The quest for excellence

Off topic a bit.

Some of you know that I'm planning on applying to graduate school. For the others, I found this pretty awesome program at a nearby university in the counseling department that focuses on college and higher education. This has me really psyched because I think counseling is a good fit for me and I know I can relate (on some levels anyway) to college age youth. It covers a wide spectrum of possible placement within a college or university which seems like a beacon of hope for possible employment. And with the hubby's plan to teach in a university, I think it would make me versatile enough that I could work where he does. Hooray for figuring out what I (might) want to be when I grow up!

But with this realization comes certain insecurities.

I'm scheduled to take the GRE on September 24, and though I don't fear the testing at all and have been working to study and cram in my head what I don't know Verbal and Quantitative-wise, I'm scared of the outcome. I don't know what the program expects of me. For the hubby, going into English, it was pretty certain that a high verbal score and high writing scores were ideal. What does counseling want of me? I figure that if I work hard on just getting the best possible score, that's best.

Also, although this program is available elsewhere, I'm rooted for now. So I'm breaking a cardinal rule of applying to grad schools... I'm only applying to one. So I'm returning to my poker-playing days and taking a big gamble... all-in. Of course at this point I'm not in at all, still in the free-writing and drafting stage of my statement of purpose.

Which also scares me. I have 2 to 3 pages to tell someone I don't know all about me and why, out of all the other applicants, I deserve to get into this program. I have to explain why it's been 8 years since leaving school and why I decided to come back - to pursue a degree having nothing to do with my undergraduate B.S. and that I have no experience in. I'm a real catch, let me tell you!

So if anyone out there has some sage advice and encouraging words, that would be awesome.

Long gone... new news.

So I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while. Honestly, I wasn't sure whether I'd return, but my writing teacher (aka, my husband) says that this is good practice. Just writing, and it doesn't matter what. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I stopped writing for a while because I got some news. I'm having a baby. I knew the last thing I wanted this blog to turn into was a "mommy blog." There's nothing wrong with that kind of blog, per say, but that's not what the aim of this blog was about. And I hear the protest scream of "what could be more domestic goddess-y than raising a child?" Agreed, but honestly, that's not what I had in mind and I've read far better mommy blogs than I could write. But just as an FYI... in the picture to the left, the doctor told me two bars means it's a baby! :)

So since I found out I've been getting the nursery together. My hubby keeps saying that I should update this, since I made the curtains (that are on the right) and we painted the room, but I was wanting to keep this my secret from the web until a given time. Then the given time came and went. I told my family, I told my friends, I did not tell the web. But now that I'm nearly 5 months along and nesting is bound to happen as a perfectly ready number of events that will beg to be blogged, I am compelled to write again. So back I come to write about my journey into wife-ness/motherhood/all-around-woman-ness.

So here I am again. In upcoming blogs you can expect to hear about the planning and preparing for the English grad Halloween party, my continued practice writing, taking of the GRE and all that follows. Stay tuned!

Fruitcake... it's not just for Christmas.

Okay, so here's my confession. I love fruitcake. I love how it smells when I bake it. I love how my friends and family respond to it around the Holidays. I love everything about it. This, though, I DO NOT love:This is an abomination to the name fruitcake. This is not a fruitcake, it's a well colored door-stop. I think this may be the most appalling thing in culinary history, tied with "fruit salad" that gets served at church functions. (You know the one... Perfectly good fruit encased in molded and cloudy jello, usually lime, and kind of slithers off the platter during whatever function it may be attending.)
Every Christmas, I make goody boxes for friends and family. This is an easy way to give me the needed bake time during Christmas, give my friends a delicious (and mostly inexpensive) gift from the heart, and open their eyes to good baking. Almost everyone finds something in the box they love and can't live without. My hope is that it's fruitcake. This is me in the midst of the fruitcake bake-a-thon of 2009.Good fruitcake starts with 2 key ingredients. Dried (but not neon colored!) fruit and alcohol. I prefer rum for bringing out the flavor of the fruit. Today, mostly because my hubby's been asking for it, I decided to make fruitcake. And I still had my 2 key ingredients from the 2009 bake-a-thon. If you bake, imagine dried fruit macerated in rum for six months and tell me the horrors of fruitcake to come.

The fruit, plus all the other ingredients get boiled down in a pot. If I had the ability for scratch and sniff web browsing, you'd think you were in heaven. At this stage my kitchen is filled with the aroma of fruit and spice and rum and other stuff (because I'm not planning on sharing my recipe here. Sorry.) The smell alone is worth the time and preparation for fruitcake.

Now for those of you confused by the term "macerate," let me explain. To macerate is to let dried fruits enjoy a luxurious bath of alcohol and juice and rehydrate themselves for the next step in dried fruit life. It's like a spa. Sort of. For a better explanation, look to the picture on the right. Six months ago those were raisins. Now, they're plump, unwrinkled and ready for cake. I guess it's kind of like botox.

So, to sum up, from this point, I finished with ingredients and got them in pans to bake. Baking doesn't emit such glorious smells as the boiling does, so we'll glaze that over. Then out they come, warm and delicious. But don't dig in quite yet! Remember the 2 key ingredients? Re-recruit that alcohol and baste the top. If you refer back to the photo at the top, I imagine you might possibly be able to tolerate it if it was soaked in rum. But even better, if it was soaked in rum, it wouldn't require the preservatives that ensure it will be around for cockroaches to munch after the bomb goes off. All natural fruitcake with all natural and great tasting preservatives. Yum.

Wedding week continued...

Still no ideas about what to do for our six-year anniversary. We have to work around my schedule though, because my thoughtless boss scheduled me to close, so bed time might be postponed on Saturday. (For those of you out there who don't know, that thoughtless boss is me.)

So six years ago, minus a few days, it was nearly probable that my wedding party would have spent the night in jail. (Tell you what, with the nearly illegal antics and the fickle friend, gravity, this was one eventful event!) So everything was on track, everyone had arrived safely and things were looking good... t-minus a few hours until Jacob and Niki get hitched! The girls and I were enjoying wine coolers at one of the two bars in Sylva, The Rusty Lizard. (They sell t-shirts!) The music was horrendous. The alcohol was watered down. The mood was perfect... for me to remember that the only dry cleaner in town that wasn't open on weekends still had my dress. "OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GET MARRIED NAKED!" The next few hours were a little manic. We called the guys, though much of that conversation was unintelligible due to my weeping. We called my mom. We paced in front of the dry cleaner. I think loaner dresses may have also been proposed. One bridesmaid and one groomsman offered to break the window and steal my dress. One bridesmaid went to the other bar in town to find help. Everyone else was trying to console the out-of-control bride. At the other bar, bridesmaid #2 had luck using her feminine wiles on a few off-duty cops and acquired the name of the business owner. Who was woken at about 12:30 am with a plea to open the next day. I rescued my dress and walked down the aisle, smelling like freshly baked Subway loaves. (Note: don't take clothes to a dry cleaner located next to a restaurant or nail salon.) But this dress was important... my mom and I had done all the beading by hand. It was a work of love and there was no way I was going to let that go.


(Keep in mind the pictures are from now and because I don't want to abandon my dress again, it's six-year-old dirty. The dress has a healthy fear of dry cleaners, too.)

At the end of this week is my anniversary. I can't wait... for several reasons. This is the sixth, and the first year we haven't been on poverty's door. So I'm hoping we'll do something reasonably abnormal and paint the town a light shade of burgundy. (Let's not get crazy here. My usual bedtime is around 10:30, so I don't expect to shoot the moon or anything!)

But with the sixth looming closer, I wanted to look back at the joyous event that brought us to where we are now.
We were married at Cullowhee Baptist Church by Jeffery Vickery. It was a very special time, of course because we were getting married, but also because Jeffery got to do it on his birthday! But that's Jacob, with his group of thugs (that's what I always think of when I look at this photo.) Pictured is about 1/4 of the group gathered for our event. I always thought of it as the wedding sans guests, although Jacob assures me there were people there. I guess I only had eyes for my betrothed that day! Or maybe our party was small because we got married in three months on Memorial Day weekend. Either way, it wasn't a huge event, and that sits just fine with me since I cried for a lot of it anyway (I don't really remember much of the service because of that.)

But I remember the reception! We decided to go low key because: 1) Jacob and I aren't fancy people, and 2) did I mention that we've been playing chicken with poverty for six years? So our reception was a picnic! And what fun! I played frisbee in my wedding dress (Which consequently is ruined from the dirt and grass stains on the hem. Ah, well. It's just a dress, right?) The best part about the reception had to be the wedding cake though. It was beautifully made by my sister. Three "tiers" (but they weren't stacked, 'cause cutting actually tiered cakes is not easy!) with fresh flowers. No fondant (I think fondant is pretty disgusting.) Three flavors: chocolate (for Jacob), strawberry (for me) and plain (for everyone else!)Just beautiful and delicious and just what I wanted. But there always arises problems in the transportation of food. The cake made it's first trip from Raleigh to Cullowhee, a 300 mile trip unscathed. But the 15 mile trip from my house to the picnic reception proved a little more stressful. When my sister asked the transporter what happened (she couldn't transport herself since she was my maid of honor), the answer was "gravity happened."If you can't really tell, that side of the cake (and a couple others) is dented, smushed a little. But it still tasted great!

More photos to come this week and the exciting story about a bride and a dress reunited. It's wedding week!

The ever elusive flowering shrub

I enjoy gardening. I love the smell of fresh, wet dirt under my fingernails and the way time just passes by when I'm communing with Mother. And I'm pretty good at it. Last year I grew a backyard vegetable garden (from seeds!) which would have been a pretty good harvest if it hadn't been for my dogs' love of squash. But I don't feel justified in calling myself a gardener... yet.

Among my favorite plants is the gardenia. I love the fragrant flowers. I love the evergreen leaves. I absolutely love that it's a perennial. In my opinion, gardening is great, but if you have to do it every year because the plants won't survive, what's the point? (There are a few plants in my "must have" list that don't fit this description, but I assure you, they are few.) I had two gardenias at my wedding, so they're almost a symbol of love. And everything I've read says they're an easy plant to grow. I wholly disagree.

The two potted gardenias that held a prime spot at my wedding were going to be cherished and loved and would be planted in a prime spot in whatever home my husband and I bought. Love plants blooming love year after year. The plants disagreed. About three months after we were married, I came home to find them dead-ish. Dying. I coddled them, I sang to them, I re-potted them. They died. I felt like a failure.

But the love survived. Don't be alarmed. My husband and I are still happily married and just bought a house last October. After the first walk-though I loved it. After the second walk-through I noticed the healthy blooming gardenia planted by the front door and announced that this would be our house! The buying process went well and we moved in. The thing that gardening websites don't tell you is that gardenias must have olfactory senses. I swear the gardenia smelled my presence as a "death-bringer." It had been lush and beautiful (and a perennial, I might add, due to it's evergreen-ness) and was nearly dead in a week. I scoured the internet looking for tips and stumbled across a site that told me if I could scratch the wood and see green, it might could be salvaged.

So I set to remixing soil with peat for good drainage and fertilizer for good pH. I tested and made sure the sun was right. And then I replanted the nearly dead gardenia. That night I had a dream that I would find a beautiful, lush, thriving gardenia. What I found was this.

I was heartsick. How could such an easy plant to grow be such an easy plant for me to kill? So when I noticed that there was a special on gardenias, what other choice could I make other than buy two new ones and start over. And this time I'm doing it right. I'm planting with intimidation. Maybe these new gardenias have a survival instinct and will learn to behave. And perhaps if these two survive, I can call myself a gardener.

Hello web, here I come.

Before I get into the whole blog thing, I wanted to introduce myself. You know... kind of a starting point.

I am not a domestic goddess as the title implies. At least I don't consider myself as such, but in recent years the title has gotten stuck. I quilt, I bake, I cook, I garden, I knit and crochet, I do a number of domestic craft type things, but I do not think I do them well. Call it my modesty or my lack of experience... either would suit, I suppose. Through this blog I will explore those avenues that have earned me the title, perhaps I will show myself to the world as a domestic failure. Perhaps I'll excel in new-found ways. I'm content either way.

With that being said, an explanation on my signature. When I conceived of the idea for this blog, I considered names. There are several "domestic goddess" blogs, and I wanted something a little more unique. So I did a little research on the myths of the domestic goddess. There's Hestia, the Greek goddess of hearth and home and her Roman counterpart, Vesta. The Norse looked to Frigg (also called Frigga) for guidance in domesticity. But none of these really related to me. Nor did the folklore of Asia or Egypt. So I looked to my roots. Being brought up Catholic, I considered St. Anne, the patron saint of housewives, but I wanted a broader range than the housewife. And I abandoned the Faith for a more Protestant belief, so dear Anne was out. But I own something of my heritage that sets me somewhat apart... I'm half Polish. To my knowledge the Poles didn't have pagan gods or folklore, but I was rewarded when I dug a little more. Granted, I do own up to being wholly Christian, proudly. But perhaps my roots go so deeply that before the Romans brought religion, my ancestors my have believed in the Slavic pagan deities? I'll assume for the sake of blog, yes. Matka Gabia was the Slavic goddess for home and hearth. Voila! A signature!

So fore the sake of this blog, I am the Modern Matka Gabia: explorer of all things homey.