All in

Have you ever heard the term "nut up"? It's a crass way of telling someone to get some courage and do what needs to be done. Right now I need to nut up, and in the worst way.
I am not lacking in the self-confidence department, at least not in a way that's noticeable. I can walk into a room full of people I don't know, introduce myself and have a meaningful conversation faster than most people can even find a chair or an unobtrusive spot of wall to stand against. But in some things, in some areas of adult life...I'm a mouse. That's the best word for it. I'm a mouse, the kind who hides in the little mouse hole, watching the vast expanse of floor in front of it, knowing that piece of cheese across the room is ripe for the taking but too convinced that the cat is going to come zooming over to eat me if I even put one foot outside the hole. For someone as mature and rational as I usually am, I find my own behaviour ridiculous and embarrassing.
My goal for this year is to collect experiences in some of the areas of life I've been lagging behind in. I won't share them here, but one thing is for certain:
I need to nut up.

-Laur

Moving

So my Mom sold our house last week. I'm really excited, but also kind of sad. I think that's normal.
I have been blogging in these past few months, at Adventures in Delicious, my new food blog. Right now I don't have anything new or exciting to say, so I think I'll just leave it at that.

-Laur

A split

So I didn't change blog providers, I simply started a new blog on Tumblr and will keep it for different reasons than this one. Come visit me here.
A lot of stuff has happened since I last posted. Sarah is almost completely moved out, and yesterday my mom and I moved my desk into the empty(ish) bedroom. We wound up having to take the doors to both bedrooms off their hinges in order to fit the two pieces of the desk through, and then wound up having to take the desk almost entirely apart to get it into the other bedroom at all. I know one piece of large, ungainly furniture that will NOT be coming to the new place with me. I guess that's not really a lot of stuff, but it was certainly an adventure.
I'm taking this cooking thing really seriously and I'm going to try to start a Wednesday night cooking club for my friends who don't cook. It's a life skill and when you get to be in your twenties, someone should be shaming you into learning how to cook if you don't already.
I do love food.

-Laur

Switching blog providers: do or do not?

So I'm thinking about switching blog providers, if that's the appropriate term. I've been looking into Tumblr and a lot of what it offers really appeals to me. I find that Blogger doesn't let me do some things easily, and I think I could share a lot more if I went to Tumblr. I don't want to go to Wordpress because it seems to require a lot more technical ability than I possess, and I want something that is simple and doesn't give me a headache or ask too much of me. Question is, though, can I import all my old posts to a Tumblr account? Hmmm.
Opinions wanted and appreciated. Thanks.

-Laur

Preparing

Yesterday after Sarah left the house with most of the remainder of her stuff (SURPRISE! My sister moved out! Cue huge sigh of relief) my mother and I cleaned out the upstairs linen closet, and then I went into my room and:

• took down all my posters
• removed most of the glow-in-the-dark starts and planets from my walls
• cleaned all the sticky-tack off the walls
• removed the white LED string lights from my window treatment
• consolidated my shotglass collection into two small boxes
• removed the pictures from all my standing frames, put them in albums, and stored the frames elsewhere
• was sad as I looked around my bedroom and realized that it looked like it only had half an identity

Now that the sibling has moved out again, Mom and I can seriously begin preparing the house for sale and then moving. We tackled the basement storage room two days ago and got rid of a tonne of stuff, and tonight when we get home from work we're going to clean out the laundry room, which is subsequently our furnace room, because we're getting the furnace and water heater replaced tomorrow. Everything is going to happen so quickly from hereon in, and I can't decide if I'm excited or full of dread. I can't imagine packing up my bedroom; even though I get rid of stuff every few months, I have so many possessions that I have no idea where they're all going to go when we move. I don't even know what my new bedroom will look like. What if it's smaller than what I have now? I already feel cramped as it is; a smaller space would be downright claustrophobic.
But I digress.
We're preparing the house for a move and right now there are garbage bags full of junk strewn all over the main floor that should probably go in the garage, but garbage collection (a double-up day, thank goodness! We're probably going to drop some bags in our neighbors' driveways, too) isn't until next week. We're going to amass more garbage before then, so I'll have to think of something creative to do with it.
One last thing; when I was shoveling snow last night I noticed that my side fence gate doesn't close properly anymore. It was swinging open and shut in the wind and making creepy creaking noises. It officially gave me the heebie jeebies. Just another thing on my to do list.

-Laur

Welcome to 2010

I don't have resolutions this year, as I find they set me up for disappointment. Instead, I have ideas

• I want to learn how to cook better than I do. I will choose and follow more recipes instead of making things up, and hone some of my weaker kitchen skills such as knife handling and pan-cooking (sauteeing, sweating, frying, browning, etc.)
• I need to get active again. My pants are getting tighter, something that hasn't happened in years, and my lung capacity is shrinking daily. I don't have enough money to rejoin the gym, so I will have to come up with a cheaper alternative.
  
• I want to be a kinder person. I'm terribly hard on some of the people in my life, and now that I know that most people aren't going to live up to my expectations, I need to stop beating them up (mentally) and beating myself up for putting them on a pedestal.
  
• I will abandon the idea of a best friend. It's an unattainable label to follow, and it winds up hurting me more than it comforts me. I read an article in Chatelaine that cleared a lot of my best-girl-friend misconceptions last month, and I feel a lot better now that I understand that best friends don't actually exist.
  

I will also try to post to this blog at LEAST once a week.
Happy New Year. Welcome to the next decade.

-Laur

Gingerpeople, to be politically correct

I don't personally like gingerbread that much. I find it a little bit bland, like it needs to be sweeter or something. It does, however, make excellent cutout shapes which is why I continue to make it year after year.
This year seems to be a defining year for me in terms of my design and execution skills; last year my decorating cookies were a hot mess, but this year? Excellence. My pumpkin carving skills seem to have undergone the same transformation, but that's another story for an unexpected and hilarious time.
On Tuesday night I decorated sugar cookies with my mother until my student came for tutoring, and then once all students had been dismissed and my mom had gone to bed, I hunkered down in front of the TV with a rack full of gingerbread men (people, persons, its?) and two squeeze bottles of royal icing (note to all cookie decorating enthusiasts: THIS WAS THE BEST DECISION EVER! I will continue to use squeeze bottles instead of icing bags for as long as I only need straight semi-thin lines), a glass of milk and both Home Alone 1 and 2, and off I went until 1:30 in the morning.

I didn't get all of them finished, but what I did get done I quite enjoyed. I'll either finish the rest when I get back from my weekend in Rochester, or leave it up to mom to finish. Regardless, enjoy my pictures. I'm becoming a more efficient cookie-roller, and had all the gingerbread men rolled, baked and cooled in just inside of an hour.

I'm going to go curl up in my warm bed now and settle down for a long winter's nap.

-Laur

Classic Gingerbread Cutouts:

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup molasses
2 eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour, divided
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and brown sugar until smooth. Stir in the molasses and eggs. Combine 1 1/2 cups of the flour, baking soda, salt, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger; beat into the molasses mixture. Gradually stir in the remaining flour by hand to form a stiff dough.
3. Divide dough into 2 pieces. On a lightly floured surface, roll out dough to 1/8 inch thickness. Cut into desired shapes using cookie cutters. Place cookies 1 inch apart onto ungreased cookie sheets.
4. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.