Operation Christmas Spirit

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Funkadelic

I'm in a funk, blogosphere. I can't get motivated to do shit lately and ever since signing up for the IronGirl triathlon, I've been having nightmares! What did I do?

My nightmares and anxiety often switch to ambition for everything I think I'm going to accomplish in 2009. I'm already working on my resolutions list (although I don't ever resolve to change anything… it's usually just a set of goals). See - I'll be turning 29 next year. For whatever reason, I'm convinced I need to accomplish lots of things before I turn the big 3-0… as if I will cease to exist as soon as 2010 rolls around.

One of my goals is to run a 10k. I've officially run 5 5k races (one of my 101 in 1001 list items) and at this point, I feel it's time to challenge myself further. I think if I can run a 10k sometime early next year, I'll feel a little better about the triathlon. And if I am successful with the triathlon (in that I don't wish for the sweet relief of death), then I may try my hand at a half marathon. HALF. I'm not crazy enough to run a full marathon. I'm pretty sure my knees would fall off.

Why am I getting so nutty about physically challenging myself? I think it's because I'm slacking in every other arena of my life: work, school, hobbies and friends. I think I'm subconsciously punishing myself for being a bad employee, bad student, bad hobbyist and bad friend. I think I'm also just deflecting my attention towards something other than everything I just mentioned. I wish I could apply this mentality to school!

Aanywho - because I still have yet to get through all of the photos from Scotland, Juli's wedding AND Kristin's wedding, I’m going to post this one measly photo from Kristin's wedding. Jeremy took it with our Nikon point&shoot (hence the poor quality) but I love it. And I've been obsessively checking Kristin's photographer's blog for updates. He's killing me.



Any tips to get me focused on the things I need to focus on?

Crafty Bitch

Despite totally crapping out on the day of Kristin's shower, I had done a lot of work prior to my night of binge drinking. I'm not sure why I felt the need to be so damn crafty, but I think I did a pretty good job for not really being a crafter [patting myself on the back].

First - I made the shower invitations from scratch. I don't know why I insisted on doing this and I definitely took the hard road to complete it. Who knew you could purchase blank white folded cards? I wish I had known that prior to wasting several sheets of cardstock trying to figure out how to put a nice crease in the card (a butter knife is how, in case you're wondering).

So here is the outside of the invite:


That was a picture of Kristin and Jackson back when we first got our Nikon D80 camera. It always cracks me up. I printed the photos out separately and attached them to the cardstock using one of those 3-D glue dots. Oh yeah - I'm fancy.

Here is the inside of the invite:


This is probably hard to read but I included instructions for the guests that probably left most of them thinking, "What the hell is wrong with this girl?" I asked the guests to not wrap their gifts in traditional gift wrap and bags mainly because I was trying to go a little "green" with this wedding and because I wanted to spark some creativity with people. Well - half of the guests, as predicted, didn't bother to follow my instructions. But others wrapped their gifts in dish towels, pillowcases, blankets or they put things in reusable grocery bags, baskets and storage bins. So I was pretty pleased.

I had asked guests to bring photos of them with Kristin because I made an interactive shower guestbook.


Kristin likes the idea of scrapbooks but suffers from the same lack of motivation that has inflicted me when it comes to scrapbooks. So - I thought this was a cute way to incorporate her love of scrapbooks while being able to handover a completed book without too much work from me! Whoo hoo! And this was the pain in the ass print job I needed from Sir Asswipe Speedy last week. I needed this printed in scrapbook dimensions (12x12 inches) and apparently that's not easy to do.

Crafts galore!

Then I thought it would be an interesting twist to collect an assload of wine corks to serve as little place card holders (to identify food) and just to scatter around. Thanks to my kickass friends who drink lots of wine or work in establishment where lots of wine is served, I was able to collect to shit ton of them.



Can you guess how many wine corks fit into this giant cookie jar? The answer is at the end of this post.


Wow. Writing this stuff out is actually wearing me out…

So my last craft project and gift to Kristin was a giant wine bottle. Jackson proposed to her with a message in a bottle so she really wanted to incorporate this somewhere in her wedding. Someone suggested that instead of having a traditional guestbook or signboard picture, she use a bottle and have guests write down "advice" and slip them into the bottle.

Cute!

I started my quest to find a gigantic bottle. This wasn't easy. Lucky for me, the fab Italian deli we go to every Saturday for lunch has gigantic wine bottles. The owner was so nice and gave me the bottle for free (after I explained what I needed it for).

I didn't want to give Kristin just a plain gigantic wine bottle. I thought etching a "B" for her married last name would be a nice touch. And I also thought etching was going to be easy. Well I was at least right about one thing.

After I practiced on two other wine bottles (at The Mr's suggestion), I finally mastered the art of etching glass. Holy fuck - this is a pain in the ass.



Theresa gave me some shelf liner to stick to the glass. I had originally used sticker printer paper but it didn't work very well and my first 'B" looked like a big blob.

The problem with shelf liner is that it's not meant to be printed on. See those smudges? That's from my hands smearing the ink around when I was cutting the "B" out with an exacto knife. My hand was black.



To make sure all of the curves looked good and nothing was missed, I took a damp cloth and wiped off the smeared ink after I finished cutting the pattern out with the exacto knife.



The etching cream! This shit stinks.


Voila! Sorry for the craptacular picture. I think I was too excited to hold very still.

Here is a shot of my practice bottle. I don't know if you can tell, but there are several "B"s etched onto the bottle.


Look - its mama bottle and baby bottle:


The clear bottle is actually a large-ish normal wine bottle… I'm telling you, the bottle I gave Kristin is frickin' huge.

Lastly - since I was feeling poetic (I'm not sure why my craft projects all had to rhyme), I wrote up an instructional poem for the guestbook and printed off the little note cards for the guests to fill out. I included pictures of what the guests should do because according to The Mr, my poem was too long and people wouldn't read it. Thanks, hon.


Oh and if you've made it this far in the post (wow - it's really long, huh?) - there were 270 wine corks in that cookie jar.

I Miss...

This week has been a big week for me. I decided to get crafty, vegan and The Mr started law school orientation. Yeah yeah... it's not that big, I get it but it has definitely shaken things up around my house.

Let's start with the craftiness. It's been a disastrous endeavour so far but there are some other craft projects that I've been working on that I may or may not share depending upon the outcome. I can only reveal my failures so much without feeling like a complete turd.

I miss the days when I was unaware of the wide world of craft fabulousness.

Now the veganism. I've stuck by the whole vegetarian thing for over a year now and haven't looked back. I don't miss meat and maintaining this lifestyle has been quite easy (although I can't speak for the awesome people in my life who make it a point to always have a vegetarian dish for me...). After reading Skinny Bitch a couple of months ago, I started to lay off the dairy as much as possible. I never adopted the full vegan diet though because it's tough!

I like to go out to eat and there aren't a lot of vegan options around Baltimore. I've pinpointed potentially 4 restaurants that claim to be vegan friendly but I love eating. I think I'd get sick of 4 restaurants. Regardless, I listed going vegan for one week as one of my 101 items because it's a pretty strict/intense diet and to prevent myself from feeling completely defeated - I thought I'd start easy.

One week. One eeeeasy week.

I miss chocolate. I miss candy. I miss desserts.

Some may argue that candy is vegan but others would say that it is not because most refined sugar is made with bone meal. Yarg! So I've been hanging onto this vegan diet for 6 days now to the best of my ability. I know it sounds like I'm cheating but it's tough when you pull up a recipe for a vegan buttercream frosting and it calls for confectioner's sugar. Isn't that sugar? Does that mean it is vegan? I'm confused.

So like I said, I've been going vegan to the best of my ability. Tomorrow night, The Mr and I are even hitting up one of the vegan friendly restaurants that I found in Baltimore.

Lastly - The Mr started law school this week. Well, he started orientation. He's been going to orientation directly after work until 9pm 3 days this week. I get that I see him all the time but man... it's been tough. The dogs have been moping, I fear for my life everytime I walk the dogs alone, I find it hard to get motivated to do anything other than sit on my ass in front of the TV and well... I miss him.

Gah! So lame. I miss my husband that I see every night and it's only been 3 days! Am I going to survive him in law school? His weekends will be dedicated to studying. I get him for one night. Fridays. And do you think I'll want to share him with anyone on that one night? Nope.

So sorry pals - The Mr is only available one night a week for the next 4 years and it belongs to me!

The Great Cake Disaster

Damn you, Martha Stewart. Damn you for making crafting, baking and cooking look so easy. Damn you for making me think I need to make a cake out of fondant to look snazzy.

So let's talk about the great cake disaster that was my special "Yay you started law school!" cake for The Mr.

Because we have found that vegan desserts are quite delish (I've made vegan cupcakes and we have been eating vegan cookies & cake from the vegan bakery/juice bar near our house), I asked The Mr if he minded if I tried to make a vegan cake. He said sure.

I made the cake Sunday night and noticed that it didn't rise very much. I didn't think much of it and wrapped them up and froze them for assembly later.

I made the marshmallow fondant on Monday night. It actually was pretty easy to make. I wrapped it up and put it in the refrigerator for assembly later.

The cakes were vegan chocolate chip cakes.

I made the vegan "buttercream" frosting last night and it was frickin' amazing. A-maz-ing. I could never be a pastry chef because I would be morbidly obese. How do you not lick a bowl clean? I had high hopes for this cake.


I also sketched out what I wanted the design of the cake to look like. I didn't want to just cover it with plain white fondant. I wanted something to add a little pizazz. I mean, this was my "Yay you started law school!" cake afterall. I also knew I had to keep the design simple or I'd fail miserably.

I decided to create a little cutout of my dogs' faces.


I started to assemble the cake since the fondant was still pretty cold.

Like the wax paper? I learned that trick from Sandra Lee. It keeps the frosting off of your cake platter.




And this is where everything went downhill…

I couldn't roll out the fondant to save my life. My dreams of ever working at Charm City Cakes quickly went out the window and I huffed and puffed my way to even try to flatten out the fondant mass.

I then had the bright idea to separate the fondant. Trying to flatten out sections of the fondant mass surely had to be easier than rolling out the entire fucking thing, right?

No.

So then I thought, "alright, well fuck the fondant all over the cake. I'll just try to make my doggie faces." Ppffft.

Here is what happens when you try to add food coloring to cold balled up fondant:


Farfegnugen, falafel, fudgecicle... Fuck fuck fuck!

Okay… well, how about I try to flatten this out. Maybe that will help mix the colors…


Son of a bitch. Unless I was intending to make my doggie faces appear as though The Mr had been on LSD, this wasn't working out as I had planned.

Because I hate wasting anything, I tried to think of a quick plan. I busted out my cookie cutters and picked shapes that I thought could work for my "Yay you started law school!" cake.

A star because The Mr was the shining star of the day.
A heart because I heart him.
A clover to wish him luck.
And random doo-hickies to fill space.

I couldn't figure out a way to justify an umbrella or a watermelon slice.

And voila! Everything looks fancier in a cake dome.


The Mr thought the cake was "cute" and feigned some sort of excitement for it. I think he was just exhausted and starved from law school orientation.

So not only did my dreams of creating a beautiful fondant cake get destroyed, the cake tasted like SHIT. Actually - worse than shit. It tasted like the shit of a dead cat that was shoved up a dead cow's butt for months. Okay - maybe not that bad but it definitely seemed like I flavored the cake with gym sock sweat.

The Mr took a bite and said, "Oh - this is interesting… it's not really cake-like…"
Then I took a bite, "Holy fuck - this is awful! Bleh!" [spit out bite]

The Mr still tried to be polite but I told him it was okay to say he didn't like it because if he really did like it, I'd have to check his pulse to make sure he wasn't a zombie that liked to munch on people's brains.

He hesitatingly agreed that it was crap but complimented the hell out of the frosting.

And to prove even further why I heart him, he looked up vegan cakes this morning and sent me some other suggestions. I may try my hand at one of the recipes listed here.

Have any of you ever decorated with fondant? How the hell did you do it?!

Weekend in Review

Aside from riding 40+ miles, I can't say the rest of the weekend was terribly exciting for us. I was sick Friday night and riding a bike for 4.5 hours is physically draining so that pretty much killed our Saturday night.

However, in the insane effort to keep moving forward with my 101 list - I did manage to encourage The Mr to check out Soldier's Delight state park in Owings Mills. I just need to visit 3 more parks and I can cross off another item. This park was pretty interesting in that it felt like we were in a different climate. I'm used to trees, grass, etc… and this felt more like a desert. Check it out if you're in the Owings Mills area of Maryland.









While it may seem crazy that after biking 4.5 hours, we still went on a 2.5 mile hike with our dogs, it was probably the best thing we could have done for our body. We managed to stretch our legs and backs so that walking felt normal again.

Also - in a funny random side note, I was e-mailing with Mia about bike riding and said that The Mr wore bike shorts AND used my gel seat and she warned, "I was told not to get a gel seat for [fiance] because it cuts off circulation somewhere down there and it could be dangerous. I wouldn't want anything bad to happen. Its so early in your marriage!" Yikes! Honey - we need to find you something else.

Any bicyclers out there wanna share some advice? We're going to look into getting bikes… although sometimes I think we're more talk than action. I mean - we created a photo blog last month and have yet to post anything on it. But I digress…

Oh - and I'm going vegan this week. I started Saturday morning. So far so good. Lucky for me there is a fabulous vegan place to grab sweets. I made a vegan chocolate chip cake last night and will make a vegan buttercream frosting tonight. I have to build this cake in stages or I'll fall apart. I get easily discouraged if things don't turn out the way that I planned. Btw - this also knocks out item 39 on my 101 list.

If that goes well, I'm going to venture out and make a marshmallow fondant (which I realize is NOT vegan but I'm not eating it) for the cake as well. And this is the main reason I'm building this cake in stages. Can I really handle all of this at once? Doubtful.

It didn't kill me

Success! I survived biking 40+ miles on Saturday morning despite having a "summer cold" (who knew getting a cold in the summer was deemed a 'summer cold') and not riding since 1996. I.am.awesome.

My ass hurts though. And let's not even talk about the pain The Mr feels. We're kind of wondering if he can produce sperm anymore. I may have inadvertently crossed off item 101 on my list without even intending to. Whoops.

Friday I had to leave work early because my sinuses were so congested that I couldn't even hear. I went home and took a ridiculously hot bath thinking I could sweat out my cold because I swear this has worked in the past. Maybe I made that up though. I skipped out on a happy hour because I didn't want to risk my 40 mile bike ride adventure. I had to finish it so I could strut into my office and yell "f you!" to my doubters.

We hit up Wal-fart, Dick's Sporting Goods and Target to try to find 2 tubings for my tires, a gel seat for my seat (because I knew my bony butt couldn't handle the entire ride), and a bike rack. Finding a bike rack was tough! We spent most of the evening doing that and getting the tubing in place (and I learned The Mr is pretty handy with a bike).

We woke up at 6am to start our journey. After a few hiccups (like trying to find the directions to the trail, having to pull over to readjust the bikes on the bike rack, taking a wrong turn) we finally arrived at the trail around 8am. And so started our journey...


The crappy bike rack.


My brave little Huffy!


My hot bony ass in a sweet pair of bike shorts. If you're ever considering riding a long distance, WEAR BIKE SHORTS. I will never judge a person again. That padding saved my life.

Riding a bike is pretty easy. Riding a bike that hasn't been ridden since 1996 is tricky. I felt like my back tire wasn't at optimum inflation. We tried pumping it up several times but it just felt wrong. So I had to suck up riding 40 miles on a partially inflated tire.

Also - while I thought I was going at a pretty decent speed, a ton of old people were zipping past me. I felt kind of like a turd but I kept on pedaling.

Mile 10. Halfway to the PA line. I was feeling great. The ride was fairly easy. At about mile 5 I gave up my gel seat to The Mr who was convinced his wiener was going to fall off. I realized at that point why women are the ones who have babies...

By about mile 15, I started to feel it. We had probably stopped about 10 times to either drink, snack, pump air into my tire or let The Mr's wang take a break from a hard seat jamming into his nuts. It had been about 2.5 hours at this point and the trail turned into one loooong incline.

I may have whimpered a little as we kept on biking but I knew the end was near.

PA, hooray!


For those that doubted me...

I have to say I was disappointed that there wasn't a big sign that said, "Welcome to Pennsylvania! You are officially a badass for biking all the way here!" We just came across the sign and went, "Oh? I guess we made past the MD/PA line..."

I was excited to bike back because I knew the first 5 miles was going to be downhill. I felt like we flew back.

We stopped off for a picture. Okay, not really - The Mr still needed his nut breaks but I wanted a picture.

When I hit the last 5 miles, I really started to feel the pain again. I wasn't pedaling very fast and I had a constant look of pain plastered to my face. I may have scared a few kids but I'm not sure.

But fuck yeah - I did it. The Mr declared that the next time I decide I want to bike 40 miles, we need to build up to it. What I thought would be a 3 hour bike ride was a 4.5 hour bike ride. Oy. I didn't take into consideration that we'd stop so much.

One of the positive things that came out of this experience is that The Mr and I are pretty stoked about biking. It's a great activity and it'll make me feel like less of a turd to bike to a location in Baltimore that is less than 2 miles from my house.

How was everyone else's weekend?