Possibly bad at BAD

Possibly bad at BAD

Kate the Awesome has taken on the weight of BAD this month, Blog All December. I'm going to attempt to do this with her because, as noted, she is Awesome, but I may have to resign myself to BAAD, or Blog Almost All December. We shall see, my dears.

I'm not going to attempt to write extremely coherent posts, as by the end of 6th period everyday I'm usually totally drained of any coherent thoughts I may have possessed. So December is going to be a sort of journal entry month, with some lists thrown in there, possibly.

To start us off, some thoughts on my pants.

The left knee of my jeans has a giant rip. (And yes, I bought them like this. I know, "how much did you pay to have someone else rip your pants for you?" and all that.) This giant whole, which is not totally open as denim fiber spans its open space, seems to be growing. One possible reason for this is that I like to sit cross-legged/Indian style in my desk chair since it has no arms and isn't particularly comfortable otherwise. But besides that, these are on of my favorite pairs of jeans, so they get washed at least once a week, usually. That can't be helping either. I guess if the knee completely rips open then I buy a new pair? Or possibly a patch.

I noticed a minute ago that my one-year anniversary on Blogger was two months ago. I figured I should point it out, although actually it makes no sense, as my blog has posts on it from January of 2008. Hmm. Oh, I see now. My October post says I just transferred my blog from elsewhere. Okay.

In other news, I have failed NaNoWriMo most efficiently. I wrote about 600 words the first day, a horrible start, and then on November 2, I decided that what I'd already written was crap and so I started again. I got about 10,000 words into that before I took about a 3 week break. Then on the day before Thanksgiving, I looked at my calendar and decided I could totally write 40,000 words in 5 days. I wrote 5,000 words that night, and now my novel sits at 15,000 words. I never realized how many words 50,000 is until I tried to write that many.

Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is calling to me, or rather my English grade is, so see you tomorrow, I should hope.

Pringle Phemonenon

Pringle Phemonenon

I'm giving myself the next half hour* to come up with something really good, because now that I know I have BEDA buddies** reading I have to attempt not to sound like a rambling idiot.***

A short anecdote: today I opened up a package of Pringles only to discover that the chips, every single one of them, were sideways! I remarked upon this to my parents, because, as you can imagine, sideways Pringles are an extremely strange occurence. My mom, of course, didn't respond, as she doesn't care about Pringles, but my dad noted that this must be the attempt of the Pringles to save themselves from consumption, as they are extremely difficult to get out when they are all turned sideways. But, obviously, Pringles have very miniscule brains, as they did not realize that I was going to have to break them to get them out of the container. So that's what I did, and then I ate them.**** Their plan to escape my mouth by turning sideways failed.

Tomorrow I get to make my Amish friendship bread and then pass on four more starter sets to my friends. Hopefully the bread comes out okay, because, after my cauldron cake disaster,***** I am a bit cautionary with anything involving heat and edibles. (Although I do all right with pop-tarts.) One of my friends already made hers and she said it was a bit too sweet, so it should probably be just right for me.

I'm excited to start our question thing tomorrow, BEDA buds, if that's still our plan. I'll be thinking up something good.

Happy Saturday.

* "Kings" is on at 8.
** SarahE, dozzzier, and Jessica C. They are cool. You should meet them.
*** Not that this is a normal occurence or anything.
**** It should be noted that this was a mini, snack-size, hundred-calorie pack of Pringles, not one of those full-size tubes.
***** Oh yes, I blogged it.

Quite a few words on my insanity

Quite a few words on my insanity

Last night I was brimming with ideas for future blog posts, so I typed them up really quick and saved them to my desk top. Just now I sat down to write today's post and opened up my list so I could choose something from it. Only then did I realize that what sounds good in my head doesn't usually translate too well too blogish,* because instead of the insightful, expandable list of topics I was hoping to discover in my document, I found this:

- tv > why I watch so much > why I am insane > why tv is rotting my brain
- oh shoot I wanted to blog about The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan and I forgot.
- what is up with this font?
- BEDA buddies sound interesting
- my AP world review book is frickin' huge.
- why I suck at list-writing
- Harry Potter > why British people are cool
- our desire to recreate abbey road > why we have failed time and time again to recreate abbey road**
- NaNoWriMo! Why don't I have any ideas? Why, whenever I come up with something, am I doing an activity that prevents me from accessing a pen?***
- LOTR > Why am I not a LOTR fanatic?
- Twilight > I shall not blog about Twilight. Forget I wrote that.
- how I seem to spend all day thinking up things to blog about in my head but then not writing them down and therefore forgetting them
- why does "therefore" have an e on the end?
- bedododododobedooooodoooodooo!****
[ did I put too many o's on that? ]
- emoticons limit my face-making on the internet
- how come no one i know IRL is doing BEDA?
- my recent use of random hotel shampoos.


As I noted in my list, I suck at list-writing. I also apparently suck at stringing together anything that makes sense. I didn't write this list while attempting to watch tv, eat, or do anything else that might have distracted me. It wasn't even late at night. And yet, I still manage to create a list of pointless thoughts that probably only make sense inside my head. None of these are blog-worthy, despite what I may have believed last night when I wrote them down. Why would I think that anyone might ever possibly be interested in reading about my recent use of random hotel shampoos?

A month or so ago, my friend and I discovered that we could send videos to each other over facebook, and we quickly became obsessed.***** While I tend to be a bit withdrawn and quiet at school, when I'm talking to my webcam I talk really fast and do some very odd things. Little did I know that one of facebook's recent changes involves allowing you to see other users' content very easily. Soon, this guy in my English class who I'd pretty much never talked to told me he had no idea I was so crazy.****** I, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Now we don't post videos as much.

That was relevant! I know that was relevant! Crap! I can't remember why that was relevant!

Actually, that might possibly be why it is relevant. I have yet again proven my insanity.


* The language of blogging, in which your words are interesting and what you're talking about is relevant and actually makes sense and is worth reading. A very difficult language to learn, I'm discovering.
** Actually not repeatedly. At our nerd party a few weekends ago, my friends and I decided to recreate Abbey Road, because my neighborhood has some of those big striped crosswalks (unfortunately it has no streets named Abbey Road) but then it got dark.
*** This tends to happen to me either during 2nd period aerobics, when I am doing a zillion crunches to Britney Spears, or while I am in the shower. If I spent all of my time in these two locations, I could probably discover a cure for cancer, and then subsequently forget it because of my lack of a pen.
**** I don't know about you, but I think that this sounds like a very worthwhile topic. I'm sure I could write a blog post at least as long as one of Maureen's, if not even longer, on this topic.
***** Or rather, I became obsessed. She just replied to be nice to me.
****** Crazy is, of course, as crazy does. Therefore, this guy might also be crazy. Also, crazy is relative. For example, my webcam personality might be crazier than my English class personality, but it might not be considered insane-asylum-crazy. Additionally, my extreme use of asteriks to indicate tangents might also be considered crazy by one who considers tangents useless and irrelevent, which they often are.

In which I ramble quite a bit about food

In which I ramble quite a bit about food

I was going to be like everyone else and tell some kind of interesting, funny Easter story, but then I remembered that I'm Jewish. I have no Easter stories. I do, however, have Chanukah stories and Passover stories and Shabbat stories.

Unfortunately I can't think of one at the moment. All that's running through my head is food: gross matzah-based baked goods, latkes, braided hallah (I do love hallah), my mom's attempt to make matzah stuffing. For Pesach this past weekend, my grandma made for tupperwares of Passover cookies, which my little cousins eat because Grandma is a bit scary. Mendel bread is a bit like those dry crunchy cookies that you dip in your tea - scones? I can't remember the name... And she also made butter cookies using margerine, because apparently you can't have butter and meat at the same meal because you can't "bathe a lamb in its mother's milk." (That's news to me. I really only know the no meat and dairy rule, and of course no pigs. No pigs ever. And no shellfish.)

In any case, Passover tends to be a holiday where I skip dessert. Sorry I'm a bit rambly tonight, I haven't yet had a chance to catch up on my sleep. :\

Happy Easter to y'all, and happy Pesach!

To match my rambly mood, here's a picture of a very blurry, very creepy, very dead animal that I saw at the science museum. About an hour after a took this picture, and several other pictures, I realized the flash on my camera was off. Hence the blurriness.

I am an afikoman failure (in two ways)

I am an afikoman failure (in two ways)

First of all, I failed to find the afikoman. Technically, as the oldest cousin, I am supposed to forget about my afikoman-finding skills and allow one of my little cousins (ages 5, 6, 6, 10, and 12, and 14 months, and 2, but the last two can't participate because they have a limited verbal capacity) to find it and then be very excited and return to to my grandpa to recieve a reward.

(For those of you who are extremely confused right now, the afikoman is a special piece of matzah that gets hidden at the beginning of the seder - the special Passover meal - for the kids to find at the end. Then traditionally the kid who finds it gets some kind of reward, usually a dollar, and then the afikoman is broken up and everybody gets a piece of it for dessert. Which, in case you are wondering, doesn't exactly make sense, as matzah is a dry cracker that basically tastes like cardboard.)

As soon as my uncle announced that it was time to find the afikoman, one of my cousins went over and pulled it out, as he had already seen it and was just waiting for the time to find it to arrive. Then there was quite a bit of chaos as all the other kids insisted that that (ooh, look, double that!) wasn't fair since he didn't have to look and none of the others got a chance to search.But then my grandpa gave everyone a dollar so it was all okay.

The second way I am an afikoman failure: I don't think that's the correct spelling, and I'm too tired to go look it up.

Aficoman? No way.

Officoman? Nope.

Aphi- Okay, that's totally wrong. I must have it spelled right.

My mother, who's been a Jew a lot longer than I have, says it's afikomen. :\ Instead of changing all my a's to e's, I'll just let y'all (yes, I said y'all) see how horrible of a speller I am. My mom's always said I can't spell worth beans. (For the record, I don't even like beans.)

Cauldron Cake Fail

Cauldron Cake Fail

Tonight my friends and I are having a nerd night to celebrate our love of vlogbrothers, Harry Potter, reading, and all other things nerdy (although I do have to admit that none of us are video game nerds). We're planning on peeps, hachen schlachen, butterbeer (rootbeer with a new label, 'cause I'm crafty like that... okay, fine, I got a label off of google), and cauldron cakes.

I pulled a recipe off of the Leaky Cauldron, because my crafty skills don't usually extend to edible items. I followed the recipe, which basically said don't use those little cupcake papers, and stick a marshmallow in the middle of each one so that it deflates and forms a dip in the cupcake.

I tend to have bad luck with baking - I overcook cookies, or I undercook brownies, and I always burn poptarts - so it should have been no suprise when, upon taking the cauldron cakes out of the oven, I instead found burnt marshmallow.
EVERYWHERE.

The marshmallows did indeed melt and form caverns in the cupcakes, but they also slopped to the side and ran off the pan and then got hard and very sticky, as I discovered when I attempted to push them back into the centers of the cupcakes.

The next problem stemmed from the instruction to not use cupcake papers. Don't scold me - I sprayed the pan, I really did, but they decided to stick anyway. My mom dug them out with a knife, which worked, mostly, but they weren't exactly pretty.

So to attempt to hide the ugliness I took some frosting and added green food coloring and sqeezed it on top of each one with a ziploc with the tip cut off. (That was another kind of mess completely.) Not exactly perfect considering I couldn't find the kind of licorice that you're supposed to make the little cauldron handles with.

Hopefully they taste okay.
:\