love/hate relationship

In this blog post, I will creatively attempt to share things that I have loved and things that I have hated throughout the month of February. (Sounds like too much school work, huh?)

I love. . . my new teapot. I've been without one for a year or so, since I about burned the bottom off the pretty blue one my college roommate got me for a bridal shower gift. I've been heating water up the old-fashioned way, in a small pan on the stove. Now we have this shiny new one, complete with steam and a whistle. Best part, I got it at Ross Dress for Less.

I hate. . . dessert flops. Literally, this cake flopped. It's the trusty Love & Butter pound cake recipe that I've made before, only this time I thought I'd channel my inner Jenny Wilen and add Nutella and chopped hazelnuts to the mix. She does it all the time, certainly I could too. It baked fine. It looked fine. . . until I flipped it over on the plate and then the whole thing collapsed into itself. So what's a girl to do when she has a crazy annotated bibliography to write and no more cream cheese? She covers the whole thing with chocolate ganache to hide the ugly. It turned out ok, but wasn't one of my finer moments in dessert baking.

I love. . . my new chair. Our old office chair broke a long while back and we never replaced it. Here I was, five weeks into my class, doing homework while sitting on the hard dining room chair. My neck and back and butt and legs were so stiff, I couldn't take it anymore. And there's no way I could keep doing that for the next two years, So we went chair shopping and I got this wonderful ergonomic thing. I told Phil it could be my Valentine's Day gift and not to buy me anything else. But he didn't listen.

I love. . . that yesterday he walked in the door after work with these pretty things. Roses and hydrangeas. He knows me well. As soon as he walked in the door I said, "I told you not to buy me anything else." His response, "Every husband is supposed to buy their wife flowers for Valentine's Day." Well, ok. If you insist. (And it really makes it sound bad that what I gave him was a bag of pistachios and as I threw them to him I said, "Babe, I'm nuts about you!" I'm blaming my lack of creativity on school.)

I hate. . . annotated bibliographies. Until this week, I had no earthly idea what they even were. I never had to write one in my undergrad classes. Lord, have mercy! This project is basically the first part to my final paper for this class. I spent about two nights researching "relevant" articles in the LU online library, I needed at least eight of them. It's a bit overwhelming when your first search turns up over 25,000 articles. And then I spent a lot of time yesterday watching youtube videos so I could figure out what the heck I was even supposed to do. I also printed out the majority of the articles so I could take notes and highlight. Today I got home from church and started in. Read, summarize, analyze, use critical thinking, assess, blah, blah, blah. I worked until just about 20 minutes ago on this thing. It took me ALL DAY LONG. I hope she reads it. (So far, the comments on the other stuff I've turned in have been a little, shall we say, lacking in great depth.) This project was on top of the 3 chapters in the textbooks I had to read and take a quiz on, plus there were a few little video clips/power points she had for us too. How do people do this, work full time, and raise kids???? Seriously, I'm so busy with one class that it's getting to the point that we're lucky to have clean underwear. ha ha

I love. . . all the crocuses that I'm seeing pop up. I pass by these in our neighborhood and the other afternoon we took Wilson for a walk and I snapped a picture of these. They make me happy.

I love. . . last night's sunset. We were on our way to Phil's aunt and uncle's house to celebrate an important birthday and anniversary, and I was trying to get my phone out while holding that stupid cake. Well, it didn't happen. But today our realtor posted this picture on facebook, so here you go. 

Happy President's Day, people. Here's to having the day off to recover from the annotated bibliography project!