30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 22

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 22: Wildlife

So, this was on my front window today.

Giant praying mantis

Apparently, I live in the fucking jungle.  This isn't one of those cases where a picture of something small just looks big because of a weird angle.  This is actually, like, 5 inches long. 

Please excuse the crappy photo.  It is difficult to take a picture of a bug on a giant pane of glass on a sunny day.  Especially when your insurance claims adjuster is still parked outside your house and you probably shouldn't be moving around too much. 

I told the girl-child (who was thoroughly freaked out by this whole thing) that we should name it.  She didn't want to.  I seem to recall a praying mantis being in some ridiculous late-night adult-ish cartoon in the 90s, but I can't remember now...  Oh well.

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 21

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 21: Broccoli

Broccoli...on a grill!

So, this is my new favorite way to cook broccoli.  I believe I've posted about grilled veggies before.  I still don't know how my family is so awesome that I can go to the farmer's market, grab random in-season veggies, oil 'em up and throw them on the grill and that they let is pass as dinner.  It's amazing.  Anyway, last time we had grilled veggie dinner we were trying out this grill basket, so I was throwing whatever I had in the fridge into it and onto the grill.  (We discovered that this particular device sucks, since it has parallel bars instead of a bunch of little squares.  Stuff falls through all the time unless you cut it just right.)  Anyway, I put broccoli into it and it was so fricking delicious.  Tonight I decided to just rub the whole broccoli heads with olive oil and sea salt and chuck them right on the grill grate.

Hot broccoli

Mmm...grilled veggie dinner.  (Don't you love the color of my dishes?)

Result: delicious!!!  Even the fat stem parts were tender.  The grilling makes the broccoli taste a little sweet and smoky.  (The crispy bits are the best, by the way.)  Try it!

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 20

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 20: Car Crash

It's been a while since I've posted.  This summer was busy.  I picked up full time hours at work and have been busy squeezing in as much homeschooling as possible before I have to go back to school.  Something happened that has left me with very much time on my hands, so blogging resumes.

Two Saturdays ago (August 11th) Mr. Sty and the child and I were heading to Madison for their awesome farmer's market on Capitol Square when we were in a car crash on the freeway.

 It is technically an at fault accident for Mr. Sty, but he reacted in such a way that he minimized injuries to everybody.  Aside from having never happened at all, the accident couldn't have gone any better.  Nobody was seriously injured, which is amazing since Mr. Sty wasn't wearing his seat belt and his rock-hard cranium shattered the windshield.  The car is totaled, so we are going through the whole car-shopping process now, which is dumb for many reasons.

Little girl was asleep when it happened.  She woke up freaked out, understandably, but after two minutes of me reassuring her that it would be okay she was totally bored by the whole situation.  The EMTs and firefighters were there cutting off the side of the car and she barely noticed.  She was excited because an off-duty EMT who stopped (Kevin...amazing...restored a bit of my faith in humanity) gave her a huge case of Strawberry Shortcake bandages.  In the ER they had her bed next to mine.  At one point they wheeled her into her own room to do a portable chest X-ray.  When they asked if she wanted to go back into my room, she said that she'd rather lay in her bed and watch the Disney Channel.  I don't know how she is so well adjusted.  She also told me that hospitals should really have books for kids to read because the whole day was boring.  Ridiculous.

Anyway, I ended up being the one with the most injuries, although they are not serious.  My seat belt hurt my shoulder muscles and tendons.  This has left me unable to drive myself anywhere, which means that I have been off work since the accident.  I can't lift things, stretch that arm, pick things up off the floor, open jars, or KNIT!  (Don't worry, I'm surviving.  Barely.)  You'd think it would be nice to have an excuse to lay around on your ass for a few weeks, unable to do chores or work.  It actually really sucks.  I'm bored, my house is messy (although Mr. Sty has been doing a good job of taking care of me), and I don't understand why everything isn't fine after a few days!

On the up side, the weather has been gorgeous lately and the child and I have been sitting on our porch a lot.  I am feeling better than I was a week ago, although I still can't drive and have to start PT pretty soon.  I'm hoping that it's just the massage kind of PT, not the weight-lifting kind of PT because, really, I'm lazy.  And it's not like my job description requires a ton of heavy-lifting.  I have been managing to knit a few rows here and there, so that helps too.

Oh, in lighter news, I took the PCAT (pharmacy college admissions test) to see how good of a candidate I would be for pharmacy school next fall.  I got the results of the test and nearly pooped my pants.  Out of the thousands of people who have taken the PCAT between 2005 and 2011, I scored in the 94th percentile.  I actually called several people on my way home to ask how the percentile system worked.  I was pretty sure that I was misreading it and that I was actually in the bottom 6 percent of my peers.  I went home and Googled the scores and the scoring system for the next 4 hours before I felt like I could tell anybody.  I'm thrilled, obviously, but part of me is kind of waiting for a letter in the mail detailing some kind of scoring screw-up.  I'll let you know when that comes. 

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 19

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 19: Assorted Food Goodies

Today the child and I went to visit my grandmother.  We visited for a while, had lunch (girl-child opted for vegetarian tacos...apparently our reduced meat-intake is sticking with her), and the two of us picked the blackberries from the back yard.  (My grandparents have always had fantastic vegetable and flower gardens.  I did not inherit this talent.  I am, however, more than thrilled to suffer the 100 degree heat for a half hour in order to come home with a pint of fresh berries.)

They also sent us home with two tomato plants and a pepper plant.  My grandpa starts their plants from seed every year, usually from seeds that he has saved from previous seasons.  The pepper pot says "golden pepper" on the side, so we'll see what that turns out to be.  One tomato is a Big Boy (that name has always cracked me up) and the other is an heirloom that his mother used to grow.  These plants produce perfect little pink fruits that are fantastically sweet.  He told me he was saving these three plants for me so that he didn't have to throw them in the garbage.  (His garden is already overfilled with huge, thriving plants.)  I told him they would probably be better off in the garbage than at my house (especially considering the combination of drought and heatwave that we have been experiencing lately), but they already have flowers on them so I figured I'd give it a shot.  (They are sitting on my porch.  They'll probably be dead by morning.)

Short-lived pepper and tomatoes

On the way home I decided to make a stop at the Mars Cheese Castle. 

I have been thinking a lot lately about how people tend to overlook and under-appreciate the attractions in their hometowns.  I drive past this place all the time.  It used to be a little, old building, but it was recently remodeled to look like this:

Ridiculous, I know.  But so fun.  The child declared that she wants to live there. 

Every time I drive past, I laugh at the fact that people stop at the cheese castle on their vacations.  Then, I remember how much I love cheese and go inside.  The store sells all kinds of things from wine and beer to candies.  Of course, there is a fantastic selection of Wisconsin cheeses.  Mr. Sty and I love to spend some time selecting weird cheeses and then having cheese and crackers for dinner.  He is fond of the habanero jack (spicy, of course!) and old, old, ancient aged cheddar.  Don't get me wrong, their 10+ year cheddars are fantastic, but they run about $10-15 for a little block and I didn't have that kind of funding today.  I opted instead for a cheese marbled with buffalo sauce, a beer cheddar (no brainer...my two favorite things), and chocolate cheese fudge.

 
I have no idea what chocolate cheese fudge is, but I don't think it can be bad.  (I also feel this way about my ambition to make a bacon-flavored beer.  It will happen one day, I just have to figure out the process and set Mr. Sty to work.  But seriously...bacon beer?  Has to be amazing.)  We also got some white cheddar squeaky curds.  I'm told these are a regional food and that people not from Wisconsin find it really disgusting and weird that we like squeaky cheese.  Good.  More for me.  The girl child demanded that we buy some beef sticks.  (Apparently her vegetarianism has its limits, and those limits are ground, processed, tubular meats.)  The cheese castle makes their own beef sticks.  They are 2 feet long and child approved.

Anyway, as soon as we came home I promptly made myself some boozy blackberry lemonade.  I chucked some blackberries into a glass and mashed them up with a spoon. 

Blackberries in the Time Vortex 

 

 

 Dead Blackberries

(If I was fancy, I'd say that I muddled them with a fancy grinder thing, but I'm just in a hurry to drink, ok?)  I poured in some lemonade.  This makes a delicious treat for a kid.  Then I poured in the rest of a bottle of Malibu.  This makes a delicious treat for an adult.   (I always underestimate how much is left in the bottom of a bottle, which explains why I am buzzed at 4:00 in the afternoon.) 

Garnish with mint or something if you're feeling special

Hooray for summer!

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 18

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 18: Something I'm Missing

This past weekend the ladies from the shop and I were lucky enough to be able to attend the Summer TNNA show in Columbus, Ohio.  (In case you don't know, TNNA is a huge trade show put on by The National Needlearts Association.)  I had a blast taking classes on tunisian crochet from Sheryl Thies and how to knit a doll version of yourself from Norwegian duo Arne and Carlos.  We shopped the booths, picked out some amazing new products for the store, knit, laughed (a lot), drank only a small amount of beer (I swear), and had a fantastic time.  However, there is one thing in downtown Columbus that seems to attract TNNA attendees like moths to a flame: Jeni's Ice Cream.  This leads us to Picture 18:

I'm drooling on my keyboard

This is a picture of the third of four delicious ice cream treats that I bought from Jeni's over a 3-day period.  (Side note: Apparently it is possible to eat full-fat, triple-scoops of gourmet ice cream all weekend and not gain any weight.  Granted, I'm not a waif to begin with, but usually I merely look at sugar and my gut grows.)  Every single flavor they have is amazing.  I usually try to have different ones every time.  This cone contains their Brown Butter Almond Brittle (fricking amazing), Wildberry Lavender (refreshing, yet creamy), and the Cherry Lambic Sorbet (tastes like lambic, which I love)!  Jeni's is sold at a few places around here, but not any closer than a 45-minute drive.  I have refused to buy it anywhere because I would blow my paycheck and lay on my couch eating pint after pint for an entire weekend.  I know that it seems ridiculous that this was my favorite part of the weekend, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who feel this way.

Moral of the story: If you ever, ever have the opportunity to eat anything that this place makes (seriously, even the sticky drips off of the floor), you should do it.  And then you can thank me by sending me a pint of their Milkiest Chocolate in the World.

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 17

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 17: Things My Daughter Does Better Than I

Most parents experience moments where they are caught in awe of their children.  This has been happening to me a lot recently.  Day (or post) 17 of the 30 Day Picture Shenanigans is about things that my daughter does better than I.

My daughter is better at savoring the summer.  I think all kids are.  Remember when summer used to seem like it was a year long?  Today was really fricking hot and this evening it was still in the high 80s and pretty windy.  She sat outside blowing bubbles despite the heat, basking in the sun

My daughter is better at enjoying the small things.

My daughter is also better at blowing bubbles.

My daughter is better at getting along with other people's children than I am.  While we're at it, my daughter is better at getting along with other adults than I am.  Also, she is better at getting out of awkward and/or boring conversations.  Apparently when you are 7, not answering direct questions while staring blankly at a person before walking away is still relatively acceptable.  My daughter is also better with animals.  I have always thought of myself as an animal lover.  It turns out that I don't actually love being around or near animals, I just don't want them to be abused or neglected.  For example, I like Gomer (the butter-loving cat).  I like his cat-weirdness and I found his morbid obesity to be adorable.  Now that he is expensive, underweight, shaggy, half-blind, and really fucking smelly (seriously, his breath is probably what is killing my house plants) I find that I don't actually want to spend any time around him.  My daughter will sleep with that stinky animal every night.  If he is on our bed, as soon as he starts making that annoying noise with his tongue while he's cleaning himself I use my feet to launch him into the hallway.  (What?  I like my sleep.)  Don't even get me started on my mom's Boston.

A couple of weeks ago the child asked if we had any seeds.  She has a flower box that Mr. Sty built her a few years ago that is filled with dirt and random weeds.  I dug around in a cabinet in the garage and found a packet of lettuce seeds and a packet of cucumber seeds that were at least two years old.  She asked for some brief planting instructions, then happily skipped off with the seeds and her little shovel.  Yesterday she ran in the house excitedly insisting that I go with her into the back yard to look at something.

My daughter is better at gardening.

She planted seeds that were years old and every one has not only sprouted, but has gone untouched by the backyard vermin.  Apparently wicked awesome gardening skills skip a generation.

Bastard cucumber seedling.  Had I planted this, it would be dead already.

I can only assume that my daughter is better at frosting a cake than I am.  (I think a quadriplegic would be a better cake decorator than me.)  She is also a better businesswoman than I am.  (She just asked if I would give her real money for some of her art.  I said sure, thinking a couple of quarters would suffice.  She said, "Okay, my art isn't that much.  Like, 2 or 3, maybe 5 dollars.")

My daughter is better at doing my job.

I'm sure that she will grow up to do all kinds of things better than I did.  She'll probably be a better parent.  (Although, when she was 3 she went into great detail about why she hates babies, so maybe not.)  She'll probably be a better cook, have her dream job, travel the world, drink better beer...  But I guess the goal of all parents is that your children be better people than you.  (So, really, if she does grow up to be an awesome person, that means that I kick ass too.  Ha!) 

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 16

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 16: Birthday Cake

Tomorrow is the girl child's 7th birthday.  (I am old.)  We celebrated yesterday by mini-golfing with my parents and then going to a local restaurant for lunch and a slab of ice cream cake as large as a house.  Today she and I (and the neighbor girls) planned to bake the most fantastic birthday cake.  I am generally a believer in doing everything from scratch, but I've recently begun biking for exercise again and that makes me lazy in every other area of my life, so we made (hold onto yourselves) boxed cakes.  I have been seeing cool pictures on Pinterest of ombre-colored cakes in which the layers are varying shades of green or whatever.  Child is all about anything being rainbow colored, so I split two prepared box mixes into 4 cereal bowls and added enough food coloring to each bowl to make the chemist and mother in me shudder.  Each bowl went into it's own separate 8-inch round pan so we ended up with teal, purple, dark pink, and orange cake layers.

Everything was great up to this point.  I forgot to grease the pans, but the cakes came out alright.  I let them cool.  I made buttercream frosting from scratch (using 2 pounds of powdered sugar, holy crap) and dyed it a lovely hot pink color (involuntary twitch).  What's that you say?  "Wow, this seems to be going pretty well so far, despite the fact that your child should be taken away from you for your use of box cake mixes and synthetic food dyes."  Oh, don't you worry.  Things began to go horribly awry starting...now.

First, while the cakes were cooling on large sheet pans on the kitchen table, the stupid butter-loving cat kept trying to eat them.  (Please see previous entries on what other stupid things my large cat likes to eat.)  To prevent this, I covered the cakes with clean flour-sack towels.  Usually he's an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" kind of cat.  Apparently today he was an "out-of-sight-so-that-must-mean-I-can-walk-on-it" kind of cat.  I came upstairs from doing one load of laundry to cries and screams from the three girls about how the cat had "ruined the birthday cake" and to find girl child with the cat in some kind of upside down half-nelson.  Really, thanks to the towels, the cakes were not ruined.  They just had tiny cat-foot sized holes in each one.  (Seriously, every single one.  They were set up in a square formation.  I think the cat was trying to play Dance Dance Revolution on the birthday cakes.)  No biggie, I calmed the girls down, moved the cakes, and carried on with the day.

The second problem, in hindsight, probably started when I got all "I know I'm supposed to cut the round tops off so the cakes are flat and I should probably cut the edges off too, but fuck it!  I'm so awesome that nothing could possibly go wrong here!  They're all the same shape and size...I'll just spread extra frosting in between the layers so that they stick together.  It will be fine!"  (The laziness.  I have it bad.)

The third problem is that I fricking suck at frosting cakes.  Actually, I suck at decorating anything, unless the goal is to make it as ugly as possible.  Leading us to today's picture shenanigan:

Behold!  The ugliest fucking birthday cake ever created!

The back half of the cake is pretty much gone...it gradually avalanched onto the kitchen table while I was trying to frost it.  I finally just gave up and tried to make the front as nice as possible.  Yes, this is my best cake-frosting job.  Thankfully, little girls don't care what a cake looks like, as long as it tastes good and you let them put an obscene amount of sprinkles on it.

The caved-in back side of the frankencake, in case you thought I was exaggerating.

 The layers are kind of cool at least.

Next year I'm buying a goddamn ice cream cake.