Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Signs The I'm Getting Old




At 25, I understand that a significant number of you will roll your eyes and say "quit your bitchin'". I get that. But after recent events and revelations, I thought that it's interesting feeling "older" at this time of my life. And I'm not talking about the achey breaky BS that I've contributed to in my body, but more the perspective changes . . .

I Drink Tea Almost Every Night During The Winter Everytime we get together for a family dinner at my Grandparent's house, the meal will end and my grandmother will do a last call for after-dinner coffee or tea. And they will almost always have one or the other. When I get home and I'm relaxing during the winter or painting, I drink warm tea with milk and a scoach of sugar. I am my grandmother . . .

I Judgy-Wudgy-Bear Teenage Girls  It's been long known that grandma's say things like "that skirt's too short!" or "what is she wearing? she should cover up" or "what the blast is going on with her hair?" I've caught myself saying these things along with such things as "I don't remember us being that roudy" and "Did we dress like that?" For the most part I always dressed different in high school, away from the norm. Older. And I don't mean slutty ho-bag older, but covered up professional older. I had no style, what can I say.

I Find Myself Trying To Defy Gravity  So there comes a point where you realize you now have to work in order to defy gravity's evil plot against your body. Before it was girdles and standing there with a martini in your hand while a rotating rubber band vibrated the fat out of your mid section. Now it's anything I can do! I refuse to drag the girls behind me before I'm at least 50 (hopefully older). And therefore, effort must be put forth. Damn.

When You Do Something Childish, You Feel Stupid  I pre-qualify the word "childish" with not something child-like (i.e. board games, blowing bubbles, etc). Before, you did something childish and your parent would lecture you and teach you a lesson or they'd tell you to grow up. Now someone else does something childish and they are tacky and petty. When you do it (i.e. childish retaliation, etc), you scold yourself. You feel good for two seconds, and then you feel stupid.

I Want To Nap. Often. I find this one particularly interesting. Yes, I know, part of it's my lifestyle. Get over it. But frankly I also feel as though nap time has come around in full swing again. Nap time used to be great fun. Now it's a necessity to make it till bed at 9pm lol.

 Back-To-School Time I'm in that cusp between fact of life thinking and still wanting to buy notebook paper and have a bouquet of sharpened pencils. It also weirds me out seeing school busses all over the place again and having to pay attention to school zones. I also see all of these great designer-esque things in the stores and I'm secretly jealous. "We didn't have that stuff growing up"!

Where Did The Year Go? I used to never understand when adults would wonder where the month or, worse, the year had gone. Never understood it. Now I do. I have no clue where August went and frankly, the idea that 2010 is only another 3.5 months long really is disconcerting. I see Halloween crap in the stores and though excited for the holiday, I also find myself wondering where the time went.

Out Of The Funk, Into The Frying Pan






Did you hear? Apparently the twilight books made a top ten list for challenged books in 2009. This made me giggle to myself. Apparently it is also frequently requested to be banned from US libraries due to sexual content, vampireness, violence, etc. Heart hug. Please note: I never condone the burning or banning of books, I think discretion should be handled by parents and the rest should fend for themselves with a brain. But just the sheer fact that any of this occured . . . giggle giggle.

Moving on . . . I consider yesterday an emotional recovery day. Tuesday I went into a really horrid emotion and hormone-induced funk. I despise when this happens. So yesterday was recovery day. It usually takes a day to really make an effort and get passed the funk. So I got off of work and headed out to the airport where I proceeded to sit in the warm sunshine, work on my vitamin D and took a brief nap. It was a beautiful day and I love watching the planes land and take off. Afterwards, I made myself go to the gym. This was a challenge, but I did it. And I'm so glad I did. When I worked out on monday I felt really good, but I was also really sore and I realized how much work I needed to commit to in order to at least get back to where I was (and certainly beyond that). I took the step though and challenged myself to push it and do extra laps. I did ten extra laps and made myself finish strong on the last two. It was a great feeling. I also had a lovely conversation with a gal learning how to swim and was privy to an experience that just made me smile. After I swim I go sit in the hot tub to stretch. Out of the steam room comes a gal and a guy. It couldn't hear them very well and it took me awhile to realize they were speaking in russian. And though I have no clue what they were saying, it was beautiful to just listen to them speaking. And he was so excited and enthusiastic and happy. I loved it. I almost wanted to say thank you. May sound odd, but I loved being a fly on the wall.



Note: This post was from a pit ago, but I liked this part of it so much that I just HAD to still post it, hehe.

Look! I Cook!


For those who know me, they know I don't generally cook. It's kind of like my green thumb. It's something I want to pursue and develope, but it's definitely a work in progress. Part of this comes from being lazy, part of it comes from thinking everything takes way longer to do than it actually does and the biggest part is simply that I'm a bit of a perfectionist. The first couple times I cooked, things came out no bueno. Then I slowly started trying my hand at easy and/or family recipes that I knew what they took or how they were supposed to be. That started coming out pretty well.

THINGS I FOR SURE CAN MAKE:
a) Chilli
b) Pasta
c) Mango Salsa
d) Strawberry & Angel Food Cake Dessert
e) Roasted Potatoes w/ Herbs ("You say 'erbs', we say 'herbs' . . . because there's a fuckin H in it.")
f) Pot Roast w/ Veggies

Well due to my recent (in the last year or two) endeavors to attempt cooking more, I was blessed with a cooking magazine subscription as well as a stand mixer (love!). As things progressed, I started getting more confident. I've made banana bread, chocolate chocolate chunk cookies, and so on and so forth. One thing I am really trying to learn is to relax. Cooking should be fun! I use to stress out so much that I never wanted to do it. Now that I'm more comfortable (and occasionally ingredient forgetful. Eeeek!) I've even taking to a bit of improvising here and there. I figured out my oven at home runs hotter than the others I worked at so my bread has to cook at a lower temp, I forget butter one time and determined that I want further chunk cookies sans butter (it's better!), etc. These things make me happy because that means I am free to make my own cooking style.


I've been lazily toying with the idea of cooking lately and I finally decided to randomly do so last night. So I opened the windows to relax and listen to the rainstorm outside and got to cookin'. On the menu: Baked mac & cheese and berry cobbler.  And here's how it came out:



Can we say "yum"! It was delish. I like it better with out egg. Still determining my perfect amount of cheese. But all in all it was a good success. It's definitely my comfort food. And this time I was smarter and made it in a smaller dish so I didn't feel like I was wasting so much (for the most part just me is eating lol).

And for dessert . . .



Bonjour! It's berry cobbler. And oh my geez, for my first ever cobbler I was quite impressed. Everything is home made. And surprisingly the dough didn't take long to make at all. And for the berries, I went sans lemon juice and instead opted for a couple spoonfulls of a light sweet strawberry wine. And the lattice pattern up top was a complete improvise. My only change next time would be to add more sugar. Since I was unsure of how it would taste in the end, I went light. But all in all, I'm quite content!


Besides wanting to perfect these recipes, I'd also like try my hand this year at banana bread again, some oatmeal raisen cookies, onion soup and whatever else sounds great. I might even try SillyGrrl's recipe for eclairs. I can't wait for more! I may not have mucho peeps at home, but I work with all men so there's plenty of hungry tummies around :)

I wish you all great cooking adventures. Love!