Spooktacular!

Spent most of the day making some of the best Halloween cookies I've ever made, sent them with Shawn to share with the other ghouls who have to work tonight. Witches, bats ghosts and pumkins. Yum!

My "little" ballerina and Hawaiian puppy! Happy Howl-o-ween!

seriously?

Who steals an ambulance while it's on a call?
That has to be bad Karma for sure!

A short wait (fingers crossed)

Clearance pending, offer in hand, waiting to hear when I leave for Yavapai AZ. yippee!
So now the wait begins... again... but I hope for real this time.

Shawn made me bacon and eggs today after a long night of work - I'm so happy he's off tomorrow night before his 3 day weekend - what will I make for Halloween treats?

The new black box

We saw Saw VI and it was glorious.... if you haven't followed the anthology due to your aversion to horror movies well then I think you've missed a Rube Goldberg movie-complex. Every movie is intertwined with another movie - some are so intertwined two movies are actually occurring simultaneously. If you can get pass the horrific, gruesome, diabolical and down right bloody traps of Jigsaw, then you would find some well written, well pieced October movie classics. There will be at least a VII and VIII which would be plenty - although then what would we look forward to the weekend before Halloween? But before this wonderfulness of 6 could begin, we had to recap the last 5 yrs worth of films... not a tough task by any means, at 93 min on avg per movie but then it set in... our 8 yr old DVD box would not work with our 9 month old TV, not even with an HDMI cable (High Def something) - in fact our sad little DVD player didn't even have an outlet for it (no wonder Shawn hadn't connected the DVD player since we bought the new TV - I thought he was just sparing himself from watching my chick flicks over and over again). So 30min before Best Buy closed we found ourselves looking for a Blueray player (I of course being the level headed of the two quickly shot down the possibility of a playstation - that would have been a whole new ball of wax I wasn't willing to set in motion). I don't know why they call is a blueray, probably because pink ray or green ray or rainbowbox player don't sound as sleek and sexy to the men folk who are most likely to purchase them... I will admit the picture looked great - even on the non blueray dvds we have. Our new sleek blueray player came with $50 worth of blueray dvds - which equates to about 2 at $24.99 a pop. Now if only the annoying high pitched noise would disappear we'd be set. I only hope I can figure out how to operate it - it was a long day... an hour long personal interview today - all about me and it was daunting, intrusive and I left feeling like all my skeletons had been ripped from my closet - labeled then hung out in the front lawn for everyone to see and take notes about which will then be turned into a book. I hope this job is worth it... and start time is still at least 2 or so weeks away and I learned today that the gov't had budget cuts for 2010 and went on a hiring freeze as of today. bummer
(Could there be any more numbers in this post - sheesh)

Yeah, I'm that lady...

-who dresses her dogs up for a Howl-o-ween costume contest at Petsmart(ballerina and a surfer pup) and then makes her husband come too and take ownership of one of them in a ring of all women
-who eats over 1/2 of her own chocolate birthday cake in a 2 day period and will finish it because her dear husband doesn't do chocolate cake but was sweet enough to get me a chocolate cake because well, I love chocolate cake
-who can listen to the same song, over and over again and find new meaning to it each time (yes on repeat over and over and over in my car)
-who can use nearly every pot and pan and utensil to make baked goods even though it could have been done with one bowl and one spoon
-who can eat more than most grown men twice my size and weight and still be hungry

yeah, I'm that lady and my husband loves me for these things!

Got Some

I made some mummy and spider-web cupcakes for Shawn to take to work - I love to make him some little sweet treat to take to work on the 3rd day of his long weekend work week, plus the night shift kind of gets the shaft (IMO). I think they turned out ok for a first go considering I have never tried to pipe anything in my pathetic baking life. I even bought a cheap cake decorating kit but ended up just using plastic baggies and cutting off a corner, messy - yes, would the bags tips and other strange piece probably worked better - yeah, but kits are for sissies I decided. I also didn't have a toothpick so I had to use the tip of a sharp knife which worked fine and I still have my fingers and eyeballs intact. Originally I was just going to make dirt and worm cupcakes with tombstones - but Shawn doesn't really like chocolate so I settled for anything I could do using store bought vanilla frosting - I didn't even make my own frosting which is a little pathetic, I admit. So, take home points: I have redeemed myself in the baking world. I may have a future in mummy and spiderweb cupcake making and I don't think my handy cupcake work won't be on cakewrecks anytime soon. (they are really yummy too)

**Total side note - I wish I could get video of Wrigley spinning on her butt... or train her to do it on command but alas, whenever I try, she stops - looking so angry that I tried to document her in the act.

Cake Wrecks

In my down time I have been baking and oddly enough having ZERO success in my baking skills - including basic sugar and chip chocolate cookies (that's what my grandma calls them). There is nothing worse than making cookies, them not turning out, your husband saying, honey add more flour - then him adding more flour to make, yes good cookies. Grrr. So in my other part of the down time I found this little gem of a website: www.cakewrecks.blogspot.com
If you have some time to sift thru and actually read the commentary too because it makes it even better you should check it out. Some of these wrecks are poorly done cakes, (or the dreaded CCCs - cupcake cakes) others are misspellings, others are misinterpretations and some are just plain bad. My cookies may have been bad but at least they haven't been posted to any cookies gone wrong website - yet. Make me want to run to Fred Myer and check out the bakery.