happy | 1 Comment »

Good thing there is a Cletus on the way and we are already running out of room with all the baby stuff we are accumulating, or else we would have 8 cats. These four kittens are incredibly teeny and cute. They are living under the two boats in our driveway, which as far as I can tell were built by our upstairs neighbor to house spiders and kittens.

pets | 6 Comments »

Last night we made the chocolate chip cookies from The Joy of Vegan Baking. We doubled the recipe to make two dozen cookies, and it made 28 giant cookies. I think one batch of not so giant ones would easily make 18. The recipe uses Ener-G egg replacer, which I hadn’t used before, and it worked very well and didn’t have any funny taste or anything. These cookies are actually too good, and the entire tub of Earth Balance in them (2 cups) means that they are also very bad. I am excited to have found a good vegan cookie recipe, now I don’t always have to bring cupcakes to events since these will also elicit a “these are vegan??” response.

vegantastical | No Comments »

My beloved orange glasses finally broke beyond repair, and of course Calvin Klein doesn’t make them anymore. But I found even better ones. These are by a company called Swissflex and you can pick from a zillion colors for the front and the sides. They were expensive, but they are super light (only 2.5 grams for the frame!) and I love that I could go buy new sides in a different color and switch them out. I think my next combination will be blue and green.

yay! | No Comments »

cletus | 4 Comments »

Heather sent me a package with my new most favorite hoodie in the world ever. I am not taking it off until the bun pops out, or maybe even ever, since technically I can now add “bun oven” to my resume. Since I do not have an obvious pregnant belly right now, more of a roly-poly “that lady might be pregnant” look, this is a very nice addition to my wardrobe. This picture was from my first sailing trip on Saturday on the bay, which was lovely.

Heather also sent a lovely peeler, which I put to use right away to make my favorite soup. It is the only thing I make without measuring stuff. It has olive oil tons of curry powder and a little chili powder, and sweet potatoes, carrots, and raisins and vegetable broth. Then you blend it all up after it boils for 45 minutes. Mmmmmmm.

foods, cletus | 4 Comments »

1: I have been an eighth grade teacher for 27 weeks now, and I have not yet run out of my classroom screaming. I don’t know if I’m really getting any better at teaching, or if I’m just getting better at not getting so stressed out about it, but either way, at the beginning of November I was having a hard time imagining spring break. Which is here now, and sadly almost 6 of my 10 glorious days in a row off are gone, but that also means there are only 11 weeks left in the school year. I don’t want it to be over so much because I don’t like it, it’s more because I am tired of having every day, every lesson be a new adventure and having no idea whether my big plans are going to work or not. I can never really be proactive about any problems or situations that arise, I can only be reactive. Thank goodness I can only be a first-year teacher for one year.

2: I have an occupant in my abdomen. No, not a tapeworm, a fetus! Its name is Cletus. Cletus the fetus. Everyone gets very panicked when I call it that, like I’d really name my child Cletus. I just like that it rhymes. Being pregnant is strange. I’ve been imagining what it would be like for so long that I thought it wouldn’t be that weird, but omg is it bizarre. I am hoping that Cletus will not have the same always late/procrastinating problems that Bryan and I have, seeing as it has appeared a whole year ahead of schedule. We are not finding out the sex, mostly to torture everyone and so that we don’t get all blue/sports or pink/flowers/princess things. I have not thrown up yet, and used those Sea-bands things (although not the real brand, the Long’s ones because they are much cheaper) to help with the yucky feelings in the beginning, so I have really had an easy time so far. Now that I have typed that, I’m sure I will have every pregnancy symptom all at once.

Here are some pictures from the ultrasound at 12 weeks (it was long because it was a nuchal translucency screen) that I have been too lazy to post, complete with crappy interpretative drawings I did for my mother. My dad says I have an imagination like elastic, but really you could see it better on the screen when it was all wiggling around. Tomorrow will be 23 weeks. Holy crap that is scary. Cletus is getting frighteningly large.

teaching, cletus | 3 Comments »

This is what happens when no one wants to eat the last cupcake. Well, that and being so gross that you don’t clean your kitchen for 6 weeks after your most recent visitor leaves. I’ve spent so long staring sadly at this that I could have already made more. Poor cupcake.

foods | 2 Comments »

Heather is here! We are have been making lots of vegan food and then quickly stuffing it in our faces. Speaking of which, I think I need another cupcake STAT.

Friday night we made an ambitious spread. And by we I mean Heather, while I mostly started things and then got distracted. Here are vegetables, crackers, and the almost overpowering onionyness of Herb Farm dip from The Candle Cafe cookbook.

Extremely good cesaer salad from Veganomicon (the croutons are especially tasty).

We also made the roasted butternut squash soup (it made 10 million gallons) from VWaV. And also the Greek-Style tomato zucchini fritters with fresh herbs from Veganomicon, but either the recipe sucks or we did something wrong, because sadly they were very soggy.

Saturday Heather made me brunch while I slept and then watched. She used the roasted potates and tofu scramble recipes from VWaV, except she kind of adds whatever strikes her fancy as she cooks in varying amounts. We are the opposite kind of chefs, and she is much better.

Last night we fancified up our leftovers and made some more salad. That recipe makes a lot of tasty dressing.

This morning we went to Fellini for a vegan brunch, which centered around hollandaise. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Then we walked off some of the hollandaise by stalking dogs at the dog park since Heather misses her pork dog.

Which meant we had room in our gullets for some more cupcakes. We made some cookies and cream frosting to go with the chocolate cupcakes form last night (VCTOtW) that we made cherry sauce for. But Heather hates arrowroot and could not get over the menses-like consistency of the cherry gloop.

The rest of our agenda today involves a dumb girl movie, Herbivore, and more cupcakes. I want it to be President’s Day weekend every day.

happy, foods | 3 Comments »

I have now been an eighth-grade teacher for 8 weeks. Man oh man is this job hard. Like pretty much impossible hard. I do very much like it most days, but it is crazy how much time it takes. I am sad that preparing for lab activities has replaced my crafting time, especially with this contest deadline approaching so soon. The only things I (with the help of my 151 students) have managed to make lately are density columns and clay boats, as we are learning about density and buoyancy. Science definitely is awesome.

teaching | 6 Comments »