The One Where Joy Is Redeemed
I’d love to start out today’s blog by saying I went home, ripped up the garden area, did all the mixing of the dirt and whatnot, put in the borders and planted all my poor plastic bucket bound plants but alas. It rained. Novel.
Instead, TheMan had to work late so I moseyed through the drizzle to China Gate, one of the better yet reasonably priced Chinese restaurants in town, and got some take out. They make the best crab cheese/crab Rangoon (pick your poison; I’ve heard it both ways) in town, especially since Chia Shang was bought out. China Gate also now makes the best Kung Pao for the same reason. I miss the old Chia Shang.
Anyway, we did catwatch day 3 (cats still alive, house still in tact, whooohoo!) and got back home around 8. It rained. Rain, rain, rain. I think I’m growing mushrooms on my person it’s been raining so much. All the wet has afford me the chance to discover something cool though: While driving in this morning (as it was still raining) I noticed that the Bug’s windshield wipers will slow down when the car is stopped, and then speed back up when it starts to roll again. Smart wipers! It’s like those radios that get louder and softer as you go faster or slower. That’s so cool…you know, once you figure out that you aren’t going crazy and that there really IS a longer pause between the blade wipes when you are waiting at a light.
I’d blather on about WoW (the game) or the cake I was supposed to bake but that didn’t happen either. Instead I took a nap, fully intending to get up at about 10ish and start in on my night’s activities, and wound up waking up at 3am when TheMan slid down the stairs and whacked into the door. Apparently he also had intended to play a little WoW (but not bake a cake) and actually got as far as loading the program and (I’m guessing) waiting for the auctioneer plug in to do its searching bit. The plug in takes about 10 minutes to get all the data, so TheMan probably was doing something else while waiting and then he was doing nothing else because he fell fast asleep. Poor fellow, we don’t have good desk chairs and instead have been using card table chairs until we find something affordable yet not shoddily built. All this sums up to TheMan was one stiff and sore puppy when he woke up at 3am in the morning and then he topped it off with a tumble down the steps.
He’s fine, more or less, although he is also at home today suffering from thwumming head due to work related eye/plork strain. That would be when your entire head throbs rhythmically and your eye twitches nauseously. Anyhow, seeings as I was in bed at 8:30, I decided to get up at 5 and make the cake. I told my coworkers I was going to bring in a cake today and by golly, there was going to be cake. It was still (still!) raining and I was about fed up with that nonsense. Come hell or high water (which at this point is starting to be a palpable thing), there was going to be cake, even if that meant that I had to get up before the ass crack of dawn to make it. That and I had had a lovely eight hour nap up to that point so 5am wasn’t really as early as it might have otherwise seemed. It’s amazing what a good night’s nap can do for you. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong, trying to get some sleeping in when I really should have been taking eight hour naps the whole time. Hmmm.
I mixed up a French vanilla cake (which, BTW is tres tasty) from one of my 3 million boxes of cake mix (10 for 10 at K-rogets, babE) and then proceeded to mix up some frosting. Frosting today was a Joy sort of thing; especially since I had run out of a couple of key ingredients and I didn’t feel like looking through Betty’s three recipes (but three well organized and picture pretty entries!) to discover I couldn’t do any of them. Besides, for whatever reason, Joy just seems like the better book to grab for frosting in general. So I cracked open Joy and immediately rejected half the entries for lack of eggage. Another third went by the wayside because I did not have heavy cream or condensed milk and several more were off the list due to this or that other strange ingredient I was not going to deal with at 5 in the morning. Even fully rested, there are limits to my cooking in the wee morning hours. That left just stupid simple frosting so stupid simple frosting it was.
It’s pretty easy, being stupid simple frosting and all, you just slap some butter in a pan, add some powered sugar and milk, cook it up for a tad, throw in some vanilla and wala! Frosting. While my cake was happily cooling on the counter, I grabbed a pan, tossed in the butter, sugar and milk and…it just didn’t look right. It was runny. Very runny. So runny that it’d be more of a French vanilla upsidedown cake due to the frosting running right off, down or through the cake and settling at the bottom of the pan. Cool idea, but not one I wanted to experiment with at the moment so I added more powdered sugar. Long time readers will recall that Joy and I have a contentious relationship anyway and this thoroughly convinced me that Joy was on crack. Again. So I stirred in the extra powdered sugar until the frosting straightened out and flew right. We were on!
After you cook the frosting, you are supposed to take it off the heat and let it cool to room temperature, which I did. Then I discovered the secret of how to create cement out of butter, sugar, milk and vanilla. Well, what do you know, Joy was right after all. Huh. I did manage to frost the cake by sheer force of will (and other trickery) but next time I shall remember that Joy knows from frosting. Everything still turned out mighty tasty and very lively since I decided, because it was STILL raining, that I was going to sprinkle all sorts of mad colored sugar on the top. We won’t even mention that the sprinkles helped hide the fact that the icing was rather manhandled into place. And armored. Heh, I made cake with frosting of protection +2!
I’m also wearing my fun elephant earrings because damnit! I’m tired of the gloom and the wet and I’m not going to take it any more. Fie on you, crappy weather, I shall wear the happy earrings and make the party colored cake despite the dreary and depressing. It’s time to pull out the stops and liven things up around here. Sadly, it just occurred to me that I should have also worn my drinks shirt, but the again that may have been a little over the top. With the way it’s been outside lately, I hesitate to jump into the festive feet first and with both eyes closed. You got to plan these things carefully; too much might just cause some sort of local temporal fluctuation and before you know it, someone’s packing their house into your stuff.
The weather site tells me that the weekend will be prime for killing and planting stuff (hopefully not the same stuff) so be prepared for the all garden review come Monday. I’ll take pics for fun and posterity and so you don’t have to read through my endless garden blather. Take heart, there is only so much lawn and so many plants…this too shall pass.
Last year at the booniverse: Mushroom people coming to get me, no time to update.
Last last year at the booniverse: When I got closer I discovered that he did indeed have something going on with his face, or more accurately, something going off with his face since he HAD NO FACE at all.
The year before at the booniverse: Armored nothing for you.