Good bye carpet crawlies, heeellllloooo gorgeous!

The monkey and I spend 2.5 days putting down a new bamboo floor in our loft area.  It looked awful before, and now there is a floor!  Behold the loveliness:

I think we did a really really good job.  The monkey did all the color selection - and it looks awesome.  I did the cutting.  I think we make a good team.

Inception - Now in HD!

I buy things with my Amex card in order to get points to use for Home Depot gift certificates.  Then I use the gift certificates to buy things at Home Depot using my Amex, which gets me more Home Depot gift certificates. 

I must go deeper! This is Home Depot Inception.



Bamboo - Not just for skewers anymore!



So last night the monkey and I went to Home Depot, seemingly our favorite store ever because we go almost every week.  We drove to the Depot of Homes in order to pay for 1014 sq ft of bamboo flooring.  Our order was 43 boxes of genuine engineered, solid 5/8" bamboo flooring in the color "Toast".  It set us back ~$1700, which includes 6.5% mass sales tax and $65 for delivery. 

Cake balls. hehehehe. Balls.

For my last office Christmas party, I decided to bake something heavy with the eggs (thank you ladies!).

I made a sheet cake and lemon curd from my Martha Stewart 2003 cookbook.  I wanted to do something cute and an homage to my girls.  So I decided to make cake balls (hahaha) - which apparently are a huge thing on the internets.

So after baking the cake and curd, you just tear up everything and mix it into a big homogeneous lump.  Reminds me of how my little sister used to (and still) eats cake (smushing it up into a frost cake paste that usually came out looking gray).

Then you roll the mixture into balls (ha!) and refrigerate.  Then dip them in some colored chocolate and decorate!  I have a set of food coloring and sprinkly stuff in the pantry that I bought for the last fancy cake I made.  It came in very handy to dye the dipping chocolate, and the fondant for the accessories.

The results were these little chicks.  I think they came out pretty cute.

I ran out of yellow chocolate, so I made the snowmen. 

I also thought chicks + moustaches + tophat = funny. 



Cray-cray Bunguin.

I don't know when my resolution started to fail me, but I find way more often these days I am left feeling like my world is a only a few good shakes from crashing to the ground and shattering everywhere.  I used to be able to shake anything off.  I guess these days, I have so much to lose.  I worry that if I lose my job, then I loose the house.  Then I worry that the monkey will leave with no home to bear.  Then, I'm back at the beginning in a crappy apartment, or my god, my mom's place. 

Those assholes who say "it's better to have love and lost, than to have never loved" apparently never did it right, because just thinking about losing my love tears my intestines to shreds.  I can't even fathom what would happen if or when the real thing goes down.

This is what happens when you let your guard down.  I hope your happy, sappy.

Life sucks and then you die.

But at least there are a few good things in between...

When things suck so bad that everything falls apart, I think I need the following mantra:
"Shite happens.  I also shit.  Therefore, I make shit happen."

These are the days of my life.

Clean Up Day

Yesterday was clean up day!

The monkey and I were lazy last fall (mostly due to the fact that I was caught up in taking a grad class and had no time to contribute to the homstead).  We didn't do any cleaning before the havy snow. There was no raking of the leaves and there are little pieces of trash blowing all over the front of the yard.  Witness the crap:

Turns out, lazyness is a virtue! It was a much better idea to clean up in the spring rather than the fall.  The leaves protected all the plants underneath.  

While raking, we used every yard bag in the garage and still had at least four barrels worth of debris.  Since we needed extra bags, the rest of the day was devoted to a Home Depot run.  Therefore the clean up continued today, and the results were great.