steady rollin'

bulletpoints!

- Although I managed surprisingly well on cards last year, there's no way I'm going to manage this year. I'm slightly bummed about this, but I think I'll just resolve to send more random letters throughout the year as that's way more fun to receive.

- I made adorable cupcakes at work again. I wish I had an excuse to make them at home, or a whole lot more people to foist them off on.

- The last two episodes of Fringe made me all excited and giddy, even with a brief Not Sure If Want moment in there. I need to get over my tendency to want to fit things neatly in canon and just write the smushy porn that I want to write.

- There is absolutely no way to reply to an anon thread with you as the subject without a) being a dick, b) encouraging the drama, and c) being a dick. I replied anyway.

- There is absolutely no way to blog/tweet/mention replying to an anon thread with you as the subject without encouraging the drama and being a bit of a dick, but it made me laugh. Oh, people.

- I had this big complicated adventure dream with JDM in it last night. It was awesome. Then I had to get up and go to work, which was less awesome, even though our new brunch cook made me Huevos for breakfast.

- Speaking of our new cook, she's been teaching J how to make stuff. Including this awesome grilled tomato salsa which is downstairs right now, calling to me. She's the best.

- I severely need a nap, but if I sleep now I'll wake up at the time which I should be going to bed. Conflict.

( food and nutrition whining )

In less I-never-want-to-eat-again-news, I have a nice chunk of design work to do this week, which is a relief after my last paycheck was half what it normally is. That hurt, but luckily J had picked up some extra hours. Haven't made a ton of progress on my personal projects though, which means I need to set myself a strict schedule and get cranking if I want to get them done before the end of next month.

The plan for today is drawing, mainly finishing a commission and getting to the final stage on my Snarry Games piece. Now I just need to resist the siren song of the very comfortable bed and not end up sleeping all afternoon!

Besides all of the other tasty things we made today, I made some banana nut bread. It came out so delicious and fluffy. Since I typed up my recipe for Blue, I figured I'd just post it here.

Makes one loaf. Vegan if you use earth balance (or non-casein margarine) and applesauce in lieu of butter and eggs. ^_^

1c flour
1/2t salt
1t baking soda
1/2c melted butter (I use earth balance to omit the dairy, but another option is 1/4c vegetable oil)
2/3c sugar (i use half white, half brown)
2 very ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 - 1c nuts chopped (i used raw almonds and cashews, which came out much crunchier than my usual pecan/cashew blend)
dash of cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
1/2c unsweetened applesauce (in lieu of 2 eggs)
1/2t vanilla

I also added a handful of raisins and dried cranberries which added some great texture to counter the crunch of the almonds!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, combine dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, soda, spices). In another bowl, mash the bananas and add the other wet ingredients (butter, applesauce, vanilla). Mix the dry into the wet, add the nuts and any dried fruit, put into a greased pan and cook for about 1 hr, or until a butter knife slid into the centre comes out clean!

Yesterday J's family came up to visit for his birthday. Sophie is a handful but was relatively well-behaved, and Natalie the baby is getting big so fast it's kinda crazy! I suspect she's going to end up tall like her daddy since all of Carlos's sisters are like 5'10". We had a fairly lazy day and mostly just hung out. We took a nice long walk, and at the end of the day J and I were glad that it wasn't us having to drive home for once.

I ate pie and ice cream on top of having had a delicious omg scone for breakfast earlier and a rockstar during the day. @_@ I've been horrible about the sugar the past week, so it's time to kick that all over again. It sucks when I forget just how crappy I end up feeling when I don't eat well. Not eating out a lot recently has been great, but I've been making enough bad food decisions that I need to up and stop with that so I actually have energy and feel, you know, good.

After the family visit was done with, I finished up a new 1mr. Had fun in this one playing with the sort of art style that appeals to its star. I think I'd like to do something fannish in that style, but I'm not sure what fandom. ^^ The last time I posted a comic link laylah was nice enough to save me from my laziness and create a feed over here, so if you're interested, you can watch the comic on IJ. For you LJ folks, there is also a feed on LJ.

And now to get myself into gear and work on some more artsy things. :3

I had tofu, spinach, and mushrooms sautee with a small amount spiral pasta for lunch. It was delicious. Now I am snacking on a banana and a spoonful of peanut butter. Equally delicious. Consensus is that my apple pie the other night turned out fantastic. Mmmfoodstuffs and cooking. With all the time-crunch of school making eating out easier, it's been a while that I've felt this happy about making foods. ^_^

Anyhow, I've finished a commission, yay! For white_cross_b@lj, whom I accidentally caused a bit of a snafu for by granting permission for her to use a different Yohji/Aya commission in her layout. I offered her a freebie as apology, but she insisted on a proper commission, and has graciously agreed for the image to be licensed creative commons. I'm about to start on the next stage of the last three commissions in my queue now which are all HP. I'm really hyped up to get these done since I've had them in my queue forever and I've got some really strong ideas roughed out.



( [PG-13] - Weiss Kreuz - Yohji/Aya - Touching Heaven with bonus sketch )

I am amazingly restless today. Went for a quick 3 mile bike ride earlier, which with the wind coming in off the bay made it a real workout. I rode pretty hard yesterday, so I really felt it in my legs today. Running has been screwing with my knee a bit, so I'm trying to make up for that with cycling. Going out on my bike expressly for the purpose of riding a trail and not commuting somewhere feels so different. It's nice being able to wear headphones too and just push myself. Fun. Gotta say, there are things I like a lot more than running too, like being able to carry snacks and a water bottle with me. :3

I need to go to the grocery store later for some little things including apples, since I've decided to make an apple pie tonight. I probably won't eat any of it myself, but I really feel like baking, and everyone else in the house likes and/or loves apples, whereas I'm more of a cherry or berry pie lover.

I'm desperately trying to force myself to sit still for an hour or so and get some work done before heading out again, so I can time the apple-retrieval with burrito-retrieval, but we'll see if I manage! Got over the troublesome spot in my commission though, which is very encouraging, so the lineart should go pretty smoothly from here on.

Being low on time and energy, I haven't been cooking much lately. In my quest to correct this (and also produce easy leftovers to take to school with me) tonight I made lasagna using eggplant slices instead of noodles. It is the most delicious thing ever and was tremendously easy. I'm definitely going to try and make this with some frequency. My only regret is not having used a deeper baking dish so I could've put in thicker layers of spinach!

( My recipe for a 9x9 standard baking dish worth... )

1. My descent back into the world of coffee drinkers is complete. The coffee I am drinking as I type this...is black. It lacks even a speck of milk. I've always been at least a sugar girl, but no~o, J and the silky smooth power of Peet's soy lattes have slowly weaned me away and into this perversion. Sure, this times well with an attempt to start giving up more sugar overall, but I never actually expected much in the way of success. I warn you now, when I get to the point of not caring about sugar enough to eat oatmeal without it, that very moment is the one which will herald the coming apocalypse.

2. J hums and sings little songs to himself all the time. Yesterday, and now as I've just discovered today as well, his song of choice has been the theme for the A-team. Unfortunately for me, that's one of those songs any reasonable person can't not join in on. Daa da da daaa da da daaaah...

3. I borrowed a book of essays from the library. Reading good biographical/personal essays ends up being such a different tone of writing than the usual fare I consume. It makes me all restless and itching to write something thoughtful.

4. Perspective is hard. [/obscure reference] ...but seriously. Albeit, mostly because I get ambitious and set myself up for a 40 hour project when I only have about 8 hours I can scrounge up. Yesterday after having spent a good chunk of time getting about oh, five percent of my image done, I decided I'd just finish it digitally and do something simpler for class. If I haven't mentioned though, I like my instructor a lot. His art is inspiring, and with themes/genres that are right up my alley.

5. It is raining. >:(

6. The blankets are piled up in such a way on the bed that it looks like J and I are still asleep. I wish that were true!

My interview yesterday went pretty well. It helps that I don't get nervous with practically any form of speaking anymore. I'll know by Monday anyway, which is quick enough to not leave me going D: for an extended period of time. Justin has already encouraged me to decide upon dining locations for both celebration or consolation. Hee.

Which, speaking of food, we are in love with the Japansese restaurant that's a few blocks away from our place. They have really really good sushi. Spider roll = slflskjgskl. And via thier drink menu, I've discovered the joy of sake and ginger ale. I'm really not much of a sake drinker, but that is omgdelicious. One drink killed me though. I are cheap date.

So...although I had seen the Transporter 2, I had not seen the first one. Wow. You know, I am a fan of the action genre, and that was ridiculously awesome in all the best ways. And so overwhelmingly homoerotic the housemates were wondering if I had developed some sort of telekinetic power to warp the images onscreen to suit my tastes. I have NO CLUE why I didn't watch it with J previously, as it was totally up my alley and then some. Well, okay, the Head Bad Guy wasn't really pulling off the prison-stache and it could have used the Good Buddy archetype to really seal the deal, but I'll take some Sly Laid-back Detective any day. God bless Jason Statham and his need to show off his abs every five minutes.

I just posted myrecipe for carrot cake over at my pancake/food blog. It's a vegan-friendly recipe, as I replaced the eggs with extra applesauce and a banana. I also used applesauce to cut out a lot of the oil and some of the sugar. If you don't like supersweet desserts, it was really easy to make and turned out delicious. If you prefer supersweet desserts or really love eggs, I also linked to the original recipe. :3

Also related to my pancakes, you should totally check out the newest additions to J's colour photo gallery. He posted some pics of when we were at the coffee bar and there was a dog in line ahead of us begging for treats from the barrista. Cutest dog ever. There are also some neat long-exposure night time shots from the hills above Berkeley. They look awesome.

Today was also a day for homework, so in order to get out of the house, J and I used lunch as an excuse. We walked down the street for pizza, and I got their vegan calzone with spinach, onions, and mushrooms. I expected it to be a slightly larger calzone since the price was about the same for an order of lasagna, but homg this thing was huge. If I spread out the fingers of both my hands I couldn't cover the size of it. Granted, I have small hands, but still. It was delicious albeit intimidating to try and eat. I forget sometimes how much I like the consistency of ricotta, so I'm thinking the next time I make pizza, that I'll go for more than just the not-mozarella and get some not-ricotta too. Unf. Tasty.

I took another break this evening to make carrot cake. I almost made that vegan as well, but I didn't have a banana on hand and there were eggs in the fridge that needed to get used so, next time. :3 Besides tweaking spices, I altered the recipe a lot with an applesauce substitute since it not only called for a ton of oil, it also called for a ton of sugar. The balance ended up turning out really well, not too sweet at all and to top things off, the house smells fantastic.

I'm still behind on getting hottokeiki updated, but I have most of november ready to go. Tomorrow, in celebration of my most recent baking success, I think my pancake will have a carrot on it. :>

And now, back to the pain of dealing with dope sheets. woe.

So, the new imac is like the most delicious thing ever. I'm still getting things set up on it, but I've also been working on my blog project, which has enough content on it now that I can link to it. ^__^

Hottokeiki!

That's my pancake and cute things blog, where I post the pics of the pancakes I make every day! Today was a peacock, since we got Blades of Glory in the mail from Netflix. There's also some photogenic non-pancake foods on there and someday, there will be cute crafty things. I'm in love with my blog.

( Now, pictures relating more with personal stuff and school... )

p.s. We just watched Blades of Glory and I still love that movie like burning. That omg what costumes to make for y-con question I'd been intending to post is semi-meaningless now. >:D I'm still going to have to figure out what /I'm/ going to dress as though. I'm remaking my FMA uniforms, but that's more of a side-project since I've cosplayed that a lot. Maybe I'll tailor down my Suikoden costume. Mrr. I'm up for suggestions though if anyone has any. :3