Life is expensive.

Moving = expensive. Furnishing a house = expensive. My taste = expensive. Self pity, party of 1. 

Nerd herd calling!

Guess who got glasses today?

People my mom hates...

My mom chooses who to hate by the most irrational methods imaginable. People my mom hates:

sally field

the welch's grape juice girl

Pretty much any child actor/actress. I once asked her if she would hate me if I'd been on tv and she said "If you were that obnoxious I wouldn't have put you on tv." So ended my childhood acting career. 

But the one person who she hates above all other people is...Martha Stewart. She loathes Martha Stewart and has been known to call her a gangster (not gangsta, mind you), a criminal, or a crook on multiple occasions. And you know what? Martha Stewart is a gangster, and I have proof:

straight gangsta, yo.

Look who came home to Mama!

we were separated at birth and are finally reunited. 

I'm. So. Excited.

What up.

Why yes, those ARE metallic gold hi-tops on my feet. Bought them for my costume when I was the Golden Snitch. And now I'm just snitchin' around the office. Jeallllllous?

have a nice day. :) 

A few bits of random

1. We're all moved in to the new place. Not quite 100% dialed yet in the guest bedroom, but as soon as we are I'll post pics (probably Facebook or an email). 
2. Gain laundry detergent really does smell that good. I bought it when I had a coupon to Harris Teeter (couponing really is that fun) and it really does make your clothes smell nice longer than other detergents do. 
3. I have too much stuff. Please feel free to knock on my door and demand free things. I'll give them to you. 
4. The dogs love all the space they have in the new house and have taken to chasing each other full speed from floor to floor and room to room. 
5. OK that's all love you bye.

Don't. Be. A bully.

Can't we all just get along? Why do people have to be unnecessarily rude? Or less considerate than they feasibly could be?

There are bullies everywhere. People just going around being rude, demeaning, condescending, choose your own synonym. Don't get me wrong, there are people who aren't total jerks. But they're few and far between (but if you're reading this blog, you're probably one of those few people because otherwise you wouldn't be my friend, and if you're not my friend I'm very surprised you're reading this blog).

I just don't get it. What's their motivation? What's the point? Does it make them feel better to be nasty to others? People who don't know me well might say that I'm quiet, that I don't say much. Sadly, it's not because I'm shy - it's because often I only have mean things to say and I was taught that if you have nothing nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all. I'm sure a few of you are surprised as all you ever hear me say is mean stuff but that just means I really like you because you'll know that while I say mean stuff, 90% of it is in the interest of humor rather than actual malice. It appears to me that a lot of other people didn't learn that.

I get it, I'm 27, I shouldn't STILL be surprised when I discover that a lot of people are just generally mean. But I still am. What's the deal, people? Haven't you heard that you should be a buddy, not a bully?

I don't know how you teachers out there do it, because I'm pretty sure if I saw bullying at my school I would put the bully in a bucket filled with hotdogs and velveeta that had been left in the sun for a week (you have your revenge fantasies, I have mine).

I think this is very useful for everyone to remember, especially the last letter:

I think sometimes people just need to be reminded to live gently. Life is going to be hard for everyone at one moment or another. We don't need to make it harder on each other. 

End preach.

Do you love Taylor Swift?

If not, are you sure we're friends? Just kidding. Ok maybe not really.

Anyway, I effing LOVE her music.

I kind of hate her face and frankly it annoys me (like, her literal face annoys me. Not her facial expressions or anything, kind of her personality, mostly just her face). But her music is awesome.

Especially the song Dear John on the album Speak Now.

Can you imagine having been a famous recording artist as a teenager and having had the ability to publicly lambast the guy who screwed you over (coughjohnmayercough)? HELL YES. That would have been AMAZING. It's like an angry text message or passive aggressive facebook status times 1 BAJILLION.

So I just appreciate that she has the balls to have done that. The balls or the drama unique to a teenage girl, whichever. I'm just like, Hell YES Taylor Swift. Rock on.

And screw you John Mayer. JK Love you long time John Mayerrrrrr!

Watch the fire burn, burn, burn, watch me heat it up

Guess who's at work today and is SUPER BITTER ABOUT IT?

This girl.

Guess who's listening to Willow Smith's single "Fireball" and is feeling equal parts shame and enjoyment?

Same person.

Now you can, too! Make sure you listen to Nicki Minaj's rap. It's funny. Omg this video is killing me.

Finally...

Did you forget I had a book review blog?

Did you think I had as well?

I didn't. It's updated.

www.ilikebooksmorethanpeople.blogspot.com

And by the way...

...over the holidays I re-read all three books in the Hunger Games trilogy and saw "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in theaters. Both were amazing. Please follow suit.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2012 everyone! I hope you're all looking forward to the new year.

I don't usually write about cooking on the blog but this thing I tried last night worked out particularly well so I thought I'd share. For our special New Year's Eve dinner we had filet mignon off the grill with chipotle mac & cheese, salad, bernaise (sp?) sauce, and brussels sprouts with bacon. The brussels sprouts in particular were good and it was a new recipe I hadn't tried before.

I looked online at different brussels sprouts & bacon recipes but none of them really stood out to me, so instead I just roasted the brussels sprouts as I usually do while frying the bacon up on the stove top, then made the sprouts a little crispier by frying them up in the bacon fat while the bacon drained on paper towels. SO if you're interested in the "recipe"...this is what I did...it's going to be very exact and specific, so ya know, be impressed (jk):

you'll need:
1 lb brussels sprouts
4 slices thick cut bacon
olive oil
salt & pepper


preheat the oven to 350*. usually i roast my brussels sprouts at a higher temperature but this seemed to work so i'm just telling you exactly how i did it this time. trim the rough end off all of the brussels sprouts & peel off the first few leaves (they tend to be dirty). slice sprouts in half. drizzle a liberal amount of olive oil on a sheet pan and spread the sprouts out so they all have some room to breathe. toss them around in the olive oil, then sprinkle on salt and pepper to taste. put them in the oven for 20 min.

while the sprouts are cooking, fry up the bacon to your desired level of done-ness (i cooked it over medium-high heat so that the fat didn't get too angry jumping out of the pan), then move to a plate covered in a paper towel to drain. do not drain the fat out of the pan. when the grease has absorbed into the paper towels, chop the bacon into bite size pieces. once the sprouts have come out of the oven, tip them into the pan where you cooked the bacon and toss them around for no more than 5 minutes. you'll be able to tell when they're done to your desired level - i personally like the outer leaves to be pretty brown and crispy, maybe you'll like them to stay more green. do your thing - then drain them on paper towels and toss with the bacon prior to serving.

i never take pictures of my food because it would just be a blurry shot of my hand moving to my mouth, so...use your imagination ;-)

enjoy! happy new year again :-)

Feels like...

Do you know the song "Feels Like Today" by Rascal Flatts? If not, go listen to it, then come back. Listen to the lyrics. I'm thinking about these ones in particular:

"You treat life like a picture

But it's not a moment frozen in time

It's not gonna wait 

'til you make up your mind, at all"

I was just thinking about how true that is. Is it just because we're still so young? Or will it always be this way? Will life always move this quickly? Just think about how much life has changed in the last 5 years...in my close group of friends alone, some of us have gotten married, some of us have moved all around the country (some a few times), some of us have taken jobs, changed jobs (also some a few times), we've had nieces and nephews be born, and some of us are even starting to think about kids (I am not in that group, I will sit on a couch and make eye contact with your baby but that's about as far as it goes).

We were all in such similar life situations when we were in college together. The details may have varied greatly, but the big picture items, the bolded items in our biographies, were about the same. Born within a couple of years of each other. Chose the same college. Chose the same sorority. Now we're scattered all over the place. 

I didn't appreciate it then. I loved it, don't get me wrong, but I feel that if I had known then what I know how - how hard it is to find another group of people like that, how rare the gift of living within a floor of almost all of your best friends at once is - maybe I wouldn't have slept until 10 everyday. There were some choices I definitely would have made differently...my priorities would have shifted. I look back now and I appreciate it more, and I wonder if there will be a time in my life where I look back at where I am now and feel the same way. And I wonder - if so, what should I be doing now to make the most of this time? 

Shouldn't we always feel this way? Always wonder how we can squeeze all the juice out of life? 

Am I the only one who gets tired thinking about that? Just food for thought...

I fixed it!

Kind of. It's actually still not correct, but hopefully only 5% of you will notice that, and of that 5% hopefully 0 will judge me.

Anyway, yay! :)

Also...

As you can tell, I tried to update the blog background to a Christmas theme, but totally messed it up. Anyone know how to get the top part to go away so that the whole background will be the Christmas theme??

Merry Christmas week

Hi all,
Sorry I haven't blogged in so long. I just haven't thought of anything in recent weeks that I felt like blogging about, and I didn't want to "blog for the sake of blogging."

So just wanted to stop by and say hello, and wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, Happy other-religious-holiday-I-didn't-know-you-celebrated.

Also, I'm pretty sure that spell check could suggest pretty much any spelling for the word Hanukkah and I'd be like "Yes. That is correct."

Just to make this post slightly more interesting, please enjoy this picture of our tree. The bottom 1/3 does not have any decorations on it anymore thanks to the destructive ways of Ronin the Beagle and Mugsy the Mutt. We discovered recently that Ronin has a particular affinity for chewing on electrical wire. Thankfully, the tree was not "on" when this discovery was made.

Eat, drink and be merry!
B

And then there was Pie.

In recent years, I've provided the pies for my family's Thanksgiving celebration. I started out only doing pumpkin, then I expanded my repertoire to include apple. My pumpkin pies have always been a source of pride for me - I get super decorative with them and basically act like I slaved all day to create this amazing example of pie-ness, when in reality the decorations I use are extremely easy to make. Evidence of pumpkin deliciousness below, including my creepy finger.

ooooh, ahhhh etc. 

I also make Oreo cookies that look like turkeys with two girls who I used to babysit when they were younger - but now we just enjoy hanging out together, so every year we get together on Thanksgiving and make the cookies for our individual celebrations. Unfortunately we aren't going to be able to get together this year, so I will be going about my Oreo turkey making solo (tear). If you want to make these for your own celebration they're quite easy - take an oreo cookie, cover the top in chocolate frosting, add a chocolate kiss at one edge of the circle, then fill the remaining space with candy corn. Finally, use frosting as glue to attach a red hot to the tip of the chocolate kiss to make the gobbler. Pretty cute. I personally think they taste disgusting so I never eat mine, but others appear to like them and they're just so darn cute. Don't they look festive??

Anyway, on to the point of this post. Before Thanksgiving every year, I have a trial period where I test my pie recipes to make sure that they're as good as they can be on the actual day. I intended to do trial runs of my apple and pumpkin pies this weekend. I got all the ingredients at the store and cleaned the kitchen in preparation. Then I realized that I had only kept 1 pie plate out of storage (I have many...don't judge). So I walked over to Rite Aid to get the disposable kind, only to find that they do not carry them. If you want a shake weight or a cake pan in the shape of a SNOWMAN'S FACE, Rite Aid is the place for you. Pie plates? No. 

Ab. Surd. 

So anyway, I could only make one pie. Sad times. I decided to do the apple since I've done the pumpkin so many times - and last year the apple pie crust fell apart and left me in the kitchen around 2 am having a panic attack and throwing dough in the trash only to start over again anew (wheeee!). I figured I could use as much practice as possible. 

I used this crust recipe and this pie recipe. If you ever intend to make a pie again - or for the first time, whatever the case may be - MAKE SURE you read that tutorial first. I have made so many pies and had so many frustrating experiences with the crust falling apart - but the method of rolling the dough out between parchment paper/wax paper SAVED MY LIFE yesterday. It seriously is life-changing. Plus, then you don't have to wash your rolling pin and try to get the residue from shortening/butter off of it, which let's be real never really is 100% clean again. So anyway - make your crust that way!! 

Here's the pie in its different life stages:

newborn

childhood - with caramel topping poured on but before baking

adulthood - out of the oven!

I recommend that you try the above recipes, they're very easy to follow and the apple pie that results is another one of those recipes that seems like way more effort went into it than actually did. Which is always awesome.

Oh, and now please enjoy a gratuitous cute beagle pic. He's super soft. Mugsy gets all the love on this blog, so wanted to throw some Ronin's way:

where's my pie?

I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving and gets to have all the different foods they want to eat! :)

I'll regret this later

I'm not sure how many of you have heard this story...and I'm sure I'm going to get mocked endlessly about this, but I just thought of it randomly and started laughing so I thought it would be worth sharing...because the humor that can be derived from this story is relatively more important than the amount of damage my ego will sustain by sharing it.

A while back (around March of 2010) I got a personal trainer. You guys have heard the beginning of this story and you're probably thinking "I remember this..." but I'm pretty sure you've never heard this next part.

So I got a personal trainer. He was roughly 5 years old, but he looked like Channing Tatum (and none of you ever met him, so you can't refute that statement). After a few weeks of sessions, he asked if I'd like to have lunch with him over the weekend. I agreed to it (what did I have to lose? answer: dignity), but we never ended up going to lunch. He made up a reason why, I believed it (see above re: loss of dignity), and he asked if he could make it up to me by cooking dinner for me at his apartment the next night.

In the course of our training sessions, he'd occasionally mention a roommate. So I was thinking to myself "Hmmm, chances he's trying to lure me to his apartment to murder me are significantly reduced by the fact that he has a roommate, so I'll go with it." (Shhhh, just let the story happen.) So I go to his apartment the next night, and lo and behold, it's a one bedroom apartment. When I asked about the mysterious, seemingly non-existent roommate, he told me that he'd moved to this new apartment within the last week. Add ten murder points.

So, with my chances of being murdered back at a higher level, I chose the chair right next to the door (subtract five murder points). Joe (the trainer) starts cooking dinner across the room in the kitchen. The door keeps making noises as if it's being opened (his accomplice, perhaps?), so he looks over his shoulder at me and asks me to throw the deadbolt on the door, at which point I was pretty sure my chances of being murdered were reaching 100%.

He's cooking chicken and cutting it up with this gigantic knife before he throws it in the pan, and as he's cooking he's telling me a story. For the sake of the story, at one point he walks over to me, knife in hand, and grabs one of my shoulders while gesturing with the knife in his other hand. At this point I legit thought about screaming and making a run for it...but clearly, he did not in fact murder me.

So I'm telling this story to my friend Heather the next day after she asks how it went and I tell her everything above, ending the story with "But luckily, he didn't murder me, and the chicken was pretty good."

Heather's response: "I'm unclear as to why you went alone to his apartment when you thought there was ANY chance, let alone a GOOD chance, that the night would end in your murder."

Things that make me awkward #324326

...when I'm sitting at my desk listening to music and I sneeze, but I can't hear if anyone says "Bless you" so in order to not be rude I just wait a few seconds then tentatively say "Thank you...?"

Pay it Forward

This afternoon I decided to leave the office and go to Chipotle to pick up lunch. To get out of the Chipotle parking lot, you basically have to risk your life and pull halfway into the road to see if there is oncoming traffic. Problem being, if there is, it is probably going to plow you down the road as soon as you can see it.

So I'm inching my car into traffic, trying to see if I can make it, and this kind pedestrian who is waiting to cross the street and can see around the parked cars that are obstructing my view holds his hand up to me to indicate that it isn't clear for me to pull out into traffic, and then once it is, waves me along.

I thought that was just the nicest thing. So just thought I'd share.


Oh, and then I ate a burrito the size of a baby and a bag of chips. Did you know that if you train for & run a marathon, it is NOT a guarantee that you will be marathon skinny for the rest of your life without working out ever?


So...remind me why I did that?