Cookie madness

Oatmeal cranberry cherry cookies... I had the urge to bake and my engineer's best buddy's son was suffering from new baby sibling fatigue, so I made a batch (sneaking in some whole wheat flour -- what he doesn't know...) and labelled it "For James Only!"

Oddly, despite being a WW recipe, it (a) did not suggest adding in some whole wheat flour (I subbed 1/4 c. of the 3/4 c. of flour) and (b) advocated a sugar glaze on top of the already sweet flavor (I skipped that altogether).

My engineer pronounced his portion of the batch tasty (yay!) and I kept only 1/3 of the very smallest cookies of the batch at home.

I have the urge to bake more stuff, perhaps because the icky, wet, dreary weather -- perhaps because I have no work to do at the office since everyone seemed to have taken the last week off, maybe to try out some new recipes for the upcoming cookie week(s) at work, and oh yeah, possibly to work off some stress while I'm waiting to get laid off. Feh.

On to more cheerful topics, like the almost finished London Beanie hat I am knitting for my sweetie. He picked the colors (black and grey -- the black is from the leftover part of the pound of yarn I used for the harf) and Spot, a friend's hat, models the result.

I used 2 strands of the black, so there would be no irritating wind gaps once it's worn. However, although it fits in circumference (I increased the number of stitches in the pinhead-sized pattern) it turned out to be too long. DOH!

So I frogged the damn thing down to a few rows above the top grey stripe, have rethreaded the yearn (onto 16" size 8s) and now contemplate more supertight knitting with the Caron black. Ugh. I like the tightness of the results fabric, but it's a pain to knit. Oh well. I will be happy when he wears it all winter. :-)

We also spent Thanksgiving at his parents' friends house: their friends, the friends' 3 adult children, with 2 spouses, and 5 grandchildren. Oh my. All 4 of us -- my engineer, moi, and his parents -- were very excited by the blessed silence at his parents house afterward. The other family was very nice, but 16 people, 5 of whom are young children, in a small house = lots of noise.

Happy news: I managed not to gain any weight (miraculous! thank you, WW strategies!) and hit the exercise room today at my engineer's condo... where I discovered that my PDA had run out of batteries. DOH! 30 minutes on the elliptical with no music = booooooring. And now, my sweetheart is curled up, sick in bed with a bug of some kind, sporadically napping.

Along with a rousing round of Tiger Woods Wii golf last night (where I sucked massively) such has been the exciting tale of my Turkey Day holoday weekend.

Food frenzy

I never understood viscerally why oysters were considered so... sexy... until tonight. Oh my.

My engineer, his best friend, and I had dinner at a super yummy place in Jersey City tonight, Edward's Steakhouse, where the guys ordered from the raw bar. I forget the type of oyster THIS one was, but oh my... putting aside the, um, shape of the contents, the sheer SIZE of the oyster was, well, gargantuan. I mean, look at the fork next to it. Jeez.

Jimmy, my engineer's buddy, was similarly impressed. So much so that he took a photo of it with his iPhone.

I'm still sighing over my "Flat Iron Steak, cocoa and coffee dusted, with wild mushroom mashed potatoes" garnished with julienned (flash?) fried sweet potatoes [like the potatoes in this photo] -- the meat was delicious, and the 'taters had an entire creamery's worth of butter and milk/cream in there, but it was all: Oh. So. Good.

And the other stuff...! Like the homemade potato chips (which my sweetheart mercifully moved down the bar, out of reach) which you can see in the lower left corner of this photo.

I guess the gazillion points I had tonight are just getting me used to the foodfest coming up tomorrow, where I am informed there will be such things as pineapple upside down cake made by my sweetie's mom (yum!!!) and sweet potato casserole w/ marshmallows (umm...ick, and not made by his mom).

Since I don't want to step on anyone's toes by bringing something that is their specialty (it is an extended gathering, with many family friends of my engineer's parents), I settled for 2 dozen roses.

In preparation for tomorrow's festivities (and tonight's decadence), I spent part of this afternoon in the exercise room here at my engineer's condo complex. Since it's frequently deserted, I was also unafraid to sing along with my mp3 player. Heh.

And now, I am going to crawl under the covers (it's freezing in the NYC area tonight) and wait for my fella to return from hanging out with his buddies during an impromptu atop at the Man Cave: since I used his keys to come home, I need to buzz him in.

Brilliant

Which is what the trees in Central Park are at the moment, particularly these golden-colored trees in the fall.


Being an utter city girl, I have NO IDEA what kind of trees they actually are. I only know that they are beautiful and I spend each fall trying to capture the precise shade of golden-orange-yellow the leaves turn, right before they fall.

Brilliant. Not what you might call my boss. She's a perfectly nice woman, but I don't really think it's a bright move to have a staff meeting to tell people that management doesn't have any news and has no idea when they might.



Or my newest favorite move: to call me at home yesterday morning on my day off (oddly enough, I seem to want to take all of my remaining vacation days for the year ASAP) to tell me that they will start announcing cuts on Monday, but they have NO IDEA who, or how many, or how long the process will take. WTF?!



Now I ask you: do you think I might have been HAPPIER not knowing this?!?!


Going to go use my engineer's exercise room now to go work off some stress.



And then tonight, he and I and his best friend as going to have an exciting night of ordering in & playing Tiger Woods Golf on his buddy's Wii. I am addicted to that game, although I have never actually played golf in real life (heh), probably because I am guaranteed to hit the ball (unlike in real life). My Mii (Wii avatar) looks like an ethnic Lara Croft (*snicker*).

Do Over

Today's post is in honor of the timeless principle of "do overs".

One of the things I like best about pottery is that nothing is irreversible ... until it gets fired (think: Mesopotamian shards found by archeologists) ... and sometimes even then: shards can become mosaic tabletops or picture frames, a la craft shows.

Witness the "oopsie" demonstrated above. My engineer was quite bummed when he accidentally shattered my little jar by knocking it over on my nighttable ... my folding iron bookcase used as a nighttable, that is.

But a little craft glue (sometimes it's quite handy being a crafty girl) and voila! Good as new, since stoneware is quite forgiving. (Porcelain would have been more likely to shatter into a Humpty Dumpty number of pieces.)

Witness also the unfired coffee mugs I made this month. I was pleased with the one on the left, but one of the ceramics gurus at the studio pointed out that the handle on the other mug was perhaps a wee bit thin.

Aside from the aesthetic considerations (his work is just beautiful*) consider what might happen once monster mug is filled with liquid. As any of you who have hauled around gallon jugs of milk or water knows, it's damn heavy.

(* Side note: the link above is to the holiday sale on Dec. 12-14 at the studio where I take my classes. The works are really reasonably priced, and Mr. Neil [see blue plate in center photo] also teaches the glazing class.)

So after painstakingly joining the handle to the body of the mug (you have NO IDEA how long that can take, even aside from drying time) I proceeded to rip it off and start all over.

Starting alll over includes making a whole new set of 6 handles (drat -- I thought I had taken photos of thos, but apparently not) from which I eventually selected one which I slowly attached to the mug body ... again. (see the one on the left in the lower photo) The water bottle is shown for scale since I like my cups BIG.

Although I'm now quite satisfied with the width of the handle, I'm still not sure that I like the curve, now that I see it in the photo.

Luckily, it is still wrapped and awaiting bisque firing, so I can probably (not definitely, only possibly) alter the curvature. The one on the right has gone off to meet the kiln, after which it will be staring-at-the-sample-tiles-wall, decision time re: glazing. (There is a final firing after the glaze is applied.)

The tea set on the right was made by someone else at the pottery studio. Just THINK about the number of steps it took to get to the final result. Her stuff is fabulous and I have promptly forgotten the mixture of glazes she used to get this lovely finish. I will have to ask her again. (Hi Diana!)

It worked!

There were three of these Zipcars parked @ the corner of Broadway and Wall Street tonight, covered in LEDs, and attracting many photos, including my cellphone. And CNN just called the election! Yippee!

Inactive

That was my voter status since I have been shamefully slack. I mean, normally, there is no chance Manhattan would ever go Republican, but I cannot stand That Other Guy so much that I made it a point to go vote early.

But apparently not early enough.

This was the line @ 7:50am, and it was despite the fact that our polling station was prepared and had set up another room in a second building as well, to handle the turnout. (My engineer voted in Jersey City at 6:30am...and was already #61 in line.)

Luckily, the electoral workers were all very well organized and came out to get people from the different districts who needed to go on different lines, etc. Unfortunately, that still didn't make my wait shrink to less than 90 minutes, so I was quite late for work. Oops. Oh well. (Since everyone in my department votes, and since I sent them THIS photo @ 8am, they were blase.)

In any case, I had checked on my voter registration status online yesterday & came prepared with the various proofs of ID needed, and voted the old fashioned way: by paper ballot. Hooray! I am now officially "active"...and likely to get summoned for jury duty. Heh.

When I left the polling station to go to work (at 9:30...) my cellphone company text messaged me, warning that I was exceeding my usage on my monthly calling plan. I got to the office and called customer service (one of the proofs of ID was a utility bill, and now I KNOW why there's that commercial about insanely confusing wireless billing statements) since I could not imagine adding my mother to my plan would change the usage that much.

Since October 15th, my mother has used 893 minutes! That's 14.8 hours! I feel like I have a teenager on my family plan. She and I had A Little Talk at lunchtime and I also changed my calling plan to 1,400 minutes/month. Ouch.

I'm going to actually go try to do some work now (while I still HAVE a job...so I can pay for the phone bill!) since I have eaten and calmed down from my calling plan calamity. Sheesh.

The Harf - Pt. 2

The harf! It lives! And just in time for Halloween too.

And Al loves it. In fact, it is currently his Facebook profile photo. (heh) I'm glad to see I did a reasonably good job estimating its length to his height (6'5" or 6'6").

Decorations in my engineer's neighborhood are taken seriously (although content is not -- hee!)

And some serious pumpkin-carving skills are in evidence around the 'hood as well.

This family did not stop at one jack o'lantern either.

Let's see...what else? I'm currently still employed (that is subject to change without notice, of course) although my motivation is somewhat in ebb these days -- what do you expect when you're waiting for a pink slip?

Oh yeah, my mom waited a whole month before asking if I was going to marry my engineer. A month. She's definitely mellowing with age.

And as much as she might drive me CRAZY, I am glad that she's still sharp as a tack, since my brother-in-law has just been diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer's Disease (he's well past mild, unfortunately) which mostly affect his language ability and his recent memory.

He occasionally doesn't recognize my sister (they've been married 34 years) or my older niece. As you can imagine, this is extremely upsetting for them, but he is just puzzled as to why these 2 women occasionally show up at his home. He does not seem to have a problem recognizing my nephew or younger niece however.

On good days, he's just the same as always. And sometimes his comprehension changes at different points of the day (e.g., he'll recognize my sister in the evening but not in the morning, or vice versa). The hard part for my family is never knowing which person they'll "meet".

At least his personality has not changed -- he is still generally a sweet and friendly person, just sometimes confused -- and the neurologist (?) has started him on a course of medication which at least is helping his ability to concentrate.

My nephew is taking him to see anopther specialist, however, so the second doctor is thinking of switching to a different med which specifically targets semantically-related AD.

And if anyone spams me with unsolicited advice about meds and treatments, I am going to freaking flame them (you would be surprised at who trolls random blogs) and then delete their posts

Okay, on to a more calming note to end this post: a pretty shot of the block my engineer lives on, taken during today's unseasonably warm afternoon.