Truffle Shuffle

Okay...not that Truffle Shuffle...

But really; how many other truffle-related phrases are hanging out there begging for use as blog post titles? None that I could think of. But perhaps you're more inventive than I'm feeling at the moment.

Yesterday I decided to make some Oreo truffles. It wasn't just a spur-of-the-moment whim: I was planning on bringing a few along as a hostess gift when the Husband and I head over to a friend's place for dinner tonight. What can I say? My momma raised me right: I try to be punctilious in matters of etiquette.

Anyway; since we only snagged this recipe because of someone else, I figured I'd share the love and pay it forward (and any other clichéd song/movie titles you can think of) and pass the recipe along. Here is your list of required equipment:

• a blender (trust me...this makes things easier)
• a big mixing spoon 
• a mixing bowl (obvi)
• a cookie sheet with baking paper
• your chosen method of chocolate melting (incidentally, mine is to make my husband do it since I tend to burn the chocolate when left to my own devices. He lets it go a few rounds in the microwave, stirring in between.)
• Some skewers
• Oh, and the food: a roll of Oreos (or half a pack of Bourbons if you're feeling cheap), 1 tub of cream cheese, 3 bars of plain milk chocolate, 1 bar of white chocolate.

To start: grab your chosen chocolate cookies and - breaking them up a bit to speed things along - place them in the blender and pulverize into a nice gritty powder. Sort of like this:

Next step: add in the whole tub of cream cheese. Make sure to mix it in really well. Think of it like cutting in Crisco to biscuit dough or pie crust mix. Thanks to the consistency of the cream cheese, it tends to require this sort of technique. Or at least, I require this sort of technique since I don't have wrists of steel that can whip meringues for hours or silently strangle a man in less than 30 seconds.

Oh, and once you've mixed everything together, it should look a bit like this:

Helpful Photo is helpful.

Now comes the slightly messy part. Get out your baking tray covered in baking paper. Time to shape the truffles! Just grab enough to make a sphere with the circumference of a quarter or a 10p piece (depending on which one you actually know the size of!), roll it out in your hands, and place it on the baking tray. Once you have enough of them, pop them in the fridge for an hour or two to chill. Trust me: you don't want to skip the chillin' in da fridge step: it helps the truffles stay in one spherical piece when you dip them into hot, melted chocolate.

Waited a few hours to chill your truffle innards? Good. Now to dip them. This is where the skewers come in handy. Yes, they tend to leave unfortunate skewer marks in the truffles when you pull them out, but unlike dipping by hand or by spoon (or by land or by sea like Paul Revere...), the skewers don't mess up the smooth finish of the chocolate. And, you can always cover the hole with more chocolate.

Try to get the chocolate as lump-free as possible. You can heat it in a bowl sitting in a pot of boiling water on medium heat on the stove, but be careful to watch for burning. Or, you can put the chocolate in a bowl and pop it in the microwave for a minute or two, but again - watch for the burning. You really only want to pop it in for about 10 seconds at a time, then take it out, stir it around, and sling it back in the microwave. Otherwise, the already-melted bits hold all the heat and burn, while the not-yet-melted bits just take longer to liquefy. 

Now that that's done, you can - for the sake of prettiness - melt that bar of white chocolate and then drizzle it over the top of your truffles for a fun two-tone effect. It makes them look much more posh than just leaving them as slightly mangled balls of chocolate coated cream-cheesy cookie.

See what I mean? Much nicer-looking than before. You can pop them back in the fridge again to keep cool until you're ready to ravenously devour serve them. It's a brilliant fix for any time that you need cute finger foods, a hostess gift, party favours (just stick 4 each into little bags), or any other occasion that calls for fancy chocolatey treats. Which is basically any occasion at all, as far as I'm concerned. And despite being really easy to make, people will be ludicrously impressed with your culinary skillz once they try them. You know, in case you're actually the sort of person worried about building up domestic goddess street cred...like Snoop D-O-double G:

For rizzle, yo.

4 Weeks and Counting

Well, hope springs eternal. Four weeks. That's how long I have until the NHS's medical geniuses have predicted that my baby will make his or her grand appearance into the world. My body will finally be back to a comfortable single tenancy again. I'll have an outside baby I can actually be entertained by, instead of spending Sunday mornings up at an unholy hour thanks to the need to deflate baby's bladder-pillow and then count some contractions. Think of it like counting cows on a road trip, but far less comfortable.

I have to admit, whenever the urge has struck, I've been able to conjure up a mental image of what having a baby will be like for years now. It's always involved lots of bossing people around and swearing. Oh, and magically looking fabulous at the end because what was a sweaty, flushed look managed to transform into a healthy glowing shimmer, helped along by accessorizing with a stylish headband. But now that the reality of my imaginings is so close, it's weird. It's bizarre to think I'll actually be doing this: I'll be having a baby! Some day, in the next month or so of my life, will be the birth day of my very first child. A child of my very own. A tiny person who's been stretching out my fabulous figure and head-butting me in some very uncomfortable places for the past 8 months. What is the world coming to?

I'll be a for-real mom. With a for-real baby. I'll feed the baby, and change the baby, and clean the baby, and dress the baby, and generally keep him or her alive and comfortable for the foreseeable future. What I won't do is the following:

1) Adopt the traditional Mom Hair-Cut. No Siree Bob. Naturally curly and super short just don't go together. I'm not looking to fry my hair or sport the afro a la Beyonce in Dream Girls, so this option is out. Plus, I just have my own stubborn stance against the Mom Hair. I will continue to cultivate long hair, darn it, and it'll look sexy and amazing. (Because I'll keep it tied back during the day to studiously avoid baby vomit.)

2) Buy Mom-Jeans. You know: the kind that sit at or around your belly button and accentuate the pear-shaped birthing hips you now know you have. The ones that, no matter how small you really are, inexplicably make your ass look like you need a wide-load sticker on the back. And they're always a pale-wash denim. I hate light denim - this isn't the 80s. I'm not John Bon Jovi.

3) Fill my Facebook page with nothing but inane updates about my baby's every move. Don't get me wrong: I fully intend to have the most awesome and interesting baby ever to grace the earth with its presence, but that doesn't mean that everyone I've ever met needs to hear about baby's first spit bubble and baby's first incoherent babble and baby's first attempt to leak from every orifice at once. I will enjoy the wondrous miracle that will be my kid without losing perspective about the other things that will still happen in the world and in my life.

4) Forget that first and foremost, I am my own individual person; not just my baby's momma. Motherhood is an incredible thing; but it won't be all the defines me. That's just as bad as being defined by having a boyfriend or husband, only no one thinks to tell you that it's wrong because babies are cute and important and need love and affection and constant attention. Yes: I will love my baby and generally put its needs before my own because, well, that's my job. But I won't forget that I've done some pretty spectacular things in my life besides growing an unbearably cute infant. I'm a musician, and a historian, and I can draw, and write, and I'm a gym-rat, and I can cook, and I'm crafty (in all senses of the word), and I'm a wife, and a sister, and a friend, and I have a damn good sense of humour, if I do say so myself. Essentially, there is nothing to be gained by sacrificing my identity on the altar of motherhood. I don't want my baby to grow up being surprised at all the awesome stuff I've done in my life because his/her arrival meant that I became an uninteresting pod-person whose sole purpose was to cook and clean and issue groundings and unfair rules. Piggly Wiggly will be served much better in life by having an interesting mother who has her own interests and hobbies and passions outside of mothering. I know I have an interesting mother and I think it did me a world of good...it made me want to be an interesting person, too. And for the record, it is my goal to be like my mom and unknowingly inspire my kids to think, "If I'd known my mom when she was my age, I think we would have been friends."

In the meantime, my more immediate concern is to wonder when I finally get to make that call to the Husband at work and say, "You didn't want to stay at work all day, right? You'd much rather come home and take your labouring wife to the hospital to deliver your baby. Good; because, guess what you get to do right now?" That, my friends, will be a very fun phone call to make. Now if only I can get the baby on board with this plan...

Pine Cone Ornaments...The Never-Ending Saga

Well, I've finally gotten around to attaching ribbon to 23 of my lovely gold pine cones so I can hang them off the tree. It wasn't a spectacularly interesting process, to be honest, but I'll share anyway.

I drove over to Jo's house this morning to grab her hot glue gun. Let's face it - I can do crafty things, but I'm not one of those flower-arranging, cake-decorating, card-making, craft-room-having sort of gals who lives for the dye-cut section of a craft store, or spends free time on the bus knitting a scarf. For starters, I think if you need a full room devoted to housing and using your craft supplies, it's time to step back for a moment and prioritize. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Any hobby besides dance or sports that needs its own room might just be a bit more trouble than it's worth. Or it's taking over your life like a giant carnivorous plant waiting to strike. Take the children, Honey: save yourselves. I was ambushed by the scrapbook paper on the way in and the patterned craft scissors have a maniacal glint in their eyes...

Anyway, Jo said I might need to grab some glue sticks for her gun (I did), so I hopped over to the craft store in North Camp to see if they had glue sticks. They did. And for the particular gun I was using, too. They're sneaky, though: in the whole claustrophobic press of the store, there were 5 packs of glue sticks hiding on the awkward side of a display case with a few guns to match. Good thing I knew to look by the double-sided tape or else I might have failed in my quest.

I already had some ribbon from the same craft store that I'd purchased a few days ago. I got about 5 metres' worth for less than £1. Score. And - as you can see - the glue sticks were pretty inexpensive, too. So far, the whole of this project's cost me about £13...and I haven't even used all of my supplies yet! (I think next I'll make a door wreath once I clean a few more pine cones.)


So back home I went and cut my ribbon into approximately 5" lengths and then tied each one in a loop. Loops tied, I glued them to the bottom of my pine cones and set the finished product on some scrap paper to cool (and to avoid sticking to my table, ruining the finish, and causing unsightly splinters).

Ta-da! Nicely finished (aside from the slight hot-glue-gloop at the top) golden pine cone Christmas ornaments. I'm pretty pleased with my efforts. I definitely think at least one more project with these babies is in order. And a wreath does seem like a fun idea...

A Cry for Pity...and Morphine

Someone kill me. Quickly and with something sharp. Do that whole SAS thing where you shove my nose into my brain with the heel of your hand. Or better yet, since I'm not actually suicidal, just give me drugs. Oxycodone, morphine, Vicodin, an epidural, anything. We're past the kiddie phase here, people: no wimpy aspirin or paracetamol or Tylenol...even my beloved Excedrin wouldn't cut it (if I was even allowed to take it when I'm pregnant, which I'm not), because this, people is serious pain. Aside from being in labour, which I can't imagine being too much fun either, this is probably some of the most annoying pain I've ever experienced. I've never broken my arm or leg or finger or anything and only ever sustained mild to moderate bruises, burns, scrapes, and cuts. Unless you count that time that I nearly took a chunk out of my thumb when cutting potatoes, but that didn't hurt so much as make me light-headed from rapid blood loss.

My hips are being torn apart. Wrenched from their sockets as part of a medieval torture. Someone has taken a sledgehammer and rammed it repeatedly against my pelvic bones. I'll never walk again. Hobbling, I can do. Maybe be a genius in a wheelchair like Steven Hawking or Christopher Reeves, but slightly less impaired and slightly less impressively talented. But only slightly. Or, I can follow the shining example of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House and let my pain make me a bitter, sarcastic, Vicodin-inhaling ray of sunshine, whose wit is matched only by my youthful good looks.

I submit the following universal truth to you: the only thing that makes pregnancy worth it is the cute baby you get at the end. There is nothing else to recommend this ages old practice. I tell you, God wasn't kidding in the Old Testament when He said, "I shall greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children...". Just when you think it's not actually that bad, pregnancy comes back to bite you in the ass. It makes you eat your words when you say, "Actually, I feel pretty good!" It will not endure such blasphemy. It's like Machiavelli: it would rather be feared than loved.

Oh, if only the next month would fly by...

For the Sake of Balance

So since I've forfeited my shiny shiny halo for the day (now how will I accessorize my harp and wings?), I'm basically a horrible person. But even horrible people can be nice, and in the interests of good karma, I'll make up for mercilessly mocking an old lady's creepy soul-sucking mermaid doll by sharing some culinary love.

A few nights ago, Seb begged for home-made fries and pan-grilled chicken for dinner. I happily obliged - deep-frying the fries the way he likes them. Considering that it takes longer and is more effort-intensive than just slinging some freezer fries in the oven, properly deep-fried chips are a bit of a rarity in our house. So this time I decided to make them even more special: I was going to season them!

As I've said before, my mad-scientist tendency gives me only a passing respect for real recipes. I mean, if Nigella or Jamie or Emeril came up with it, I've got more respect than Kanye has for Jay-Z. Represent, professional chefs! But when it comes to my own inventions, I'm not known for my habit of writing things down to ensure replicate-able accuracy. In fact, I'm sure most things I've faked my way through in the kitchen turn out to be distinctly different each time I do them. With that in mind, take the following with a fair dose of flexibility.

So: my home-made seasoned chips:

1 tsp Steakhouse Pepper

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp hot chili powder

1 tsp paprika

1 tbls salt

It's possible there's a tiny bit of cumin in there, but no more than about 1/2 tsp at most. Oh, and this concoction should last you through at least 3-4 large potatoes' worth of fries. I only just used the rest of the stuff tonight on some baked potatoes with barbecue baked beans on top.

Checkers: eat your heart out. (Am I the only one who's hungry again?)

There Goes My Halo for the Day...

I tried; I really tried, but it was impossible!

I was filling some time by mindlessly trolling Teh Interwebz for some pretty picture to pin to my Pinterest page. The baked potatoes are baking away in the oven. The vacuum has done its vacuuming for the day, leaving my floors nice and tidy and crumb-free. My gold pine cones are sitting on a shelf awaiting my return tonight with my friend Jo's glue gun. So, in lieu of anything productive to do, I decided I wanted to look at pretty things for a while until the Husband showed up again at home.

Stop numero uno: Google image search. I found some pretty brightly-coloured front doors (a project I've been weirdly longing to tackle for the past few days...even though there's no way I could realistically paint our front door a sunny yellow or a spunky turquoise), and one particular door led me to an interesting blog called...

It's quite picture-heavy, much like

which I've been keeping up with for a while, just to have nice things to look at when I'm too lazy to read through tons of text on most of the blogs I follow.

Anyway, after finding Indigo Meets Violet, I had a wild moment of curiosity and decided to hit the "next blog" button at the top of Blogger's ubiquitous header bar. Everything was an absolute miss. There was something about cats and adages (don't begin to ask me why these things go together), a few blandly-formatted ones on quilting, and then, this gem. Prepare to be surprised. To be horrified. To wonder why anyone would proudly admit to making something so pants-wettingly frighteningly ugly in a public forum.








Keep going...I'm not giving this one up easily....









are you still going?










are you sure?





can I milk the suspense any more to leave you with an underwhelming sense of anticlimax, perfectly encapsulated by the "wah-wah!" sound effect?

I feel like Marilyn Manson the Mermaid here is going to crawl out of the screen at night to eat my soul like a Dementor...but scarier. If only there was a way to show you the Chuckie-lookalike Mad Hatter or the Alice in Wonderland who looks like Hey Arnold's sister, separated at birth...and raised in a crack house.

...work it football-head.

Hey. I warned you that this cost me my halo for the day. How could I pass up Coke Whore Ariel, complete with Vegas show girl headpiece?

Because I Actually DID Get Bored...

I really did make scones as a way to fill the time and give myself a tasty snack. Alas, if you want play-by-play photos of the whole messy process with a list of how many dirty dishes this endeavour will cost you, you're at the wrong blog. For that kind of detailed and fun approach, I humbly direct you along to Cakery Bakery: the sugary brain-child of my sister-in-law, Rachel.

But for my own baking expedition, I'm a much more "off the beaten track" sort of gal. No: not cliché-happy, but desperate willing to take a look at a set of instructions in a recipe and think of them like Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Carribbean...

"They're more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules..."

That said, my guidelines came from my trusty rusty Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The cookbook of my childhood...except mine still has the cover attached. I never did know what the cover to that book looked like: I have no memory of it with intact binding.

I'm practically certain you could successfully Google this if you were so inclined, but I'm feeling magnanimous enough to make things easy. So here, for your reading and baking-experimenting pleasure, is Fannie Farmer's cream scones recipe:

2 cups flour                         4 tablespoons butter/white flora/crisco
2 tsp baking powder           2 eggs, well beaten
1 tbsp sugar                        1/2 cup cream
1/2 tsp salt

You mix all the dry ingredients together and then add the fatty lard-like product of your choice. Then, your butter/shortening added, it needs to be cut it in.

This is best done with a pastry cutter (one of my requisite kitchen indulgences as a young housewife), but if you're pastry cutter-less you can always go for the old two-knives trick. Just one knife in each hand dragged back and forth in opposite directions through your floury mix.

Once the whole mix resembles either coarse meal or a mound of tiny peas in flour, you add your eggs and cream, stirring until the mixture is blended (aka: there's no dry flour anywhere). Flour up your counter and hands and then knead the dough for a minute or so. Roll it out so it's just less than 1" thick and then cut it into wedges. At 425° F, you pop these babies into the oven on a slightly greased cookie sheet and 15 minutes later: voilà! You have scones.

Now, I have nothing against the late great Fannie Farmer. I respect her formidable New England prowess in the culinary arts. But these scones just sounded a little too boring to eat on their own as a snack. And let's face it - my own hunger is usually the first thing that motivates me to cook anything, so anything I cook has to be something I want to eat. Enter my own additions to the recipe:

1/4 tsp nutmeg             1-2 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon          1/2 tsp vanilla extract.

Obviously, all the dry ingredients get added at the beginning with the flour, baking powder, et. al. and then vanilla is added along with the cream and eggs. This adds just a hint of spice to the scones, which makes them something special. What would I do differently next time?
1) either add more sugar to make them slightly sweeter, or just sprinkle white sugar on top before baking them. I opted for the second approach with half of the scones this time. (The Husband informed me that this makes them taste somewhere in the no-man's land between scones and hot cross buns, which is - apparently - a good place to be for Dr. Frankenstein's Scone.)
2) there is the possibility of adding a full teaspoon of vanilla, but since this was a first-time experiment, I wanted to be careful not to overdo it. I didn't: you can definitely double the vanilla if you so choose.

So here, in all their glory, are my Cinnamon Vanilla Cream Scones:

I had mine with some butter, but I think they'd be brilliant with some clotted cream or apple butter or maple syrup or something. I'm salivating just thinking about the possibilities.

So there you go! If you get bored and hungry and are in the mood for a good cold-weather, breakfasty-type snack, I'd suggest giving these a go. Or (even better), take Ms. Farmer's base recipe and come up with your own fun variation! I'd be interested to see what else could be done to these scones.

The Little Things

Cue the high school flash-back moment where the above title reminds me of this song by Good Charlotte.

Now is one of those random moments where I wish I still had my pink leather studded bracelet. Sigh...it scares the crap out of me to think that the days of ball-bearing necklaces, studded bracelets, and pink Chuck Taylors were Ten Years Ago! I was a freshman in high school then. The 9-11 attacks had just happened. I was in the marching band. My eyebrows were severely over-plucked. Well, at least that's one thing I don't miss about being 14. Well...that and actually being 14.

Anyway: nostalgic moment over (as I fight the urge to cue up a Blink-182 playlist in iTunes...) The whole point of this post was to make a note of one tiny home improvement I've been able to easily make today. I love easy projects - they balance out the things like my painting/upholstering project that take multiple days (or sometimes weeks) or hanging all the curtains, which involved lots of drywall dust and playing with the electric drill. Nope: this project was simple, easy, and done so quickly, I had to undo part of it because I forgot to take pictures!

This shameful specimen is the weird corner cabinet in our bathroom.

I miss our old bathrooms. To start: there were two of them. And the bathtub in the main bathroom was wide enough to sit in without feeling like you might need to employ axle grease and a shoe-horn to get yourself out. Personally, I think that's the bare minimum as tubs go: in reality, one day I will settle for nothing less than a tub that comfortably seats two people. That, my friends, is living in style.

So, much as I love having some built-in storage, this cabinet would not have been my first choice when it came to said storage options. As bathroom storage goes, this cabinet is the cabinet that gets picked last in team dodgeball. It's the cabinet at the watering hole with the gimpy leg that's the first to get eaten when savage predators come. It's the cabinet all other cabinets studiously avoid during cabinet mating season. I think you get the picture I'm painting, here. And in case you don't, lucky you: I have another visual aid to demonstrate just what's wrong with it!

Yup. The handle is too small, and there's this odd peachy patch on the bottom of the door. Now, don't get me wrong: I don't mind the off-white hardware to match the off-white cabinet (even though the shiny-off-white paint could really use some TLC right about now...), but the cabinet door is magnetized so that it stays shut and doesn't swing open lying in wait to conk you on the head when you stand up from the toilet. A great feature, to be sure, but with the aforementioned tiny handle, you can't really get enough purchase to pull the door free of its magnetic bonds on the first try...and as it turned out, the Little Handle That Could eventually couldn't. After one too many attempts to get razors and wet-wipes out, the knob just popped off. I would have screwed it back on to the fitting and let that be that, but the cheap wooden handle had sheared off on the inside, leaving no thread to screw it back into place.

Oh darn. What a shame. Guess that means I have to go get a big enough knob for the cabinet door. Let's all take a moment to mourn. (Want me to lay on the sarcasm any thicker?)

After reading a few posts on Young House Love about updating things just by changing out the hardware (like I did here on my kitchen dresser!) I decided that at least as an intermediate step, the bathroom cabinet needed a little design-love. So it was off to B&Q again (soon they'll know me by name!) and a few minutes later I walked out with a lovely door knob that wasn't too big, but wasn't too small, and...came in a snazzy oil-rubbed bronze finish. (Yup, you guessed it...YHL moment.)

A beautiful contrast against the cabinet door! Oh, and to attack the creepy miscellaneous stain, I just got a cotton round with some nail polish remover on it and scrubbed at the door for a few minutes until it was clean enough for my satisfaction. I'd contemplated grabbing the leftover glossy white paint from when I refinished the chest, but
1) I'm sure the inventory says it's off-white, and I don't feel like painting it back later on unless I'm going to find a way to make it look super-swank in the meantime.
2) I can't remember what I did with the sandpaper anyway, so painting was off the table since I wouldn't be able to rough up the current crappy paint enough to give my new shiny paint something to stick to. Maybe eventually I'll do some navy blue stripes in a nautical theme. It depends on how much I feel like changing up this bathroom before we move.

And so, one door knob and some nail polish remover later, my creepy bathroom corner-cabinet was looking much better. (And feeling much easier to pry open!) And I love how the ORB knob looks against the off-white paint. The contrast brightens things up considerably.

Now to go make scones...because I'm bored and don't feel like begging around for a hot glue gun to borrow just yet.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

(Ah, the NATO phonetic alphabet...gotta love it.) So, I can get on the cross trainer for half an hour most days of the week and be fine, but a walk outside in the woods leaves me crippled for the rest of the evening? What's up with that!?

Seriously: I stood up a few hours ago with the intent to go wash my face. I managed to get to the point where I was standing up and my hips and groin and pelvis and everything hurt so much, I had to sit back down and ask the Husband to fetch me a bowl of hot water, wash-cloth, and face wash. I only just hobble-shuffled my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth (you know, since being temporarily crippled is no excuse to skim on personal hygiene) and the whole journey went step by slow and painful step. It was like I'd been kicked in the crotch and then had my legs violently wrenched from their sockets.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not about the intensity of the workout I'm getting. The walk in the woods today was pretty leisurely. It wasn't uncomfortable at the time. There was only one steep hill and the pace was gentle. Fair enough: there's more of an impact with walking than with spinning the wheel on the cross trainer where my feet never leave the peddles, but still. It's not like I was marching through the Russian winter with the French Imperial army or anything! I wasn't doing bone-rattling jumps over rough terrain in my best mama-kangaroo impression. And yet, my whole pelvic bone and joints just don't agree with any form of walking that lasts more than 30 minutes at a time. They ache and stiffen and twinge for hours afterwards. I look like I should be shuffling around leaning against a walker with tennis balls fitted to the bottom! I should be playing canasta with all the arthritic octogenarians who can now ambulate with greater facility and speed than me. It's pathetic.

When did the cruel gods of pregnancy decide that gut-busting sessions at the gym lifting weights would be okay for me to handle, but Sunday afternoon strolls in nature would leave me couch-bound for the rest of the day? This can't continue, people! I'm too heavy to pick up right now, so there can be none of this damsel-in-distress, bride-over-the-threshold sort of crap going on.

Dear Baby: please appreciate that while I'm glad my pregnancy hasn't been nearly as bad as it could be, I really don't need this. Mommy's pelvis is an important thing, and it needs to stay intact for many years to come. If you could work on not breaking it, that would be great. 'Kay, thanks.

Going (Orna)mental

What can I say? You have to pick the low-hanging fruit when it comes to cheesy titles.

So after cleaning and drying my scavenged pine cones, I've finally moved on to the second part of this process: spray painting! In any event, the directions I used said that it would be good to grab a clear acrylic spray to act as a protective coat that would help preserve the pine cones for longer. Definitely a good idea, but I didn't just want nice natural-looking pine cones. Sure: some of them will be their natural colour (and I'll probably top them with bows in a cute red ribbon), but I have to admit, I loved the look of sparkly gold pine cones, too.

Granted, mine aren't sparkly yet, but they are gold. I made a trip to B&Q (big surprise, right?) yesterday and took a look through their spray paint section.

I have to admit, I wasn't impressed by any of the gold colours. They were all kind of orange-looking. Or bronzey. I mean, I know that anything called "antique gold" is going to be a bit darker than a straight-off "gold"; but even the "gold leaf" colour looked way too red for my taste. I wanted a very yellow, very bright, slightly cooler gold. Accordingly, I shook a few cans and illicitly test-sprayed them on the plastic shelves to see how close to the cap colour the paints actually appeared. Turns out I was right: all the "real" gold paints were way too red. Well, aside from the gold glitter spray: that actually was the right shade. But, I didn't want just gold glitter on a natural woody-pine cone background; I wanted the whole thing to be a solid gold colour...possibly with gold glitter to be added later. So, according to the label on the lid of the can I finally settled on, the £4 spray paint I got is "brass"...but it looks pretty gold to me.

So, £10 later, I walked out of B&Q with a clear top-coat and some metallic gold paint. Not bad considering how many pine cones I'll be able to spray with these two cans. I'll definitely have more ornaments than any sane person has a right to keep in one collection. With that in mind, I might give a few away if they turn out right once I've moved on to the ribbons-and-string phase of this operation. That should be an interesting challenge...and I can foresee quite a few hot glue gun burns as part of the process.

Anyway, I grabbed some scrap paper from the pile to protect my lovely furniture, propped open the windows and got to work. Granted, this meant that the house was pretty chilly for the rest of the day, but it beat having a headache from huffing VOC-loaded spray-paint fumes for hours. Anyone who's spray-painted anything recently will know that I'm not joking when I say that the fumes off that stuff are strong: like, I'd warn even Keith Richards to watch out before spraying this stuff in an enclosed space.

You're supposed to wait 10 minutes in between coats so it has time enough to dry. And you definitely want more than one coat anyway. Another common sense/Young House Love tip: lots of thin, even coats are better than one thick gloopy one. (Just see that tip in action here.)

Accordingly, I sprayed about 3-4 coats of gold paint and 2-3 coats of acrylic top-coat on my pine cones. Just a hint for anyone thinking to attempt this madness at home: you will have to rotate the pine cones around a lot in order to get anything resembling full and even spray paint coverage. My 3-4 coats of gold paint are probably the bare minimum of what you can get away with and not have too many bare patches sticking out. (I confess, after a while I got all Rhett Butler on it and frankly didn't give a damn whether all the interior bits of the spines were perfectly gold-coated.)

The instructions insist that after 3 hours whatever you've spray painted is officially dry. I didn't have any mishaps with smudging paint (Though there was a lovely effect when I got some on my newly-grey-painted nails...), but hey: better safe than sorry. I'm pretty paranoid anyway when it comes to painting things, whether it's my nails or an abused storage chest or even some pine cones I picked up on an army tank test track, so I say you can never be too careful about letting things dry between coats.

In the end, this is what the result of my painting experiment was:

They look pretty good, I think. I'm still debating whether or not to add the gold sparkles as well, but we'll see how it goes first with getting some string attached so they can hang off the branches of my Christmas tree. It's been a fun process so far making my own Christmas ornaments. The next step is to consider making a few wreaths to hang on all the doors that face in to our hallway. There are 6 doors, not counting the front door which is around a corner, so I don't want to go overboard making stuff I can't store for the rest of the year, but maybe a few of these pine cones can be saved for wreath-decorating and not just tree-hanging. We'll see how it goes!

Like a Boss

So there are serious marks and minor marks that you can accumulate on the British driving exam. Depending on how grievous your error is, you can be slapped with either one of these bad boys. You're allowed 15 minors before you fail, but no serious marks should dare show up on your evaluation sheet or it's back to the lists for you! And in this case, "back to the lists" meant, back to the scraggly end of a 12-week-long queue to re-take your practical exam. (Unless through clever espionage and internet stalking you managed to jump the queue when some lesser mortal lost heart and mysteriously cancelled.)

Anyway, despite the image that the driving test proctor is the stone-faced gargoyle guarding the entrance to Minas Morgul (though I think the land of legal driving should have a happier Middle-Earth equivalent), there is a decent bit of lee-way to be given in passing your test. However, your best bet - aside from being wickedly prepared - is to cultivate the perfect atmosphere and then hope for the trifecta.

I'm a nicely-mannered, 24-year-old, pregnant lady, so already my sympathy points are quite high. But then, my friends, I had the good grace and fortune to happen upon The Trifecta.
1) My instructor was a lady. A lady my mom's age...who likes babies. And likes to talk about babies.
2) All the roads I drove on were either in our old neighbourhood on the other side of town or, were fortuitously close to our new home on the north side of town. WIN.
3) The one reversing manoeuvre I was asked to complete was to back into a parking space at the end of the test. There was one other car in the parking lot.

Seriously; could they have made the test much easier in the end? Well, yeah: I could have done it on a closed test track like back in Maryland, but hey! I'm not complaining at this point. I passed! And not only did I pass: now I'm going to invoke the right to use my blog for shameless self-promotion and guilt-free bragging to say that I passed perfectly. I'm like the Mary Poppins of driving tests! Not a single minor mark against me: my cheery test proctor found my driving to be flawless.

Practically perfect in every way.

So now, I get to heave a huge sigh of relief and go choose the greasy, fried, salty, and delicious take-out dinner of my choice as a fitting reward for my efforts. I smile now at the end of an era - I'm legal again!

Pining Away

On Saturday we had a lovely walk out on the proving grounds. Turns out, this was the perfect time of year to go hunting for pine cones. Why pine cones? You may be asking yourself. Well; wonder no longer.

Anyone who's been wasting their life on keeping up with my Pinterest page knows that I've started a pinboard full of decorating inspiration and ideas for the upcoming autumn and winter holidays. Especially, Christmas and Thanksgiving. And the predominant theme linking all of the photos I've chosen is the rustic, cottage, outdoorsy aesthetic. Anything with wicker, or holly, or cinnamon sticks, or orange and clove pomanders...basically, if I can find it outside, I bring it to decorate the inside.

I've always been a fan of things like this. My parents lived in Germany for a few years before I was born, so we've always had cute wooden Christmas ornaments, little people made of yarn, giant baubles made of decoupaged newspaper (I know you hate those things, Mom: I'll take them off your hands at any time...), and wicker pine cones and tiny wreaths of woven twigs. To this day, those sorts of decorations are just how a tree is supposed to look to me. My soul died a little last Christmas when, while working at Basildon Park, I had to decorate this dinky little white fake tree from Next with some hideous multi-coloured lights, tinsel garlands, and a bunch of ratty vintage baubles that looked in rougher condition than Lindsey Lohan's last mugshot.

But back to our walk in the outdoors. The Husband and I hadn't been out to the proving grounds for ages. Since before we moved, actually. This seemed like the perfect time to remedy that gap in our lives. How can you not take advantage of having sprawling tracts of relatively untouched (except for all the tank tracks, that is) woodland in such short driving distance from the house?

Since, by this point, I'd already been gathering momentum in my Cheap Holiday Decorations quest, I figured that the walk could serve the extra purpose of outfitting me with more pine cones than you could shake a stick at. So off we went, equipped with a plastic shopping bag, to enjoy nature and bring some of it home with us.

Now: anyone who's spent any time in nature will know that there's a slight hitch coming up in my plans. Nature is not a clean place. There's dirt and twigs and pine needles and...bugs. Creepy, crawly, slithery, slimey, nasty winged and many-legged bugs who have no respect for the pinecones you want to take into your clean and orderly home. Who will unabashedly tag along for the ride, coming out to make you scream like a little girl long after you've forgotten that they decided that your nicely opened and dried pine cone made a good home. I couldn't stand for this sort of fifth column sneak attack. Not in my house. Not with my Christmas decorations. No sir. So what did I do? I did what any sensible technology-dependent adult would do: I Googled how to de-bug and preserve scavenged pine cones for crafts.

The method I found on this website and then this one seemed to be the most fool-proof method. As the second website points out: you COULD dry them in the oven, but there's always the risk of melted sap dripping, things catching fire, smoking sap or cones...basically a whole mess of problems that would only end in tears (and a long day inhaling oven cleaner fumes looking like a Sylvia Plath re-enactment). Considering that pregnant and oven cleaner fumes don't go together, I figured that drying, opening, and de-bugging my pine cones in the oven was most emphatically NOT the way to go.

So, armed with a bottle of vinegar and what was at first a shamefully full sink (which I show to you in the interest of full disclosure...after all, the first step is admitting you have a problem...), I went to work on my bag 'o cones.

Some clean dishes, warm tap water, and 1/2 cup of white wine vinegar later, I was chucking tiny pine cones into my sink with merry abandon. I swished them around a bit and left them to soak away in a potential insect holocaust for about 20 minutes. Then, mass bug-waterboarding treatment done, I retrieved my now-closed-and-damp pine cone stash and set them up in neat rows to dry on the one cooling rack I have to my name.

The next morning A few days and one round with the blow-dryer later, this is what they looked like:

Needless to say, there is still some work to be done on these bad boys. I need to hit up the craft store down in North Camp to snag some spray acrylic coating, some nice string, maybe a bit of ribbon, and some sparkly gold spray paint. They might not all end up gold, but I do like thinking about the visual "pop" of some gold pine cones on my Christmas tree. New crafty project, here I come...

It's Like Christmas!...but not.

So I came back from a joint trip to the gym/library today to discover, waiting on the hallway floor, a mysterious postal notice slip with none other than my name on it. Snazzy, hmm? I always love getting mail. Well, unless it's a bill or payment notice for my student loans, or random junk mail (like all the pointless flyers to Dominos or the random Thai/Indian/Chinese places around the neighbourhood), or stuff that's actually meant for the previous occupants of the house we live in.

Anyway, my package pick-up slip was none of these annoying things, but the mystery still prevails. According to the slip, it was something I have to sign for, but it wasn't a huge box of things, it was just a packet (as opposed to the other options of a letter, catalogue, or perishable item). This is where I stroke my chin with a mock-thoughtful squint and wonder if it's the free cloth diaper I signed up to get.

Oh yeah, bask and revel in the sheer intensity of the lame mom-ness I've just described. I'm getting excited about whether or not the mailman missed a chance to give me something in which to catch baby feces, direct from the source. And not just something that acts as a repository for my child's bodily waste - oh no! It's something that can be washed and re-used in the most earth-friendly, Captain Planet, hug-a-tree sort of way to consistently aid in the disposal of my baby's excretions for months to come. And I'm excited about this. Dear Lord, what has happened?

Okay, I kid. ...er, slightly. I mean, I get excited about tiny baby socks and tiny newborn-sized onesies, and the fact that I have about 3 meters of grey stretchy cloth to tie around my middle and hold a baby in. If we're being honest here, free cloth diapers coming in the mail aren't too far a step from being excited over any of these other cute-and-diminutive-but-otherwise-nondescript necessities for the child that I'm about to spawn nearly any day now.

I wonder what colour it is. Having just purchased half of what will be our cloth diaper supply the other day (that's waiting to come in the mail, too), I'm curious to see just what sort of reality I've let myself in for with cloth diapering. I mean, my mom and my mother-in-law both cloth diapered us as babies. Obviously, things have changed quite a bit on that front in the past 28 years or so. At least, one would surely hope so. If portable phones could shrink down to about 1/6 their original size in that time frame, it'd be nice to think that some of the creative and innovative genius of the times could be harnessed to improve the technology of containing and removing baby poop.

from this...

...to this.

Somewhere in the midst of Gilmore Girls rants, laundering baby clothes, and packing a hospital bag, I'm sure that I haven't yet completely lost my mind. In fact, I hereby justify my weird excitement to get a diaper in the mail thus: since I'm about to be a mom to an outside baby with outside baby needs, it's rational to invest thought and energy into giving a crap about how I meet those needs...including the need to have one's waste properly taken care of. And the fact that the diapers come in super-cute colours doesn't hurt, either. Hey, if I can't go blow some money on fancy new leather boots (oh, how I wish) or trendy new autumn clothes pour moi (soon, my precious, very soon...), at least I can find pleasure in the things I need to buy. Like baby diapers!

Oh yeah...update: Turns out my mystery package was a surprisingly-prompt set of cloth diapers that I'd ordered just a day or two before. Considering that I placed my order late at night on the website, I'm doubly impressed that the things got shipped out as quickly as they did! The inserts are now spinning away in the dryer (the instructions say they do best when pre-washed before first use) and I'm now slightly closer to having my hospital bag finished! For more on the wonder of cloth diapering (and part of the reason I decided to go this route), check the lovely Petersiks over on Young House Love with this cloth diapering post.

A Mild Moment's Insanity

Christopher! No: Luke! No: Max! No: Christopher! No: Luke! Chris, Luke, Chris, Luke...I can't choose! I'm only part-way through season 1 and I've already forgotten half of the numerous twists and turns taken in the romantic life of Loralei Gilmore. I've seen roller coasters and stretches of Alpine switch-backs that took fewer hairpin 180s than the dating life of the vivacious Ms. Gilmore. I never could quite decide, even watching it for the first time, which of the three I liked the best. No Team Edward/Team Jacob-style divisions here: I have love for all the Gilmore men. I keep vacillating between them like the spinning strawberry at Spring Fest! (Oh, the memories...the Spinning Strawberry of Death)

This is what happens when I feel too inexplicably tired to make it out to the gym in order to keep my pregnant ass in shape before my husband needs to take the car to drive to Reading to take a test for his BS 1/2-MBA programme that work forces him to do. And by "this" I mean spending the day eating far too much leftover chili, taking a walk outside in the crisp autumn breeze to drop bottles off at the bottle bank, and marathon-watching old Gilmore Girls episodes until suddenly my talent for faster-than-lightning speech has improved seven-fold and I can drop obscure pop-culture references with more skill than Jim Meskimen doing a Morgan Freeman impression. (Or maybe Jeffrey Dean Morgan looking suspiciously like Javier Bordem...) Now I'm debating the merits of Loralei's various beaux whilst simultaneously wondering why the hell I ever left my old brown corduroy jacket with the fleecy collar and cuffs at my mother's house. The whole reason I bought that jacket in high school was to achieve some semblance of the Rory Gilmore aesthetic.

There is a reason that no other show speaks so directly to my twisted soul.

Waiting for the Day

33 weeks now, and the day I could be having this baby is getting creepily close. Just this morning before leaving for work, the Husband suggested to me, "Why don't you start getting your hospital bag together if you have time today?" Weeeeeeeird.

Now I have to start thinking about having my "Get ready and go" bag all set. To figure out what I want to wear home (a snazzy new WFU tee would be nice...I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for college right about now), what I'll need while I'm in there, what the baby will need to be taken home in...heck, I have to start thinking about having an actual outside baby!

In preparation for this momentous event, I've finally re-installed the car seat. This is one of the only times that our tiny car actually feels...well, tiny. I'm only just realising how spoilt I've been for leg room until now. Who knew that a car seat could take up so much stinking room? Well, I suppose I did know that, technically. We did have the seat base installed before, but took it out in order to make room for either passengers or an Ikea trip. Not any more! That car seat officially takes precedence over whatever else could be put in that space since D-Day rapidly approaches, at an approximate 49 days away. (Did I say, "weeeeeird" already?)

I'm also just noticing that I am doing that whole "nesting" thing. News flash: people aren't jerking your chain when they tell you about bursts of energy and a near-OCD need to...

...before the baby arrives. Just today I've:

• taken out the trash
• taken out the recycling
• vacuumed the living room
• dusted the windowsills (which I don't think I've done yet in this house...)
• swept the kitchen and dining room area
• made the bed
• seriously contemplated cleaning the shelves in the fridge (but that might wait for one more day)

I mean, I'm not a dirty person. I enjoy and insist on having a clean house. But doing that much cleaning all before lunch time without the incentive of either A) going on a trip [so I can come home to a tidy house] or B) having company over [so I don't have to wallow in shame] is unusual. Another house-wide dusting rampage will probably take place once we're back from London later on. I knew I was in trouble when I caught myself eyeing up the door frames and wondering how much dust could have collected on top of them.

What the heck!? My house isn't a dusty cobweb bedecked kind of place! My baby's not going to notice if I haven't dusted the door frames, or vacuumed behind the radiators, or shampooed all the carpets...

I should stop this list now before I come up with more work for myself. I still have to make it to the gym most days and get ready to take (and pass!) my driving test. Then I can start worrying about whether the state of the [oven/carpets/door frames/bathroom sink/dining table] is acceptable to bring a baby home to.

In the meantime, I'm going to take several deep breaths, watch some Gilmore Girls, and remember that the baby won't die if I don't dust everything in sight to within an inch of its life.

More Baby Stuff

While all the sheets and onesies and blankets we have are spinning away in the dryer, I have another new toy to play with. Though to be honest, it's not much fun without a baby to play with in tandem. After the research I did and looking at the heinously expensive prices of most baby carriers, Sebastian agreed to let me get a Moby wrap for our little munchkin.

It's basically a long piece of fabric that you wrap around and then sit the baby in the criss-cross'd folds. (Anyone else having a moment of singing "Jump" by Kriss-Kross? Just me?...)

Anyway, it's great. No fiddly buckles and straps to play with; you can have the baby in it from the get-go (provided he's not too tiny); baby can face you or the world depending on how controlling those pesky neck muscles is going, and because you just re-wrap the Moby each time, it's easy to share if you and the other resident baby-carrier aren't the same size. (Incidentally, I think we are the same size when I'm not pregnant...I've stolen Seb's jeans before and his t-shirts all the time...)

So, since I can't just get new things and let them sit somewhere unopened until I need them, I decided to play with my Moby...

Albert the Wake Forest teddy bear became my test dummy for our inaugural run. It seemed to go pretty well. And, if all else fails, there are handy-dandy instructions (in full colour!) that came in the bag. Oh, and this is what it looks like un-packed and un-worn:

In any event, I may feel a bit granola carrying my kid around in this, but at least it doesn't look like I have an alien popping out of my abdomen...

Update: we tested the Moby out on my nephew, Henry, over the weekend. Result? The Moby works just fine and I actually know what I'm doing well enough not to drop, tangle, or otherwise injure a baby. Henry, however, was far less than amused at the reality of being strapped to my chest with no means to thrash his head about in search of boobs.