Retiring

Now that I'm newly married and starting a whole new chapter in my life, I figured my all new stories deserved an all new blog.  You can now catch me over at Happily We Roll Along!  If you were receiving my blog through email and want to receive the new one as well, follow the link to the blog page and on the right hand side is a section where you can "Subscribe by email".  Just fill out the little box and you'll be all set!

Time Flies When...

A.) you're planning a wedding
B.) you're starting your own business
C.) you're adjusting to your own new schedule as well as the schedule of your live-in loved one
D.) you've just discovered that Netflix offers Wi-Fi streaming of Bones Season 1-6 (commercial free viewing WOO-HOO!)

Well, that about sums up the last month (at least) of my life.  I'd love to write a witty, awe-inspiring blog of how I'm spending my last few months of bachelorette-hood, but the truth is that my "bachelorette" days have been far, far behind me for many years now (good thing I wasn't keeping a blog from age 19-25...).  Now that the holidays are over (thank God-I love Christmas but it was a bit stressful this year), we are in full wedding mode.  I don't want to go into too many details, but I am definitely not dealing with the stress well.  I don't think I've quite reached "Bridezilla" stature yet (please don't ask my mother for confirmation of this as I'm sure she disagrees), but I was pretty much done with the wedding once the dress was picked out.  I've been very lucky to find special vendors and a wedding planner who completely understand what I want, and as far as I'm concerned at this point, I'm just showing up and getting married-which, after all, is the point.  The problem is, there are still a lot of questions I'm required to answer, and after about two I start to feel all wound up in the pit of my stomach, my ears start to burn, the room starts to spin, and I feel the need for a priest, some holy water, and a good old fashioned exorcism.  Blake deals with this in several ways: leaving the room (if possible), not asking me any questions about the wedding (if possible), or delaying the questioner (if possible).  When all else fails, he just reminds me that we can elope at any point, then I feel guilty since I'm the one who wanted a wedding to begin with.  So far he still wants to marry me, which means the subliminal messages I've been playing while he sleeps must be working.

Last October I quit my job at Microsoft, for several reasons.  Quitting my job and all the decisions we had to make following that is a story in itself, but ultimately I decided to do something my mom and I had talked about for the last year.  I decided to start my own business.  I learned to quilt last year, and I have known how to sew, knit, and crochet for years, but I had always done it as a hobby.  My mother also sews, and we had joked for some time how we could have our own craft show booth someday.  Well, I took it to the next step and decided to do it right.  I set up shop on Etsy with the intention of eventually having enough inventory to do a craft show.  Eventually (which for the time being means "after the wedding") mom will begin stocking her own inventory, and I want to do my first craft show in October.  There are many things that go into starting any business, no matter how large or small, and I am keeping track of all the steps-my real fortune may be in a "How To (or NOT to, only time will tell)" book that features helpful practical hints like, "Don't try to start a business when you are planning your wedding unless you have unlimited funding, God-like patience, and a metabolism that can handle 4 glasses of wine at dinner.  Even then, you may want to think twice."  I digress.

Minus the funding, patience, and metabolism, I have opened shop as The Sewprano.  I am extremely proud of myself to have gone as far as I have to this point.  I don't have a huge inventory, and I don't have much listed yet, but my goodness, just to be recognized as a business took a lot of work!  There was paperwork to be filed, tax numbers to be acquired, and websites to be set up.  I have learned how to "Photoshop" (I can't afford Photoshop so I use a free online program called Gimp that I like very much and is very similar), and I have learned to create my own logo, blog background, headers, etc.  This requires a lot of time on the computer, and I'm still trying to get stuff made to list on the Etsy site, so all in all it's slow going.  The point is-it's going!

Sooooo, with all that you can imagine that Blake and I are still struggling to adjust to our life together.  I absolutely love being home when he walks through the door, but we are still very much on different schedules.  I am trying to figure out the whole "work at home" thing with the whole "housewife" thing, and I've never been very good at housekeeping to begin with.  I haven't quite got into a routine yet of when I do chores and when I work on The Sewprano, when I work out and when it's ok to watch Netflix.  Unfortunately, by the time I've figured it out for the day, Blake has walked through the door and is ready to relax, preferably with me.  I don't relax-well, ever.  When I do, it's not until 8 or 9, and by then he's almost ready for bed.  We're slowly striking a balance between our schedules and our natures by keeping open lines of communication, taking things day by day, and making out madly after disagreements.

Which means we're ahead of the curve with the marriage game in my opinion.  Now if we could just survive the wedding.

Cookie Day 2010

Cookie Day!  This year was the best yet.  Well, actually it was relatively uneventful-no exploding baggies of chocolate or extra butter in the nut bars.  Last year's Cookie Day didn't even get a blog, due to the fact that I had bronchitis and pneumonia for most of the holiday season and I can hardly remember if there even was a Cookie day.  I did, however learn some valuable lessons from the past two years of baking that led to oodles of goodies and not too many "oops"-es.

Cookie Day this year did not begin on a Friday, which was the actual baking day.  I started gathering recipes a month in advance, and narrowed them down by the Monday before.  Then Blake and I made a spreadsheet-yes, folks, a spreadsheet-for ingredients.  We went shopping on Wednesday, and I had piles of cookie sheets, mixers, ingredients and everything I could think of that we'd need ready to go by Thursday night.  Friday morning rolled around and we hit the road for Bubbi's Big House (we ended up only forgetting a few things-like the extra eggs and butter.  Hey, no one's perfect).

Ahem.  In case you didn't know, Bubbi's Big House is my parents' new house, not something out of a Pee Wee Herman episode.

So, we hit the road for Bubbi's Big House.  We were only on the road for five minutes before I exploded into some very colorful language about some very bad drivers.  I don't know what it is about the Christmas season, but it seems to bring out the stupid in anyone driving around me-and I'm not exactly known for my patience.  It makes me feel better that Blake at least agrees with me on this point: we should probably be the only two people allowed to drive as we seem to be the only people who understand the actual rules of the road.  However, I digress.  Rules of the Road by Nikki and Blake can be another blog.

In any case we managed to make it to Bubbi's Big House (as we all call my parent's house now) without getting in any wrecks or shooting anyone (anything other than the finger, that is).  We unpacked (Dinner Impossible style)...





 and then got on with the baking plan.

Wait.  Baking plan?  What is this plan you speak of (I can hear all you people who know me all too well!)?  Well, I do believe I mentioned that I learned a lesson or two over the past few years, and having a plan actually helps.  I say this with a slight tinge of regret, since there is far less possibility for disaster and thrills when you actually know what you are doing.  In my opinion, no day in the kitchen (or anywhere really) is complete without at least the possibility of danger.  Then again, Blake seems to be of the opinion that having me in the kitchen at all is akin to one of those natural disaster movies my father loves so much, so I thought it was probably best not to tempt fate or Blake's patience and just come up with a plan.

So the Plan.  It wasn't very complicated-just make all the doughs that have to refrigerate first, and then everything else.  And-wait for it, wait for it-not only did I have a plan, I had notes.  Since we have used several recipes for several years in a row, and we had figured out tricks and tips, I actually wrote them down.  I know, I know, I'm taking all the fun and spontaneity out of Cookie Day.  I'm becoming *gasp* my mother.  Hmmm, maybe not such a bad thing....

Bake, bake, bake...clean, clean, clean...

and by 5:30 the ovens were off and the cookies were in tins!  The last chores were wrapping the caramels and sugaring the homemade gumdrops, which I was saving for last.  See, we had a special guest helper at the end of the night...



Blake cut the gumdrops while Jack and I tossed them in the sugar...

Then we put them in a separate bowl to dry.  Jack liked throwing the gumdrops around in the sugar...but he liked eating them better.  The special project ended when he started licking the sugar off his palms.  But hey, not bad for his first Cookie Day!