Author Archives: metamegan

>Thanksgiving

>I know I have been a bit of a debbie downer these days, so I am working on feeling more grateful for all the things in my life that are awesome.

At bedtime with the boys I ask them to list 3 things they liked about their day. Luke is usually stumped unless we had hamburgers for dinner, but Jack goes on and on. He’s thankful that I am putting him to bed, that he got to go to daycare that day, that we read stories, that he got to play. He usually gives Luke and I a lot of ideas.

The other thing I have been doing is to try to write down 5 things a day that make me happy. Coffee shows up on that list a lot. I write it in my work notebook, so it’s interesting to be looking for a note and reading something like this:

Make log files bigger than 500M?
coffee, sweet puppy, pear tea, halloween candy, bacon
netstat -an | grep EST | grep 1521 | wc -l

I am writing this in advance, because I have a crazy idea that I am going to take 4 days off from the computer. (I already asked Dave to plan to be available to google things for me if necessary.)

So I am hoping to be thankful on Thanksgiving that Jack isn’t throwing up all day, like last year! Regardless, I am so thankful for my family and friends, and even my job.

Happy Day Everyone!

>Nuts!

>Last year I sustained second degree burns in a tragic Thanksgiving Day nut caramelizing incident. This year, I decided to avoid that by
1.) Caramelizing the sugar for the caramelized nuts before Thanksgiving Day, and not while a vomitous child wants to be held.
2.) Doing 2 batches at once, so I can make the cake again before Christmas without going through the trouble twice

So I caramelized the nuts, and i even made some long strings of sugar for the kids to eat, and everything was wonderful and magical. Then I started to clean up, and the sugar was really sharp. I now have about 4 cuts on each fingertip. So here is what I am thinking. From now on: no nuts.

I’ve blogged about this cake before. Here, here, here, and here. Oh, and here. Each time there is some wacky thing that goes wrong, so I am glad I haven’t broken the trend. Some might wonder why I keep making this cake. Easy, it’s AWESOME, and if I stopped cooking/baking things that caused bodily harm, or wacky adventures, or involved gross miscalculations, then my family would starve.

Hmm, this may not be the pep talk I needed to give myself the day before Thanksgiving! On the bright side, I should have a lot of good material on Monday when I am back to blogging again. I have a crazy plan to take 4 days off from the computer, so I have scheduled posts for the next four days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

>MetaMultiTasking

>Sunday afternoon I was making a leisurely, pre-Thanksgiving trip to the grocery store, forgetting things, getting stuff that wasn’t on the list, back-tracking, breaking into a sweat, you know, the usual.

Then I made the mistake of turning on my phone to see what time it was while I waited in the interminable line at the deli for my 10 slices of stuffing-destined prosciutto. And what happened? I read a txt from Dave that said I needed to hurry home so one of us could pick Luke up from a birthday party, and that also, work was calling me.

Cue extreme panic attack. OMG! I was at the grocery and my phone died. PEOPLE AT WORK NEEDED ME ON A SUNDAY AND I WASNT AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY. I decided to forget the rest of the list and get home as fast as possible. Also, Luke needed to be picked up.

So I drove home, honked the horn, Dave ran out to drive off to get Luke while I dragged the groceries in the house. I called my co-worker, got the scoop, and started unloading groceries, and logging in at the same time. And because I think I am awesome at multi-tasking, I also started composing my blog post about the whole thing. “Look at me! I can put all the groceries away in the time it takes to login to my work computer! Look at me, bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan and tossing off bon mots all the while!”

If my camera wasn’t broken, I would have the picture that captured my (slight lack of) success. And that picture would have been taken 2 hours later, work problem still not solved, and it would be a picture of a pile of lonely groceries on the floor in the kitchen.

>Avalanche

>Dodd, Dave and I saw Blues Traveller in the summer of 1996 at Red Rocks. I know what year it was because I just googled (and giggled) “Avalanche Stanley Cup” and saw that the Avs won in 1996. Anyway, Dodd and Dave and I were at Red Rocks, enjoying the show, when a lady came up and grabbed Dodd by the shoulders and said, “You guys, we really need to show John Popper that we totally support the Avalanche and that we are proud that they won the Stanley Cup! So, yell Avalanche as loud as you can!”

Um, OK, why not?

So Dave yelled, “AVALANCHE!” And Dodd yelled “STANLEY CUP!” And I yelled, “FRED!” What? I was looking for my friend Fred. Then all three of us yelled together, “AVALANCHE! STANLEY CUP! FRED!” I loved the way Dodd yelled Stanley Cup because he did the “-LEY CUP” in a really low voice. That went on for the rest of the night. And by “night” I mean several years. In fact, the night Dave and I got engaged at a bar in Chicago, the Blackhawks were playing the Avalanche in some sort of playoff game, and Dodd and Dave kept yelling, “AVALANCHE! STANLEY CUP!” The fact that we knew the owner, and bartender, and had just gotten engaged went a long way that night.

Dave and I were reminiscing this weekend because Luke asked about avalanche mitigation and Jack just yelled, “AVALANCHE.” We laughed and said, “You sound like Dodd.” And Jack said, “Is Dodd a chipmunk?”

No, but I can imagine how his laugh would have sounded when I told him that story.

>Note to Future Self

>
When looking back on summer/fall 2010 and wondering where all the photos are, remember that you lost your memory card, and then you bought a new one, but you broke your camera the next day, then you found your old memory card, but iphoto somehow stopped working, and would only allow you to look at one picture at a time. But, when you are too lazy to write all those great posts you have had in your head all day, you can just bang your head against the computer until one photo appears and then write a quick sentence about that. Behold: Halloween.

>Centro

>I got to sleep in today and it was glorious. Then we biked to Centro for brunch, and I needed a spicy breakfast since it was 28 degrees when we left the house. We bundled up pretty well, but Luke and I wished we had scarves or ski masks because our faces were freezing. But Centro was the best. I wish I could say I branched out and ordered something different, but I just got the same thing I always get: Huevos Rancheros. The. Best. Breakfast. In. Boulder. And I LOVE Lucille’s, I really do. But Centro is so exactly what I want. Perfect amount of spice and sweet, perfect portions. I swear I am not saying this because the Bloody Marys are also really good.

Dave had the special, Jack had the coconut fried bananas with vanilla anglaise, and Luke had a burnt grapefruit and a quesadilla.

After brunch, we biked to the Buffs game, which the won, yea! Then biked home just before 4, when the sun was already down behind the mountain. Short days, and cold. But my huevos rancheros sustained me until we got home and I made hot cocoa.

>Thanksgiving Stuffing Bummer

>I am busily making my menu for Thanksgiving, and I want to make the same stuffing I made last year. See, two years ago, this stuffing had major potential, but the chestnuts got overcooked. Last year, I think I solved the chestnut problem and I was so happy that all I had to do was turn to my blog to find out exactly what the solution was. Sadly, all there is is a list of things I really need to get around to blogging about, like my stuffing solution. GAH! So I guess I have to solve that problem again this year.

>Getting in Shape

>A few years ago, I had a subscription to Shape magazine, and every month Dave would say something about the airbrushed picture on the cover. I never really believed that the pictures were airbrushed, and I always thought that if I just worked out for 4 hours a day and cut out carbs that I could look like that too. Once, Dave pointed out how a person’s abs in a picture inside the magazine looked nothing like the abs on the cover, and I started to see the light.

Then I started reading jezebel.com and their Photoshop of Horrors feature. But it got really fun when I started discussing photoshop with Laura, because she was able to do what 30 minutes of exercise a few times a week, and a diet of halloween candy could never accomplish. Behold, my snowboarding bod:


>Aaaand one more Jack’s Birthday Post

>

I love how Lucy’s tail starts wagging at the end. And about the cake… It was dry. I decreased the baking powder (3 teaspoons instead of 3,5) and the sugar (buy 1/4 cup out of 3 cups or something), but I didn’t increase the liquid. Maybe that was the problem. I was pretty sad about it, but it didn’t stop my from having cake for breakfast the day after Jack’s birthday.