A pile of pizzelles

To get ready for Christmas, I made a bunch of pizzelles with the pizzelle maker I got at our White Elephant gift exchange last year. Here's me making pizzelles last year:


I don't have any pictures of me making pizzelles this year because you really can't beat last year's picture, can you? No. Instead, here are some pictures of the pizzelles I made this year.



P.S. My White Elephant streak of awesomeness remains intact. This year I got two bottles of wine (!). It was the second best gift available, the first best being a bottle of vodka. We get a real assortment in our gift exchange. About 2/3 of the gifts were the kind of crap we intended to be featured in a White Elephant exchange, the other 1/3 were actually decent stuff.

Anyhow, I made the pizzelles because I hate baking. Thus, pizzelles are the perfect cookie for me to make because essentially you are making tiny waffles. I am good at waffle making, bad at baking. Then I had a cookie exchange, which used to be an annual Lisa tradition, now resurrected. It was smallish, but fun. Some people from work and a few other friends from various places, including Annie of blog fame. A good time was had by all.

Now my parents are here, they arrived on Saturday night in time for Brian's 35th birthday, which was yesterday. Wow, I am married to a geezer. My brother Jim and his girlfriend will arrive on the 28th, in time for Owen's birthday! Which I cannot believe is less than a week away. Wow.

The endless season of sickness and some unrelated b$@%*ing

For some, the holiday season is a time of happiness, joy, *"cheer"...

(*note: I put quotes around cheer because we got an email from our department head today about our work Christmas party tomorrow, in which he said to 'join us for some food, fun and "cheer"'. WTF was the reason for the inappropriate quotes around cheer?? This is one of my pet peeves. Quotes do not indicate emphasis, people! If thats even what he was doing with them. Really, I am completely baffled by this totally inappropriate use of quotes.)

For us, the holiday season is apparently a time of illness. Yes, we made it through the horrendous stomach bug of '07. Rather, Brian and Owen made it through and I helped clean up. I never got it, thank god. Given the grumbling going on in my Mommy group, it sounds like this has been going around the entire Triangle area, so it wasn't just me. In fact, one of Owen's daycare teachers also spent her Thanksgiving vomiting. She said she particularly enjoyed that she had to do it repeatedly in front of her inlaws. Hee.

Anyhow, that finally passed.

Now we all have colds. Owen started getting his right around the time his stomach bug was letting up, and Brian and I both have it now. And I don't want to be all stereotypical about men being whiny sick people, so I won't.

Ahem.

I'll wait for Brian to dispute that in the comments or something... I know you're reading this!

The thing I hate most about having a cold is the red nose. Well, maybe second to the sore throat. I always get a bad, bad sore throat. I think its because I have ridiculously large tonsils. I don't know if those two things are actually connected, but it makes sense in my head so I'm going with it.

Anyhow, its time for the unrelated b$@%*ing (look at me keeping it all PG rated).

1. Owen has been on full time sippy cups for at least two months. This is great because those Dr. Browns bottles, as wonderful as they are, were a REAL PAIN IN THE BUTT to clean. Now we don't have to send anything to daycare other than a big bottle full of water that they can use to mix up his drinks. And soon, when he drinks cows milk, we won't have to send anything fluid at all. That will be a fun day. Anyhow, we have thus invested in a good number of sippy cups. We have a couple Playtex ones that have handles. These are about $4-5 per cup. I think we had about 4-6. I bought these first because I thought they would be easier for him to use, what with the handles and all. Then we started having some problems... Cat problems. Jasmine is obsessed with chewing on the spouts of his sippy cups if they have had formula in them. So she would find his cup that he had discarded on the floor and chew it. Or his cup that he had finished that was in the sink. I think she chewed 2-3 of these to the point where we had to throw them out. When we started getting low, I went to buy some more the next time I was at the grocery store. But all they had was girly colors, and even though we are getting Owen a play kitchen for Christmas (ssssshhhh, don't tell him), I didn't want to raise no sissy boy drinking from a pink cup. I didn't want his other baby friends to give him a hard time. So I got some of the Take-n-Toss ones that are essentially disposable. They're like that Gladware in sippy cup form - You can and will use them over and over again, but you won't cry when something happens to them. These were $2.99 for 8 cups, so way more bang for your buck. Except Jasmine still wants to chew the crap out of them, and since these are made of really thin plastic, even one good chew means death to the cup. In contrast, the other ones were still okay with a few chews because the spout was made of pretty thick plastic. So now I am trying to do the cost benefit analysis on sippy cups. And also on keeping Jasmine. No, I'm kidding. I'm not getting rid of Jasmine.

2. Yesterday I took my car in for its 30K service. Since my car is a fancy hybrid, we decided I should take it to the dealership for the service. Either I have been lazy about getting my car in for its regular service (possible) or we have taken it somewhere else (also possible) for at least one of these services, because this was the first time I had gone to our dealership for anything other than an oil change, and I only did that once too. Anyhow. I got the shuttle guy to take me to work. Later in the afternoon they called me to tell me that my car was done and that the shuttle guy was going to come pick me up. The dealership is only a couple of exits down from where I work, so this shouldn't have taken long. I still had some work to finish up and I also had to leave by 5 at the latest to pick O up at daycare. When I got there, the service guy was like, "Uh, we actually have a little bit of a problem. Something happened to your car and we're going to fix it, but it isn't going to be done in time for you to take it home tonight." Okay. I think what happened was they were pulling the car in or out of a garage area and the garage door was not up enough and they scraped the roof of my car on the bottom of the door. So they were going to get me a rental car. I thought this meant a rental car was going to come to me at the dealership. We went out and got all the crap I needed from my car...

(incidentally, the guy asked me what I needed from the car and I said "parking permit and iPod stuff (I mean, my charger and my iTrip - I had my iPod with me)". Then when I called Brian and told him what was going on he said "What are you going to do about the carseat?" Duh. The carseat!! I had completely forgotten about that. I forgot about my glasses too - I only use them when I'm driving so I leave them in the car. I am a fantastic mommy!)

...I looked at the damage and it was really just scratches that could be buffed out easily, not a huge deal.

The rental car guy came and it turned out he was going to take me to the rental car place. I don't know why, but they use a rental car place in Chapel Hill, which was like, 25 minutes away. Why they would do that when the airport is much closer is beyond me, but whatever. Then I got my rental car (a minivan! I felt like a real mommy!) and had to drive back to work - another 25 minutes. All in all I was gone for about two hours. By the time I got back I had time to do some lab stuff that desperately needed to be finished before I could leave and then ran out to go pick up Owen. I didn't think it would be a big problem, but it really turned out to be a fairly major inconvenience that I could have done without. I was irritated, but only slightly.

Today I went to pick up my car and pay for my service. This was a big service, so it was like, $500. Which is crazy, but whatever. Thats what I get for going to the dealer, right? I said "And I'm sure you gave me a discount, because the whole ordeal yesterday was a big inconvenience". He said "Oh, of course. Its about $100 off. And we cleaned and detailed your car for you"...

(okay also? Why do they call that 'detailing'?)

...I had had a coupon in my hand for $25 off this service, but I ended up not using it because he had already given me a $100 discount. My service came to $450. I paid and drove off.

As I was driving I started thinking "He gave me $100 off and I still paid $450? Is that right?" I stopped in a parking lot and looked at the bill, added stuff up on my fancy calculator on my fancy iPhone, and couldn't figure out where this discount was. I went back to the dealership and asked him to walk me through the bill and where my discount was. He showed me. It turned out he had taken 10% ($50) off. He had counted the price of the detailing in as part of my "discount". I was pissed. I didn't want my car cleaned (although it needed it for sure, so it was a bonus), I wanted MONEY back for my trouble. I explained that I had had a coupon that I didn't use for $25 off that I had found on their website. My point was that if they'll easily give $25 to anyone for having a coupon that they can just print out, when they screw something up the discount should be significantly more than that. I thought it was a little bit ridiculous. The guy was also bugging me at this point. I was not happy to begin with, and he almost instantly adopted an attitude with me that was making me even angrier, like I was just some crazy lady. He asked me, "What will make you happy?" The way he said it indicated that he meant: "What will get you off of my case, lady?" I told him that his dismissive attitude was not helping me be happy. In the end he gave me an additional $100 off, which is what I asked for, pretty much (actually, I asked for $100 total off, but he gave me an additional $100 off, so $150 total). In the end I was happy with how it was resolved, but not happy that I sort of had to argue for it and that they hadn't done that to start with (or at least something better than $50 off).

Happy Freaking Thanksgiving!

We had a fun weekend planned. My parents ended up not being able to come up for Thanksgiving because my grandfather fell and broke his back the week before (!) and they stayed in Florida to help out with that. I was feeling a little bit bummed that we didn't have any plans and afraid that Thanksgiving was going to turn out just like any other day, so Brian bought a photo printer (its totally awesome actually) and decided that we were going to sip champagne and work on Owen's baby book this weekend. Maybe go to the museum, hang out at home, do some Christmas shopping (online thanks - I am not crazy). We also had plans to hang out with friends on Saturday.

Instead this is what we did:

Owen woke up on Thursday morning, ready for his first Thanksgiving. I dressed him in his cute 'Baby's First Thanksgiving' outfit and sat down to give him his sippy cup of formula, which he guzzled down. And promptly threw up all over me, his outfit, the ottoman, the floor. This is the first time I have ever seen a baby actually throw up, as opposed to spitting up. Uh, its an obvious difference. This was more like 'The Exorcist'.

Took off the outfit and changed him into something else. Rinsed the outfit out with hot water and put it in the dryer - I had invited two friends from work over for dinner so O still needed to look cute!! Brian made biscuits and fake bacon for breakfast. We sat O in his highchair and gave him some, and a little bit more formula since he had pretty much not ingested any the first time. He picked at his breakfast and barfed all over it. Eeeeexcellent.

He was pretty good the rest of the day but was starting to have some diarrhea. Friends came over, we ate, O went to bed, we hung out, it was fine.

Next day O has major diarrhea. And Brian starts puking. And puking. Oh great.

Friday and Saturday alone, I think Owen went through about 10 pairs of pants. Brian was in bed all day both days. Obviously, we cancelled our plans. He's moving around a little bit today, but not much. Owen is still sick. We're already on our second pair of pants, and its only noon.

So there was not so much sipping of champagne and scrapbooking and hanging out with friends happening this weekend. There was a lot of grumpy babies and messy pants and sleeping husbands and trips to the store for Gatorade and Pedialyte (O is not a fan). I did get some Christmas shopping done and ordered our Christmas cards, so at least some progress was made.

And so far I have not gotten the horrendous stomach bug. Fingers crossed!!

In other news, O is steadily getting better at walking.

Hope you had a nicer weekend than we did!

I'm glad its not just me

Apparently some hedgies have a weight problem to deal with too.

Perfect Mommy Night

See if you can identify the components of a Perfect Mommy Night in the photo below:

2 years

Today is the two year anniversary of when my brother died.

This morning we all got together by phone with my dad and Jim, who were at the cemetary. We shared Ed stories over the phone, and they poured a beer over his grave. And I drank a beer for lunch.

Owen celebrated Ed's memory by taking a 3.5 hour nap.

It is hard to believe that we have gotten to this point already - two years later! That morning, I was so unsuspecting of how my life was just about to change forever.

So many things have changed in these two years. We have made lots of new friends, lost some people who turned out not to be friends after all. We decided to start having children, got pregnant and had Owen, who is almost a year old. Jim has a new (well... new in the last two years) girlfriend who we love and they bought their first house. My cousin got married, as did Herryn. We have gone on lots of trips to visit friends and family, and have had lots of friends and family come to visit us. We got Jasmine.

It has been a rough time, but a lot of wonderful things have happened too. I wish that Ed had been here to see them.

Knowing the exact instant we get frost

The other night, Brian and I were sleeping snugly in our bed when we were awoken by some unidentified beeping. It woke up Owen too - CURSES! It was 5:30 am, and he's a light sleeper from 5 onwards! Anyhow, we finally figured out what it was: our newish indoor/outdoor thermometer. We got it this summer sometime so that we would always know how freaking hot it was outside. Apparently it has an alarm on it to tell you when the temperature goes down below 37 degrees (Farenheit, for our UK readers). Who cares!! I am sleeping. What am I going to do, run out and cover my (non-existent) roses with blankets? If I cared that something was frost-sensitive, wouldn't I take care of it BEFORE I WENT TO SLEEP?

We couldn't figure out why it had come on because there was no obvious indicator on the thermometer that there was a low-temp alarm on. So it was difficult to turn said alarm off. I was hoping it was just a fluke, so the next night we went to bed and forgot all about it. Of course it was not a fluke, and the alarm went off at 1 am. Fortunately it only woke me up. Unfortunately, it woke me up. I couldn't get back to sleep. I was annoyed, so I just took the batteries out. So now we have no thermometer.

Thats okay, its cold (finally!). I don't need a thermometer to tell me that!

Bento Boxes

Owen is eating table foods with us all the time now, and I am always running out of ideas as to what to make for him (usually same thing that we're eating, but this is not always suitable if we're eating something that doesn't translate well to finger foodness). Someone pointed me to a Flickr group about kids lunches. In there, people have annotated photographs of what they have sent for lunch for their kid that day. One person had these fantastic bento boxes that she makes. Check these out!! They're amazing.

Not a lot going on. We are totally geeking out watching the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions.

Memes upon memes

two memes to do:

A. I got tagged by Owen for 8 random things about myself.
1. I just got reminded about how, in 6th grade, my friends and I used to have all of these businesses where we would sell crap to the other kids in our class. Like, we would doodle on pieces of notebook paper, fold them up and sell 'fans'? Or we raised guppies and sold them? (The other part of that is that we would take the dead guppies into school and this one group of boys in our class... and if you went to middle school with me, and I know some of you did, ask me and I'll tell you who...would EAT THE DEAD GUPPIES. I remember they put them on their lunchroom pizza or in their chocolate milk or whatever. Ew.
2. My first car was a 1977 Pontiac Grand Prix and it totally had an 8track player, but my parents replaced it with a cassette player for me because they love me.
3. I watched the Bachelor for more seasons than most people did. And yet, I haven't watched it for a couple of seasons. WHO IS WATCHING THIS?!?!
4. I am obsessed with celebrity gossip. But I don't get the time anymore to keep up on it! Crap!!
5. When I found out Studs was going to be a boy I was a little bit bummed because I had these visions of buying little pink dresses and having a cute pink nursery. And yet, now that he's Owen and not Studs? I cannot imagine having anything other than him :)
6. I stopped eating meat when I was in 6th or 7th grade.
7. I wanted to be a plastic surgeon for a looooong time. Until I realized that calculus was going to prevent my going to med school. And now I realize that this was all for the best, all around.
8. My dad is in the final stages of making me a dollhouse which I am so excited about, and YES I AM 32 YEARS OLD. Shut up.

OKAY WAIT. After I had already finished this my mom (who is here visiting) reminded me of another good, random story for this meme. Okay. In 8th grade I was in the Kiwanis Youth Symphony in Racine. We went to Florida to play a concert at Disneyworld and we were there for a couple of days. So imagine, you've got a bunch of middle and high school kids staying together in hotels. I think there were 4 people in a room. And.... I am not what you would call 'neat'. In fact, I am what you would call 'a total slob' (if left to my own devices). My other roomates, in typical teenage girl fashion, were also a bit on the slobby side. And anyway, one day our room was in such bad shape that the MAID LEFT US A NOTE that we needed to clean up our room. How bad is THAT??

B. Tiffany tagged everyone in the universe:
Jobs I've had
1. Music store clerk
2. 'Wrap Desk Coordinator' (aka lead register girl) at Express. Pre-cool headphones days.
3. College Pro home painter
4. medical records filer

Places I've lived
1. Alliance, OH.
2. Arlington Heights, IL
3. Racine, WI
4. Windham, NH

Foods I love
1. Indian food
2. Pizza
3. cheese curds
4. kringle

Websites I visit
1. Triangle Mommies
2. Go Fug Yourself
3. E! Online
4. Television Without Pity

Places I'd rather be
1. Sleeping
2. Shopping
3. Out at a nice dinner with friends (and husband, obviously)
4. Playing with my buggle!

Movies that I love
1. Amadeus
2. Zoolander
3. Rushmore
4. Star Wars

TV Shows I watch
1. Ugly Betty
2. Lost
3. The Amazing Race
4. Project Runway (although I have to buy this on iTunes, thanks so much Time Warner Cable for not getting Bravo in Durham!!)

People I tag:
Melissa (like you're going to get the time to do this, Ha!!)
Kendra
Brian
Roger
Annie

And you all can choose which of these memes you want to do. I am not a tyrant.

A smiley leaf

I saw this leaf while I was walking this morning.

Morning at our house

This video made me laugh so hard I was crying.



Multiply this x 4 (even Beamish gets in on the action) and you will have the morning at our house. This morning while we were laying in bed, Brian said "The cats really get annoying in the morning!"

One day in daycare and the tough clothes tumble

You're going to have to trust me here, but Owen, despite all appearances, is not a homeless baby. He does have a Mommy and Daddy who love him, feed him, bathe him and clean his clothes. You would never know this if you saw him for the first time when we were on our way home from daycare.
When he was in the younger infants room, they would take the babies outside almost every day, but I think they would be playing on a blanket or in an exersaucer or something. He would come home looking almost exactly the same as he did when I dropped him off. Okay, maybe he'd have a clump of dried rice cereal in his hair, but nothing major.
Almost instantly upon being switched into the older infant room, Owen started coming home looking like a homeless baby. This is the anatomy of a homeless baby's outfit (I should also mention that when I picked him up this day, he had dirt all over his face because he had been trying to eat it).

This is a cute outfit we got as a gift. It was cute in the morning, anyhow. Here is what it looked like when I picked Owen up:


Exhibit 1. Some strange food stain. They do use bibs at daycare, but bibs are not foolproof.


Exhibit 2. Some other strange food stain plus a spot of barf. The barf actually happened on my watch. On the way home we needed to make a stop. When I was paying, I sat Owen up on the counter (I was holding him, obviously. I don't need no parenting classes!). He proceeded to barf all over himself, my arm, and the counter at the store.


Exhibit 3. The mysterious black knees and ankles. I really do not know what causes this, to be perfectly honest. I think it is the surface they have outside in their play area. It is like rubber gravel, if that makes any sense. I assume thats what these stains are from.



This mysterious black stain is the biggie. I can never get this out. Here's another pair of pants, part of a cute outfit:





These pants have been through the wash no less than FIVE TIMES. They have been treated with Shout, with OxyClean, with detergent, with a combination of these three, etc. This is the best I have been able to do.

@#%$!

Taking dorkyness to an even higher level

Well, so upon reflection, thats probably not true.

I think I hit my peak of loserdom when I joined the band at my work. I'm a scientist, and I work with a bunch of scientists. So being in the band at a science place is like, the height of dork. But in the band at work I have been playing saxophone. Of the three instruments that I own and thus could play now without having to go out and rent (flute, alto sax and oboe), the flute and sax are the easiest to pick up again after a 10 year hiatus (and actually, I played in the CWRU jazz band for my first year of grad school, so it was slightly more recently that my sax had gotten some action).

Oboe is a very challenging instrument to sound good on at the beginning. All new oboe players sound like dying ducks. I was thinking that all oboe players, despite the fact that they used to be very good, would sound like dying ducks after not touching their oboes since their last concert of college 10 years ago. So, even though it was really my primary instrument, I was terrified to try it again. I think even more so because it was my best one: what a shock to go from sounding pretty good to sounding like a dying duck! Better to just keep the good memories of how it used to be.

But then someone in my work band joined the Durham Community Concert Band. He totally talked me into joining. And, of course, what community band is looking for a saxophone player or a flute player? None of them. Both of those are a dime a dozen. So it was settled: I was going to play oboe.

Holy crap.

I never learned how to make reeds to any level that I could actually use them and sound good (long story why not, but suffice it to say that I am a freak among oboe players to not know how to make my own reeds). In college I used to use the other oboe players reeds when she didn't like them anymore. She always said she was amazed that I could sound so good playing on such crap :)

So anyhow, I had to buy some reeds first. I did this over the internet. Woo!

Then I had to make friends with my oboe again. I busted it out about a week before my first practice with the band. Not good. Although, to be fair, not as bad as I thought it would be.

First rehearsal. It is 2 hours long. My embochure is so shot that I cannot keep my mouth on the reed for more than 15 minutes. This is going to be a nightmare.

Second rehearsal. Much better! I can keep my mouth on the reed for much longer. An hour!

Now it has been 6 or 7 practices, so I am feeling much better about things. Our first concert is coming up on the 27th AND I have a solo. Small, but still. OMG. And I'm happy to say that I sound okay. I mean, nowhere near where I used to be, but I don't sound like a beginner.

I'd make a pretty crap Southerner.

Last week I went to Carolina Beach for my work retreat. I drove out there with two of my friends from work. G is a relatively recent transplant from Canada, D is from Iowa, but his wife is from South Carolina. G asked about boiled peanuts, because you see signs on the highway for them a lot. I've never had boiled peanuts, and neither had he. D, being married to a Southerner, has had them and tried to describe them to us. And they did not sound good. We had to stop to get gas and there was a guy selling peanuts and stuff out of a little trailer at the gas station, so D bought us some boiled peanuts to try. I bought some regular peanuts in case they were nasty and we needed to get the taste out of our mouths.

If you've never been so "fortunate" to come across boiled peanuts, here is a picture I took of them:


They look slimy, and thats because they are. Wet and cold. Actually, D said that when he had had them previously they were served hot. These had crystals of some sort on them, either ice (ew) or salt (I love salt but... ew).
They look kind of normal on the inside, but instead of being dry and crunchy looking, they look like a wet dog.


I wish I had taken a picture of me eating a boiled peanut. D's analysis that they tasted a bit like beans was right on. It was like eating cold, slimy, al dente kidney beans out of cold slimy little cases. I don't think G or I will be picking up any more boiled peanuts.

Also, they were totally not what I expected. I don't know, I expected them to be green for some reason, don't ask me why. And I also didn't expect them to be in their shells. I think I was picturing another thing that, I don't know, but I think might also be Southern because I have never seen it before: wet walnuts. I've never had them, but they are a topping or mix-in you can choose at our local frozen custard place. Yet another reason why NC frozen custard is a little bit off. I guess I thought those were boiled. The guy in the trailer was selling those too - wet peanuts or something - in little containers and I thought thats what the boiled peanuts were going to be. You can imagine my shock when D whipped out the plastic bag full of slimy, cold, wet peanut shells.

At my retreat we were subjected to another strange Southern thing, sweet tea. Actually, thats not revolting like the boiled peanuts were, but I'm still not a huge fan. It tastes good but is a lot sweeter than I like my iced tea to be.

This past weekend we went to the local Farmers' Market with D and his wife K. I saw some purple hull peas, which I see every week when I go to the Farmers' Market but I never know what to do with. But I asked her what to do with them, and she said she usually serves them with rice. I decided to cook them with onion, garlic, carrot, celery and tomatoes and some herbs and served them with rice, a la K-dog. They weren't bad, actually, especially when I covered the whole thing in hot sauce.

Another friend from work (an Indian friend) gave me some ideas of what to do with them to make indian peas. They're essentially black-eyed peas, which I've had in indian before. So I might try that next. They were a good compromise between Brian and I because he likes peas (he's English, what do you expect?) and I hate them. These actually had a slight pea taste, but not enough that they made me want to hurl.

Four stars!!

Do you ever read People magazine? I do. I subscribe to it. I love all that sort of trash.

Anyhow, People also has music, movie and book reviews. The movie and music reviews will often be low. I mean, I'm flipping through one issue right now and I see three music reviews that got only 2 and a half stars. But I've noticed that the book reviews are ALWAYS high. I can't remember ever seeing one lower than 3 stars. And I think I can only remember one that was 3. Usually they're 3 and a half or 4. And I noticed this a while ago, so I've made it a point to check every time I get a new issue (weekly). Are all books fan-freaking-tastic?? I find that hard to believe. I have read books. They are not all good.

I'm not sure exactly how to explain this phenomenon. The best I can come up with is that all writing looks like 4 star work compared to People? Not that I'm complaining, obviously.

Oh I know....!

I know, you all want my links back. Well, you're just going to have to wait! That is going to take more time to accomplish than I have at my disposal right now. Thats the real bugger about switching templates. Whine whine!

New template in progress

I think blogger dumped the template I was using, because it never comes up anymore and it is no longer available as a choice. I don't like any of the choices that exist already, so I'm going to have to come up with something myself. Give me some time.

OMGOMGOMGOMG!

It is raining! For real, like for about an hour or so!! Woo!

OMG IT STOPPED RAINING!

Okay, that lasted for like, five minutes. What a gyp.