I had a very domestic, busy weekend -- spent gardening, doing a crafty project (mostly, painting the border of a corkboard which is the extent of my crafty skills), cleaning, cooking, and of course, baking.

Didn't get to the pasties unfortunately...after waking up at 8am, bustling about all day and then staying up until 2am to otherwise procrastinate on the internet, I got too lazy to attempt the pastry crust. Also, I suck at timing butter -- you know, setting it out to be at room temp for cookies/cake or sticking it in the freezer for pastry crusts. I'm best at spur-of-the-moment recipes that require no advance planning whatsoever. LOL

Anyway~

Mint Double Chocolate Fudge Cookies stuffed with Thin Mints!



Sorry, the lighting in my kitchen sucks and I took the photo with my phone camera. :/ I'll figure out food photography yet.

The cookies turned out fantastically -- the texture was fudgy and soft around a slightly crunchy chocolatey center, and crisp around the edges. You can see the middle part in the cookie I broke in half. The entire thing was mint chocolate chocoholic galore, but not too sweet. (I love dark chocolate.) I'm not going to tell you how many I ate. My roommate is a bit of a health nut, but I think I broke him now, with the influx of Samoas and now double chocolate fudge cookies into the household. Bwahaha!

The only thing that will keep me from making these cookies again, aside from the once-a-year opportunity to buy Thin Mints, is that coating the TM with the batter was a bitch and a half. TMs are covered with a hard chocolate shell and it's as slick as a freshly waxed floor, so the batter just wouldn't stick without a bit of swearing, messy fingers, and creative use of a butter knife to trowel it on like grout. I've seen the concept done w/ Oreos and Samoas, and now I can see why, because they have a rough surface. The chocolate coating fuses with the rest of the dough later, though, and the TM inside softens into chewy, still-a-bit crunchy goodness. Yum.

Ah, well. I'll prob make them again, but on a special occasion like my yearly Xmas cookie gifting binge.

( RECIPE HERE )

When I was a young'un, I was terrified of robots. I mean, I was terrified of a lot of things, E.T. being one of them (that scene with the pulsing heart AUUUGHH), but robots and all their weird robot parts took the cake. I cried when C-3PO and R2D2 guest-starred in Sesame Street, it was so bad. (It was all that exposed wiring in Threepio's mid-section. And I was like, FOUR.)

For years I tried to explain to my friends why this was, and could only vaguely say that it was because of the Superman movies (cuz memories from when you're about 3 are hazy at best) and of course I'd just get a blank look in reply.

Then in ONTD someone posted a 'childhood traumas' post and posted this video, and HOLY SHIT THAT'S IT! SUPERMAN III!

(I'm also thinking maybe watching Terminator as a young'un didn't help, either. What was it with 80s movies and being as freaky as possible?)

WATCH THIS. AND TELL ME IT ISN'T DISTURBING. I freaked out a little bit again just now, watching it. And I was three or four when I first saw this. *shudders*



DDDDDD:

...In hindsight my parents didn't do a very good job of censoring what I watched, huh?

Recently, I discovered the joys of deep-frying.

I'd been working my way up to it, having received my mom's iron skillet that she'd given up on (being heavy and improperly seasoned) and while it's fun to fry and stir-fry things in it there's really nothing so satisfying as the loud sizzle as you slip food into a deep pool of oil.

...Maybe a little bit of it is the guilty pleasure of eating something so patently unhealthy.

Made tonkatsu. It was awesome. Am now contemplating buffalo wings.


Speaking of buffalo wings, the hubby and I entered Hooters for the first time in our lives the other day as we were waiting for some friends for dinner at a restaurant across the parking lot. He declared the girls ugly and the food overpriced. (I didn't mind having eye-candy, though I did agree with his assessment.) *I* think he's probably not the target demographic anyway - his demographic being married family man who doesn't think scantily clad busty girls ten years younger than him offsets tiny plates of $6 garlic fries. With his wife in tow. Hah!

We got a flat on the way home tonight. Ran right over this thing that looked like fabric but apparently wasn't (big clunk and an 'OH SHIT!') and at any rate I couldn't have swerved anyway, being in rush-hour traffic and boxed in on all sides.

So now there's a nice big hole in the side of my brand new tire of my brand new, sexy car. Which, as anyone who's ever had a flat will tell you, isn't fixable. Fixable means a quickie $10 repair at any tire center. Non-fixable (me) means $100+ for a new tire, and even more considering my tires are 18in performance something-or-others. Yowza.

Anyway...there were some perks. Lucky moments, even. We (the hubby and I) discovered that our car has a flat tire alert light. We also discovered -- as we were sitting there by the side of the highway, twiddling about on our phones and calling people and wondering who had AAA (my mom) and if our State Farm policy, purchased just that day, (lucky, see?) covers roadside assistance (it does) -- that the CHP has a program where tow trucks patrol the roadway and assists stranded people like us. For free.

Considering that all I've been hearing on NPR lately is that the great state of California is going down like the Hindenberg, piloted by squabbling no-compromise useless Democrats and Republicans and captained by Ye Olde Thumb-up-my-non-girly-ass Capitan Schwarzenegger, suffice it to say that I was very (pleasantly) surprised that such a program is going on in California.

There's always a silver lining, somewhere.

I went to yoga for the second time in my life today! and for the first time, I wanted to go back. It helped that my teacher wasn't a big beefy guy who spent the entire class bragging about how awesome he was, or who had an entire coterie of middle-aged women fluttering around him like he shat gold... (Considering the alarming frequency with which he bent over, tucking his head between his knees like he was checking for hemorrhoids, maybe he did.)

No, my teacher was a very nice, mild mannered, and understood very well that sometimes flabby beginners are easily intimidated and need to be coaxed out like kitties from under a car. She didn't ambush one from behind and start talking loudly about stiff backs and unbalanced joints or suddenly lean on you when you're already leaning as far forward over your legs as you can get. It also helped that the lights were turned down so said beginner wouldn't get self-conscious about looking as graceful as a beluga whale trying to do a ballet.

So, I'm pleased, and going back next week.

...It also helped that the athletic hubby wasn't nearby, doing the poses with an easy 'Oh my, isn't this fun' smile while one was sweating and panting and feeling as big as a house.

You know how they say to do at least one thing a day that scares you?

Guess what *I* did first thing today?

I jump-started my car...by myself! (Well, of course, someone else was there w/ his car, but he didn't know what to do either.)

Okay, you can laugh, but considering that I thought the battery was going to blow up and blind me and I'd have to spend the rest of my life whacking people in the shins with my cane, it was pretty damn courageous of me. My abject fear of batteries began when I was a bored child at home during the summer and whose parents took me only infrequently to the library, and having no friends within a five mile radius (thanks to attending a private school across town) and banned from embarrassing my brother by hanging out with him and his friends, I compensated by reading every single written material in the house. This list includes not only random adult-level books owned by my parents, but also things like the dictionary, the KOA campground brochure, and my mom's medical dictionary (which is how I learned how sex works, and I thought it was most boring concept ever until I was in my teens). In the Yellow Pages 911 section I learned how to rescue a person who got struck by a downed power line and how to administer first aid and rescue breathing.

...In the car manual, I read CAUTION: BATTERY MAY EXPLODE, ALWAYS USE EYE PROTECTION. Which no one takes seriously, except when you're a child of 8, this makes an impression. You know what else made an impression? That sticker on the side of the water heater/furnace that warns you about explosive vapors and illustrates it helpfully with a graphic of someone being consumed by flames. To this day I won't go near the furnace.

But this morning, when the car wouldn't start, I quailed for a moment and seriously considered not going to work OR, alternatively, to call the hubby to come back from work and take care of it (I don't have AAA anymore, sigh), but then I caught myself. One of my major feminist principles is that women should be able to take care of things themselves w/o depending on anyone else, so I girded up my metaphorical loins and said IMMA DO IT, IMMA SHOW THIS BATTERY WHO'S BOSS.

So here I am at work, unblinded and whole, and proud of myself.


Although if the furnace ever breaks....I'm not going near that thing.

Dear people at work:

I love you guys. Seriously. You've all been incredibly warm and welcoming and helpful.

BUT.

I know you might just see me and my Korean new-hire-like-me coworker in passing, since you and we are in different departments and departments don't really mingle.

BUT.

My Korean new-hire-like-me coworker and I DON'T LOOK ALIKE.

Sure, we're Korean (the only Koreans in the office) and female and are around the same age and have dark hair and similar heights and um, slanty eyes, but trust me on this, we don't. For one, I'm lighter skinned. She has curly hair and high cheekbones. She weighs probably about ten pounds less than I do. She likes wearing dresses. I prefer pants because I never quite got over my tomboy childhood in which my mom put me in every hideously frilly dress she could find. WE DON'T LOOK ALIKE.

On the first day I got asked at least three times if we were sisters. Over the two months since we started I've been mistaken for her at least a dozen times. Just now I discovered that someone from HR had sent her my insurance paperwork because she thought my coworker was me.

GENERIC ASIAN GIRL POWERZ, HOOOO!

what "the gay agenda" is? Is it related to the *gasp* Jewish agenda? Or the black agenda? Or the Obama agenda? (because, you know, he's black, and apparently only white people don't have agendas.)

OH NO, THE OPPRESSED MINORITY ARE RISING UP TO SMITE US!

Or smack us on the ass with a lavender wand spangled with tinsel and turn us queer.




Actual stuff about goings-on in my life to come, aside from getting my blood angried up by stupid-ass people.

Busy today, packing up to visit friends in Los Angeles and AZ. (Yes, yes, cue 'don't forget your proof of citizenship papers!' jokes. I actually fear for the police if they stop Cindy -- who was a labor/immigrant rights activist for years -- for any reason.)

In between laundry and packing, I baked these:



apple tarts!

I've found another blog to follow! She's a young, crafty mom with an amusing and sassy sense of humor.

This has made my day. /LAME

Craft and foodie blogs are my secret yen. I'm a wannabe crafter/foodie, so all these blogs let me live vicariously and fantasize that one day, that'll be me, with a snazzy, artistic blog with all sorts of snazzy, artistic photos of my wonderful creations. Watch out, world. Except I'm lazy as hell, so my Doctor Evil moment will come, but er, later.


Other stuff I did today, just to combat this revelation of my utter lameness, was go to the comic book store to partake in Free Comic Book Day.

Wait, that doesn't do much for my Lame-O-Meter, does it? Ah, hell.

WELL--well, it was in an indie comic book-themed art gallery with live music, so. Downtown San Jose's attempt to catch up to San Francisco as a cultural hub proceeds pretentiously apace. The music was bloody awful, though, so we (the hubby having been guilted into coming) left early. Maybe I'm just not ~sophisticated~ enough to 'get' the SJ indie music scene, but sorry, screaming rap into a mic with a rock backbeat is not my idea of edgy and cool.

Ummmm. Other news, the hubby watched Clash of the Titans via download. (I don't feel one speck of guilty about d/ling it, because the one time I paid to watch it was more than it deserved.) His reaction to it was priceless. I suppose hetero men don't derive as much enjoyment out of Sam Worthington thigh shots, huh?