Pick a rose just to hide my face...

How to spend your "friday" night:

Listening to the new Portishead
Chomping on a cookie or two
Burning a mix CD for the bowling alley peeps to just "happen" upon
Looking at Muse icons and waiting to immerse fully into all that Muse love

800-685-0809

These assholes keep calling me. They called me 17 times in the last week. I finally got pissed off and got on the Do Not Call site and filed a complaint for each and every time they've called me, EVER. They've called THREE TIMES TODAY! DUDE, it's only 9am!

So, this time, when they'd called the third time in 30 minutes, I answered the phone. Said nothing. Then said hello...and then got a confused young man's voice also saying hello. I asked who's calling, and Adam and whoever the hell he's with was asking for some Edward dude. I told him that no one of that name is here, and told him in the most exasperating way to stop calling me. If I have to, I'll bust out the "this is a business line and you're keeping me from customers, so stop harassing me and take me off your list" speech.

Grrr. I hate waking up to assholes calling me for no good reason.

Timing is a wonderful thing, you know?

My car's on it's last legs. Yes, the SHEEP probably isn't going to last much longer. This is a sad thing. I got that car in high school and had planned to run it into the ground before I got a newer car. It was great...it was clean and the previous owner didn't smoke in it, but the odometer busted a month after I got it, the radio and antenna busted a good three years later, got the shocks and struts replaced before student teaching, had my battery die WHILE student teaching, got this thing out here to Washington, had to have the brakes and rotors fixed in the late summer, and now my transmission is going.

It took a while, but I came to terms with the fact that yes, I'll have to get another car. I thought this one would last longer, but it IS 16 years old and it's well over 150,000 miles. I'm ready. The timing sucks, but I'm ready.

Thing is, my parents are all wanting me to get my car fixed. I've told them already that I'm not gonna drop a ton of money in that car only to have something else crap out on me. It's time for a newer car. So whatever happens, they'll (obviously) just have to deal with it. After all, it's my car and my life and I'm not living at home. I'm out in the world.

Why does the timing suck? I'm busy today...I work tomorrow through Tuesday, and Wednesday through Sunday I'll be back in Illinois. Our taxes aren't filed yet, and I'd like to use what I'd be getting back to help out as a down payment on the car. I don't want to wipe out or even halve our savings. There's one car I've got my eye on but the price will not last on it. I've found a few others, too, but I'm worried for those as well. I'm on an extreme time crunch and I don't want to miss out.

So yes...this is the predicament I'm in. Car now or car later...I'm not sure what'll happen. All I know is that I'm not keen on driving the SHEEP...I'm afraid I'll get stranded somewhere with it, and Carl's not keen on me driving it, either. I just hope this all gets worked out sooner rather than later.

So my loyalty to DMI's Peoria branch died today. Actually, it probably died a long time ago, as things and people made it less fun and that's just no good. So a friend transferred to another branch and I ended up heading there as well. The RM there ACTUALLY IS INVOLVED WITH THE COWORKERS! Yes, these things do happen. And the RM doesn't seem to be a rude wet blanket either, so that's awesome sauce as well. I hope things go well there.

So now it's just me rearranging my desk and reminding myself that I NEED to go to bed soon. I work at 4am and then I've gotta pick up Carl from dental surgery. Fun fun. Oh yeah, and the transmission may be going out in my car. Even better.

Pitchfork has up a stream of R.E.M.'s new single. It makes me smile and gives me goosebumps and it's the first time I've been really excited about a release of theirs since...erm...oh dear. Reveal? I used to really love that album...but yeah. April 1st, please!

I just dropped about $90 on getting a year's worth of pictures developed. Oh trust me, it's very worth it. And to put this in perspective, I'm getting doubles...a set for me, and a set for my family back home.

That being said, I can pick them up sometime after 11pm, so if I'm totally still awake after watching the new Ace of Cakes, I'll be all over those 500+ pictures.

Upon watching the first ep of Torchwood:

OH HELL YES! Thank you for bringing back the Jack we all know and love. Thank you for ending the Gwen and Owen bitchfest. And, this may make me into a huge ass, but thank you for actually making me interested in seeing the rest of the series WITHOUT relying purely on getting through till we've got Martha.


(Jury still out on whether or not I'll watch Doctor Who. They've still pissed me off with the treatment of Martha, but I look forward to seeing her on Torchwood.)

Well, no one will be able to tell me that I didn't get my walking in this weekend...

Tomorrow my car gets to go in and get a barrage of things done to it of a maintenance variety. I won't go into the list, but everything should have been done a long time ago but a long time ago I didn't have money for it. *shrug* Now I do, and now hopefully it'll all get taken care of (and I'll have a happy sheep again!)

But since I've gotta drop off my car at 8am and Carl doesn't get off work until 9am, I've got time to kill with no real place to go. I had originally planned to walk over to Top, but that's three miles away. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you...that's just a bit more walking than I'd care to do at that hour. So instead I'll walk the other direction to the ghetto looking Albertsons and spend some time there. (Or I could walk to Safeway and not have to cross Canyon...that's tempting.)

Either way, I'll be getting a good two miles of walking in. At 8am. When the temperature will be hovering somewhere around freezing with a chance of rain and snow. That...that'll be interesting. But I'm up for it. My iPod is charged and I'm gonna set out my warm clothes and psych myself up for a walk longer than I'm used to, and then go chill at Carl's parents' house until my car is done. (Or until Carl wakes up.) Not quite the way I'd like to spend my last day off before eight straight days of working alone in what has become quite the shit hole I'll call work, but I'm sure I'll get over it.

*sigh*

I need to be in a better frame of mind before I go to bed...

*DIES! And DIES AGAIN!*

Oh please let this be true. Yes, yes, I know...the books keep getting raped over and over again. But this...this has the minute possibility of maybe turning out at least 60% correct! And that, my friends, is really something!

Haha, no, not one of *those* moments. Cakes, people! We're talking cakes!

( Come see my beautiful display! )

So, a few months back Carl and I saw Interpol up in Seattle. Concert rocked despite some of the shit with the people around us, and we actually were pretty amused (and enjoyed) listening to Liars, who opened for the 'pol.

Now Liars is playing at the end of the month in Seattle....and we're seriously considering going. Actually, that'd be pretty cool. And it's only $13 a pop...assuming we don't get the tickets from Ticketmaster.

Alrighty folks...the GJ is dead. GJ themselves are allowing themselves to kick the bucket, so here I'll stay. Hope you'll stay with me, too.

That is all.

(Note: Drop $40 on a permanent account and get the Daria Moodtheme up again.)

So, I guess this means that, despite what I've heard about how this HP movie will be conducted, the big ending will certainly be there.


Oh, and today is my one year anniversary of moving to Washington. I feel like I should celebrate by making a cake or something, but I don't need to be eating that. And actually, I was gonna make some sandwich bread instead.

So today...today I couldn't get done what I wanted to, and had to deal with Mr. Un-iced White Cake Extra Raspberry Filling And Then I Never Buy The Cake Dude, who sucks and likes to rip us off. (And, according to Deb, just like to watch women work. *shudder*)

( The Gorey Details... )

In other news, the New Year approaches quickly and I planned to be in bed already. And I'm hella hungry, but don't want to eat as I'll be up in five hours anyway. I passed out watching a Mythbusters marathon and woke up to the cat jumping in my lap, cleaned myself up a bit and then called home in time for their ball drop. And then got on here, fully intending to just shut down the compy and ended up downloading some 20 songs off a music blog. Oops :p

Anyhoo, I hope you all have a wonderful (and safe) New Year. I hope that all your wishes for yourself and others come true, and that you're year is full of so much happiness and good cheer that you can barely stand yourself! :)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

So, work today was less sucky. A person of interest from yesterday's immature shenanigans was upbeat and "normal" today, without making any mention or reference to her ridiculous behavior yesterday. UGHHHHHHHHH. Great. Now I get to give Jey the lowdown but I can't remember quite everything as it happened. Nancy...little help? Or maybe I should just go, "hey, she's up to her same tricks again, and I'm offended/pissed off by how I'm getting treated, and you need to step in and take her down now or you'll be going down with her."

Carl just bit my hair. WTF?

I'm tired. I left Dad a voicemail of me singing him Happy Birthday, as it is his birthday today :) I just hope no one at home goes out driving tomorrow. Second week in a row that they're getting an ice storm, and this one looks BAD (I miss Theresa Bryant and Terry Swails getting me all worked up about the weather).

I'm sleepy. LOL...I'm tired, I'm sleepy...already ate dinner (more like late lunch) so yeah...fun fun.

Yeah, nothing else to report, really.

Tis good to listen to OK Computer again. It's been a LONG time.

Work's been kicking my ass lately. Not like overworked and under stimulated, but more like under appreciated and disrespected. I'm getting REALLY sick of it. It got old a long time ago, and when higher-ups can only act in an immature manner...well, then it's time to get knocked down a few pegs. Of course, me being the lowly person I am can't do as much as I like, but I'm certainly not gonna take this lying down.

I'm sure Carl and I scared the shit out of the cat earlier today. We were making burgers on our grill pan (wedding gift!) and about smoked the apartment out. Two open doors, an open window and lots of fans later, dinner was served...and good. Especially my glazed carrots. Num num.

Got my Christmas tree and ornaments from the parents on Friday and promptly got the tree up and decorated. It was nice to get that up. Didn't have an appropriate topper for it, so I put Carl's viking helmet on it. It looks hella sweet.

(Man, I LOVE OK Computer! Best purchase I ever made without knowing a thing about Radiohead. Never heard the song "Creep", but I'd heard good things about this album and bought it on a whim. So, so great. Takes me way, way back to high school when I listened to this all the time. And thus started the "wrong" feeling of Radiohead = happy music. I've been told that only Gen-X'ers would see Radiohead in such a way. Already got the honorary title.

Heh...Radiohead as happy music...much like Depeche Mode is happy music, right?)

Nevermind...the rest of this post is gone. I'm gonna sing along to "The Tourist" and be on my merry way.

I've been jonesing for cookies for a few days now, and since Carl has requested scratch cookies instead of cake-mix cookies, I'm continually looking through the five different cookbooks of chocolate chip cookie recipes to decide what I want to make.

Yesterday I tried a recipe from a book Katrina got me for my birthday. It was a rather easy recipe (and it used only one of my sticks of butter instead of two):

1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons of flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
Pinch of salt
6 Tablespoons of granulated sugar
6 Tablespoons of brown sugar
8 Tablespoons of butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon Vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 cup chocolate chips

Mix dry ingredients, mix butter and sugars and vanilla, then add egg, then slowly add your dry ingredients, then add your chips. Bake at 375 for four minutes, take out your cookie sheet and bang it on your counter or range twice, then put back in oven for 5 minutes. Ooookay.

I'm sorry. Those sucked. They were crispy as hell, and I'm not a crispy cookie person. Soft, chewy cookies all the way, man.

Disappointed in my cookie failure, I vowed to make cookies again tonight, only using my America's Test Kitchen recipe. Well, that didn't happen as I needed two eggs to make my macaroni and cheese (I'll get to that later) and I needed four eggs total. Again I worried about which recipe to use now that I had my egg limit, but opted to make the Haggen recipe found on their bag of chips. Why not, right?

I tossed the bag, so I won't give you the recipe here, but let me just sum this up for you.

Bad recipe.

Either the cookies were too big and didn't cook all the way without getting burned bottoms, or they finally rose to a nice height and were overcooked and brown. You should see the progression in my cookies by sheets baked: sheet 1 - large, underdone, soft cookies, sheet 2 - smaller, overcooked, crunchy cookies, sheet 3 - smaller, less overcooked, semi-crunchy cookies, sheet 4 - smaller, slightly underdone and brown edged, softer cookies.

Haggen cookie recipe can go down the drain.

I know there's a cookie recipe that works. It exists in the Betty Crocker "red pie" cookbook, which came out in the 1970s and was insanely popular. How do I know? Because my Mom owns it, and the prices that book is going for on eBay are nuts. But we've used it numerous times to the point that I tweaked the recipe. Of course, the recipe and those tweaks sit in a drawer in Mom and Dad's kitchen back home, where the cover to the book now sits on top of the book itself, disconnected, and numerous pages have had to have those ring-protector things put on as they've ripped out over the years. That cookbook has been through hell and back, but it's got some of my favorite recipes ever in there.

So tonight I set out to try to find it. First stop: eBay! Before I realized what keywords to look for, I did a general Betty Crocker cookbook search and looked until I found pictures that jogged my memory. And lo and behold, there are many of Mom's cookbooks up to be bought. Only problem is that they're just as popular now as they were back when Mom got her book, so the price runs up on the books quite fast. At the moment, there is just one that is at a beginner's price, and I wouldn't feel comfortable thinking about bidding on that thing until it was much closer to it's closing date. The others? I'm not going there.

Not a huge fan of eBay, though, so I looked elsewhere. Amazon has some great, mint condition versions up for the buying. Too bad they cost in the hundreds. Yes, over $100 for a 30-year-old cookbook. Alibris has the book for $65, but I don't think I'd part with that much money for that book, no matter how great it is.

I guess that when I get back home, I'm just gonna have to go through Mom's cookbook and photocopy the recipes I don't know, but love, so that I can have that gilded chocolate chip cookie recipe in my grasp again. And my chocolate chip cake recipe. And my french silk frosting recipe. And my hamburger stroganoff recipe. And my buttons and bowknots recipe. And my sugar cookie recipe. And my snickerdoodle recpie. And my soda biscuit recipe. And my....

( Image heavy post! Whee!!! )

I watched Iron Chef America last night, where the battle was Iron Chef Cat Cora and Paula Deen against Robert Irvine and Tyler Florence. They were making holiday treats, so of course I was all over this episode. Missed out on the first part because of, erm, activities...but came into the show maybe 10 minutes in.

Paula made these fudge balls, and if I remember correctly, she dipped them in caramel (and then white chocolate?) and then in peanuts and had them on sticks for the eating. It looked so overly sugary that I felt sick to my stomach, but hey, that's holiday treats for you.

Anyway, Alton Brown kept going on and on about one of the fudge ingredients. I'm quite sure the guy has heard of such a recipe, but he just continued to rail on Paula for using a "processed cheese" or "cheese product" in her fudge.

It's called Velveeta, Alton, and believe it or not, it CAN be used in fudge. Here's a recipe. It's southern, Alton. YOU'RE SOUTHERN! Hell, Paula isn't even completely southern (as Robert Irvine pointed out) and you mean to tell me you've never heard of Velveeta Fudge?!

For SHAME!



Oh yeah, Tyler, nice square log you had there. *snort*