I have nothing interesting to say or post about right now; however, I felt the need to share the cutest picture ever taken in the universe.  Below you will find my parents' dogs, Ethel and Fred (yes, like the Mertzes of I Love Lucy.... Lucy is not pictured).  Fred is a baby and they are both French Bulldogs and I'm sorry, but they are the cutest dogs in the world.  This is how they slept in the car the other day.  <3.

In other news, yesterday I was a waste of human flesh.  I worked like a normal person and made a grocery list comprised mostly of things to make various dishes I have liked or pinned on pinterest and never tried.  Because I am too lazy to actually go shopping though, I selected a chicken recipe that I had all of the ingredients for; or so I thought.

When I got home, turns out the piece of chicken I had left already went bad (it smelled beautiful when I opened that Ziploc, let me tell you).  So I made some tomato soup and leftover greasy thai food and proceeded to watch America's Got Talent and Law and Order SVU rather than do anything of any sort of productivity.  Do I get any points for doing the dishes?  No?  Damn.

Anyway, off for a lunch break with my mom and sister.  I just felt the cuteness of this picture should be posted on the internet in my own little corner of the world.

A Birthday and A Lazy Sunday

Saturday night was my dear Swoowski's birthday so I spent a good amount of the day making cupcakes.  I decided on Banana Split flavor and while they came out delicious, the whipped cream frosting on top melted before I even made it to the party.  They consisted of banana cake, strawberry frosting, whipped cream frosting, chocolate ganache, sprinkles, and a cherry on top. I enjoyed making them and they went over pretty well.  The problem is that I have a bunch of leftovers laying around here just tempting me now.

Today I really didn't do much.  Four of us girls went to brunch still wearing fake eyelashes (something I always pull out when out with this group because they always do... it's amazing how fun they can be every now and then),  and last night's make up.  I spent most of the day hungover though so ordering unhealthy thai food was a logical response for dinner.  It certainly wasn't a healthy day but tomorrow is a new start to be productive.

Banana Split Cupcake Recipe: (This is all my own variation on a recipe I found at Annie's Eats)

Ingredients for the cake:

2½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
12 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
2½ cups sugar
6 eggs
1 cup plus 2 tbsp. buttermilk
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe banana


Ingredients for the Strawberry Ice Cream Frosting: 


Half cup pureed frozen strawberries 
About two cups of confectioner's sugar (alter this depending on desired consistency 
1/4 cup heavy cream 
1/2 cup butter, softened 


Ingredients for the whipped cream frosting: 
1½ cups heavy cream, chilled
1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
½ tsp. vanilla extract


Ingredients for the ganache:
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 cup heavy cream
1 tbsp. light corn syrup


For garnish:
Multi-colored sprinkles
Maraschino cherries




Directions:
To make the cupcakes, preheat the oven to 350° F.  Line cupcake pans with paper liners. (I chose to make mini cupcakes) In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking powder and salt; whisk together and set aside.  In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment cream together the butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes.  Reduce the mixer speed to medium low and add in eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.  Mix in 1 the mashed banana until well combined.  With the mixer on low speed alternately add the dry ingredients and buttermilk, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients and mixing only until just incorporated.


Divide the batter between the prepared cupcake liners, filling each about 2/3 to ¾ full.  Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 15-17 minutes (20-22 if making regular sized cupcakes).  Allow to cool in the pan 5-10 minutes, then transfer the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.


For the strawberry ice cream frosting, combine the softened butter, heavy cream, and confectioner's sugar.  Make sure butter is soft and smooth or it will become chunky when you add the cold strawberry puree.  Add puree and continue mixing until you achieve desired consistency.  Add a layer to each cupcake using a wide tipped nozzle on a pastry bag. 


For the whipped cream frosting, add the heavy cream to the chilled bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment.  Whip on medium-high speed until soft peaks form.  Add the powdered sugar and continue to whip until thoroughly combined and stiff peaks form.  Be careful not to over-beat!  Blend in the vanilla extract.  Frost cupcakes using a designed tip for a real whipped cream effect.  Chill in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.  


For the ganache, place the chopped chocolate in a heatproof bowl.  Bring the cream to a simmer over medium-high heat.  Remove from the heat and pour the hot cream over the chocolate; let stand 1-2 minutes.  Whisk together until a thick, smooth ganache forms.  Blend in the corn syrup.  Let stand at room temperature at least 10 minutes so the ganache is not hot.


To finish the cupcakes, pour a spoonful of the ganache over the whipped cream topping of each cupcake.  Garnish with sprinkles and maraschino cherries before the glaze sets.  Chill the assembled cupcakes until ready to serve.


If you do not want to worry about keeping the cupcakes chilled so much (the whipped cream frosting melts quickly), you can replace that layer with regular vanilla buttercream frosting.  

New cover - Rihanna's "Umbrella"

Some blogs may have really specific focuses.   I guess the good ones do.  And I guess the original focus of this blog was to help me lose weight.  What a cliche.  Anyway, at this point I think the purpose of this blog is just to have one more outlet in my life.

I'm a person who over thinks.  Not necessarily over thinks situations, but just who truly thinks too much.  Part of this creative renaissance as I like to call it means that I feel ready to explode all of the time with ideas, arguments, music, lyrics, anything.  I didn't always know where to go or what to do with all of it.  Now I have a lot of healthy outlets.  There is of course cooking and baking, singing, playing the piano, reading, teaching myself the guitar, and writing in general.  I currently have open five "songs" and one novel on my computer desktop as well as Garageband, where I recorded my latest youtube video.  I have used all of these things today.  The "songs" are in quotations because although they have some sense of melody in places, they don't have music or real structure per se.  I just write whatever comes to mind on the nearest outlet.  It might be a napkin, it might be the bottom of another document or a receipt.  If the computer is open, it's the closet word document.  Sometimes I go back and piece them together with the idea that one day, they will be whole songs.

The truth is, I need to be multitasking all of the time or I feel like I'll go crazy.  For example in the car.  Yesterday, I spent 3 hours driving because morons see some rain and forget how to move their vehicle.  This is awesome when I feel like singing or have something good to think about.  But when I have something negative on the mind, like some idiot jerkface who I want to punch in the stomach, and no escape; just me and the bumper to bumper traffic, well, I'm a basket case.  I need paper or something nearby all the time.

Anyway, I made a great salad for lunch today consisting of pearl barley, curry, cardamom, mustard seeds, coriander, lemon, onion, red pepper, chicken and arugula.  It was quite delicious and I have lots of leftovers.  Recipe is from Bon Apetit magazine and can be found here Curried Spelt Salad (I couldn't find spelt so I used pearl barley and it worked deliciously.  I also substituted red bell pepper for carrots because I think carrots are gross).

In the interest of staying true to this blog, today I ate:

10 am - Oatmeal with a bit of brown sugar, salt and cinnamon; Coffee with cream

3:30 pm - The aforementioned salad

8:30 pm - Leftover slow cooker chicken and salsa in a low carb tortilla with avocado and a side of asparagus and a yukon gold potato (with spray butter and greek yogurt).

Throughout the day,  a lot of Fresca... my drink of choice as I try to drink less Diet Coke.

Here is my work of the day - A cover of Rihanna's "Umbrella".  Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRNfSB8g0Ho

A Personal Renaissance

Whilst avoiding work at my summer job today, I managed to come across this amazing blog that I have neglected for over a year.  To be honest, I completely forgot it existed.  I've got to say that after reading over all of the posts from last winter, it was like watching a human being falling apart.  I know I tried to keep everything censored and all so as not to lose what was truly the worst job in the world,  but I feel so much better about my life just having realized yet again how much it sucked last year.

In case anyone is actually reading this or was wondering what happened to me that I stopped writing - here's a quick overview.  February and March dragged on and continued to be some of the most depressing months of my life.  Every day at my inner city teaching job, I felt my creative energy further and further drained out of me in some attempt to please a bunch of people I had absolutely no shred of respect for regarding how they ran a school.  Everything I had ever learned or cared about was thrown away in attempts to track my every move and fit a structure that treated students like color by number pawns rather than individuals with innovative minds.  It's a wonder I didn't denounce teaching altogether.

Somewhere around April, I realized that I was ruining one of what surely will go down as one of the best experiences of my life by not truly learning from my students all that I could be.  Screw the myopic administration and their definition of a school that treated one book that some guy who taught in the inner city for two years wrote as a bible.  I decided to start teaching my way and realized again why I wanted to teach in the inner city in the first place.  I wanted to reach students who didn't have a lot of people trying to reach them.  I embraced the fact that my coworkers were the most unbelievably dedicated, talented and passionate people I had ever met and I lamented the way they were all treated by our heinous excuse for a principal.  I pushed my students creatively and bs'd my lesson plans regarding how it fit into the respective structures and common core standards that were so callously written to be tested on a bubble exam which leaves no room for true vision or thought.  

On the same day that I was voted Teacher of the Year by the entire student body of my school (as a first year teacher mind you), I was told that I "did not seem to share the vision of the school" enough to be recontracted for the following year.  By this time, I had already been interviewing at other schools everywhere and had started to feel that if I had to spend one more year in that hell hole, I'd probably die anyway.  Was I terrified of how I was going to manage my mortgage payment?  Absolutely.  But it was the best thing that ever happened to me.  I gained a wealth of experience, learned what I am capable of accomplishing as well as withstanding, and will never take a decent job for granted ever again knowing what it is like to wake up feeling like I wanted to vomit every day just for having to go to work.

Enter Disneyland.  That's what my current coteacher calls the school where I work now.  I went back to my roots, accepting a maternity leave position at a large suburban school near where my parents live.  I am treated with respect, I love my students, I learn so much from my coworkers and my boss knows how be encouraging while still maintaining a strict sense of professionalism.  While I still do not have a full time job, I will be there throughout the entire next semester and maybe one day, the school will hire an English teacher, and maybe one day... that teacher will be me.  In any case, I am making pretty much the same amount of money in addition to working as an administrative assistant for an IT outsourcing firm.

The best part of both of my jobs is that while they are challenging and require me to be on top of my game creatively and cooperatively, I go home with the mental energy that was drained from my life last year.  My hair grew back (I had lost almost half of it due to stress), I no longer have a tick in my eye, and I no longer spend my entire extra curricular life drinking or watching mindless television.

Some time last summer, I read through all of my college papers and felt a sense of yearning for the academic I once had been.  This, combined with an excessive appreciation for Eminem's Recovery album, caused a renaissance in my creativity.  I started writing again - songs, my novel... started a new novel as well, articles, whatever.  I started singing more.  This carried throughout the year.  I got a piano off Craigslist for Christmas and taught myself how to sing and play at the same time.  I now post videos to YouTube.

I won a $500 karaoke contest last week.  I'm trying to eat healthy, but am not replacing the batteries in my scale.  I love my family and friends who stuck with me when I was undoubtedly a wretched person to be around.  It is now my goal to finish one of the novels, write a few full songs, and just never let go of all of my positive inner energy.  I can't believe I let a stupid job get so in the way of who I am as a person.  Maybe this blog will have a different flair to it now.

This is a link to my youtube account, one example of the ways I've expanded personally in the last year

YouTube Account of my Cover Songs .

General Disposition Sinking

I need to find some new highlight for my day.  The level of apathy I function with Monday-Friday is seriously detrimental to my health.  I suppose that's all I should say online although it would be nice to have a place to actually vent everything.  I need to find something that is exciting and new and maybe challenging in a good way.  I'm getting old and feeling like I seriously missed something along the way. I have a condo, the job I thought I wanted, a great family, fun friends... what do I need?

In other news, my condo is currently about 45 degrees.  Seriously.  45.  If you took a huge chunk of snow and put it in my living room, it would not melt. It's not even broken.  I just don't know what to do about the problem.  My work building is way too hot, home is way too cold, my body cannot handle the chaos.  Luckily, I'm going to my parents' house after school for my grandpa's birthday and it's supposed to get back up in the 30s this weekend.  The diet isn't working as quickly as I would like it to either.  Jeez what can I even think about to make me happy right now?  Daydreaming?  The general amount of indifference I feel toward everything is worse than anger or frustration. 

Food yesterday:

Coffee and creamer

Tuna sandwich with my homeade tuna - tuna, hardboiled egg, celery, onion, greek yogurt, chipotle, salt and pepper, mozarrella on a sandwich thin with swiss

Almonds

Chitpotle - burrito bol with black beans, vegetables, chicken, tomato, easy cheese, greek yogurt, guacamole

Smoothie of greek yogurt, half and half, cherries and cinnamon. 

Just another manic Tuesday

 Not really.  Nothing exciting actually happened yesterday.  I ate more than I was supposed to because I had this insatiable craving for an unidentified food which I never really took care of.  I caught up on a little tv, had some brief conversations with friends.  The truth is that the mundane-ness of my life during the week is generally quite less than riveting.  Got through my day at work which is really all I ask for during these bleak months of dismal clouds and bitter cold where our heat is on so high that I need to open a window which just causes confusion in my body because it never evens out.  It feels like my blood is boiling inside half the time.  Students never care about their actual work which is quite disheartening when you put all of this effort into trying to teach them really important things that they are completely behind on.  How much more can one person do?  I'm reaching a startling level of apathy toward everything related.

Food:

6:45 a.m. - coffee and creamer

11:00 a.m. - Some Indian food package thing that was pretty healthy and very good

1 ish - A small piece of brownie that one of my co-workers made.  Too attractive to pass up.

4:30 p.m. - Fiber bar

6 p.m. - a few pieces of cheese

7:30 p.m. - leftover fish and vegetables with some fresh mozarrella in strawberry balsamic on the side

8:30 p.m. - a few spoonfuls of ice cream

Throughout the night - more cheese, some granola at some point.  I don't know exactly but I know I couldn't seem to stop wanting food which would explain why I am only down .6 from yesterday when I was up. 

In other news, I am going on a date Friday.  Dates are things I'm not too keen on.  Don't get me wrong.  I love getting to know guys and when that butterfly excited feeling hits, I'm all in favor.  But that rarely comes from meeting a guy one time, thinking he is sort of alright, and accepting a date with him.  Only once in my life have I truly been interested in a guy I met once and exchanged numbers with and that was probably because he was in no place for a relationship so he was distanced.  I only like guys who do not like me... not because I have some masochistic tendency toward self-afflicted heartbreak, but because I am attracted to people who are really independent and who prefer that I am the same way.  People get overbearing very easily to me.  So what it usually means when a guy is being distant and completely unneedy is that he's not really all that interested.  As soon as a guy is interested, he calls too much, assumes too much, is too unnatural and it pushes me away immediately.  I already forsee this with the current boy.  Too many questions, too much desire to do things like talk on the phone (something I reserve until I actually have some interest in conversing on such a device), too eager to plan too long of dates.  We'll see how it goes but the cynic in me is already feeling the runaway.  I mean, he's too young for one thing.  Our lives are totally different and our outlooks on life are as well.  Not sure why I bother getting myself into such ridiculous situations considering when I like someone, I know it.

Thought I ate Healthy enough but the Weight Still Isnt Dropping

So I made a point to eat healthy this weekend, save for a few beers on Sunday that were not really supposed to be a part of my 16 day challenge.  Either way, I didn't have a food cheat day but this morning I was back up a couple of pounds.  This weight loss thing is depressing when it isn't working.  I used to be able to stay focused for a few weeks and drop weight rapidly.  Now it's been over a month and my best day I was down 10 lbs, the first 5 of which were totally ridiculous excess pounds that dropped pretty quickly.  Actually I suppose I was down 11 lbs on my best day, which was Sunday.  Nowhere near where I want to be and I know that this is normal speed of weight loss... just not what my body used to do.  I guess it's true that we all take our young metabolisms for granted.  I didn't think mine would change because it sort of stopped being great when I was 16 and I've had to be careful since then.  At 26 though, I'm definitely noticing the struggles.

Friday I came home and went to sleep really early.  It took me two and a half hours to get home thanks to the craziness of snow plows and spun out cars and all that.  I was in a horrible mood about a million things so I just crashed.  We had no one in school and it was technically the easiest day of work every but still managed to be frustrating.

Food:

6:45 a.m. - Coffee and creamer
11:00 a.m. - Lean Cuisine
Not sure but I think I had some Greek yogurt or something at some point.  No, it was one of those little fiber bars.
7:00 p.m. some granola and a low-carb tortilla that were supposed to be a snack but ended up being dinner because I fell asleep.

Saturday:

around 10 a.m. - made an omelet with two egg whites, one egg, green pepper, onion, Canadian Bacon, goat cheese, Parmesiano Reggiano, and I think that't it. 

Kept wanting to snack so I had a small amount of granola (not no carb so maybe there is my problem)

I need another jar of peanut butter

Delicious Greek Yogurt no sugar added smoothie from a place I just discovered.  It's called Cassava's and I ate this little jalepeno bread thing too.  Oye, carbs. It was super tiny though.  Like the size of a donut hole. 

Dinner was a Lean Cuisine pizza before going out.  Stuck to vodka sodas all night and did not eat late night except for a couple of bites of turkey and cheese rolled up.

Sunday

10 a.m. - Grande skim latte

11:00 a.m. - Another omelet made the same way

12:30 p.m. - Bloody Mary x 3

5:00 p.m. - Lots of hummus with pita and then chicken over hummus from Zad... a delicious Med restaurant I went to with Swoowsk, her brother and mom.  It was a delightful dinner full of entertaining stories of my favorite siblings' childhood.

Didn't eat again but enjoyed some beers while watching the Super Bowl.  That's about it for that.

Monday was back to work but the day was alright.  I'm running out of groceries but need to make it through the week because I am really running low on cash.

6:45 a.m. - coffee and creamer

11:00 a.m. - lean cuisine

3:00 p.m. - Greek Yogurt with peach

6 p.m. - almonds

7:30 p.m. - Herb crusted fish with vegetables in Parmesiano Reggiano *sp?

10 p.m. - Smoothie made with raspberries, blueberries and blackberries with Greek yogurt, half and half and cinnamon