A Bird's Eye View

Today was a great day due to a small thing.  As in...literally a small object.  But before I can talk about this small object, I need to provide some background information.

Our office building is luxurious in that everyone has his or her own office.  I am lucky enough to have a window office that looks out over a large field that may or may not be a swamp.  If it is a swamp, it's been enormously beneficial in allowing various animals to inhabit the area surrounding the office building.  My friend Maria and I have often spent a few moments of our otherwise busy time gazing out the window upon the likes of groundhogs, cardinals, Canadian geese (curse the geese...I'll never escape them!), and even a huge red tailed hawk.

(via)

That was a glorious day.  It sat in the tree next to my window for a full 15 minutes!

Enough background.

Maria walked into my office today with a Christmas gift.  Inside said Christmas gift was a bird watching guidebook and a pair of binoculars.

New.  Favorite.  Object.

I've never been a bird watcher, but all of a sudden I felt like I understood the heart of hearts of all bird fanatics out there.  I have a full book of 121 birds to search for and check off the list!  I have 121 glossy pictures to marvel at!  I have binoculars with which to peer into the sky and watch the 121 birds speed across the horizon!  HOW COULD ANYONE DO ANY WORK WITH BIRDS IN THE SKY??

So if you walk past my office for the next, oh, I don't know...year...expect to see me with the binoculars glued to my face.  I will put a check mark next to every single bird in that book if it's the last thing I do.

All else is for the birds.

Christmas 2012

I've found that not having internet in my apartment seriously cramps my blogging style...as in, I tend to very rarely post anything these days.  Honestly, I find that very sad because it means that it's unusual for me to exercise my literary abilities.  When working at a software company, literary abilities are not something that I put into practice terribly often, except to write careful instructions:

"This issue is due to (error).  To fix, click (link), find (tab), change (field value), update, and refresh."

I'm getting distracted.

The point of this post is to recap our Christmas in Florida, which also meant my first Christmas not at home with my family.  Instead of Christmas looking like this:

...it looked like this instead:

Since pictures are worth a thousand words, here's a photographic recap of the trip (please pardon the phone photos).

So overall, we spent time with family, went to a lovely church on Christmas Eve, hung out on the beach, saw an alligator, viewed another fantastic church, and saw an amazing sunrise on the plane back to Boston.  It was a low-key Christmas, but the best part about it was the time.  It's so rare these days to just have some time to stop and let go the cares of every day routine, and so when an opportunity to take that time to just rest presents itself, I think it's truly invaluable.  

In Which Will Be Found Dessert and Pumpkins

Sunday was full of adventures.  No Sunday would be complete without going to church, so that's where we headed first.  Except instead of going to our regular church, we went somewhere else for the sake of variety.  We went to a place where psalms are sung, descants are added to almost every hymn, and the service is almost two hours long.  It was great.

After church, we headed to have a cinnamon roll/pumpkin carving...festival? with some of our friends.   Since you can never have too many cinnamon rolls, we decided to make two different kinds.

Verdict: no two cinnamon roll recipes are the same.  However, both were fantastic and almost produced four sugar-induced comas.

To counteract the sugar, we moved on to pumpkin carving.

In order to carve the pumpkins, we needed to have pumpkins to begin with.  When you're a kid, picking out pumpkins to carve is great fun.  When you're a young adult, picking out pumpkins to carve should still be great fun.  When you're a young adult and the wind is blowing hard and the rain is falling steadily, picking out pumpkins becomes more of an adventurous chore rather than great fun.  I would have taken a picture of that particular event, but it was too blustery outside to attempt to break out the camera/phone.  Instead, I will leave you with a picture of our finished products:

(Obviously, the glowing letters are the feature of that picture.  Writing by trackpad is not my strong suit.)

And so we departed in peace, full of cinnamon, sugar, and butter and thoroughly covered in pumpkin.  Sunday well-spent.

Post Script: we briefly considered making this, but it seemed a little outside of the scope of both our abilities and our little carving tools:

DILEMMA

I have a major, major problem. It's such a large problem that I don't know how to solve it. Seriously...what happens when Christianity and identity are at odds with each other??? But I am getting ahead of myself. What is this serious problem, you ask? I will tell you.





Ben and Jerry's Free Cone Day is DURING LENT.

Lauren's Birthday!

Lauren M. lives about an hour and a half away from Gordon, which gave Diana, Meghanne, Michelle, and I a nice car ride in which to be ridiculous. I mean, heck, what else do we ever do?

Here, Diana and I decided to be Sherlock Holmes and Watson. I think I was Watson...


We took one wrong turn on our way that led us to a warehouse that apparently had something to do with either new or used cars - couldn't figure out exactly what - but we found a Mini with the Union Jack on the back of the mirror. I think I want it.


Once there, there were, of course, the obligatory and yet much-loved roomie pictures:



...and then things got a little weirder.




(Scenario: "Jillian, you just found out that Matt Damon is your father." I'm trying to remember why I was so excited...)


(Scenario: "Jillian and Lauren O. are planning a camping trip for Meghanne, but she doesn't know about it.)


(Scenario: "You just found out chocolate has been made illegal." I find our reactions very accurate.)


(No scenario; just really good carrot cake.)

And finally, this was the whole group!


Happy birthday, Lauren!

2010 vs. 2011

Last year, Sara and I attempted a multi-tier cake as a New Year's Eve project. It was interesting....

Our only real disaster was what is now affectionately referred to as the "doughnut cake."


We fixed it by stuffing the gooey hole with a very large cupcake:


On the whole, our made-from-a-mix Funfetti multi-tier cake turned out reasonably well considering our somewhat disorganized planning, our relative inexperience in cake-making, and our severe lack of proper pans. It was a little lopsided.



This year, I'd say we've made some improvement. We made this cake from scratch, including no less than 8.25 sticks of butter. No joke. Talk about an artery-clogger!


...And there are only 6 sticks in this picture. Butter never killed anyone....right....?

Anyway. We were a little skeptical at first, because it looked like a cow pie.


But in the end, it turned out looking (and tasting!) very nice.



Happy 2011!

Applications of Doom, Chapter 423,987,268,522: In Which I Rejoice Greatly

I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE!!!!!!!!! With ALL of them! Now I just have to schedule one more audition and figure out how I'm going to work the two auditions scheduled on the same day, but all the thinking stuff is done. HOORAY! And I finished them all before the end of the year. Happy 2011, world!

Christmas Baking

I enjoy cooking and baking a little too much - my arteries may well one day self-destruct. Yesterday, I made dinner including pasta sauce with 5 tablespoons of butter. (I did make carrots too, but I didn't photograph them.)


After that I made chocolate mousse...


After that I made mint "oreos," shamelessly taken from another blog. But hey, they tasted good.


But the crowning victory/artery-clogger of the evening came in the form of the Snickers cupcakes that Sara and I made. Artery-clogger is an understatement. These are possibly the unhealthiest cupcakes we have ever made....but they taste SO GOOD. We got the recipe here. First we made the cupcakes, admittedly from a mix, but with excellent added ingredients including oil and sour cream.


Once they were done, we filled them with chocolate mousse, made from whipping cream, vanilla, and melted chocolate chips. Our first attempt at that kinda failed, because our melted chocolate re-hardened. Weird. But we made some more and continued.


After that, we frosted them with homemade buttercream frosting (including two sticks of butter, three cups of powdered sugar, some vanilla, cocoa powder, and a little milk) and topped them with bits of chopped up Snickers. They came out beautifully!


Sara and I enjoyed them throughly.


We may both suffer heart attacks in the next few days, but at least our mouths will be full of cupcake.

Erie, PA!

Fact # 1: Erie is the farthest west that I have ever traveled in the US. Sad, right?

Fact # 2: Traveling to Erie was a lot of fun!

Nathan, Sarah, and I left on Friday morning around 8, picked up Lisa a little down the road, and were on our way soon thereafter. In the parking lot where we found Lisa, we also saw Mr. Buswell, a violin teacher who taught at Gordon and who just so happens to be a rather famous, internationally-renowned soloist. Exciting!


We didn't stop and say hi though, because we may or may not have been running slightly behind schedule. 9 hours and lots of toll booths later, we made it to Erie, where we met Andrew and other family members too. In my opinion, roadtrips with good friends are great, even when you're really overtired.

The next day was Andrew's 21st birthday! Happy birthday, Andrew! We celebrated first by going to a rehearsal for the Christmas service/concert the next day, but then with Chipotle-style "wraps," Funfetti cake sans frosting, ice cream, wine, and a movie later that evening. Yay!

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, worked on our puzzle in the afternoon, and then went to the service/concert at night. Playing at the service/concert was actually the point of going to Erie, but it was only one of the many highlights of the trip. Fact # 3: this church is gorgeous. Here's the view from the oboist's chair...


As previously stated, Christmas concerts like this one are what make Christmas truly Christmasy for me. This one was no different. How wonderful it is to have the opportunity to play glorious music (which, as musicians, is what we like to do best) to celebrate the birth of Christ. Moreover, it's a collaborative effort, and something that is deeply meaningful to everyone present. We looked fancy in our concert dress too! Fact # 4: my friends are super, and I love them all dearly.


Post-concert, we went out to birthday dinner at a hibachi restaurant. It was so cool! They cooked the food in front of us, and it tasted delicious!



They gave Andrew some fried ice cream for his birthday, which was a little weird.


Finally, the next morning we finished our puzzle (Lisa, Sarah, and Andrew did most of the work, but Nathan and I helped too), ate a little breakfast, and went on our way.



Now we're all back on the East coast (or in Vermont...which has no coastline), but it was a lovely, lovely trip. Let's do it again sometime.