Happily Listing...

i'm starting to feel the holiday spirit. i think that the mister and i will need to drag the christmas decor out of the garage. good thing that the night time marauder who stole about 12 bags of recycling cans out of our garage was kind enough to not go digging into the giant cupboards that are in there as well(is it wrong of me to suspect my cat hoarding neighbors??).
this year my california family has decided that for our gift giving that we would each select(or have selected for us...thank you Jessie) a single name and give to that person only(except for the little niece and nephew who deserve the king's ransom for just being so awesomely adorable).
here is one of my lists:

Etsy Buy Handmade remainsoftheday

the swanbones prints are so hauntingly beautiful and i have been eyeing the little le creuset sugar bowl and hippocampus print for many moons now...
unrelated...i want everyone who reads this to know that i am still taking my prenatal vitamins(man my hair and nails are healthy) and i'm really looking forward to another go in the new year.
and also that i will always and forever love this song. i love that scene in Valley Girl(yea i'm old so what!) when Randy is hiding out in the bathroom at the "val" party and this song is playing in the background. oh! adding this movie to my Amazon list.

little baby smershalls...

a birthday and a cake debaucle...

yay for greg's birthday! yay for cake! yay for three count 'em three different cakes that i made until finally with the third(from good ol dunken hines mix) it was actually edible. about a week
ago i had greg flip through my favorite cookbook "Baked." so...he ended up choosing something that i had been really wanting to try out...their red hot velvet cake. this recipe calls for a cinnamon buttercream instead of the tradional and ahem...nasty cream cheese icing( i hate the cream cheese) so i was all set except that i could not find the necessary "cake flour." so, for cake numero uno i just went for it with regular all purpose flour. not good. it was all wrong. a brick if you will. a note here, i was trying to get the cake prepped a day early. second note, i was off by one day on the date of greg's birthday. he was too. we both had the day of the week mixed up and in my defense, i was still looking at an april calendar at work. i have since torn off april's showers and am ready for some may flowers.
ok, so, since i ended up having an extra day, i decided to redo the cake. so i tracked down cake flour and more red gel food colouring and was good to go. right? nope.
cake number two went together much better, it could have baked maybe a minute or two less, but was looking pretty awesome. then came the damn buttercream. i have no clue what happened. maybe my butter was too soft and my tiny kitchen too small. the recipe is so simple, and i am a competent enough basic baker(i worked as a baker in a cafe in tallahassee for about a year). i should not have even bothered icing the cake with that beast in a bowl, but i did thinking that it would "mellow." mellow it did not and gross it was. after greg's birthday sushi dinner when we were settling down to watch The Money Pit with a hunk o' cake there was a deafening silence as we chewed and pondered what exactly was weird about that cake. the wind was out of my sails as i chucked it into what my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Bartel used to call "File 13."
that would be the trash to those of you who did not have Mrs. Bartel in the third grade.
the third cake was a hit. a delicious treasure in a sea of dyed red blech. thank you duncan hines for helpin' a gal out who just wanted to let her fella eat cake.

happy earth day!!!

some morning pics of what i am trying to grow on my little patch of asphalt and roof. marshall l-o-v-e-s walking on the roof he feels like king of the castle. he also loves posing for the paparazzi. so this was a good morning for him. not shown were my lemon cukes, chocolate peppers and patty pan squash. fingers are crossed that they make it in this heat.

a Marshall story...or, Marshall's first story

Kent, this is for you~
About three years ago, Greg and I had been yearning for a dog. We had certain requirements like: not a puppy, not too big(this was hard for me because I had only ever had or wanted big dogs), not a spaz. I stalked dogs on pet finder.com and we cruised the humane society for just the right piece o' tail(sorry, couldn't resist). There were definitely some cutie pie dogs, but something would always happen like someone else would adopt it before us. That happened more than once. It was really disheartening, because it was very important that we connect with the right dog, and that we were doing more of a rescue thing because obviously, we could have easily just paid 500 dollars and been proud parents. We did breed research and narrowed it down to french bulldog, boston terrier, english bulldog, and on impulse, the pug. We then found out about a local pug rescue that was having a pet adoption fair at petco. We went and it was madness! There were about thirty pugs. Some of them were seniors with grey faces and sad buggly eyes, some were mixed and kinda crazy looking(not that the pug isn't funny looking on it's own without even having something like beagle thrown into the mix). Basically, we had to write down the names of several dogs that we wanted to get some face time with. I saw Marshall who was actually named Cranston and thought he was the most beautiful little pug that I had ever seen. Greg bent over into the portable doggy pen to lift him out so that we could take him for a short chaperoned walk and he literally JUMPED into Greg's arms. It was love at first sight.
That was it, we knew that he was the one. We had to wait about a week until the Little Angel's Pug Rescue got back to us(just in case someone else had chosen him too). It was nerve wracking
and then we got the call...he was ours. We still had a home inspection to go through and a three hour training session the following Saturday, it maybe would have been easier to adopt a Russian baby we joked. But he was ours and it was like he was the missing link when we brought him home.

Happy after Christmas!!!!!!!

Marshall is the bestest most awesome little lady dog. he's definitely of the Oscar Wilde old school dandy variety.