Sorry...

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately. Here is a visual excuse:



The sad part is that most of my readings are in the form of PDF files on my computer!! These are just the books I have to read.

Seriously though, I am loving grad school. Working full time and going to school at night keeps me pretty darn busy, but I haven't felt too overwhelmed yet. I love learning and having classmates that I can talk to about the things I am interested in. I don't so much love homework, but who really does?

Move Over, Cake Boss!!

Now that I have started my masters program, I have to accept the fact that I am going to have to cut some things out of my life. I just don’t know what to cut… Still, I want to enjoy myself a little, teensy-tiny bit, so I lavished my time last weekend and teamed up with my friend Emily to make a cake for our friend Melissa’s birthday. Emily is AMAZING! She has a love for learning new things and acquiring new skills, which makes her my hero. She recently taught herself how to make gourmet cakes and I really wanted to learn too (and to spend time with her), so I asked if she would make a cake for Melissa’s birthday with me and she agreed!

Melissa LOVES argyle. She and I went to the outlet mall last year on Black Friday at like midnight and the very first store we hit was Tommy Hilfiger (and let me tell you, we hit it HARD). So, we decided that Melissa needed an argyle cake and Emily just whipped up a design out of thin air!! Thursday we mixed and baked the cakes and then Friday we cut, frosted, and decorated it. It took about 6 hours each night. I didn’t realize that cakes were such an investment, but I also learned that time=love and we LOVE Melissa, so it was no big deal. It was nice to chat and catch up on each others lives. Also, Emily introduced me to www.peopleofwalmart.com, which may be the best thing that has happened to me since the cheezburger network. We were laughing so hard I was almost crying.

Friday, while we were decorating the cakes, Emily’s roomies were having a screen-on-the-green in their back yard and it was so funny how people just gravitated over to watch us while we cut and frosted the cakes, dyed the fondant, and decorated the cake. No wonder those cake shows do so well, people just can’t help but be fascinated. I also think it is funny how, since people watch those cake shows, they think they know what they’re talking about and like to stand around and tell you what to do.

If I’m being honest, it was mostly Emily who is responsible for how great the cake turned out. She had to not only make and decorate the cake, but do so while fixing all of my mistakes. Move over, Cake Boss - Emily is the cake MASTER!!

Saturday we had to transport the cake over to the restaurant, which turned out to be quite the task! The cake was pretty heavy and the design was really delicate, so we were being as careful as we could. Unfortunately, the roads is DC are HORRENDOUS and as we bounced along, little pieces of fondant would just pop off. I would try to avoid one pothole, just to hit another.The damage was fortunately minimal, and the cake still had a good side for photographs, so we were happy. We also found parking right in front of the restaurant, which is nigh on impossible in Adams Morgan, so that was pretty fortuitous as well.

Melissa’s birthday was a blast! We had a nice little brunch at Napoleon Bistro and Melissa actually wore an argyle sweater without even knowing what kind of cake we had made!!

Really, the candles won't blow out? Mwahahahaha!!

August Garden Update

So I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the bad news: vegetable borers (nasty worms and bugs) got to my squash, cucumber, and zucchini in containers. I couldn't see them from the outside, but all of a sudden the plants started to yellow and wither. Upon closer inspection I could see that the bugs had bored into the stems and eaten them up until they were hollow. Also they crazy hot weather was too much for our green beans and they withered too. I was sad, but for me this is just a hobby. It made me realize that there are people out there whose livelihoods and families' lives depend on their crops and something like a little bug can be absolutely devastating and leave them with nothing. We are very blessed in this country.

Before

After

On the bright side, I am very glad that I decided to plant my extra seedlings in the planter by our door rather than throw them away. They are thriving and taking over all of the bushes that management has planted. The zucchini is taking over half of the walkway. I hope my neighbors don't hate me!





My upside-down tomato plants are doing really well too, but the tomatoes seem to be staying green and growing very slowly... I'll have too google and see if that is normal.



My basil is seriously thriving! I cleaned all the leaves off of them to make homemade pesto and they were full and bushy again within a week!

I have really enjoyed having a garden and LOVE getting to harvest and eat the veggies I grow! :) It is a lot of work, but I like having something to care for and work on and look forward to!

NYC Birthmonth Celebration

To celebrate my roommate's birthday, we went on a weekend trip to New York. We have all been before, so we decided to treat ourselves a little and do some things we hadn't before. It was a great weekend, but it was BLAZING hot!

Friday we started off with a 4 1/2 hour bus ride, which went a lot faster than I thought it would. Once we got to the city, we dropped off our bags at our hotel and walked over to the United Nations Plaza.




Then we got all dolled up and headed to a fancy-schmancy restaurant for dinner. We weren't planning on it, but it turned out that we were in NYC during their Restaurant Week, so we got quite a deal!






After dinner we walked over to time square and caught a show! It was AMAZING!!







Saturday we decided to take it slow and just enjoy the city. We visited parts of Central Park that we hadn't yet been to, got birthday cupcakes, relaxed in our hotel a bit (to recover from the heat), and then went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant and enjoyed the city at night.











Sunday we went to church in the city and then caught the bus back home. Let's just say we were totally beat by the time we got home!

Last Few Months of Freedom

Starting at the end of August, I will essentially have no life out side of the University. I work there, I will be going to school there, maybe I will just set up a cot under my desk and sleep there too. With this fact looming at the back of my mind, I have been trying to enjoy my summer and my last few months of freedom. Having amazing and amazingly fun roommates and friends has made this task a lot easier!

We started off with a birthday bash for one of my roommates, where we packed our house full of friends and ate pazookies: not-quite-all-the-way-baked chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven, topped with vanilla ice cream. YUM!




There have been a lot of really crazy rain storms this summer, so we went for a walk in the rain and took advantage of our complex's badly functioning drainage system and played in the huge puddle that formed in the courtyard.


For my other roommate's birthday, we took a trip to NYC (this one gets its own post), had party, and generally took every chance to celebrate. She had a birthmonth rather than a birthday. I gave her the Wii Fit Plus game for her birthday and we have enjoyed making fools of ourselves. Here is the birthday girl trying out her new toy:




In late July my good friend/pseudo-sister from college came to visit me with her 3 adorable kids!! It was fun to get to show them around DC and to see what a complete Supermom she is! The only downside to the trip was that that weekend was the National Boy Scout Jamboree in DC, so the city was overrun by a swarm of tan and olive green. We took the kids to the FDR memorial and my friend was explaining to the boys that they needed to be quiet and not run around. She told them "we need to be reverent here because this is a place where we are remembering President Roosevelt who was a good man." Her son replied, "oh, you mean like Jesus?" "Well, not quite THAT good..." she said.


A trip to the beach is a MUST for a summer of fun, so at the end of July we headed out on a day trip to Bethany Beach, Delaware. It took me over an hour to find parking, but the warm sun and cool ocean water were totally worth it. I am still pasty white, but not quite as pasty as I was before. On our way home we stopped by the Delaware State Fair. Fried foods and adorable baby animals rounded out the trip nicely.

Deutschland Wird Weltmeister!

These past few weeks I have been learning a lot about faith... by means of the world cup. You know the drill, you hope for something, you act in faith upon that hope, and then you eventually receive a witness that the thing you had faith in was true. Tonight I took a BIG leap of faith.

In case it is not readily apparent, I heart all things Deutsch and am rooting for the German team. My roommate served her mission in Spain and hearts all things Es(th)pania (Disclaimer: I do not apologize for butchering the Spanish language). The tournament has now progressed to the point where Germany and Spain will be facing off in an epic battle of speed, agility, skill, and hopefully shirtlessness, thus placing my roommate and me at odds and irreparably damaging our relationship. I hope that Germany will win. I trust in their ability to do so. So I took the leap of faith, acting on that hope, and placed the following posters on my roommate's bedroom door.

For those of you who don't speak German, the posters say: "I Love Germany!", "Goal!", and "Germany will win the World Cup!!" For those of you who do speak German, I translate "Deutschland wird Weltmeister!" as "Germany will win the World Cup" and not "Germany will be the World Masters!" for obvious reasons.

When we take a leap of faith such as this one, we know there will be trials and opposition. In my case, upon discovering my posters, my roommate chased me down into my room, shot at me repeatedly with a spray bottle, and shoved me brutally, pushing me down the stair(s). I have pictures as evidence for the pending trial. She has gone to bed and the persecution has subsided for the moment. Now I must patiently wait for a witness of my faith, namely, to see Germany trounce Spain in the match tomorrow!!!

The face of someone who has been told the truth and finds it to be hard... and we know why that is.

Neener!!

Ghetto Garden - Week 4

Kids, they grow up so fast!! I was just looking at my last post and I can't believe how much my garden has grown in the last month! It has been really hot here, so I have had to water every morning, which I kind of like, because it makes me even more invested. I am also investing myself monetarily - I have since purchased 2 Topsy-turvey planters for my tomatoes and made a rope trellis for my cucumber. Here are some pictures:

Green Beans

The basil smells so good! You just have to bend
down a little and the air smells like it!

Tomatoes in a Topsy-turvey planter

Serrano Peppers

On the left are two summer squash plants and on the right is
zucchini and cucumber, which is growing up the trellis that I made!

So I planted my little garden on our back balcony, but then I had left over seedlings, so I made some space for them in the planter in front of our town house where the landlord maintains decorative plants. Some of them are really thriving and some are taking a little longer because they don't get as much sun, but they are coming along too. All together we have 3 summer squash, 4 cucumber, 2 zucchini, 2 tomatoes, 4 green beans, 3 basil, and 3 Serrano peppers. :)

My roomie planted this one... we actually were planting sunflowers,
but somehow ended up with a cucumber!

Totally ghetto - cucumbers next to the air conditioner...
I hope it won't hurt them... :)