Breadmaking

I'm no gourmand and don't really relate to foodies. But I have a whole lot of ideas I'd like to try for just because and just for me and the husband, but we don't have the income to support a spending spree at the grocery. (Especially now with my being out of work and all.)

Every so often, more often as it's becoming more necessary, I get in the groove and make some tasty staples. Like bread. I love making bread because it's a great combination between art and skill. If you don't do everything just right with the right temperature and the right humidity, things  go wrong. Like the story I heard in my baking program in school:

Breadmaking: yeast development.

A new baker was making bread and forgot to add the salt. He let the master baker know and the dough was discarded immediately because incorporating salt evenly into a 20 pound ball of dough is too difficult to be worthwhile. A little while later that same young baker was finishing up his shift by taking out the day's trash. The back door to the dumpster in the alley was slightly jammed. After a little brute force, the door gave way to a huge mass of bread dough taking over the alley!

The moral, well, more practical lesson, is that without salt, the yeast will not stop producing gas (not to mention making the bread pretty tasty.) And yes, that story may have been a bit fabricated. It might be in it's entirety, but it stuck. So I always add salt.

Like I say, I would like to do this more often, but my budget prevents it. But I'm hoping to hear back from a local grocery for a job. Crossing my fingers that my application and resume scream "pick me pick me!"

Christmastime! (Best and Worst)

I have a confession - I love Christmas music.

I know as a 30-something in the naughts (teens now, I guess) I should roll my eyes at the slightest hint of a jingle bell and carolers should send me into a fit of spasms, but Christmas is my favorite holiday and nothing gets me in the mood like Christmas music. Every year my husband and I buy a Christmas album to add to our collection (right now my iTounes music list is at 223 songs running 12 hours' worth of holiday bliss) and I think this years' will be Buble. I would love to share my favorites.

10.  Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree: I absolutely love how this song combines traditional sentiment and a get up and boogie tempo. At #10 it's obviously not the best, but it works it's way on to the list.
9.  Christmas Waltz: I'm a sucker for a waltz. And this one is so beautiful, conveying the chill of winter and the warmth of the holiday.
8.  Mele Kalikimaka: Forget chill of the winter. With a fun bounce and a lesson in language, this song is awesome.
7.  Step Into Christmas: Christmas spirit isn't something that just comes to most people because, let's face it, Christmas means dealing with angry shoppers, keyed up family members and the search for the elusive "perfect gift." What I love about Elton John's song is it's reminder to get into the spirit.

6.  Opera of the Bells - Destiny's Child: I love Opera of the Bells anyway, but this is an amazingly beautiful version. A capella music shows great mastery of music. And, really, how could Beyonce screw up Christmas?

5.  Sufjan Stevens' traditional hymns: You won't hear these on regular radio. And many people might not even know who Sufjan Stevens is. In honesty, his entire Christmas collection is amazing (with one exception noted below) and well worth owning.

4.  Linus and Lucy: You hear it come on the radio and you start dancing like your favorite Peanut's character. Admit it.

3.Baby, It's Cold Outside: I've heard lots of versions of this song, but I think the one I like the best is from the Elf soundtrack featuring Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redbone. I love the regret and longing in the tempo, but some versions mess that up by making it more upbeat.

2.  All I Want for Christmas is You: My guilty pleasure.

1.  Barenaked Ladies' Barenaked for the Holidays: I love this whole album which isn't common. (Even the songs I noted below.) I love that it incorporates Hanukkah, so it's really not a Christmas album. This is my favorite (favoruite?) from the album.

But not all Christmas music is created equal. There are some songs that come on and I become the raging 30-something that all my friends say I should be. These are an abomination to the holiday!

10.  Put the Lights on the Tree by Sufjan Stevens: It's not easy to write original holiday music with the huge repertoire that has been created over the years. This one lost me at the line "call your grandma on the phone/if she's living all alone" implying the co-habitable grandmas don't need a phone call. You can see a cute video to this marginally bad song here.
9.  Santa Baby: The materialistic mentality of the holiday season really brings me down (after years of being asked "what do you want" I've gotten stuff overload) and the debauchery of greed that comes on Christmas morning. This song is that anthem. (To note, my favorite version of this song is by Kylie Minogue.)
8.  Jingle Bells: There are four notes. Ugh! Bored.
7.  Greensleeves: It makes me mad that this heralded as a Christmas song, when really, it isn't. The lyrics to What Child is This? were written in 1865 and the tune predates it with lyrics unbecoming of Christ's birth.
6.  Aaron Neville: His warbling vibrato makes it very, very difficult to enjoy any song he sings... most especially Christmas standards. Please Come Home for Christmas is the worst.
5.  Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by James Taylor: I love this song. I do not love that Taylor changed the words to make it limited. Christmas is about future and opportunity. The original lyrics: "one day soon we all will be together." Taylor's: "in a year we all will be together." What??? I have to wait a whole year? He does this throughout the song.
4.  Last Christmas: A song about a breakup. Just plain depressing.
3.  Christmas Wrapping: Not about a breakup but a missed connection. But the song just rubs me the wrong way.
2.  Twelve Days of Christmas: As far as the song per usual goes, it's not bad. But I've heard an instrumental version of this song that drove me nuts. No words makes this song repetitive and dull.
1.Christmas Shoes: Has there ever been a more depressing Christmas song??? My mom's gonna die and I want to get her one last gift.  -_-

Have a Merry Christmas!

A day of making the home... A mess.

So since I'm faced with this great abundance of time (har har) I decided that today would be a great day to get a few projects done that have been on my itinerary for a little while.
• laundry
• prepping for an imminent yard sale
• kitchen stuff

The laundry is started and is slowly churning in the machines of clean. To be honest, this one chore is the bane of my homely responsibilities not because it's a forever ongoing task, but because it takes so long! Put in a load. Wait. Put in a load. Wait. Etc. so I'm currently on my third load (of about eighty) and I'm waiting. Time which I thought would give me an excellent opportunity to move on to the second task.

I have so much stuff in my house that I don't need that I know a yard sale is looming in my future. So I set to tackle one closet at a time. Today's closet I went through very successfully separating the things to keep and the things to jettison. (New load. Wait.) And hey, there's this box of photos that hold memories from when I was two until now that need homes
in the abundant albums found in the same closet. (Dang, I forgot to put in the new load.) So now my dining room table looks like this.

Sigh. Moving on. We had turkey for dinner last might and I pride myself on stretching a carcass as far as it will go, so unfortunately it seems that turkey broth and stock was the only accomplishment of the day. (My apologies to vegan and veggie friends out there. But an omnivore's gotta do what an omnivore's gotta do.)

Now I know why I have an unfinished list.

Looking for work

So yesterday I had almost decided and today I have done it. I quit my job. Now, I would normally give two-weeks notice leaving a job because I feel it is a sign of respect to my employer. I was not feeling respected at all and decided that if I could not reciprocate respect, none was deserved.


This has been coming for two months and for two months I had been holding out hope that things would turn around, but from my vantage point, things have only gotten worse.

I'm looking for a job now. Anyone know of anything in Greensboro or the nearby surrounding that might accommodate my schedule with a dependent Monkey?

Today's Trials

Sleep.

I've found that this is the most elusive element in parenting. Firstly, parents don't get enough of it. During the first three months we were easily up every three hours with the Monkey. And now, even though I go to bed at times I deem to be ridiculously early for an adult and sleep through the night, I don't feel rested in the morning. True, three days a week I get up for work before any person should stir, but that doesn't matter. I'm ALWAYS tired.

But that's just me. As for the Monkey, though she sleeps through the night like a champ now, her daytime sleep is wanting. For example, I put her down for a nap at 10. As per usual she cried for about a minute, then quieted down. This usually implies that she's gone to sleep. But here it is, 10:25 and she's been talking to herself the whole time. I hear in my head "well, at least she's not crying." True, true. But without a decent morning nap I can assume to have a miniature sized Grinch on my hands for the rest of the day, making shopping stressful, meals unmanageable, and quality time downright heartbreaking.

Sleep child.

So, it's been nearly a year since my last blog. *fail.*

A lot has happened since then. I was on maternity leave, went back to work, went to Ireland, decided I was missing too much of Annabelle's life and cut back on working to stay home with her. There have been plenty of things that I could have blogged about. Firsts, adventures, baking, homemaking, and whatnot, but Somewhere along the way I lost track of my own thoughts and focused on my girl.

Well no more!

So, yes, I'm still focusing on my girl, but who's to say I can't do this too? So my plan is to blog daily, since I have all this "free time."

To start, updates from previous posts:
-My gardenias died. I give up. Somehow there's a bush growing at my neighbor's house they

don't care for at all that flourishes (from which I nicked flowers all summer without their knowledge), so I suppose the lesson is I love the plant too much. Point of fact, coffea plants and gardenias are in the same subfamily: Ixoroideae. Perhaps this could explain my love of both gardenias and coffee. Heaven help the coffee farm I invest in though! (To the left, the shrub with the white specs is the neighbor's obliging gardenia that gave my house such fragrance. See how well it grows???)

-I did not get accepted to UNCG's counseling program, which is perhaps for the best. My friend Emily was accepted (woohoo Emily! So excited!!!) and after her tales of coursework, classwork and practicum, I think I would have had less time for my Monkey than if I had kept working full time at PCJ. Things are far better this way.

And in coming weeks, dear readers, you can look forward to posts about my Monkey, holiday baking, a new hobby (to take the place of my abysmal gardening failure) and many other domestic activities that try to keep me busy.

Blog again. Too long.

So the last months of my pregnancy were the hardest, mainly because I was so tired. That's why the blogging was so... missing.

So in short to catch up, my application is in to UNCG. I am a graduate school applicant and check my email with some frequency expecting to see the words unfortunately, we're sorry, and fail. Jacob assures me that I won't be seeing that email, but my insecurities carried over. He even brought home a copy of the rejection letter so I could prepare myself.

And my Annabelle is here. On January 5 I gave birth to an amazingly beautiful baby girl... then promptly fell asleep. Clarification: this was not supposed to happen. They prepped me for surgery and injected the anesthesia... a local, so I could meet the little peanut right away. And then the doctor strolls in wearing his wader boots... not joking. Jacob filled me in on this part of the story: he pulls them out of a cabinet and pulls them on before surgery, Jacob giving him a quizzical look. Doc says "I don't care if *birth stuff* gets on my shirt, but I don't want it messing up my shoes!" While this is happening, I'm losing feeling everywhere south of my ribcage, so things are going good. But the anesthesia creeps up on me like a cougar on prey and before too long I'm pulling hard breaths and struggling to stay awake. Local anesthesia became general and I was out for the rest of the procedure... and the two hours afterward. It was all worth it though to see this beautiful face once my eyesight adjusted.
So it's been three weeks since and every minute with her is so wonderful. And I hear her calling for mom now....