Monday, March 30, 2009

Wait and Hope

Last night as I drove my brother home and we were talking about how life is going, where life is going, I realized that I'm ready. I'm ready to step back into the turbulence of preparing for my clinicals again. I'm emotionally biting at the bit. I don't think I would have gotten here if I hadn't been studying my textbooks, quietly, subtly reassuring myself that this is already in my head, I just needed to put it all back in my heart.

Defeat can crush a person. It's crushed me. But I heal, eventually. It takes time and it takes care. It takes a lot of faith to get back to where I am feeling confident again.

So here I am, realizing that I'll have to stuff my plastic wound with Puffs instead of medical gauze, realizing that I will have to invade friends' bubbles so I can figure out the proper place to stick a needle (without actually doing so, I'm not a sadist) for various injections, realizing that I'll need to find a good place to hang up that practice IV so I can calculate drip rates again.

And in the end, be the nurse that has always been inside.

In the meantime, I'm playing in Sock Madness again. Here's the result of Round One:



Mom is modeling them because they never come out *my* size. They may also wind up in the frog pond so I can have that Dream In Color back. ;) Hey, never said anything I knit was permanent and frogging is the poor girl's stash enhancement.

Happy Monday all!

P.S. here's that Cranberry Orange Muffin recipe I made the other day. It is molto bueno.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The egg

Tomorrow is Sock Madness. Knitting will increase and so will silences so I better come up with this now while I can.



What is up with the hair/makeup trend? At first I thought the Progressive Insurance girl was just an attempt to look like the Esurance cartoon chick with the outrageous eye-makeup, the bubble hair, the brilliant red lipstick. I didn't realize that this was actually the introduction to a new trend.

Girls, why do we try to make a farce of ourselves? Make-up should be used to simply enhance our own true beauty. It should be subtle, not overly done. We should look like women, not cartoon heroines.

After all, don't you remember the 50s and 60s? Do we really want to go back to that again?


I didn't think so.

I am all about makeup and looking nice. But I take my makeup tips from Carmindy, not Wonder Woman.

Just a thought.

The Egg is what I call that outrageous pouch in the back of some ladies' heads that are supposed to make the hair higher or something. I keep expecting an alien to pop out and wink at everyone.

Monday, March 16, 2009

How not to lose weight.



Yesterday our church had a rather competitive Linger Longer, pitching the girls vs. the boys in a bake-off. I had signed up and thought I started off thinking I would make my tried and true Cinnamon Popcorn recipe. But that's kind of dull and who would really eat it? (Well, Melanie would, I know that much, she loves it as much as I do.)

So then I was perusing a few blogs and came across the Meanest Mom's Kitty Litter Cake. AWESOME! After all, who wouldn't consider that just too cool to eat? Or, maybe, too disgusting after I showed off the idea to some family and friends and got the general face-of-displeasure - a wrinkled nose and a gaggy tongue face.

Fine. And after someone mentioned that Girl Scout Cookies are out and that they refused to buy them because they are 1) way expensive and 2) don't benefit much from the sales *anyways*, I thought "Hey! I'll make my own favorite sort of GSCs, Samoas!" You know, the kind that are shortbread with caramel/coconut on top, chocolate bottom and lovely chocolate drizzled all over? Yeah, THOSE. Mmmm. Well, come to find out, the recipe is right HERE. Or rather, the bars are there, I didn't want to get all fussy with actually making cookies.

A few notes:
- unwrapping caramels is a good way to pass the time while toasting the coconut.
- The shortbread is very crumbly (or maybe it needed to be cooked longer/needed more egg).
- It still tastes absolutely fantastic.

Sadly, I was beat out by several other dishes, one of them being a brownie with Caramel Ghiradelli chocolates, pudding, whipped cream, and crumbled Heath bars on top. Just describing it makes my teeth ache, good gravy. And since there were no prizes, there were no hard feelings. And I didn't bring home any leftovers either, which is a win right there.

But maybe next time I'll make the kitty litter cake after all. If I can't win best-of-taste, I'll win the most-disgusting award.

Enjoy the recipes!

Image not copyrighted to me at all, I'm sorry, I'm bad but unrepentant.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Copy & Paste

Because I'm lazy and I write better in my LiveJournal than my Blogger, I'm just transferring my thoughts from there to here.

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After filling out all those Craigslist ads and realizing that instead of a nurse, they wanted an envelope licker and whatever else they wanted for WorkFromHome, I started getting spam emails. That's fine, I can always set a filter on the ones that get past the Gmail Spam Ninjas but now I'm starting to get Mystery Phone Calls. Those are harder to ignore, especially when I'm waiting for people to ask me to work for them. One was from area code 303 but hung up on me when I answered the phone. The other was "Restricted". They both get the finger.

In other news, my sis sent to my mom who forwarded to me a link to The Meanest Mom. Who has this Youtube Video in one of her posts but I'm eager to show you all NOW:



Finally, last night I headed out to Borders to meet some of the smartest, wittiest, loveliest group of people I have ever had the honor to meet, RUBBERNECKERS:



We offended some Borders customers with our flagrant touching, grasping, and groping of balls (of yarn) and other such inappropriate behavior and conversation. It was awesome. Definitely going back again. And yes, we broke the record of number of attendants to the Utah Knitters Knit Night ever.