Philosophical Nonsense

Of the Chinese curse variety.

Sunday the power went out at work, so we were pressed into removing all of the perishable goods from the grocery section and placing them in bins which were loaded onto refrigerator and freezer trucks.  Whee.  Imagine working in pitch black, no air conditioning, hauling around pallets of stuff and trying not to run over anyone's toes while navigating with the use of a very dim flashlight.  Can you say OSHA violations?  I knew you could.

Today, we went to the zoo.  I got to pet a behbeh donkeh (only 3 days old!) and had most of my fun petting/feeding/being chewed on by the dwarf Nubian goats at the petting zoo.  Boe, bless him, recognizes that I am insane for the goats and so we make it a point to hit the petting zoo part both at the beginning of the zoo visit and at the end.  Himself gets bored to tears but he puts up with me making a fuss over the goats and giggling like an idiot.

Between work and school, I barely know which direction is up.  I really really want to sew, but can't really do that until the Tornado Room (so named because it's a disaster area) is cleared out -- I tried to clear it out myself, but my face broke out in hives and I began to wheeze about five minutes in.  Not good.  So I have to get The Spouse and The Daughter to do that for me...which means it might get done by the end of 2012.  If I'm lucky.

In other news, my sister Mel is driving up from Florida on a quick visit to drop my neice off with my parents for a portion of the summer.  Let's see if Bitz can learn to share Lennie this season.  Unfortunately, Mel is driving up on the weekend with the highest volume of cake sales for the year...Graduation Weekend for FWCS.  I tried to find a replacement (there's a coworker who doesn't normally work weekends), but apparently the only family that matters is the one this cow-irker has, not anyone else's.  Even after I explained that I haven't seen my sister in a couple of years.  I was delighted, let me tell you.  >:-/  So I'm going to have to call off one of the busiest sales days of the year and leave my coworker H screwed with no help.  H and I talked it over and we mutually decided that if I have to call off to see my sister, then Sunday would be the better day.  So that's the game plan.  At least 1 coworker is understanding.

Uh, other than that, school is going well.  One instructor has publicly stated on numerous occasions that she doesn't give A's ever...well guess what lady, you're going to have to change that stance.  *cracks knuckles*

I keep motivating myself by looking at real estate listings and home builders' websites.  Also looking at vehicles, since my poor Lumina will probably last me until I'm out of school (I hope!) but not much longer than that.  I'm kinda leaning in this direction, since that allows for some flexibility as far as cargo and stuff goes but is more fuel-efficient than an SUV or truck.  Or I'd like a Prius.  I'd like 40-odd mpg, you know?

Yesterday at work, I noticed I wasn't feeling well.  As the day went on, the worse I felt until I finally gave up and went home early.  I hit the sack at about 6 last night, then woke up this morrning at 7 feeling like I'd been hit by a truck.  Naturally, I called off of work.



I went to the urgent care place and came out with a scrip for heavy-duty antibiotics and a handful of shiny new diagnoses: tonsillitis, otitis media (middle ear infection), oh, and my personal favorite, pneumonia.  Which is pretty much what I had assumed I had -- the quantity of vile-smelling, chunky grossness that I've been coughing up today has been truly epic.


Typing this pretty much wiped me out for the next couple of hours, so I'm off to nap.

Well, i had the day off of work and school today, so mostly today I was a lump.  When Boe is depressed, it brings me down too, so that's kind of a major uphill battle times two to have to trudge back into equilibrium.  We're down to our last $5 until Thursday and my car is on fumes, so we are pretty limited food-wise to just what we have in the cupboards and what our imaginations can come up with.


I think I've mentioned before that Boe hates cake.  HAAAAAAAAATES cake.  Granted, working 9 years as a birthday party clown will do that to a person, so I think it's perfectly understandable. Anyway, you read the bit about being broke, right?  Believe it or not, Boe actually craved chocolate cake today...yeah, I was stunned too.  But the broke thing made it a bit of a conundrum.  So I looked up a chocolate cake recipe that got a bunch of good reviews on Allrecipes.com and substituted a bunch of stuff.  The major substitution was using 2 grated tablets of Abuelita (so delicious!) in place of cocoa powder (since we didn't have any cocoa powder).  I also threw an additional 3 tablespoons of cinnamon into the batter, and doubled the amount of vanilla extract.  Then I poured the whole shebang into a pan, put it into the oven, set the timer, and hoped for the best.

The fail occurred when the timer went off and I pulled the oven rack toward me to poke the cake with a toothpick.  The entire middle was still liquid and sank.  Sigh.  So I put it back into he oven, set the timer for another 15 minutes, and promptly burst into tears.  Boe heard me sniveling in the kitchen and came to check on me...he said that if the texture turned out more like brownies, that was okay, since he loves brownies.  I love that man.

So the timer went off again, and the toothpick came out clean, so I pulled the pan out of the oven.  My heart sank.  It looked like there was a 2-inch border of cake surrounding the sunken crackled center of brownie-textured fail.  We cut into it, and Boe popped the first steaming chunk into his mouth.  His eyebrows shot to his hairline, and he mumbled something around the cake in his mouth. 

"Hoby schrp, of, iss z OON."

"Huh?"

He popped a second chunk of cake/brownie fail into my mouth.  Fail?  How could I ever think that this bliss was fail?  It was moist, dense, incredibly rich, with a hefty cocoa flavor as a base note, vanilla smoothness in the middle notes, and the cinnamon really shining through at the top of the nose.  It's not sticky-sweet, more like a cross between dark chocolate and semi-sweet.  Unlike most chocolate and cocoa based foods, I didn't desperately want a glass of water to accompany it. 

I am SO going to remember this recipe for future use.

Yep, graduation season is officially over. It was so lovely and peaceful!  I had a whopping 5 special orders to get done today as the sole cake decorator, along with the wedding cake. 

Which, by the way, turned out ( quite nicely. )

Pulled another 12 hour shift today.  Graduation season sucks. I am beat.  Going to bed now.  *falls over*

This past week has been the lead-up to our store;s Grand Re-opening after 4 months of remodeling.  Managers have been snappish, we have been horribly confused because mutiple managers are telling us different priorities, etc.  So yesterday I worked a 13 hour day in order ti impress the corporate bigwigs...stocked shelves, re-did all of our demo cakes, that sort of thing.  It was crazy busy in there!  I wound up getting out the door at 9 PM.  I came hime, crashed out, and got up at  4 AM to get to work by 5 AM since menagement asked me to cime in early.  I made it another 9 1/2 hours today.  I am so tired, my eyes are trying to cross as I type.  So if you don't hear from me, I'm just sleeping for the next thousand years or so.

He's at the game store, playing in a Magic The Gathering tournament.  I took the day off so we could celebrate by sleeping in, Happy Adult Fun Times (tm), and in a coupld of hours we're heading over to my dad and stepmom's house for a celebratory dinner. 

Because Boe hates cake -- 9 years as a birthday party clown will do that to a person -- I bought tiramisu instead.  He's happy, I'm happy, all's right with the world.

Princess's birthday present to Boe was allowing him an extra-long snuggle this morning...she let him snuggle her for about 2 minutes instead of her usual 30 seconds.  Hey, if you know Princess, you know that she rarely gets snuggly, so we always feel very honored when she deigns to allow us to express our affection for her.

This is the top tier. I didn't take photos of the 2nd or 3rd tiers, since I boxed them before thinking of taking a photo.   No, I don't get the green roses either.

It was cursed. No, really.

I got into work at 10, and my co-worker Holly had scraped the cake down and was decorating it.

It looked *awful*. And Holly's our best cake decorator -- she is so talented! So she scraped the cake down, took everything apart, and invited me to try.

My try looked even worse than Holly's.

In all, we scraped that cake down and tried to decorate it SIX times today. That is a mortload of buttercreme icing in the trash -- I think we probably went through a full 40-lb bucket, what with all the decorating and scraping, over and over again. Finally, we got it looking okay. Not great, but passable. Then Holly airbrushed the gum paste flower bunches and we applied them to the cake, draping them down the side of the cake in a cascade. This is important later on.

Holly left for the day, and the designated wedding cake picker-upper arrived. I took the cake on a cart to the store entrance, and did a quick double-check to ensure everything looked good before putting the cake in the picker-upper's car.

The entire top tier had crumbled into three pieces from the weight of the gum paste flower bunches. The wires used to twist the individual flowers together acted basically as a knife, slicing the top tier apart. Cue mental expletives.

Folks, I've done one -- count 'em, one -- wedding cake. And I had to remake the top tier of this cake on the fly. I somehow managed it in 20 minutes, but the cake layers were still frozen and I hope the bride and groom took some time at the reception prior to doing the cake cutting, so they weren't stuck eating frozen cake.

So, the statistics on this wedding cake:

3 tiers
Total number of attempts to get the darned thing to look decent: 8 (6 today, 2 yesterday)
Total pounds of buttercreme icing used: approximately 40
Number of gum paste flower bunches that needed to be custom-sprayed: 4
Approximate weight of the cake: 30 pounds
Total amount of time spent on this cake: about 10 hours, spread between 3 cake decorators and 2 days

Yep. Cursed.