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Our home computer died and our wireless router crapped out weeks ago. Did I already tell you this? I can’t remember. Anyway, I’m tapping this post out on my phone, which is miraculous, technologically, I guess, but mostly a pain in the butt…er, thumbs. This morning, I trudged the baby through the snow to the library so that I could at least pay the bills and write my posts for MamaPop and We Covet. So my real live Internet time was perforated by, “Mum, I’ve looked through all of the cool books. Can we please go now?” and a sickening squirt every time the guy at the next computer spit his tobacco juice into his coffee cup. (I really could not believe the librarian was cool with that. I know I wasn’t. But then my Master’s is in Professional Writing, not Library Science and Tolerating Repugnant Habits.)

I will tell you more about Christmas and show you some pictures the next time I have some extra minutes online. For now I have to get back to cuddling on the couch with baby, the husband, and his ManCold and waiting for what seems like an acceptable amount of time before eating some of the brownie bread pudding that I made (oh my god SO GOOD). Stay warm!

There was this skit on Chappelle’s Show that detailed some historic gang war that eventually brought about the advent of crack cocaine, with one gangster, played by Mos Def, advising his minions to get some cocaine and some “buh-king soda.” I can’t find it anywhere but now any time I say “baking” it comes out “buh-king.”

Anyway, even though it is, as Amy correctly noted, incredibly pretentious to utter the phrase, “my holiday baking,” I’m going to tell you a little bit about My Holiday Baking. And I don’t really have any pictures because my various internet and computer situations are just stupid.

My friend Mary and I have several times made plans to do a joint baking blowout at her house since she now has that counter space stuff that I hear so much about, but we haven’t made it happen yet. So, this past weekend, I went to town.

Final stats:

- Two batches of Cinnamon Rolls – delicious as always. I made two batches because the husband always whines when I give most of them away. However, I fail to see how three people eating 50 cinnamon rolls is at all a good idea.
- One batch of Bittersweet Cranberry Brownies – I think i took these out of the oven too soon. Not sure how I feel about them. Will probably eat all of them anyway.
- One batch (two dozen-ish) of Eggnog Cookies – I don’t know where I got this recipe, but these are yummy cookies
- One batch of Mexican Chocolate Cookies
- One batch of Snickerdoodles
- One batch of Chocolate Crackle Cookies
- One batch of Eggnog Cheesecake Bars
- One batch of Pomegranate Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I also made the dough for Chai Shortbread Cookies, but haven’t baked them yet. Don’t know if that will happen.

My dining room table is covered with baked goods. I can’t say that I mind.

In less glamorous baking news, the baby’s school is having a Navidad Fiesta today and asked the parents to donate some food stuffs. They sent home a list of foods and recipes to use. I signed up to make banana bread and taco dip, figuring that many potluck type events are dessert-heavy and could use some balance.

I could have used my own recipes, but I can be a very by-the-book person so I used the ones the school sent home. The banana bread recipe was pretty basic. So was the taco dip, but it was one of those recipes that contains instructions like, “open…dump…spread,” which sounds kind of disturbing when you put it that way. This particular taco dip consisted of two packages of cream cheese spread in the bottom of a baking dish, topped with two cans of beanless Hormel chili and two packages of shredded cheddar cheese, then baked for 15 minutes.

As much as I’m a wannabe foodie, I also have a gigantic soft spot for the less sophisticated foods and I’m a big fan of canned goods. However, even this was a bit much. I mean, I really like canned cranberry sauce and while those ridges look downright charming on a tube of jellied cranberries, they look really disturbing on extracted chili.

Also also wik: I watched Julie & Julia last night. Loved the Julia part. Not so much the Julie part.

And thank dog, because trying to spin my day of laundry into a blog post is a task that would make Rumpelstiltskin throw his hands up in defeat.

A funny thing did happen this morning, though. My word-of-the-day email from m-w.com came through and it was “ennui.” I was surprised to see that I had been pronouncing it incorrectly for many years. It’s ahn-WEE, no en-YOO-i. I took a few minutes being retroactively embarrassed of all of the times I may have used it in front of someone who was either too kind or too smug to correct me. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to make a joke out of the situation, coming up only with, “I’ve been pronouncing ‘ennui,’ incorrectly. Meh. I’ve got to change.”

ba-dum-dum-ching

I just want you all to recognize that I made the extreme sacrifice of peeling myself off of the couch and trudging over to the desktop to write a post. The wireless router in our house died so I can’t use my laptop and I started to tap out a post on my iPhone until the little voice in my head whispered, “You are stupid.” For all of its loveliness, the iPhone is not quite a computer. Whenever they work out the holographic projection of a keyboard and a display, then it is so on.

Prior to this, I went to the kitchen to first finish cleaning up and make myself a cup of tea, when the husband chose that moment to barge and declare that he was making popcorn. He also suggested that I cut up some pomegranates, because he knows how much I like squirting purple juice all over the kitchen. What a doll!

Anyway, I finally have my tea. And I need to have you guys over at some point because I made a Bundt cake this weekend that I think is pretty yummy but the husband and the baby aren’t interested.

This actually brings me to the, erm, point, such as it is, of this post. The Bundt that I made is a Pumpkin Apple Spiced Bundt and I got the recipe from The Food Librarian. She is doing 30 days of Bundt cake recipes and I’m going to type Bundt here just to bring the Bundt count of this post to a healthy six. The 30 days of Bundt cakes are part of her participation in “I Like Big Bundts,” (sung to the tune of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seminal composition, “Baby Got Back”) leading up to National Bundt Day on November 15th. Did you know there was such a thing? The Food Librarian is rad in general, so I recommend checking her out, Bundt or no.

Every time I see the accompanying graphic of two Nordic Ware Bundt pans suggestively posed, I start giggling and can’t stop. Also: BUNDT.

Anyway, I find myself in the awkward position of being responsible for consuming the Bundt that I made, because I feel like going to work and saying, “Here’s a 3-day-old Bundt that I ate half of. Can I have a raise?” is kind of rude. So, please come over. My jeans beg you.

A serious downside of NaBloPoMo is having to write on Sundays like these, during which nothing happens. I’m nursing a sore neck after having a spasm yesterday morning while sneezing (just go ahead and let the stupidity of such an event wash over you), watching The Godfather II with way too many commercial breaks, and drinking a Mexican Coke. Aren’t you glad I shared?

Sometimes, when I’m sad like I’ve been, my sadness becomes more of me than I am. Like in Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg’s character lets spirits use her body. Sadness, with its bad posture and shitty clothes, jumps in and sometimes it’s like it gets really drunk and decides to go for a drive. (Note: I am not actually drinking away my sadness.) While it’s driving, it veers off to some unpaved road called Rage. Sadness gets tired of sleeping and sitting around and trying to think positively and goes completely batshit with rage.

I get so angry and every stupid or uncaring thing that people do, to me or to anyone, just makes me angrier. Hearing about people going insane and taking it upon themselves to go on shooting sprees doesn’t make me sad, it just makes me angry.

“We’re all miserable in some way, you prick. Let us decide how we might want to wreak destruction on ourselves,” I think.

I’m sorry to be such a downer on an otherwise beautiful Friday afternoon. But that’s what’s going on in my head.

Does your sadness ever veer off into rage?

When I was at the grocery store on Sunday, I was paused at the tea section, hunting for a certain kind of iced tea bags that the husband uses. I couldn’t find the iced tea, but my eye stopped on the boxes of Constant Comment.

In my informal observations, the varieties of teas available to the general public have greatly increased over the past 10 or 15 years, with popularized versions of things like green and chai teas becoming commonplace.

I go through periods of being really into tea and will buy many different flavors, though I remain a devoted coffee drinker as part of my morning ritual.*

My mom drank tea all the time when I was little and one of her favorites was Constant Comment. Seeing the familiar red and black box at the store, I suddenly craved the spicy orange flavor. I bought a box and last night, I drank my first cup in years while thumbing through the JC Penney Christmas catalog and scratching my head over some of their jewelry items. (Ahem.)

Did you know that Ruth Campbell Bigelow created Constant Comment in 1945 and was so named because the recipe received nothing but “constant comments?”

*I make it sound so peaceful, when my “ritual” involves gulping 3 or so cups in a most crackheaded and fiendish fashion after stumbling out of bed and before shoving my kid out the door with a hearty, “LET’S GO! COME ON!”

I’m trying to not think about how far away Starbucks is and how badly I want a Pumpkin Spice Latte, so I started reading back through this blog’s archives and my LiveJournal archives.

October is, perhaps, my favorite month. It’s firmly in fall and has all of fall’s best features. It’s gorgeous to look at and the weather is fantastic. Plus, there’s Halloween, which I love, and my birthday (also on Halloween).

30 days from now, I will turn 31. That number sort of hit me yesterday. I remember talking to a friend last year about turning 30 and she mentioned being totally cool with 30, but 31 kind of got her because she could officially say that she was in her Thirties. 30 sounds kind of cute and grown up. 31 is suddenly, “Oh, this shit is real, huh?”

Anyway, one of the best things that I’ve done in life is to start documenting it on the internet. Honest! I never could commit to a regular diary or journal, but for some reason the internet and I were likethis. Now I can check in with my former self whenever I want.

So, if you like, come check out some past October 1sts with me…
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So, first of all, regarding this post, thank you all so, so much for commenting and lending your support and understanding. I was literally overwhelmed by all of the people who came out to offer a comment, letting me know that, while crazy, I am not alone.

Still doing Weight Watchers, though a sort of loose version. I adapt it as I need to. I’m slowly losing weight and things feel different this time. I attribute that mostly to my new-found fervor with regard to healthier food. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty frightened by the food industry in the U.S. and all of the icky governmental circle jerks that contribute to it.

So, this time around, going the easy route by stuffing my freezer with Lean Cuisine wasn’t really an option. In fact, since giving up Diet Dr. Pepper, I’ve pretty much done away with all “light” foods. That is, I don’t really buy light versions of foods. I don’t buy diet bread or light or fat-free salad dressings or light butter or skim milk or fat-free cheese or freakish 100-calorie desserts. None of that. (However, I do buy low-fat organic yogurt. Full disclosure, n’at.) I want Food. This has taken some effort on my part because I could eat more if I bought such things, but I just no longer see the point of sustaining myself on edible food-like things, which will inevitably become tiresome.

I’m eating a little less during the day so that I can eat a regular dinner with the dudes. That’s the major change that I’ve made. And you know what? It’s working really well. Mentally, I’m in a much better space. I’ve noticed that I feel satisfied/full much easier. On days when I indulge a little, I feel uncomfortably full and I think for awhile that became my normal “full” feeling. There were a lot of emotions involved, ya know? I would eat past that point for any number of reasons, stress being the main one.

I still genuinely love cooking and baking and, most of all, eating. I’m amassing an insane collection of favorite recipes and even more recipes that I want to try. I just today signed up at Evernote to work on a system of organizing recipes from all of the food blogs that I read because I want to try all of them. (Evernote, by the way, is pretty cool. I don’t know, for my purposes, if it’s a huge departure from the organizing/tagging features on Google Reader, but it’s still very nice.)

I also wanted to touch on a few points that were raised in the post mentioned above. I do not hate my body or the way it is shaped. I used to and believe me the way that I feel about myself now is so much healthier than the way I felt about it for a long, long time. And I kind of feel like I do accept my body and that my desire to lose weight, while certainly tied up in the bullshit that I’ve been dealing with for nearly all of my life, actually comes from a good place, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I think there’s like…stuff going on in the world besides my ass vigilance. But here’s a (dark, crappy, phone) picture of my cat being forced to wear a babushka.

As of this morning, I am the mother of a second-grader. Excuse me while I gather my internal organs. They seem to have exited my body.

Part of this morning’s first day of school activities included the annual picture. Every year for the past four years, we’ve taken a picture of the baby on the front porch. And every year I screw up the perspective entirely so that it’s hard to look at the pictures from year to year and get a good sense of his growth. Case in point:

Top row: pre-K, kindergarten
Bottom row: 1st grade, 2nd grade

You have to adjust and notice that his legs are about 500 feet longer than they were last year. Other things of note are the brand new Chuck Taylors and the flat-brimmed hat. These were both very specific choices of his. The Chucks are low-tops because the high-tops were the shoes for first grade. The flat-brimmed hat indicates assimilation into the fashions of mainstream hip-hop. Whatever.

I, of course, had an annual first day of school picture growing up. My mom would cart me to my grandmother’s house and they would take my picture in front of this tree in my grandmother’s front yard. Nearly every picture has me squinting fiercely because those pro photographers had to have their backs to the sun. I think the last one would have been 10th grade because after that year I started my ballet program that had me at ballet class first thing and not going to school until later in the morning. Also, by that time I was far too sullen to bother with such nonsense.

And I’m pretty sure that tree is dead now.

We stopped by the baby’s school Tuesday night for their welcome-back event and got to check out his classroom and meet his teacher. I need to take a moment and gush about his school. It’s just wonderful and we’re so lucky to live some place where a progressive and outstanding public school exists. And the building itself is amazing. It is always spotless and it’s decorated so warmly, you can’t help but cheer up a little bit when walking through the halls.

The husband and I both went to struggling Catholic schools for elementary school and we both recall them as being very drab, which is weird since Catholic churches are always so campy and over-the-top with their decor. You would think that the decorating bug would carry over to the schools. But I guess the priests and nuns who didn’t have the gift of knowing which gold chalices would go best with stained glass window depicting some anguish and naked people are assigned to education detail.

Anyway, another awesome thing about the public schools here is that they do an excellent job of providing everyone with school supplies. The only downside to this is that it eliminates the need for the annual school supply shopping.

We decided to hit up Target that night anyway to get the baby a new backpack and a big thing of pencils for our house. While we were there I decided to poke around the bedding section to check out their duvet selection.

We have these comforters from Ikea that are about four years old. They’re still in good shape, but are rather dingy at the top where our greasy hands and faces come in regular contact with them. Despite my best bleaching efforts, the faint yellow remains as evidence of many good nights of sleep and drool.

All of the duvets that they had in stock were at least $70 so I decided to wait and order a cheapie version online and grabbed some new sheets while I was at it. I went with these two:

I’m going with the chocolate/blue combo because I totally have my finger on the pulse of the color scheme trends of 2003.

ANYWAY, all of this duvet talk kept making me think about Fight Club and how silly it is that I am even concerned about such things. And then I also started wondering if duvets were also mentioned in Raising Arizona when H.I. and Ed are giving Nathan Jr. the tour. But that was a divan.

With that sorted out, I think I can move on with life now.