I finally get it. They get paid to play.

This weekend, I had an incredibly important revelation.

I should have married a baseball player.

(Or Topher should re-route his current professional life and pursue major league baseball. Which he totally could do. Maybe.)

You see, professional sports stars PLAY FOR A LIVING.  As in, they play games and get paid for it!  Those things we all do on family holidays or gatherings, they do every single day and make millions for it.

Millions I tell you.

The best part?

If Topher was a baseball player, a professional one, then I would get to spend my days watching him, hot dog and beer in hand, in air conditioning (because player's wives get special seating, yo.)

Le sigh. If only I'd known.

I could have had this:

Maybe we should all just be professional sports stars.  Because it's clearly so easy.

What is your dream job for your partner? Or rather, what are your thoughts on Topher's new look, above?

ah, the results of too many hours in the car and too much stress

Perhaps you noticed my little blogging absence.  Perhaps not.

Either way, there is one answer for said absence: 

Work.

That thing that most of us head off to every morning has been using up all of my prior blogging time. I'm not complaining- I only have three weeks of it left before our new work/life adventure begins and I'm managing a major project that I.JUST.LOVE in these last three weeks- but I didn't even see personal interweb sites like facebook or gmail until Friday night this week!  

I did see the office for about thirteen hours each day, and as crazy as it sounds, I'm going to miss that.

What I won't miss involves seventy minutes every morning and seventy minutes every evening wherein my stress and over-thinking about this work thing and that work things leads to fingers as you see in the above picture.

Take a look at those thumbs.  Do you see the redness?  

Yes, I bite my cuticles when I am stressed.  

It's a really horrible habit. I bleed, they are painful for the day, and I instantly regret it.   But couple lots of time to think about all stressful things and sitting in traffic, and two bleeding thumbs and some slowly healing ring fingers is what you get.

Is work sucking up your life? Or do you have a horrible stress habit?

Posting by email vs. moving to wordpress

Hello my loves!  Today I ran a 10k, and it seems to have re-ignited my blogging brain. I've been having a serious case of block and work-time-suck lately.

However!  Here I am, writing a quick post from my email (to see if it works, alas), though I'm in a great debate.

I am moving to a new country. A country where they apparently sometimes shut down blogs, especially blogger, and I fear my ability to post regularly, which I plan on and want to do.

So I ventured into setting up a wordpress version of this little corner of the cyberwebs.  The verdict?  

I hate it.

All of the free templates either limit the usage of my own header (it makes it all fuzzy!), my own tabs, or my own general artistic feelings.  See, I can't edit the CSS (unless I pay?!), and thus can't really adjust the width of the template, the color of the text, the SIZE of the text, for goodness sake, or really anything.  And that pissed me off, after editing and adjusting this here little blog to my heart's desire.

A while ago, I'd considered switching to wordpress and paying a designer to help out.  I LOVE Joy's (fellow bee Poodle's) gorgeous, unique, and well-crafted designs, but in recent weeks, her prices have increased to a place that a pre-Peace Corps girl just can't afford.  Which completely sucks.

I thought I'd love WP if I tried it out- I love that you can reply to comments.  I love the interface for posting/etc.  But, I just don't love the lack of customization available to non-paying .com users. 

Which, I think, leads me back to hopefully being able to blog via email.

Here goes nothing!

Gooey Goodness...Wednesday?! Apple Cake with Caramel Glaze

This past weekend, we celebrated Topher's birthday (and of course Memorial Day! Thank you veterans and active military!) and his only request:

Apple Cake.

I actually really dislike this cake, as I don't really like fruit cakes or pies, but I know how much the hubsy does, so I was happy to oblige.  I got this recipe from a dear friend, Claire, and I (and Topher's tummy) can't thank her enough!

On a side note, actually good birthday cake TO ME is buttery yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

But really, all I really want is the ice cream and frosting.  Who needs CAKE?

Husbands, I guess.

Anyway, apple cake.

Your needed ingredients:

Start with combining the dry ingredients:

then add the orange juice:

next up are the eggs:

then it's time to combine all:

It's a nice, thick dough/batter:

You add nuts of any variety- I had pecans on hand, so in they went:

Mmm...cake batter...

The most labor intensive part of this cake starts with these:

Requires a husband who loves peeling:

And has you tsk-tsk-tsking until you get apples like this:

 While your husband peels, you can make the cinnamon sugar mix:

 Take a few minutes and slice the apples, then pour into the cinnamon sugar mixture:

And combine until you get this yumminess.

Finally, it's time to layer in preparation for baking. Start with a layer of batter...

then add apples...

Repeat three times, alternating batter-apples-batter-apples-batter-apples:

Sprinkle some brown sugar on top...

And bake for a really long time, until apples are very browned:

After it's cooled, flip it over:

And prepare the caramel glaze that you didn't photograph.  It's easy: half a cup of brown sugar, half a cup of butter and two tablespoons milk.  Boil. Cool.

Then...

POUR.

DRIZZLE.

LICK.

Then serve to in laws and husband...

Oh, and then lament how your cheesecake went from this:

to this when you tried to cook just a bit more because the middle jiggled a little bit.

Shit.

Cheesecake will not defeat me. Check back in a few weeks for a SUCCESS. I hope.

APPLE CAKE

3 cups flour

2.5 cups sugar

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. baking powder

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

1/3 cup orange juice

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup chopped nuts

_________

1/4 cup sugar

2 Tbs. cinnamon

1/2 cup brown sugar

6 apples, sliced and peeled

DIRECTIONS:  Mix the dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients until well blended.  Mix the apples/sugar/cinnamon mixture in separate bowl.  Grease and flour 9 inch tube pan.  Alternate layers of batter and apples (3 layers each). Begin with batter and end with apples.  Sprinkle top of apples with brown sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for 1.5 hours.

What's your birthday cake of choice?