BUTTER 'N THINGS

There's been a lot happening with my friends here. And with my new interest in making and decorating cakes, I made cakes for their big events. Here's cake #1 for Nadder's birthday, a chocolate cake with coffee butter cream frosting.

And there was an engagement and a graduation. You can see the red velvet cake in progress. I still have to work on my piping. :) Maybe I should move on from the ziploc bag.













And then I made a chocolate cake with ganache for Pete for Valentine's Day, but I didn't manage to get a pic before I left with it... maybe because the butter started to separate from the chocolate. :( I have to work on my chocolate. However, he sent me some lovely lovely flowers. Orange lilies, orange gerber daisies, brandy roses!

NEWFOUND PROWESS

I have lived on my own before. I've done a lot of things by myself for my place. But ever since I started living with my male housemate, I've sorted just left some things for him to do. Like, for instance, hooking up cable, modems, changing light bulbs... Well he had been gone since last Friday, and on the first day, the light bulbs went out in the ceiling fixtures in the kitchen. Crap! It took me 2 days (as was also busy) to replace it because (1) had to figure out how to get to the light bulbs in the fixtures (2) had to go buy light bulbs (3) had to replace light bulbs. This is ordinarily a task I just let my housemate take care of. I dunno, silly, especially since I'm taller. I was pretty proud of myself for having done this task.

Another empowering event involved the tremendous snowfall we got over the past few day. Now, this might be just something a Californian had yet to experience, but it snowed about half a foot overnight. Normally, my neighborhood is really good about shoveling snow (even before I'm out the door), but I had to make first tracks yesterday morning! When I got home after a day of working, I had to take my car to go to the gym, so I got all dressed to do some dirty shoveling. I shoveled the steps to our house and shoveled around my car! Very satisfying. Got in my car, burned a little rubber, but got out of the snow!

Thank you, thank you.

CONGRATULATIONS, DR. TSE!!!

A nice stamp of the 3 letters Ph.D. to commemorate a tremendous body of work packaged together in a nice neat bow. Great job!

Much delayed pictures that I took of the crazy freezing rain a few weeks ago. I thought that "freezing rain" sounded pretty treacherous, but really, it was quite beautiful.


Crazy sideways ice: