Whole lotta nothing

Hello. Been a bit silent here.  For those who may have happened by the site lately it was in quite a bit of disarray. I was attempting to change the site design, but the one I chose ended up being a headache and a half to get sorted. So many elements of it weren’t working for me, so I ended up trashing that whole idea and going back to the design I’ve been using. The past week of mucking about with a new design I really wanted to work has left me rather frustrated and feeling as if I’ve nothing to show for myself now that it didn’t work out. Funny how site design changes, even when unnecessary, can make one feel defeated in that worthless sort of way. Hence the post title. So melodramatic and fatalist, no?

I have made a few little adjustments now I’m back with the old design again, customizing it a bit and I hope it looks good for everyone to see. If something is amiss, let me know and I’ll see if I can sort it out.

All this boo-hoo-ing aside, I have decided to add a section to the site that might perk up a few ears. If you know me, then you know I love me some good breakfasts. I’m so going to let the awful grammar in that last sentence stay that way. Just let it sit there. Let it simmer a bit…. Yep, ok, moving on….

Breakfast page! Yeppers! There will be a breakfast page (or two or three) with recipes and a small gallery because I honestly don’t think I have it in me to basically upload the equivalent of my ginormous breakfast set from flickr. I think my eyes would fall out and I’d start stabbing myself with spoons if I did decided to make a gallery that big (752 photos thus far…. eugh…). So think of this as a sort of homage to my breakfast addiction.

Also, I’m starting to twitch a bit with the freaking-out-ness because we’ve less than TWO WEEKS before our vacation to Yosemite!

Musings and then some

I’ve been craving pancakes something fierce lately. When I made some a few days ago, I wondered why they weren’t fluffing up and looked funny in the pan. It wasn’t until I was done cooking the third one when I realized that plain flour was in my pancake mix container. So I basically made flour with an egg and soy milk… and a few frozen blueberries. At first, I thought breakfast was ruined, but soaking them in the last of my favorite maple syrup saved them a bit. This morning when I made pancakes again (with proper mix this time) I used some homemade cranberry sauce for a topping since I’m out of maple syrup. MUST. GET. MAPLE. SYRUP. I don’t do the “pancake syrup” stuff shown in tv commercials because that’s just gross. Give me my Grade A DARK amber (or grade B if I can find it), thank you very much. Last night in a panic for breakfast foods I grabbed some basic Bisquick pancake mix at the meagre selection of “food items” at the drug store. It’s ok, but the Aunt Jemima Buttermilk is better. The one nice thing about this breakfast was the tea. I used another flowering tea and was delighted when this one opened up after pouring the hot water over it. Little tiny yellow flowers burst from the bundle and floated to the top as the rest of the tea bloomed. I actually gasped and smiled the whole time. The little flowers ended up in my tea cup every time I poured myself some.

Every six months or so I go through a Manic Purge Mode. I look at things around me and am amazed at how much junk I’ve accumulated. What’s worse is when I try to get rid of the junk it sits in my car for another six months until I can be bothered to dump it at the local Goodwill. Tonight I did a mini organizing to my tea cabinet to subdue my manic restlessness. I threw out teas I know I won’t drink or don’t like anymore and also found some I’d forgotten I had. I’m not going to buy any more tea for at least a year! I must get through this crazy stockpile I have that’s threatening to take over the whole cabinet.

Today I bought two new plants. I’m a little afraid to buy certain kinds of plants because my apartment is a temperature nightmare. There’s a solid 30-40 degree difference in this place between summer and winter, which a lot of tropical plants don’t like and certain picky plants freak out about and die no matter what I do. However, I decided to go ahead and buy some more. I lost my two snake plants this past summer/autumn for very odd reasons that I’m still not able to figure out. They were acting strange for months and finally died. This depressed me a lot because it’s VERY HARD to kill off a snake plant. You could leave a snake plant in a closet for two months in total darkness and it could be fine. In fact, it would be happy. But I managed to kill them! I wasn’t watering them too much, but parts of them still kept dying off. It was weird. Whatever. I bought another one today and I’m starting over. I did notice that after leaving all my plants out on the deck for a day in the rain this past spring to get a nice “natural” watering that brown spots showed up on a few of them, which freaked me out and I almost lost my huge pothos in the kitchen, but it’s still holding on. I think I need to trim some of it back though. It’s looking quite haggard, poor thing.

I simply want to purge all the ridiculous stuff I have that’s taking up space and then surround myself in a few books, some nice paintings, and plants. I’ve been thinking a lot about paintings and changing out the wall decor here. I love the Dan-ah Kim prints Zach got me, but I’m sick of everything else. I want big paintings with rich colors of english “country” scenes with people wearing riding habits and coon hounds sitting all proper in the foreground or women and men all dapper  in overflowing bunched up fabric like in Gone with the Wind sipping sherry at a garden party. I’ll even take a nice impressionist rendition of the Swiss Alps – something with lots of chunky paint daubs on it.

We saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows today. It was good, but not as good as the first one and I was disappointed in the lack of Holmes-ness in it. I thought there would be more references to little things in the stories, but either I didn’t catch them, or they were so obscure  that again – I didn’t catch them.  I understand the director’s whole approach to Sherlock’s “method” being the inner monologues and slow-mo sequences, but it wasn’t as nice as actually hearing him call out everything he sees, which always dumbfounds everyone around him. That’s what I like. That’s SHERLOCK! The plot for the movie was a simple one, but I felt got very convoluted so in the middle of it I was bored and even briefly wondered what the point was of what they were doing. So not a fan of the gypsy woman making a threesome to the party. It’s better when it’s just Watson and Holmes. Stephen Fry as Mycroft was hilarious, but a certain scene with him and Watson’s wife had me rolling my eyes incredibly because of how HORRIBLY out of character it was for him. Bleh.

I started my 2012 Challenge (I think I mentioned that already?) and am almost done reading the first book, Nicholas Nickelby. Not a fan. It’s ok, but I think it’s one of Dickens’ weaker novels. I started off well enough with grand life-changing, eye opening things happening to the protagonists and then everything starts to even out. Now it’s nothing more than a roller coaster of mini events of mild interest/importance leading up to one kinda big event and for some reason there’s more characters being introduced. I’m not all that interested/sympathetic towards the protagonists anymore because the mini events they’ve been through thus far have been so incredibly boring I’m wrinkling my nose with disappointment. The characters are as all Dickens characters – highly exaggerated caricatures of human adjectives such as Vanity, Greed, Avarice, Lust, Wholesome, Honesty, Self-Righteousness, etc… etc….

Off to bed now. Unlike many, I have to go to work tomorrow (so does Zach – I grumble for both of us).  If you happen to have off tomorrow – have a nice breakfast for me.

Oh no! A post without photos!

Shocker! It’s not for want of trying to have photos, but more like I’ve been so ill from The Worst Sinus Cold Ever my limbs feel like lead and the thought of picking up my camera – let alone putting it next to my sinus puffy face – just isn’t happening. So since I can’t pick up my camera, I at least picked up my fingers and typed away at setting up a new design for my website. Throughout the weekend I’ve sat at my desk or in bed or on the sofa with mounds of dirty tissues around me and some sort of cold medicine at hand. The process has roughly been: type… type… type… blow nose… hear the  squeaky “Eeeeeeeeee” sound of my head decompressing…. type… type… type… *repeat from beginning*. I look at my bed at night and laugh. Ha! Yeah right. Sleep is not happening while the tidal wave of snot flows back and forth in my head when I lay down. I might just be a little bit delirious now from lack of proper rest.