As luck would have it, today is a day where I truly have it all.
The stars must be in alignment, or something.
I went to the gym this morning, The Bachelorette is on tonight and whilst chugging a cold Diet Coke this afternoon, I had the great pleasure of baking lots of goodies for a bake sale at Craig's work.
A pretty good day, if I do say so myself. It would be even better if I could figure out how to style my new haircut, but that would be asking too much. And I'm not one to rock the boat; I wouldn't want to spoil my Happy Place day.
My day didn't start off as nicely as I would have liked because someone took my spot in Body Pump class(yes, I have a spot) and I had to position my bench and weights in between two mirrors. It's not just the line in the middle that annoys me, but these two particular mirrors are different. One side of my body looks normal and the other side looks oddly disproportionate. For this reason, I refuse to stand on the right hand side of the exercise room. At my gym in Georgia, one of the exercise rooms had AWESOME mirrors; mirrors that made MY legs look long and lean. The adjacent room had mirrors that made everyone looks like oompa loompas. Needless to say, I didn't take yoga too often. It's hard to relax and concentrate when the circumference of your thighs expands by several inches just by entering the room. Let's see, something else could have potentially ruined my happy day. Oh yes, I went to open a bag of spinach for my green smoothie, except it wasn't spinach, it was lettuce. Evidently I didn't buy two bags of spinach at the commissary the other day like I thought I did. I don't know about you, but the idea of drinking liquefied lettuce doesn't sound too appealing. I realize that I sound completely ridiculous because I drink liquefied spinach, but a girl has to draw the imaginary line somewhere. Right?
Despite the horrific events plaguing my morning, knowing that I had an afternoon of baking and an evening of trashy, mindless reality tv awaiting me, my attitude remained positive.
Craig's work is organizing a couple of bake sales to raise funds for their Organizational Day. When news of the second bake sale broke (we missed the first one), many of Craig's co-workers (my taste testers) suggested, with much enthusiasm, that Chief Smith's wife do all the baking.
Of course I happily agreed because, as I mentioned above, my incurable sweet tooth and I just love baking. The smell of baked goods unfailingly lifts my spirits.
Last week Craig called and informed me of the bake sale date. I suggested that he poll his workmates to see what kinds of treats everyone wanted. Not even an hour later Craig called back with a huge list of desired goodies. Always happy to get elbow deep in chocolate, but also quite aware of my limits (and lack of refrigerator space), and not to mention, not wanting to hog the entire bake sale table, we whittled down the list to four items.
Brown-Butter Toffee Blondies
Blissful Snickerdoodle Bars
Cookies and Cream Chess Bars
Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies
During this afternoon's marathon baking session I loosely calculated that I used 1 1/2 lbs of butter, 4 lbs of sugar (brown, granulated and powdered), 11 eggs, half a bottle of vanilla extract and 1 lb of chocolate....among other things.
With the hard work (and all the dishes!) complete, I'm waiting for two of the items to cool enough so I can cut (hopefully neatly) and wrap all the goodies.
You know, I tried intently to be a good blogger and document my afternoon with pictures. As I'm sure you all won't be able to live a full and complete life without visual representation of my baking session. My intentions were good. My camera was bad.
My batteries ran out of juice and I *had* a stash of extra batteries but they seem to have disappeared. I think the battery eating Wii remotes ate up the last few I had stowed away. I even tried to pilfer a few from the Wii Fit board, but I guess when the directions say not to use previously used batteries, they actually mean it. After a short prayer and a curse word or two, my camera came back to life. Not wanting to waste any ounce of battery power I quickly plugged the camera into the computer and I got some blasted error message.
Gone are my pictures.
No pictures capturing the beauty that is the mixture of creamed butter and sugar. Is there really anything better than that? You could spread it on toast and I'd be a happy girl.
No photos of the happy baker with the customary sunglasses perched upon her head. My future is bright, after all.
Ahem.
No snapshots of my neatly packaged goodies in clear baggies affixed with a cheery and colorful sticker.
Eh. I'm a horrible photographer anyway; you're not missing much.
In other news, I learned a very important lesson today: if you want your ice maker to start working again, just buy a bag of ice. It didn't produce a single cube for an entire day and as soon as I bought a bag of ice, the darn thing started working again.
I'm glad it magically started to work because I didn't really want to bug our landlord over something so trivial. However, I would have done what was deemed necessary because we go through ice like crazy around here.
Craig has taken to sitting in an ice bath (!) after his long Sunday morning runs. Seriously, he runs 10-15 miles and then comes home and sits in freezing cold water.
Hey, whatever it takes to preserve his body.
Have I mentioned that he's training for a marathon? October is a busy month for him: Army 10 Miler at the beginning of the month and the Marine Corp Marathon near the end. I'm slightly concerned that we'll spend the entire month of November at the hospital replacing all of his ailing joints.
The idea of running a marathon intrigues me, but....nah.
I'll stick to being the cheerleader....with 911 ready on speed dial!
OK, time to cut up the goodies...and sneak a few end pieces (shhh!).
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