Category: Daily Life

I started the day by sleeping in a bit (an extra hour anyway). Then I spent about an hour trying to finish one of the books I bought as a Christmas gift, before I have to wrap it. If I play my cards right, I'll be able to read one more gift book before tomorrow.

The rest of the day will be given over to cooking and baking. Right now I have a dark chocolate pecan rum cake in the oven. It's just the standard Bacardi rum cake recipe but with chocolate cake mix (and Captain Morgan rum, because that's what I always have on hand). 

After that, I'll start a batch of Swedish Cinnamon Rolls for tomorrow's breakfast while I broil bacon for today's breakfast.

Those are the only things I have to make ahead of time. For tonight, I'm going to bake brie with brown sugar and pecans, and also heat up some Parmesan spinach/artichoke dip that I bought pre-made at Costco. I'm serving both with baguette crisps and Lavosh crackers. 

We're having lots of guests for tomorrow's dinner, so my sister and I are making a turkey and a ham. I'm going over to her house early so I can make the turkey stuffing (and lend her my roasting pan) and I'll also mix together a batch of pomegranate salsa while I'm there. 

If I'm feeling really inspired, I might make a batch of sugar cookies today, just for the heck of it. I have an entire drawer full of cookie cutters and it seems like a wasted opportunity when I let a holiday go by without using them.

My only other plan for today is to finally wrap all of the gifts I've bought. My husband and I have given each other most of our gifts already, but I'll take the remaining ones over to my sister's so other people can see us unwrap them. I have little doubt that the cats will pluck the bows off the gifts within just a few hours, but at least I'll have *something* under the tree for a while.

If I don't post again in the meantime, Merry Christmas! Hope your day is everything you want it to be.

Yesterday morning I was bustling around the house in my robe and slippers doing chores and otherwise trying to finish out my weekend. I was headed down the short flight of carpeted stairs between the studio and the kitchen when one of my slippers got caught and I fell backwards.

My foot was twisted so painfully that I couldn't even cry, only lie back on the stairs and gasp in pain. It occurred to me that if I'd fallen differently and gotten seriously injured, my husband would never have been able to hear me from where he was sleeping on the opposite side of the house, with a white-noise-producing fan drowning out all sounds.

I sneaked a tentative look at my throbbing foot and was relieved to see that at least there was no blood.

It's fairly certain that I fractured at least one toe, but if you've ever done the same, you know that there's nothing that can really be done about it. I hobbled around all day and discovered that my ridiculously expensive orthotic shoe inserts actually served quite well as a de facto cast when it came to keeping my foot stable and minimizing the pain. Still, I could feel my pulse in my entire foot all day long.

I'm hoping to get in to see my sports medicine doctor sometime today, now that all of the other muscles I wrenched in the fall are speaking up and demanding recognition. I'm hoping that some laying on of electrodes will settle things down. For now, the only remedies I have available are ice packs and mega-doses of Tylenol.

Falling down the stairs at home is actually one of my biggest fears. We have a steep, narrow staircase that leads to the basement and I am always afraid I'm going to slip or trip over one of the black cats in the semi-darkness and fall to the bottom. You can bet I'm going to be even more careful than usual on those stairs from now on.

So how was your weekend? Did you make it through with your entire skeletal system intact?

This is only for my own neighbors, but I wanted to be sure to spread the word because this is so incredibly useful.

Yesterday I took advantage of a service that allows you to park at the Johnson County Executive Offices parking lot in Mission and take a bus to the Country Club Plaza for $1. That's right: no parking hassles, no Plaza traffic to deal with directly. It was awesome.

It runs through December 27th, so you can run out there, get your shopping and/or dining fix for the holidays, and not have to worry about the hideous inconvenience that is holiday Plaza traffic.

The stops are at 47th & Pennsylvania and 47th & Central. I bailed out at Pennsylvania and grabbed a quick dinner at California Pizza Kitchen before meeting my sister, niece and nephew for coffee and a stroll later on. I should have gone to the new Blanc Burgers & Bottles location instead. If you weren't aware, it's in the old Pizzeria Uno spot. 

I didn't end up catching the bus back because my sister had her car, but I can definitely envision going the bus route for dinner on the Plaza with my husband over the holidays. $4 round trip for two people is way cheaper than valet parking and you don't have to worry about all of the jaywalking pedestrians.

Incidentally, I found out about the shuttle service because I'm now a fan of Mission, Kansas on Facebook. If your town has a Facebook page, I highly recommend following them. You never know what kinds of interesting things might be going on right under your nose.

Yesterday my husband and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage. If we didn't have a photo record of all of the hairstyles between then and now, I'd have trouble believing it's been that long.

Oftentimes we'll go to Las Vegas for the milestone anniversaries (here's what we did for our 10th anniversary) because that's where we got married in the first place. However, we'd just been there last summer for BlogWorld Expo, so we decided to do something else.

I took a vacation day and we spent the day recreating our first date from 1992. The plan was:

• Lunch at the Chinese restaurant where we first ate together
• Ice cream cones at the nearby McDonald's
• A viewing of "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey"

You know what? Seventeen years is a long time. We realized that when we got to the restaurant I thought had been the site of our first date and we both agreed that it wasn't the right place. Even on the way there, we'd been puzzling over why we would have been in that neighborhood at all back then, considering that I lived a considerable distance away at the time.

The thing is, we hadn't meant to go on a date at all that day in 1992. We'd met up to discuss the idea of putting a band together (which ultimately took us about a decade), hit it off rather well, and decided to go grab a bite to eat. The evening turned into a date, but because we hadn't actually planned it, we didn't take as much note of the particulars as we'd thought.

Thus, we both agreed that we'd eaten at a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the general vicinity of the wrong one, but neither one of us remembered what it was called or where it was. We ended up picking a random, old-school Chinese place and deciding that we were at least following the spirit of our first date, if not the specifics. Our anniversary-appropriate fortune cookie fortunes were, "A chance meeting opens new doors to success and friendship" and "Cookies go stale. Fortunes are forever."

Once we'd blown the restaurant portion of the day, we figured we might as well have a good ice cream cone, so McDonald's gave way to Baskin-Robbins. Mmm, chocolate almond!

I had the Bill and Ted DVD all ready to go, but my husband thought it might be fun to go to a movie in a theater, which we seldom do these days. Thus, we finished out our day seeing "New Moon." It was even his idea, I'll have you know.

Neither of us was ready for dinner after the movie, so we ended up grabbing some fast food tacos right before my bedtime. My husband spent most of the night suffering from food poisoning, which he suspected came from the restaurant where we had lunch. So much for choosing randomly.

I don't know what we'll do for our 20th, but I'm thinking it might be time to break away from our history and do something bold and new. Any suggestions?

When I was growing up, I was the kid who loved Christmas. I made ornaments for the tree, insisted that we decorate with every last swag of plastic holly, and practically turned myself inside out with excitement waiting for my parents to get up on Christmas morning so we could go downstairs and see what Santa had brought.

Even when I got older, I still loved the decorating and cookie baking. In my first horrible little apartment, I had a real tree in the living room and started my ornament collection from a store called Santa's Surplus.

In 1998, my mother died not long before Christmas. She'd been on a steady decline from lung cancer and we knew it was coming to the extent that we hadn't even bought her any gifts. Ever since then, all the excitement I used to feel about the holidays pretty much vanished.

Once my niece was born, and later my nephew, I regained a flicker of the old holiday spirit through their eyes, but it still wasn't the same. Some years I didn't even put up a tree or decorations at my house, and I let the annual cookie party become sporadic.

This year is different. All year long I've actually been looking forward to the holidays. I've been buying gifts and squirreling them away almost since last Christmas. I scheduled my cookie party well ahead of time and I'm expecting more than a dozen attendees. I even invited my niece and nephew to spend the night last weekend so we could decorate the tree and choose the best wreaths and garlands to put up in the living room.

I'm looking forward to Christmas Eve with my dad and stepmother. She's cooking a Christmas goose! I've never had goose before.

Christmas Day now has its own set of traditions at my sister's house and we'll no doubt cook an enormous meal for the extended family and any friends who would like to join us. I can hardly wait to see everyone unwrap the gifts I've been putting aside for them.

I'm not quite sure what makes this year different. Is it the healing power of time? Is it because I'm happy in general? I'm not inclined to question too closely. I just hope it means my decade of grinchiness is finally over for good.

For work, I use Quantcast and Compete.com to get ballpark estimates of the traffic that various blogs receive. Every now and then I check my own blog URL and this is what Quantcast had to say about you this time:

This destination reaches over 1,517 monthly people, of which 1,290 (85%) are in the U.S. The destination is popular among a primarily male, middle aged following.

I guess attending BlogHer every year hasn't affected my traffic much, huh? Although I do tend to hang out with Karl quite a bit at BlogHer. Hmmm. 

In other news, I did get poison oak on my arm. It can take up to a week to appear…and it did. Now I have an itchy, blistery spot on the right forearm that I'll probably be enjoying well into the beginning of the year. Lucky me!

I have the day off tomorrow and I'm planning all kinds of fun things. I have Kansas City Social Media Club breakfast in the morning, then lunch with my aunt and her cousin.

Later in the afternoon, I'm going for a session with an image consultant whom I met at a recent tweetup. She's going to teach me to do more dramatic makeup when I'm performing with my band. (I think her intention is to get me to stop being such a little brown wren all the time, but my tomboy instincts run pretty deep.)

Then in the evening, my niece and nephew are coming over to help me put up the Christmas tree and decorate the house. They'll be spending the night, so I imagine there may be some cookie baking involved as well. 

So do you fit the demographic that Quantcast claims I attract? Do you have anything fun planned this weekend? I must know!

I did it! I proved to myself once again that no matter how much of a blog slacker I am, I can still post daily if I want to.

I'm sure that you're all as heartily sick of my filler posts as I am (caturday, anyone?), but seeing all the new comments and interactions has spurred me to want to be more consistent with my posting again. For years I faithfully posted every weekday and it would be nice to return to some semblance of that.

I have some ideas for most posts this week, so look for a reasonable number of blog entries in the coming days. As for today, well, I stayed up late yesterday and I really need to get some breakfast and get to work.

Hope you had a relaxing weekend. Have a great week!

I am generally the world's biggest procrastinator, but something came over me yesterday that drove me to just work and work and work some more.

The day started much like every Saturday, with me sitting at my desk in my pajamas, surfing. Then I realized that I had a vet appointment for Velvet in about 15 minutes, so I hastened downstairs, packed the cat in the carrier, put on some random clothes and made it to my appointment just in time.

When I got home, I looked out at the beautiful morning and decided I would get outside and do a little pre-winter yard work. By the time I finally finished (with a break in the middle to go get a grilled knackwurst at my local sausage store), here's what I'd accomplished:

• Cut down several years' worth of unsightly volunteer trees surrounding the walnut tree in my back yard. This is a task that can only be done in the fall or winter because of the massive poison oak vines that climb up the side of the tree. I used my loppers to sever the vines near their base and then I sprayed the hell out of them with Roundup. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that I didn't touch anything poisonous.
• Put away the lawn furniture, hammock and stand, both barbecue grills and every other random thing that was being stored outdoors for no particular reason.
• Used the hedge trimmer to shape the yew and boxwood bushes in the front of the house.
• Cleaned up all the trimmings and other flower bed detritus.
• Cut down other random volunteer trees and this year's dead yucca stalks.
• Dragged all of the brush, clippings and branches to the woods in multiple wheelbarrow loads.
• Cleaned the outsides of all my storm windows. The fact that it turned out that most of the dirt was inside did not spur me to break out the screwdriver and take the windows down for cleaning.
• Spackled and painted over all the holes from my failed attempts to install a toilet paper holder in our half bath. Today I'll put up the new one.
• Pried up the grates in the driveway and shoveled out the drain with a trowel. Took all the leaves and dirt to the back yard to continue my years-long project of trying to fill a sunken spot next to the patio.
• Used the garden hose to clean all the spiderwebs, wasp nests and other ickiness that had collected around both the front and back door.
• Topped off the flower pot that my husband's studio clients use as an ashtray with a clean layer of sand.
• Replaced all of the burned-out light bulbs in the garage, studio and front porch (six of them in total).
• Did what I could to sweep out the garage. It needs to be thoroughly cleaned and hosed out, but that'll have to wait for another time.

It was a sweaty, exhausting day and I found a leaf in my bra when I went to change my shirt, but I am so happy to have all of the work out of the way. I always hate myself when I don't do this stuff and then look out and see snow all over the hammock.

Today my day is looking more structured. I have my shift taking care of the adoptable kitties at a local Petco store, than tacos with Mexikansan, then band practice.

How are you finishing up your weekend?

I pretty much cooked all morning and afternoon yesterday. I made dinner rolls, trifle, turkey and dressing, a variation on this butternut squash and sweet potato soup, green bean casserole (the mushroom soup kind, but with fresh, steamed green beans) and mashed potatoes and gravy, and I served jellied cranberry sauce from a can at my husband's request. 

It was a lot of food for only five people (me and my husband, my dad and stepmother, and a guitarist buddy of ours). We'll be eating turkey for days unless I give up and freeze a lot of the leftovers, which I probably will.

Here's the aftermath:

And that doesn't even count the two dishwasher loads.

The soup was the only part of the meal that wasn't well-received – too much of a break from tradition, I guess. I thought it was delicious. I was proud of myself for not speaking aloud any of the obscenities that swirled around inside my head as I was finishing up the main course and listening to my dad and husband in the next room making snide comments about baby food and liquid pumpkin pie. Um, who got up early and cooked all day, you ingrates?

Once everyone left, my husband and I watched several episodes of Glee that we hadn't gotten to over the past several weeks. Eventually we had the obligatory cold turkey sandwiches with Miracle Whip.

How was your Thanksgiving? Or if you're outside of the U.S., how was your Thursday?

I'm sitting here stuffed with all the food I spent the day cooking, sipping a New Belgium 1554.

I had intended to do an "I'm thankful for" post, but I can hardly think of any aspect of my life that I'm NOT deeply thankful for. Husband, family, friends, cats, work, our home, my hobbies…I'm incredibly fortunate and I am aware of that every day.

I'd like to congratulate girlvaughn on winning the $25 SnapGifts gift card. The random number generator awarded her the prize and I've sent her a coupon code so she can choose whichever gift card she'd like.

Enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving! I might be sleeping in tomorrow, but you'll hear from me sometime tomorrow morning.