“There’s a secret door in my room. I use it for getting away from the bad guys, and from ninjas.”
Jun 28 00:58:00 2010

“The good news about having a baby brother or sister is that I will get to give it hugs and kisses!”
Jun 24 18:27:23 2010

“Peace out, yo!…What does that even MEAN, anyway?”
Jun 23 15:31:07 2010

“Dog paw? Fascinating!”
Jun 22 09:22:44 2010

“Oh, today is Father’s Day? Happy Father’s Day, Daddy!”
Jun 20 18:20:08 2010

“I want a Scooby-Doo party on my next birthday. Then I can give out little dolls of monsters, zombies, ghosts, and aliens as party prizes!”
Jun 18 15:13:23 2010

“Miss Brenda’s stir-fry pork, I LOVE YOU!!!”
Jun 15 19:37:36 2010

“Men, I’m Annalie of the USS Gourmet. I’m here to tell you, this whole ship is one big security camera!”
Jun 14 14:56:53 2010

“I’m pretending to be an Earthbender!”
Jun 13 12:57:05 2010

“I stand corrected. I’d better stick to martial arts.”
Jun 9 16:41:05 2010

“Mom, tell Miss Brenda and all your friends that have kids that it’s kinda easy to suck yogurt through a straw. They need to know that.”
Jun 7 03:45:58 2010

@OutofmyMind It is! Did you know you can also eat applesauce with a straw? It’s true, I do it all the time.
Jun 9 16:40:27 2010 in reply to OutofmyMind

“You’re my darrrrrlin’, you’re my darrrrlin’, you’re my DARRRR-ling Clementine…”
Jun 5 14:52:16 2010

“I’m going to put this picture from @babybug in the place of honor…right next to the best picture I drew.”
6:27 PM Jun 4th

“Yeah, yeah. I’m SIX now, you know.”
9:46 AM May 10th

“It’s lunchtime already? Huh, the day goes by.”
1:24 PM May 30th

“Wow, it looks SO three-dimensional!”
2:30 PM May 26th

“This is so sweet and sour, I can’t get enough of it!”
4:50 PM May 24th

“No, I’m sorry. I can’t sing that song for you again. It’s a one-hit wonder.”
12:20 AM May 22nd

“Kiki’s Delivery Service is a little movie pronounced by the same company that made Totoro.”
11:13 PM May 7th

(talking on her cousin’s phone rattle) “Hello? Talk to me. Oh, BILLY! How are ya? I haven’t talked to you since kindergarten. SO crazy…”
8:04 PM Apr 28th

“Can I have some more cram bangoons?”
4:21 PM Apr 21st

“I’ll do it, but first you have to threaten me with candy.”
12:53 PM Apr 21st

“Aliens never surprise me, because you can ALWAYS expect aliens on Doctor Who.”
1:46 PM Apr 18th

“I think I have allergicness to pussy willow pollen.”
5:22 PM Apr 15th

“This is @babybug. I drew her mouth open because you know how she just talks, talks, talks all the time.”
2:03 AM Apr 11th

“You know how people just LOVE apples, and I’m one of them.”
3:07 PM Apr 8th

(trying on Easter dresses) “This one passes the jump test, and it’s SO zero minutes ago!”
4:48 PM Apr 1st

This is the look Troy usually gives me when I tell him how late I stayed up the night before, crocheting and watching movies or TV. I’ve been doing that a lot recently. I can’t give you details or show you pictures of the finished projects because they are gifts for people who might be reading this. Right now I’m working my way through Bones from the beginning (the first four seasons are conveniently available on Netflix Instant) and have been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it. Also, I’ve decided once and for all that the best way to watch a TV series is in large chunks—say, one whole season in a week. Since I have a show to watch, I’ve been crocheting more than usual.

All this crocheting and TV-watching has been happening at the expense of the time I might normally spend editing photos and writing blog posts. But there hasn’t been much to write about lately anyway.

What exactly have we been up to? Well, I think I mentioned that I’ve been crocheting a lot. I’ve also been working on our container garden, and three months after moving I’ve finally gotten back into the swing of cooking most meals at home instead of eating out every other night. Troy’s been working hard; it’s a busy time of year for his job, and when he’s at home he’s been catching up on yard work and projects around the house. Annalie has been getting a huge kick out of observing the recently-emerged-from-their-chrysalides butterflies in the butterfly garden that Unky Ben and Angie got her for her birthday. And almost every day this week there has been an restaurant set up in the living room including a little table & chairs, dishes, silverware, and “walls” built from footstools and pillows, where Annalie grandly serves us apples and water and goldfish crackers.

Okay, I guess I could have been writing about all those things I mentioned. But I haven’t been. I’ve just been living them. I go through stages sometimes where I get annoyed at how I always have a camera in front of my face, attempting to capture all the moments instead of just enjoying the moments. I suppose I’ve been in one of those stages lately. It’ll pass eventually and I’ll be back to capturing every little thing for posterity.

Meanwhile, life’s just chugging along. Summer is coming. We’re all good.

Our flight from Omaha to DC on Saturday was at 6am. When I woke Annalie up at 4:15 Saturday morning, she sat up and immediately started crying and saying it was too early. My mom and I knew exactly how she felt. We’re both night-before-travel insomniacs, and we had to wake up at 3:30am to leave for the airport by 4:30. My mom and I were pretty much zombies all day Saturday, and Annalie was ten times crazier than usual, which is how she gets when she’s really tired. We all went to bed by 8pm Saturday and slept peacefully for 12 lovely hours.

Except that meant I went to bed at 11pm tonight and couldn’t get to sleep. After a while I got tired of tossing and turning so I got up and watched bits of the last six or seven episodes of Chuck on iTunes.

I’ll be honest; it’s been hard to love Chuck this season. The characters have to change for the show to not be completely boring, conflict is necessary for good story-telling, darkest before the dawn, blah blah blah. Even knowing those things, though, I still just didn’t feel as interested in it. I’ve decided there were three main reasons:

1. I’ve been keeping up on the Chuck news and reading the episode reviews. I think it’s been a bit of overkill for me.
2. Because of the addition of a new character (Daniel Shaw) to Team Bartowski, the team was often split up or working at cross-purposes. One of the things I love best about Chuck is the chemistry between the three leads. Take that away and the show just isn’t as much fun to watch.
3. I managed to watch the first two seasons of Chuck, all 35 episodes, in the span of one week. Maybe if I’d had to watch them one episode at a time, waiting a week or more between times, I wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much.

I’ve been theorizing for a while that once Season 3 is over, if I were to have a marathon and watch the whole season in a day, I’d probably enjoy it much more. And after fast-forwarding through the last half of the season, I was happy and relieved that I was right, and I enjoyed the bits I watched much more than I expected to, both because I knew what was going to happen (I hate suspense, remember?) and because it was like watching a long movie instead of a serialized TV show. Also, I had forgotten how many great moments this season has had…

*SPOILER ALERT*

Morgan’s stunned and joyful reaction to finding out Chuck is a spy…Morgan and Awesome learning that they both know Chuck’s secret…Casey realizing he has a daughter, and later telling Chuck he has to decide between love and love of country, and that Walker is a good woman—who’d have ever thought in Season 1 we would get Casey encouraging Chuck to go after the woman he loves, in Casey’s own inimitable style!?…Chuck’s straightforward declaration of his love for Sarah…Chuck at a low point, drunk in his boxers and holding a plastic guitar, while Sarah sweetly admitted she fell for him before he even defused that bomb with a computer virus…Sarah and Chuck, in handcuffs, kung-fu-ing the bad guys in the bakery together so awesomely that it was like dancing (and Casey and Morgan pitching in with a re-enactment of a previous fight scene with Casey & Chuck).

*End spoilers*

Yeah, I find that I’m still liking Chuck quite a bit, rough patches and all. I will say, I loved episode 3.14 and have high hopes for the remaining five episodes. Now let’s hope they get renewed for Season 4 so we can have a whole season of Morgan annoying Casey and Chuck and Sarah fighting awesomely. And maybe a few more performances from JEFFSTER!

(All that said, Castle is still my new favorite show. And it already got renewed for next season, so I can watch its last few episodes without worrying about its chances for renewal!)

Okay, now that I’ve let my geek flag fly again (all over my blog, at 3am), I think I can go to sleep now and dream about the list of things I need to get done week before Annalie’s birthday party this weekend.

p.s. New banner’s up! Thanks again, B.

Probably none of you reading this have any clue that I like the TV show Chuck, right? I’m pretty quiet about it.

Lauren had the idea for one of the days of 7 Days to be a Chuck day, just for fun. Here you can see me very obviously speaking into my spy watch, without anyone around me even noticing. Also, I’m wearing my orange Chucks, a mustache from our Chuck party in January (also seen in Sonja’s Flickr stream), and my Orange Orange t-shirt. (Appearances to the contrary, I’m not obsessed. Chuck isn’t even my favorite TV show. I’d have to say my favorite show right now is probably Castle. Nathan Fillion is only one of many awesome things about it.)

Brenda and I had to go to IKEA for the 37th time in two weeks yesterday, and mamalang couldn’t make it to the meet-up yesterday so she drove all the way to meet us at IKEA instead. We shopped, we chatted, we ate meatballs. It would almost be boring how all these internet meet-ups go so well if they weren’t so much fun.

I’m getting a bit behind in my 7 Days blogging because we’ve been scrambling to fit in all the things we want to do before Brenda & Bug go home. Tomorrow (Wednesday) is their last full day here; they fly back home Thursday morning. Brenda was worried that two weeks would be too long, that we’d start to get sick of them, but it seems like they just got here! They could stay another two weeks and we’d probably still be finding things to work on in the house, or fun touristy things to do. But they miss Toby, and he misses them. And the house is almost completely done, which it wouldn’t have been for another six months if it weren’t for Brenda.

We’ll be sad to see them go, but we’re so very glad they came!

Brenda has written about what we’ve been up to in a bit more detail, if you’re interested.

I’m sitting here getting my geek on, watching Dr. Who while I crochet some balls. My mom has become a huge fan of David Tennant in the past year or so, and when we were in Omaha over Christmas I watched a bunch of episodes of Dr. Who with her.

I remember watching Tom Baker in the original series when I was a kid, but I’d never seen any of the modern series till recently. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it, although I shouldn’t have been. I’ve always been a sucker for all things British. And as I’ve demonstrated time and time again, I’m a geek. I can’t say I’m a die-hard Dr. Who fan; I have no idea what the Dr. Who equivalent of a Trekkie or Browncoat or an X-Phile is so I’m pretty sure I don’t qualify. But I like the actors and it’s a fun show with excellent writing and cheerfully cheesy special effects, which I sort of love. Best of all, all four seasons are available to view on Netflix Instant. That means there are hours and hours of new shows for me to watch while I crochet. Score!

Anyhoo. I was sitting here watching Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, when I suddenly remembered that today is National Delurking Day. I haven’t mentioned it on my blog before simply because I didn’t want to. But this year I want to. If you’re a regular reader of this blog but you rarely or never comment, today’s your chance to say hello. I’ll even make it easy for you by asking you a series of questions that you can choose to answer or ignore, as you like.

Do you consider yourself a geek? Why or why not? What geeky shows/movies/games/books do you love, and think that I should love too?

I guess I’m not a very good Chuck fan. I neglected to mention on Twitter, Facebook AND my blog that the two-hour Season 3 premiere of Chuck was this past Sunday, and that another episode aired at the regular time on Monday, on NBC. So, um, watch Chuck next Monday!

I have good reasons for not mentioning it though. I was busy enjoying the last few days of my visit with Lauren, who sadly had to fly back home before the Chuck party.

Then I was getting ready for the Chuck party. We grocery-shopped and made magnets and put together some goodies for the party favor bags.

We got t-shirts made with the awesome graphic that Brenda designed. She also designed the bitmap art (inspired by the Chuck opening credits) for the favor bags.

We did some house-cleaning and some cooking.

Then there was the actual partying, woohoo! Along with me, my mom, Annalie and Brenda, Sonja and Noah, Jen and Emily, Heather and her girls, and Brenda’s mom Sue all came down for the Chuckaganza. (Troy came up with that one.)

We showed off our kung fu moves.

Then there were the mustaches. Oh, the crazy mustaches. I think Brenda came up with the idea, and then I said, “I have this cheap felt that’s been sitting in my cabinet forever…here, cut up some mustaches!” We got double-sided tape and the rest is history. Much to Sonja’s delight.

No one—and no thing was safe from Sonja’s mustache-ing fervor.

See? There were also mustaches on the kitchen trash can, Annalie’s piggy bank, and a drawing of a teddy bear taped up in the hallway. Though I think the trash can might have been Brenda’s doing.

And after we put the littles to bed, we settled down with our coffee and chocolate souffles to watch the two-hour premiere. It was, in a word, awesome. The episode that aired the next night was even better. I think this is gonna be a good season for Chuck. I’m so glad I discovered this show (thanks again, Mike!) and have been able to share the fun with so many other people.

Not to mention the mustaches.

For more photos of the weekend, go to the photoset Chuck Party 2010 in my Flickr.

If you want to catch up on Chuck, you can see the first three episodes of this season, plus the last few of Season 2, on NBC Video Rewind. A few more are available on TheWB.com.

Yep, Lauren’s been here for a couple of days now, and we’re having fun. We’ve fed her Mexican food and Italian food and Chick-Fil-A and homemade french toast. We’ve introduced her to Fresca and she’s introduced us to Tim Tams, which are delightful.

We’ve painted pottery and made Shrinky-Dinks. We’ve taken her to Michaels twice, where she’s bought lots of yarn that she can’t buy at home; and to my local specialty yarn shop once, where she bought more yarn and I allowed myself to be (1) convinced that I could learn to knit (gulp!) socks, and (2) talked into buying some really gorgeous sock yarn (not pictured).

We made plans to go to the Air & Space Museum, but ended up postponing them because the morning got away from us. We tried to go to Old Town but when we got there we saw all the red shirts and jackets and realized that it was overrun with tourists from Nebraska who are in town for the Holiday Bowl. Normally we’d be quite pleased to see Nebraskans, but in this case they’d taken all the parking spaces and left none for us. We ended up postponing our Old Town trip too, but I did take Lauren to our local post office where she watched me mail packages to A. Erin and Sarah. I’m sure that was very exciting.

Then, after a trip to Ralphs for some groceries, the minivan broke down. When I called my insurance company’s roadside assistance number, I was informed by a recording that due to “severe weather” in my area the wait for service was averaging four hours. You know you’re in Southern California when misty rain is “severe weather.” My mom and Annalie waited for us at the store while Lauren and I walked the half-mile back to my house to get the car so we could go back and get them and the groceries.

Later on in the evening, Lauren realized her credit card had been hacked and someone had bought $700 worth of online gaming with it. She had to cancel it, and tomorrow while I’m seeing about getting the minivan towed and fixed, she’ll be waiting around my house for someone to bring her an emergency replacement Visa because it’s kind of nice to have such a thing for, y’know, emergencies when one is traveling overseas.

The good news is, we’ve been catching Lauren up on Season 2 of Chuck, since Season 3 will be starting in just over a week. That’s why I have not blogged much: we’ve been spending our evenings crocheting & knitting, talking, eating too much junk food, and watching episodes of Chuck. Despite theft and breakdowns and interrupted plans, life is good.

I love Starbucks’s kid-sized drinks. They’re reasonably priced and are never too hot to drink right away. What I don’t like is that their cardboard sleeves are too big for the kid drinks, and of course Annalie always wants a sleeve for her cup. I usually wrap a napkin around the cup and put the sleeve over that, which sort of works, but it’s far from perfect.

I’ve been meaning to crochet a cup sleeve for Annalie forever, to keep in my purse along with the cloth cup sleeve I bought from BeachMama ages ago. Tonight, I finally did. The pink one on the left is for Annalie. Guess who the green one is for?

p.s. You all heard that Chuck is coming back sooner than expected, right? The premiere is Sunday, January 10th with two hour-long shows, then another show on Monday the 11th in the regular timeslot. Woohoo!

A month or so ago, I wrote about how I was going batty trying to figure out a pattern for my not-yet-born niece’s blanket. You might remember that I was crocheting lots of little things just to give me a break from rearranging skeins of yarn on the floor and frogging my test squares. I blogged about the cupcakes and headbands and baby bottles I had made, but I didn’t blog about everything I’d been crocheting, because some of the things I’d made were gifts, and I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s surpise.

I crocheted this adorable little alien dude for Kuky’s baby boy Nathan, based on this free amigurumi alien pattern (registration required) from Lion Brand Yarn. The cupcake was a big-sister gift for Kuky’s daughter Isabelle. Like the other cupcakes I’ve crocheted, it’s based on a free cupcake pattern from BitterSweet.

Annalie saw the alien I was making for Nathan, and was very sad when I told her it wasn’t for her. So I crocheted one for her one too. Annalie named her alien “Prettiest.”

Another crocheted baby bottle. I…made this so long ago that I can’t remember if I started it at the bottom or top. I know I did one with the first one, and then I tried it the other way with this second bottle, and I liked the second way better. I can’t remember which was which, though.

I had to send a little care package to Anna after her visit here, because a piece of her stroller fell off in my van. I stuck in these balls that I crocheted for her kids. Annalie chose the colors especially for Apple and J.

These stripey crocheted balls were a gift for my friend Mike’s two boys, to include in a package I was sending to their family. Mike, whom I know from 7 Days, is the one who described the show Chuck to me as "Get Smart meets The Hunt for Red October," which convinced me I needed to watch it immediately. The rest is history. To thank him, I wanted to paint him a mug. He suggested I paint one for his wife, too, so I did.

Mike’s mug, on the right, has a Casey quote on it ("I don’t kid about quiche"). His wife’s mug, on the left, has a less direct Chuck reference. The first line in the Cake song "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" is "I want a girl with a mind like a diamond." An instrumental version of that song is used over the credits of "Chuck." Mostly I just really like that line, and knowing Mike I suspect that it describes his wife pretty well. (There is a photo in Mike’s flickr of him and his wife posing with their mugs in the last run of 7 Days, too.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work on the blanket I’m crocheting for my niece.

Someone commented on the above photo on Flickr today, which made me think, Hey, I never blogged about that! I checked the date on the photo and looked in my archives, and sure enough, that was right about the time I was lamenting the Bloggers’ Paradox. No reason I can’t write about it now, though.

So. About a month ago when Brenda and I were IMing late one evening. I mentioned that I was thinking about baking some cupcakes. She said she was thinking about watching an episode of Chuck. I said, why don’t we do both?

Note: this is a staged photo. I don’t normally leave pots full of gooey substances sitting so close to my laptop.

I took my laptop into the kitchen and Brenda and I both watched Chuck vs. the Dream Job on Hulu, IMing with each other from time to time, while I baked. I used Nigella Lawson’s easier-than-you-think Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes as inspiration, adapting the recipe to ingredients I had on hand (apricot preserves instead of cherry, vanilla cream cheese frosting that I had in the freezer leftover from making Joe & Nina’s birthday cake swirled on the top of each mini-cupcake instead of a glace cherry).

Pretty and delicious. Want the recipe?

Rich Chocolate Mini-Cupcakes
adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

For the cupcakes:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, broken into small pieces
• 1 1/3 cups apricot preserves*
• 1/2 cup sugar
• pinch of salt
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

for the icing

• 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
• 1/3 cup plus 1 Tbsp heavy cream (I used half-and-half, which worked fine)
• small amount of vanilla cream cheese frosting for decoration (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. Line 24 cups of a mini-muffin pan with cupcake liners, or spray with non-stick spray.
3. Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and put over medium heat to melt. When the butter is almost completely melted, stir in the chocolate. Leave it for a moment to begin softening, then remove pan from the heat and stir with a wooden spoon until the butter and chocolate are smooth and completely combined. Add the preserves, sugar and salt and stir well. Add the beaten eggs and stir till everything’s pretty well-mixed. Stir in the flour and baking powder.
4. Spoon the batter into the muffin papers in the pan, dividing evenly between the 24 cups. Bake for 15-20 minutes, till a toothpick entered in the center of one of the cupcakes comes out almost clean. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out.
5. When the cupcakes are almost cool, break the chocolate for the icing into little pieces and add them to the cream in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, remove from the heat and then whisk, either by hand or with an electric mixer, till thick and smooth. Frost the cupcakes, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon. If desired, spoon some vanilla cream cheese frosting into a piping bag and use a decorative tip to add a small swirl to the top of each cupcake.

*You can use almost any kind of preserves, really. Marmalade works well, as do cherry and raspberry.

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