Lazy Sunday

I love Sundays when I do absolutely nothing aside from feed myself food from time to time. This makes me sound extremely lazy, but I am, so I'm fine with that.

Bailey spent the day lounging around in the sunlight (it's a rough life, haven't you heard?)

Here I am.

Notice me.

Have you noticed me?

Oh you did. Let me get pretty.

The one productive thing I did today was make a cake. I originally wanted to make a red velvet cake (for Valentine's Day, duh), but conveniently the grocery store here had zero bottles of red food coloring. So here you have it:

Alien velvet cake.

It's the best I could do. Happy Alien Valentine's Day.

It turned out all the same.

Can't even tell.

Kind of like Christmas.

The best thing about making your own cake is you can put as much frosting as you want on it. Sadly, I still didn't think there was enough frosting. 

More frosting next time.

Also, how are you supposed to keep the frosting from getting all crumby when you cut it? Do you have to let it sit in the fridge for, like, 20 minutes or something? I have no patience for that. So I've come to terms with crumby frosting. It's fine.

And since I didn't update last weekend, here are some highlights:

I made waffles.

Thanks to the $10 waffle iron I got on Black Friday.

I made bread.

And I finally got I Can't Believe It's Not Butter today to spread on homemade bread, because I finally felt bad enough about spreading slabs of pure butter on each and every piece. Me on my way to being healthy.

In other news...

I finished my training at the Anti-Cruelty Society yesterday, and I've already got three dogs on my list that I want to adopt. Actually, make that like eight. Or twelve. In any case. I walked a beagle mix yesterday who was absolutely adorable and decided to poop smack in the middle of the adoption waiting room while a couple of people were discussing adoption. It was a fine moment (and yes, I cleaned it up).

I got a shirt, so it's official.

So in summary, it is now my job to play with puppies. Expect pictures in the near future.

I'm Back

So sometimes this thing happens during the winter here. I go into hibernation mode, and the only thing I can do is drag myself to work in the morning, drag myself back to my apartment in the evening, and sit on my couch and do absolutely nothing until I go to bed.

True, I tend to do that not just during winter, but winter is especially bad. It's freezing, it gets dark at 3pm so by the time I get home it feels like 10pm, it's hard to walk because apparently 80% of the neighborhood doesn't believe in shoveling their sidewalks, and sitting under a blanket doing nothing is just about the best thing in the world.

Thus, my almost-two-month hiatus from doing anything productive outside of the time I spend at work. It happens.

Since I've been out of touch for so long, here's a five-second summary of the highlights this past winter (did you hear that, Chicago? This past winter - don't make this warm weather a tease, I told you winter is over). Don't worry, it's not long, because like I said, I pretty much did nothing. So here we go.

I ate cake. Are you surprised?

Yum.

Bailey wanted some.

You're sharing, right? You always share.

I decorated sugar cookies with Katie when she was in town, something that happens on average once a year.

Owls, because they're cool.

And then I ate them.

I made homemade bagels! TWICE. Probably the most productive thing I did in the past two months.

These are good.

I made bread! I wish this was as impressive as the bagels, but honestly this was quite easy with this book.

And then I ate the bagels and bread while sitting on my couch watching TV.

Bailey wanted some.

Just a crumb?

Bailey was grumpy.

It's 7am on Saturday. Why haven't you fed me?

She also passed out multiple nights right on my legs, despite the fact she had almost an entire queen-sized bed to sleep on.

I hope you didn't want to move anytime soon.

And that's pretty much it.

Oh, and I did some yoga. Lots of yoga, actually. In fact, yoga is probably the sole reason I'm not 50 pounds overweight right now. But I don't have a picture of me doing it, since it's hard to get a picture of that, so you'll just have to take my word for it. You don't have to, though. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me. I'm also developing an obsession with all things Lululemon, and they had a warehouse sale in Chicago recently, so you can definitely believe that I went to that and immediately afterwards wept for the state of my bank account. Totally worth it. I've decided to allow myself one Lululemon item per credit card bill, so I can slowly accumulate things without feeling massive amounts of guilt since they're quite pricey (again...totally worth it). So really, I was just making up for lost time at the warehouse sale.

And so there you have it, a summary of what my life was like during possibly the most depressing time of the year (after the holidays, and still cold). I'm getting pretty excited for some things coming up though...mainly, I finally got accepted as a volunteer at The Anti-Cruelty Society and I have my training with the Dog Care program next Saturday, so I will totally be getting my puppy fix there.

I also signed up for a February fitness challenge at my yoga studio, because that's definitely something I could use. So take that, Chicago. Bring on the cold.

No actually, please don't. Please stay warm and get warmer.

Dessert Friday #24

It was kind of a boring Dessert Friday last week. Well, I guess not. Maybe. You can judge.

I overdosed on sweets the entire week last week, and by the time Friday rolled around, I was actually in the mood for something salty (I know, I don't think any of us expected this day to come). So Nick got a bag of caramel and cheese popcorn from Garrett.

:D

And...uh, I only have one picture because we may have destroyed most of that bag on the 12-minute train ride back from work. It happens.

And just because Dessert Friday was kind of not really a dessert (and also because it was about to expire), I had a crème brûlée the next day after lunch.

Lunch dessert.

Did you know Costo sells packs of microwaveable crème brûlées? Now you do. I microwaved mine and it turned out fantastic, but you can also take a blowtorch to it...if that's something you keep around (you chefs out there).

Last Friday night was a quiet one for me. One of Nick's coworkers was having a party, but I had a work holiday party the day before, so going out was just about the last thing I wanted to do on Friday. So instead, I elected to stay home, watch approximately 4 hours of Friends, and sit next to Bailey on the couch.

Okay, you can take one more picture of me.

She got a little camera shy.

Stop, I'm blushing.

Nick also got me a yoga mat for Christmas (!!!) and I broke it in immediately.

Ahh!

It's an Aurorae Northern Lights mat, and it cost approximately three times as much as my old yoga mat (which is on its last legs, I'm sad to say). SADLY, I think I broke this one in so much (read: practiced twice on it) that it already has a small rip in the middle (what!). Thankfully Aurorae has a good defect policy, so as long as I get on returning it soon, I'll be able to get a replacement.

The rest of the weekend was spent at Ikea picking out bookshelves (our old one was literally leaning to one side and I prayed every day that it wouldn't fall over) and then putting them together.

The instructions for the shelves came with a good life tip.

You should have at least one friend.

We ended up getting two bookshelves because I wanted glass doors and Nick was all "But I like seeing the books," and apparently our method of compromise is to just get everything everyone wants, so now we have one bookshelf with glass doors, and another one that's identical except without the doors so Nick can see his books.

We spread out the building over two days, and Bailey supervised both times.

Do it right.

As soon as I opened the box for the bookshelf with glass doors, I regretted buying it because there were approximately six gazillion bits and pieces.

What is this?

Have fun with that. I'll be here.

Bailey got a bit curious at one point.

But there are toys on the ground!

Thankfully she knew she would in big trouble if she so much as sniffed at any of the pieces, so she mostly stood her ground on her tower.

Please. I'm an angel.

Apparently the building process was so enthralling that she ended up passing out.

Just let me know when I can jump on the shelves.

It turned out okay. There was a small hitch with one of the hinges, but we now have a standing bookshelf with glass doors.

It has doors!

I don't know why it looks crooked. I took a torpedo level to it from all possible sides, and it was straight every way, so I'm just going to stop panicking and assume that it's not going to fall over.

Dessert Friday #23

It's been so long since Friday I couldn't even remember what I had for dessert until I asked Nick.

Back to Crumbs.

Nick took responsibility of providing Dessert Friday last week since my desserts from Magnolia were such a big failure the week before.

PB

Red velvet

Surprised I ate the red velvet one? You shouldn't be. I bet next time I go to the doctor for a check-up, they're going to come back and say I have abnormal amounts of red food coloring just sitting in my system and it's slowly poisoning me.

Thanks cupcake

To counter the massive amounts of terrible-for-me food I ingest, I've started doing more yoga because it's colder than Siberia outside so I never want to run, and let's be honest, I hate running with a passion whether or not the weather is agreeable. I'm also too cheap to spend $500 on a yearly gym pass (IT'S A LOT OF MONEY OKAY), so that leaves me and my yoga mat in my dining room (on days when I don't go to the studio).

Bailey watches me struggle through every Ashtanga move and judges heavily.

You're doing it wrong.

She's been an absolute terror the past few days, basically running laps and jumping all over the place.

GIVE ME YOUR HAND I WILL EAT IT

She'll have bouts of sanity, but don't be fooled. She's a nut.

Lies. I'm an angel.

We're doing this "Letters to Santa" charity thing at work where we each buy presents for a child in need in one of the neighboring schools, and last night I spent approximately 45 minutes of my life wrapping this toy cash register that my child requested. She also requested a puppet, but apparently Target and Wal-Mart do not carry puppets, so I gave up the first time I went shopping and got her socks instead. Then of course last weekend when I went to Ikea, there were bins after bins of puppets. Of all places. So now she gets her Christmas wishes, plus two pairs of fuzzy socks.

This was really hard to wrap.

It was a terrible wrapping job. I'm not even going to show you a picture. That child is probably going to open her present and wonder why Santa hates her and mangled her wrapping paper.

Orrr she'll just start playing with her cow puppet and toy cash register and put on those adorable fuzzy socks. I like this scenario more, so I'm sticking with it.

In other news, Nick and I beat Machinarium and now I seriously don't know what to do with my time.

Although...my Blu-Ray set of all (yes ALL) the Harry Potter movies came in the mail today (finally, it's been so long I forgot that I bought them), so I guess that's what I'll be doing for the next week or so.