What better Valentine’s day activity than making an awesome cake?
Iz and I made this last night:
Following the directions on Bakerella, we actually managed to make something pretty cool – and it was really fun to make (and we just happened to have some of the “chocolates” - which as you can see, Iz designed - left over to eat last night). OK, I know it doesn’t look as fabulous as hers, but we were pretty pleased with it, anyway.
I’m hoping the light that’s currently a faint glimmer at the end of the tunnel isn’t another oncoming train. I can’t say anything more right now for fear of falling flat on my face before I even get started (especially since it depends on the help of people I hardly know and several random things going right when I need them to), but if this works out it would be a dream come true!
If it’s as cold as it was here in Maryland last night (a gazillion degrees below freezing), you might want to consider leaving a tap or two to drip overnight.
Or, of course, you could spend your Saturday morning with a hairdryer, gently warming every inch of copper piping in your house(and just outside, because your neighbors don’t think you’re crazy enough) hoping to hell you don’t make something even worse happen, like a burst pipe. Or maybe the burst pipe happens anyway, I’m not 100% sure. At any rate, after you’ve gently warmed enough copper pipe, you’ll hear an almighty clunk and some rumbling that sounds uncannily like a child falling down the stairs, and you will have water again. After a quick check to make sure that you have water, and a child that didn’t fall down the stairs after all, you can take a well deserved break.
So far, nothing worse happened, or at least I don’t think so. I have running water in all the right places but none on the floor, and I’m fairly sure that’s how it’s supposed to go. From now on I’m going to leave a tap dripping overnight, because I’m not doing that again.
Even though there’s really not much to write about. Well, there is, but I don’t really know where to start., so I’m going to take it slowly, category by category.
Personal stuff:
- Still job searching, getting kind of discouraged by the whole process. I apply and apply, and even get interviews, but I can’t get anyone to bite. I’m starting to think that there’s a specific reason for that, but hopefully that reason won’t exist after the next few months. It’s frustrating. I need a job to pay for any retraining onto a new industry, but I can’t get a job because I’m in competition with a gazillion other people for each and every job. If I could train for another area, I could apply for more jobs, but I can’t, because I can’t afford the retaining.
- Christmas was awesome – we had a family Christmas with my Mum and Dad visiting, and I relaxed for the first time in I don’t know how long. Pictures to follow, possibly, depending on how lazy I get. So don’t count on pictures showing up anytime soon (although I’m trying Windows writer, which means at least I have a desktop icon to guilt trip me into blogging).
Bigger stuff:
So it’s time for the inauguration on Tuesday. Unfortunately we have plans on Saturday (Iz has a birthday party to go to) – I would have liked to take her down to Baltimore where Barack Obama will be appearing Saturday afternoon. I’m so excited about this – we’ll finally be rid of the idiot Bush. I’m just hoping that America as a country really can change, because what I see sometimes is so really screwed up. What still needs to change are attitudes, and there’s a long road there. America is still definitely a country with a lot of intolerance – not just racial, but religious (it’s OK to be a fundamentalist Christian, but try being anything else in this “Land of the Free”).
My thoughts on the whole thing are a bit jumbled right now – somehow I feel bitter towards a lot of what I’ve tried to embrace over the last ten years or so. I’ve been through periods where I feel that England and the US are very similar, and then there are times when I feel that for two countries that share a lot of things, you couldn’t live in a more alien society. Maybe more about that in an upcoming blog post, because it should probably be explored.
OK – so apologies for the blog post about nothing, I promise I’ll come up with some good subjects soon.
