Today, exclaimation mark

Today!


I will get out my yoga mat and give Daisy Fuentes the finger, via my Wii remote, and try Pilates again!
I will not forget to make dinner early!
I will stop being sadface about my stupid cold sore!
I will try the new shampoo&conditioner I bought!
I will fold laundry! That part isn't as exciting, I just have to do that today!
I will get ready for friends visiting tomorrow!
I will stop looking at this face so I can go do these things instead of jibbering and smooshing him!

Ugh the last one is so hard to do.

Still a win!

The past few days I've baked and cleaned my kitchen constantly.. and eaten the rewards.  Actually to be truthful I've shared 90% of my goods, which is a good percentage ratio if I want to lose a few pounds anytime soon.  So last night was wine and chocolate chip cookies night.  Sounds great if you ignore that my cookies weren't quite as soft as they should have been, and one of the bottles of wine tasted like vinegar and blistex (possibly because we were talking about blistex). Still drank it of course.

I'm sure drunk baking makes Martha Stewart sad, so, let's just say I'm left with a bunch of blah cookies and a need to try the recipe again with sour cream this time.

I said one glass of wine

Um anyway.. since I am tired and the only amazing insight I can give into today will be after I watch Lost tonight.. I'll just share my new discovery of MyPlate from the Livestrong website, which I really like and we'll call it a day.  I'm wondering if I input wine + chocolate ONE MORE TIME if someone will pop on the screen and just ask me if I'm at all serious about getting into shape again.  And I'll likely reply "I thought so too but.. here we are.."

Since I haven't done this in a while, I'd like to share how a night hanging out with Brooke leads to super random things when I go to my computer in the morning.  Sort of like my version of the "whats in your bag" game only funnier and with empty wine and cookie residue everywhere, as you can imagine.  Then I go to my laptop and I realize it has pictures of yellow bridesmaids dresses on my desktop, the ticket check out web page for a Russell Peters show in Windsor in July and my google search bar I had unsuccessfully tried to identify one of the Geography teachers from our old high school.  Since I'm a responsible adult that means at 1:30am I went upstairs, washed my face, flossed and brushed my teeth... carefully moisturized my upper body and fell into a coma for 6 hours. 

Baking bad cookies and drinking bad wine = somehow still a win!  I thought you all should know.

Earth Day

First of all, I just want to get something off my mind about this website.. since we're all honest here. I get so much spam comments for n00dz sites it's absolutely unbelievable. The funniest part about it is that they're basically all the same thing ... (random B list celebrity) uncensored!! I guess these people just keep writing new ones until someone is even slightly interested. OMG I was waiting for the day Ashanti would un-censor herself!


Anyways, it's Earth Day (but isn't every day really Earth day?) so some time spent in the yard, not being a vampire, seemed appropriate

my little hazel eyes

Busy Bee

I've just spent hours making stuff for a bake sale tomorrow. I had a great couple days, too, actually. Lots of sunshine and kids, and working in the dirt. Grown-up playdates and late nights talking and drinking wine. Been fun and busy. I like keeping myself busy sometimes.

As a side note, apparently the bird that flew into my huge wall of windows last year DID die and fertilized our flowers... I freaking knew it. Speaking of, we had a really awesome time explaining a dead bunny rabbit on the side of the road to a 3 and 4 yr old. What is that red stuff coming out of it's bum? Uh. Great question!.. who wants freezies when we get home???

I got this!

Funny, especially if you ever had dinner with a bunch of Italians... or my friend Rob. If you're inexperienced I'll give you a couple cheat moves. Pull out a gun or give the waitress your credit card info over the phone while you make the reservation and insist she charge you. Or both.





THE LEAST I CAN DO FOR THIS BLESSED ANGEL IS BUY HER SPAGHETTI ON HER BIRTHDAY.. I GOT THIS!!!!!

Japanese Food... over there!

My Dad took me to dinner for my birthday and quickly realized having no reservations on a Saturday night was akin to Mary and Joseph finding an Inn on Christmas Eve. Every place we wanted to try was a huge wait - then in the parking lot we saw a literal sign! Not of the restaurant itself, like you'd think, but just the words JAPANESE FOOD with an arrow. The best part is that it wasn't even clear where exactly it was pointing, that sketchy white door? No idea but behold! there is Japanese Food in this direction. You don't need to know what kind, it's just Japanese ok! EAT HERE.

And we did. It was actually a nice place called Bento Box where they had great sushi etc... the sign lied though since I ended up ordering a favourite of mine, Bulgogi, which is actually a Korean dish. I will never trust a sign the same way again.


I'd also like to announce that my experiment with Black Bottom Cupcakes was a success! They turned out like this. The top, you must know, is cooked cream cheese frosting and chocolate chips. Ohhhh ya, it totally is.


I thought the chocolate chips had something to do with the black bottomness but apparently it's only so because of the tops being white.. and, I suspect, related to the cupcake batter being actually very heavy. Think chocolate pound cake, heavy. Needs a glass of milk, heavy.

You can only safely eat 2.

I was also successful on my LAST attempt to make medium mold cupcakes I used with the remaining batter. You've likely seen the GIANT ones from Wilton... well this is 4 smaller ones. They have all been bitchy and fallen apart or stuck but this last time I greased and floured the SHIT out of it so seriously if this didn't work I was giving up forever. This was the result.


I was out of frosting this time so I just added chocolate chips to the middles. Yum.

I packed up 8 of the remaining Black Bottom cupcakes and sent them to work with Sean where they served a better purpose than becoming they newest addition to my hips and ass. I already need to send some people home from that party. I guess everyone at work liked them so my kitchen has been commissioned to make more for the bake sale. Pretty excited to re-make these! Might even try my own cookies on the weekend just to put the huge bag of chocolate chips to another use.

PASS FAIL

My cupcake experiments have crossed into attempting lots of other things. It's pretty pass/fail.. eat or unwilling to be eaten. I tried a low-fat blueberry muffin recipe the other day and it was very rubbery. I put that in the category of FAIL. Vanilla Buttermilk pancakes this weekend.. PASS.

I wish there was a better way to test this stuff out but as it was pointed out to me at my bday Cranium tourney, which on topic included great cookies and a sweet brownie pan from Rob, I might have beat the batter too much or something which made the muffins rubbery. I feel it'd probably be beneficial for someone to actually show me how to do it and what the finished product would taste like if I actually knew what I was doing/had experience. So I think I'm going to sign up for a cake making class soon. It's just like me to aspire to whipping up the best cupcake ever with just a recipe in hand and not knowing what it was supposed to taste like anyway. I could be counting a lot of things as a fail based on the recipe sucking (aka being average) and not really know. As a younger me, it caused me to obviously be super impulsive and have a quickly defeated attitude when I was in fact NOT the best at everything! In adulthood I've gotten better at letting it be a motivator to put in the actual work, and in this situation I eventually want to make a fantastic fucking cupcake y'all. It will happen.

Drunk Cranium: guess what this is? A kilt. FAIL.

I'll confess I'm talking about more than making cupcakes now as I've wandered into bigger goals but we'll stick with cupcakes here. And in those situations I am often reminded of an always appropriate quote from the somewhat obscure movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. You ever see it? Stranded after a plane crash some average guys and a billionaire are trying to survive to be rescued in the wilderness. And at one point they attempt to kill a bear I think and when it seems really unlikely, as in seriously we're going to be eaten by this bear, Anthony Hopkins character replies that "What one man can do, another can do". For myself, and people like myself perhaps, this will remain a memorable motivator because it is undeniably true. The only thing in your way is how much you want to.

Advertizing lied to me? No!

I imagine fictional moms are the best. As far as I know from TV if the kids spill a bunch of grape drink in the kitchen, you aren't mad, you just grab the Bounty with a look that says "Oh ...boys will be boys!" Don't forget that all the kitchens are basically spotless except for that one mess. You know how it gets that way? Fictional moms, bless their tidy hearts. In real life they'd be severely OCD but in Bounty World messes excite them!

Mmm it tastes exactly like 30 mins of cleaning!

You see when a certain little boy pissed all over the bathroom this afternoon, like it was on fire, what I should have said was "I have been waiting all day to use these paper towels! Out of my way everyone, it's my time to shine!!" and not the obvious which is why the hell would you do that? And a thoroughly exciting* review of where it's safe to pee and where it isn't (hint: nowhere but the toilet is safe). Man, fictional moms are so cool with everything! I'm sure we could all be like them but I don't think the OCD or the daily batch of pot brownies would be all that good for me.


*pissed off

My birthday week rundown

I hope everyone had a great long/easter weekend. I'm currently eating way too many coloured chocolates and I'm not sure if we got a weird batch, but a lot of them look like my favourite comparison of the week, 'the rock of Gibraltar'. I have no idea why mind immediately goes there but it does so I'm going with it!

seen here, being rock-like

I haven't updated since my birthday so I'll mention it was really great! Sean took me out to Spencers for dinner. It was SO good there, I loved it! We need to head back there in summer weather to sit outside. There were a few people who braved it even though it was not very comfortable - one of which was a very old Italian or Jewish woman, I couldn't tell. She was with her son and was so funny.. she put on her "rouge" right there while talking to the waitress ..aka was rubbing lipstick on her cheeks. Then she kissed the waitress as they were leaving. That is some friendly patronage.

After dinner hanging out above the boardwalk!

Also picked up a Wii fit during some post-dinner shopping. The next day we spent the day at the park with one of my friends and her kiddos, and almost all of us came back with mild face sunburns lol. Brooke came by with two bottles of super cool wine and we used the Wii fit for drunken fun. My fave was an aerobic Lady Gaga class and then I accompanied Brooke on a faux jog, wine glass in hand. Now I kind of want to do that to someone in the park, yanno, like "oh hey man.. how's it going? so nice out huh? sorry am I spilling some of this on your shoes? that's not going to come out".

Friday was the march birthday dinner with my Dad's side of the family, it was really great to see them all again. Lots of kiddos going to be around this time next year!

Saturday we were doing house reno-stuff; I mostly stayed outside with Gabe until the clean-up. Later on that night we had Sean's mum over for ice cream cake, and then a couple (old and new) friends over for a super late dinner at a SUPER Italian place.

Yes that is a picture of a Ferrari porchetta cutter right in the middle of the restaurant. Everything there was kinda great like that, including the staff really enjoying feeding Rob for some reason. I was also a BIG fan of the huge wall of wine and the generous amount of alcohol in the Cosmos. Will be going back there hopefully a lot.

Played a few Wii fit games before I broke out the Cranium Turbo. It was nice playing with people who understood the rules.... all I'm gonna say about that! It was a good night. Sunday I don't want to talk about. Apparently Jesus rose from the dead so that people could bicker around the dinner table and talk about others when they don't think anyone is listening. Yeah.

My contribution to the sanding on Saturday, holding Sean's beer

By the way one of the cheapest and most fun presents was the Hipstamatic app for my iPhone. I've been having some fun as you can see! :) If I get any pics from my actual camera I'll flickr them for ya another time!