Of course it is happening inside your head…

But why on Earth should that mean it is not real?

Anyway, I wouldn’t really say that I’ve made a return to the written word/world of blogs. But I have things to say, so by golly, I’m going to say them! Just not tonight because it’s late and I really need to go to bed. Ah, if only this were a Friday night instead of a Thursday. Thursday’s are always so gruesome.

 

And now, I’m off to dream about places like this:

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire

 

Last semester of senior year, I asked my Linguistics professor if she had any particular recommendations for grammar guides, because I was nervous that mine wasn’t quite up to par. She told me to get this book and I have been addicted ever since.

A fun game!

I like to go here and play How Far I Can Go with the Least Amount of Money.

The winner? Puerto Rico comes in at an easy $270! I can hear the surf now…

HOLD THE PHONE. For just $410 I can fly to Geneva? I’d take Europe over the tropics any day. I’m officially saving my hard-earned dolla dolla bills for a trip to Switzerland.

 

The other fun game is Find the Most Expensive Place to Travel–GREENLAND? Seriously? How does a flight to Greenland cost $4420? There goes my dream of seeing the Northern Lights in their most pure form.

Stuck in my head.

Walk it out, yo.

This summer (back in the time I like to refer to as BFU–Before Flare Up) I accomplished a major goal of mine–running in a race. I signed up with my good friend, Runner Kelsey, and by “signed up” I mean, “was forced to register upon pain of death because she was sick of hearing my complaints about not doing anything exciting.” So, since Miss K was sick of hearing about my  boring life, she decided to give me a goal, run a 5k with her on Father’s Day.

We headed over to the race course (at a high school about 20 minutes away) and prepared ourselves for the burning heat. I was a little nervous before we got started, but not overwhelmingly so. It was a verry small race with a lot of kids and old folks (it was called the Run With Dad race–so yeah, there were some pretty old dads). Anyway, the important thing wasn’t my time (32:00) or the fact that it was entirely uphill and over 85 degrees outside, nope. The important thing was that I finished. And I felt damn good.

I'ma beast.

Sidenote: Look at how happy I was! A sigh of nostalgia for my tanned skin and toned arms. Now my arms are limp noodles and my skin is pallid with a tint of orange from all the carrots I eat (no seriously, I have orange hands, knees and toes).

Moving right along…I signed up for another race 3 weeks later, a 4th of July race in temperatures above 90 degrees. I felt like straight up passing out at the end and disregarded all of my training and just sat down afterward, in better shape than some fellow runners who barfed at the end. Ick. 29:23 was my time–I almost cried when I saw that I made it under 30 minutes. From then on decided that I was going to call myself a “runner” and train for a 10k–maybe even a 20k in September! I thought I could do it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m running 5 miles on weekends and a couple shorter distances during the week, when–bam. I’m sidelined with the illness outlined here. I quite literally came to a screeching halt.

The point of this post isn’t to really talk about my sickness–that will come at another time. I just wanted to say that I went running again for the first time in months on Sunday…and frankly, it did not go well. I don’t know if you’ve ever just stopped doing all forms of physical exercise for a couple of months, but it’s damn near impossible to get started again. For approximately 1 minute I jogged along rocking out to some Gaga on my ipod and thought, “hey! This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be!”  And then another 30 seconds passed. My legs felt like they were about to fall off, my lungs were on fire, my stomach clenched up in protestation of the strain that was being placed on it, and I had to stop. I took a couple of deep breaths and just started walking. I don’t think that pipe-dream Turkey Trot 5k is going to happen–who am I kidding? I can barely run for 1 minute, let alone 1 mile.

Honestly, I’m trying to be okay with a mile-long walk with Rat Dog and my momma in the evenings. Like Miss SnackFace just wrote, why aren’t more people content with walking as a form of exercise? I’m going to rock out the walks for now, and maybe someday I’ll walk myself to a half-marathon

I know that there are lots of folks out there who have had to deal with physical and emotional setbacks after an injury (or disease, in my case)–how did you deal with it? How long did it take for you to get back into the swing of things?

Ideas and Ideals

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.” –Cobb, Inception

Have you ever been woken up suddenly, without warning, with an idea stuck in your head? Like it had been placed there by rogue thieves who snuck up on you in the middle of the night and implanted an idea so that it sticks–there’s no forgetting it once you wake up. Besides making for the plot of an amazing movie (seriously, Inception was one of my favorite movies of the summer), that is exactly what happened to me this morning. Last night I went to bed thinking about pizza and woke up this morning positively obsessed with the idea of cinnamon rolls. But not just any old cinnamon roll–I’m talking about cinnamon roll pancakes.

Mmm, who doesn’t love cinnamon rolls? You’d have to be insane not to love the little swirls of dough and buttery cinnamon-sugared goodness, all baked to oozy perfection. My Grandma DiMuzio was known for a lot of things in her day, but was positively famous for her cinnamon rolls. She would spend an entire day making dozens of batches of the gorgeous rolls so she could send out packages to each of her TEN children and their families. It was almost better than Christmas morning when we got one of Grandma’s boxes of cinnamon rolls in the mail–all of my sisters would fight over who got to open the box first.

This morning, I wanted to do some justice to Grandma D’s memory by making some cinnamon rolls, but damn it, I’m lazy. Do I want to wait for 4 hours to let some yeast rise? Uh, no. I want to have my cinnamon rolls delicious, but quick. I hope Grammie doesn’t think any less of me. For some reason, I think she’d actually be quite proud of the emergence of this idea…

Behold, the Sourdough Cinnamon Swirl Pancake

In order to achieve the taste of yeasted dough, I mixed together a batch of sourdough pancakes. I happen to be one of those people who keeps a jar of sourdough starter in my refrigerator, just in case I feel the need to knead. I also happen to make awesome puns. Anyway, here’s the recipe as I created it this morning. Typically, you’re supposed to create a sourdough sponge and let it sit out the night  before making your pancakes, but as I said before, this idea came to me in sleep. I just had to roll with it.

1 cup sourdough starter, divided between 2 bowls

[the rest of the ingredients are per bowl]

1/2 cup flour (I use King Arthur All Purpose)
1/2 cup almond milk
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 flax egg (1 tbsp. flax mixed with 3 tbsp. water, microwaved for 30 seconds until gloopy)
A little bit of vanilla

Bowl 1:
Mix together all ingredients and let it sit there while you prepare the cinnamon swirl mix.

Bowl 2:
2 tsp.  cinnamon (maybe more? I just added some until I felt like there was enough)
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tbsp. Earth Balance, melted
1/4 tsp. cocoa powder (this is mostly just to make the dough a little darker in color)

Mix together (not too much!)

Then the real fun begins! Well, it’s only fun if you consider attempting to do a swirl in a hot griddle/pan with two different kinds of batter “fun.” I just call it “making a mess” but whatever. Try to swirl the two batters together. This is really just trial and error here, my methods were erratic and I mostly just ended up with pancakes that looked like yin-yangs. Which is totally fine.

Makes a whole stack-o-cakes

While your pancakes are cooking away on your pan, prepare the topping. This topping is essential to the flavor and authenticity of the cinnamon swirl pancakes.

1 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tbsp. Earth Balance, melted
1 tbsp. flax seeds
1 tbsp. maple syrup
crushed walnuts

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. When you’re ready to eat, top off your gorgeous (or not) cinnamon swirls pancakes with the brown sugar topping. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Wipe that drool of yo' keyboard. It isn't sanitary.

And here’s one more money shot, just for posterity’s sake.

How bad can that be?

Somehow, I managed to save a couple of cakes for my parents. My mother declared, “Ihop would have a field day with this!” and I had to concur. Ihop, do you see these? Call them Ruth Cakes or something to that effect–just make sure they’re vegan.

My dad’s reaction was…interesting. As Grammie D was his mother, he is a more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of taking one of her most beloved recipes and changing it. He got over that trepidation quite quickly when he took a bite of these pancakes, though. “Close to Nirvana,” he stated. I smiled knowing that I had managed to achieve something close to culinary greatness.

“I want sausage!” was my dad’s next statement. Sorry, pop. Can’t help ya there.

When the shit hits the fan.

Lots of crazy things have happened in the last couple of months. Well, mostly just one thing–a little disease I like to call Ulcerative Colitis (also known as UC//also known as ULTRA CRAP) which once again reared its ugly head. I’ve been down for the count literally since my last post. I’m fairly certain that the antibiotics I took for strep (and, as it turns out, bronchitis) caused me to flare up and–long story short–I ended up in the hospital. Finally things are starting to look up. Taken long enough, I say. I’ll provide more details about my sob story later….because I’m considering resurrecting this ol’ neglected blog, but it might take a while for me to get into a good habit.

I am working on an epic post of epic proportions, hopefully to be published tomorrow evening sometime after I get home from work. Check back! It’ll be worth the wait (or maybe not, but at least give it a shot!).

Mon

Triumph!

Well, sort of.

See, on Monday I was convinced that I had strep throat. Horrible day at work plus a terrible state of health did not equal a happy Monica, so I forked up the 50 bucks that it takes for me to get seen at the urgent care clinic (holy crap–being an adult with my own health insurance is expensive) and had the nurse practitioner shove a strep swab down my throat. The immediate result was that it was negative, but I’d have to wait “a few days” for the full results to come in. Of course, things rapidly deteriorated from there and as soon as I got home from the clinic I hauled ass into bed–where I remained in confinement until Wednesday afternoon. I had to use 2 precious days of PTO for being sick, which sucks because everyone knows that PTO is for vacayyytion, not sick days!

(Note the sarcasm {sort of}: I’m grateful to have a job that even offers me health insurance and paid time off. Too many people are not nearly as luck. But I’m still pissed that I can’t take a nice long holiday during the holidays. I digress.)

Anyway, I got back to work yesterday to find out that this illness which I have seems to be going around the office (it’s a very small office of 30 people) and that my coworkers are dropping like flies. Accusations also flew…like flies (badum-tcchh). Yes, I was the one to blame.

Right, so the point of this is just to say that the urgent care clinic called today to tell me that I had strep. I was right all along! Good thing I skipped out on work, otherwise I’m certain that I would’ve infected the entire office, instead of most of it, because I am the front-desk girl and basically handle everything that comes in and goes out. Including germs.

—————————————————-

The real point of this post wasn’t to triumph in my knowledge that I know my germs (maybe a little). Nope. During my 2-day lie in, I watched an excessive amount of Pushing Daisies and have decided that my love of Lee Pace almost rivals my love for Matthew Gray Gubler. The decision comes down to this:

Awkard, tall, and skinny?

Or this…

taller, skinner, and awkward-er

Eyebrows or cheekbones? Pie or crimes? The ability to wake the dead or to read a 500 page book in 10 minutes? You decide.

And another that I’m seriously loving about this tv show is the complete adorableness of Anna Friel. Seriously, where can I buy her entire wardrobe for this show? I’m planning an epic shopping trip this week to buy some Charlotte Charles, aka Chuck, clothes. Because I’m that obsessed. And I don’t even like shopping. For a girl who has lived in Northern Virgina almost her entire life, I sure did miss out on the retail therapy gene that most females in this area seem to have been blessed with.

I'll take one in every color, thanks.

I aspire to be as adorable and chic as her every day of my life. Of course, I’m fairly certain that I sad the same thing after I saw Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer, but that’s not important (although I do luurve that movie).

Okay, so I’ll admit, this post wasn’t exactly living up to the “Excitement Experiment”  that was promised, but I haven’t exactly been doing much these days. I had strep!

Here’s a little something to spark your creativity, though. Listen to the whole thing!

Oltremare, by Ludovico Einaudi

21 Days

Isn’t that how long it is supposed to take to break an addiction? I’m not entirely sure, but that’s not the point, haha.

Just know that I apologize for my absence from the blogosphere. My grandpa came to live with us for the month of July, which was indeed an adventure because he’s got Alzheimer’s and was constantly demanding cookies. So, my excuse for not blogging is cookies? … don’t judge me!

Work has been work has been work. Not much exciting going on around these parts. I work, I come home, I make dinner, I go to the gym (occasionally) and I go to bed. Pretty tedious and repetitive, if you ask me. I’d like to shake up my days and make them more exciting and rewarding, but I’m not really sure how to go about doing that. Which, I guess is the whole point of this blog–to hold me accountable for my own life. By regularly posting about my life I’m bound to discover something unique among the drudgery, right?

When I originally set out to write this blog, I wanted it to be called “The Excitement Experiment” because I wanted to make it my mission to make the most out of my days and weeks (and weekends!). The goal was to do something totally different & new to me each week. Like taking a knitting class one day and a BodyPump class the next. Or learning how to decorate a cake. Or writing an entire short story in 24 hours. Little things that would shake up my days.

Clearly, the Excitement Experiment failed before it even got a chance to get started. I’d like to give it a kick start again soon, to see if I can revive the whole concept before pitching it out of my head permanently. I’m going to give it my best shot!

Question to the general populace: What do you do to make your life more exciting? We all get stuck in ruts sometimes and I want to hear about how you lovely people manage to escape the grind!

Linens n’ Things: A Redecorating Story

After graduation, I came home for a few days before heading to Hawaii for a little vacation with my BFF Sarah. Upon returning, I made the final adventure to my college apartment and brought back my stuff (well, it took two trips over the span of a week to get it all back, but you get the picture). Moving back from the ‘Burg (in a word) sucked. Back then I had space! And two places in which to put all of my stuff–one room at school and one at home! But somehow I had to squeeze everything back into one teeny-tiny little room, which had been collecting junk for the past 14 years. The state of my bedroom after moving back home was something straight out of Twister.

This is the stuff OCD nightmares are made of.

Please note the bunk bed (which is far older than I am) and collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I clearly have issues with parting from childhood memorabilia. So, naturally, I did what any normal person would do when given a situation like this: nothing. I had just started working full time (complete with lots and lots of commuting) and just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. Fast forward a week and as I fell out of my bed (no ladder, see?) for the umpteenth time I decided that it was time to change. The most obvious course of action was to take everything in my room out so I could do a little rearranging, right? Wrong.

Death trap hallway.

My parents weren’t exactly thrilled with my redecorating plan, as it involved turning our hallway into a fire hazard. I had to remove it all the next day and put it back into my room–thus defeating the purpose. But eventually, after a week (or two) I got it looking something like this…

So close! And yet so far.

Rat Dog was thrilled to have a place to move around, lemme tell you. What she doesn’t love is the new setup that my room is currently rockin’ because she can’t snuggle under the bed anymore. Yes, nearly four weeks after officially moving home, I have a real bed (buh-bye bunk) and a bookshelf and a brand spanking new life. Out with the old! I never knew I had so much stuff randomly saved. My pack-ratting would rival an episode of Hoarders (which was incidentally the spark for this little adventure). Okay, not really, but did I seriously think that my gym uniform from middle school would have any sort of sentimental value to me now?

Ikea had a sale this weekend so I grabbed a couple little things that were needed to transform my icky, old bedroom into a comfortable new sanctuary.

A room with a view, at last.

All was not lost for Rat Dog, though. I may have picked up a little doggie bed for her to snuggle in as well, because I’m such a great person and all.

It feels so wonderful to have a place to live now! Even though I’ll be getting my own place (sooner rather than later), it’s wonderful for now! Yeah, it took me a month to get there, but whatever.

Life Goal # 2 (Purge my life of old & unnecessary clutter): Completed!

Stay tuned for the completion of my Life Goal #3…

Monica