Tomorrow I’ll be in the office for the first since mid-August – I’m bringing the cookies (so more cookies for me tomorrow), we’re going out for a team lunch, and then we have the holiday party tomorrow night.  I’ll be eating all day.  And I won’t have to time to run tomorrow, so I can’t fight it that way.  And if I get the chance to run on Thursday, it’ll be later in the day, and I don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to running later in the day.  (Get it?  Track record?  Camembert!  These are the jokes, people.)

I need a personal valet

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You know what’s (maybe not so) surprisingly hard?  Trying to wash my hair without the use of my right index finger.  I sliced my finger up pretty good on a boot at the store yesterday (defective zipper), and it is really very irritating having to be this careful about the dominant finger on my dominant hand.  It’s not useless – I can type, so I can work – but the cuts sting like crazy when they get wet or when I curl my finger in too far (or too fast).  Washing hands?  Painful.  Washing dishes?  Sucky.  Washing hair?  Very difficult.  Pretty much anything to do with water.  And I have to bake tonight!  I like to mush the sweet potatoes when I add them to the mixer.  Guess I’ll be mushing one-handed.  And the cookies!  Oh, the cookies.

My life is hard.

I think I left my brain at the food court

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We braved the mall today.  It was…not terrible, but we’re both completely worn out.  What is it about shopping that takes so much out of people?  It wasn’t that much walking, and it wasn’t that crowded.  Maybe it’s about the decisions?  We spent entirely too long in one store, considering a couple of ideas, and then we spent even longer in Clarks, trying on too many shoes.  (They actually had some shoes in John’s size (almost – not wide enough).)  After that, there was one more particular thing I was looking for (an idea of a thing), and we got to the point where I’d see a likely store, cruise through it in 30 seconds or fewer, and walk right back out – not the right place, they don’t have the thing.  When I found that I wasn’t even looking around anymore, we knew we’d had enough.  But then we had to walk back through the entire mall to find where we parked the car.  There’s something weird about the layout of that place.  It makes zero sense to me.

This post is not making that much sense to me, either.  Better publish quick before I think about it too much!  (That is not how this is supposed to work…)

Wordy

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The other day I was talking to John about how I try to post something every day, and that while I like posting every day, I’m not crazy about the pressure I feel to do it (self-imposed though it is).  On the other hand, I’ve been pretty successful at it lately, and I’m not losing any hair over it.  I posted 28 days out of 30 last month – that’s not bad.  So then I checked my history.  In seven years, my lowest number of posts per month is 2 (happened twice – May 2014 and July 2013).  At the other end, in seven years, I’ve posted more than 30 times per month 11 times.  I posted the most times in a month in May and March 2010 (36 times each), but I think I have to give the win to February 2010 (35 posts) since it only had 28 days.

The most mind-boggling part of this exercise is the realization that I used to post more than once a day!  That hardly seems necessary.  I just don’t know when to shut up.

It’s a nice place

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Annapolis is really pretty all decorated for Christmas.  All the storefronts have pine boughs with red bows all over, and the sidewalks have potted trees with lights, and there are wreaths hung across intersections.  We took a short walk last night down Maryland Ave.  All the stores were open late, doors wide open, and there was Christmas music (an instrumental version of “The Christmas Waltz” – one of my favorites) playing near the end of the block.  Just past it, a very nicely dressed Santa Claus came over to say hi.  He asked John if I’d been good this year.  Sexist, but otherwise he was a nice Santa.  There was a whole gaggle of kids at the other end of the block, but we didn’t stick around to find out if they were going to sing or anything.  And on the way back, we passed an older couple who wished us a merry Christmas.  People can be so nice when they aren’t being horrible.

So we came back home, and now we’re listening to Pandora’s Christmas station.  This is probably as Christmas-y as we’ll get this year.  We’ll do our shopping this weekend, and we’ll make sure we get out in the evenings to enjoy how festive Annapolis looks, but we’re not planning to do any decorating (outside of Bird and Bird, who will be joining us on our travels).

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I did stuff!

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Yesterday was kind of blah (and SO rainy), but today the sky is shining (yeah, I know, but I like it) and I did things!

Here are the things that I did:

  • Exercised!  Well, that was yesterday, technically, but my arms and shoulders are sore today, so I feel like I accomplished something, and it counts for today because I feel it today.
  • Went for a walk with John!  It was chilly but pretty, and I got Starbucks on the way back.
  • Facial at Massage Envy!  Supposed to be once a month, but I haven’t been since July.  I went to the Annapolis location, bought some stuff I was out of, let someone massage my face for 50 minutes, and left happy.
  • Went to Panera!  Panera is in the same shopping center as Massage Envy, and my appointment was at lunch time, so I picked up lunch AND dinner to go.  Today’s food crisis: resolved!
  • Picked up pants!  When I went to Athleta with Jess a couple of weeks ago, I bought a pair of pants that needed hemming (they offer free hemming when you buy in the store), and they were ready on Monday.  I was not in town on Monday, but I am now, so I picked them up today.  Yay pants!
  • Watched the trailer for the third Captain America movie!  Okay, that was last night, too, but I watched it AGAIN today, and we might just watch Winter Soldier tonight (yes, Dad, AGAIN).

Maybe that last bullet shouldn’t count as something I accomplished today, but I’m excited about the movie and I get to choose the list, so….yeah.  Also, I didn’t include helping Corey with his blog questions because I don’t think I helped.  So that doesn’t count.  Is it sad that I’m starting to think productivity means leaving the apartment?

Ugh

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Another shooting.  Have a picture of kittens instead.

kittensinmugs

Also, apparently I have titled posts “Ugh” two other times.  I am repetitive.  Sorry!  Also also, I upgraded WordPress today and finally installed JetPack, so now I have more stuff to play with.  I got a LOT of spam comments on old posts (a group from 2011 and a group from 2014) all day long, so I added a CAPTCHA that makes you do math.  You’ll have to let me know if it’s too hard for you.  :/  AND I added a Share button.  If it’s annoying, let me know that, too.

Have a puppy, too.

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Everyone’s a comic

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I’m home!  The flight was a little bumpy, otherwise uneventful.  Not full.  The flight attendants were practicing their stand-up routines, but one of them liked my hat, so I’ll give them a pass on that.

We spent much of the day watching more Supernatural episodes.  Season 1 Sam and Dean were such babies!  We’ll have to work that show back into our regular TV rotation.  I’ve missed the Winchester boys.

Oh, hey, I learned a new joke on Thanksgiving that is my new favorite joke, but I can’t write it down.  The joke is in the delivery.  I have a video of Christine doing it, but John just pointed out that I took that video in portrait mode, not landscape, so I can’t post it online.  I’ll be laughed off the internet, possibly with tomatoes thrown at me.  You want to hear it?  You’ll have to come see me.  Or call me.  Skype is also good.  We’ll work it out.