MySpace-March 28, 2010-I've Got A Feeling...

Well, first, Joe went to Joe town without me because I was on call last night and was supposed to go to KC to spay and neuter cats and dogs but never got an email confirming that there was enough room for me to go. So I stayed up late.
Last night, I went out to dinner with people from school hoping seriously that I wouldn't be called out for a foal who's diagonosis is overwatching. I didn't get called out. We ate Mexican and talked for hours. I told everyone about the engagement ring (this group hadn't heard) and everyone was very excited! They agreed that Pie Throw wasn't a good time for a proposal.

Today, I ran some errands including renting books on tape for my journey. I baked some cookies, watched a movie and then watched House. After House, I watched two more movies-Confessions of a Shopaholic and Sunshine Cleaning. Both were really good. Steve Zahn was in Sunshine Cleaning and he sort of reminds me of a high school boyfriend. Joe saw a picture of this guy and said that he saw how they looked alike too. Maybe a little. Maybe they both have big noses? I don't know. I guess I don't see it or don't want to anyway.

Anyway, I've been super happy. I think that Joe putting down some money on an engagement ring and actually picking one out (that will put some of the ones on other girls' hands to SHAME!!!) really helped with this. It didn't hurt that Thursday when Joe woke up that he was in a fantastic loving mood! He was super sweet. He said that he couldn't wait to start a new adventure together, one of OUR own.

I really think that Joe and I will be better off from now on. Everything will be an adventure together. Time to get engaged and moving and married and kids. And its going to be great. I really love Joe. Sigh. He's so great. I can't wait to start our adventure together either.

There's really so much for us to do. So much for me to do. I need to send out graduation announcements. I need to loose some weight. I need to really think about going to church any at all because if I want a Catholic wedding, that would be a first step. The second would be having Joe become Catholic. (Appartently, he will need to be for that church wedding.)
[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 26, 2011.]

MySpace-March 23, 2010-So This Weekend...

So this weekend, it snowed. Jackie and Casey came down to visit through the spring time snow storm on Saturday afternoon. Joe and I fed them cipino (seafood stew) which was good as usual though is probably nearing the end of the good leftover stage. We sat around not doing much and playing Rockband.
Sunday, before Jackie and Casey left, we decided to go to the mall and look at the rings I had picked out. I seriously thought that this would take minimal time. Look at the three rings, put them on, Jackie puts in her input on which one she likes better, which one looks better on me. Not so. The salesgirls pulled out other rings none of which I really liked.
Somehow, Joe made me narrow down which one I liked better. I really decided that I liked the more expensive one, even if it was out of Joe's price range. I kept backsliding towards the other rings. (Which I really did like!) Then out the blue, Joe is like 'Let's put it in layaway!' Was this really happening? Did we just decide on an engagement ring? Did we really make this decision?
I feel guilty saying that Joe put the ring in layway. It sounds like he's cheap. But the fact of the matter is that the ring was out of Joe's price range. However, he had/has a large amount of money saved up towards the ring and I don't think that it would take much for him to save up the balence.
I don't mind. Its fine.
This is what the ring looks like:
Okay, it doesn't look exactly like that. The three center stones are oval. Up the sides are two arches that are filled with diamonds. In the center of both sides on the setting is a small stone. On either side of the center on the sides, are more stones. (Joe and I actually argue if this is the case. I can't remember. I was pretty shocked!) Its big. A lot bigger than you would picture me liking. 1 1/2 total carets.
It was on clearance. That's the only way that we could have afforded it. Its regular price was A LOT! But I love it. I love that its big. I love that its shiney. I love Joe. I can't wait to get my ring and have him propose! Yea!

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 26, 2011.]

MySpace-March 13, 2010-Date Night!

Early this week before I came home, Joe asked if I wanted to go out Friday night. Thursday is often date night but Friday would be good too. I asked Joe if he had any plan because I really hate making plans. He said he did and he thought that we should go to Jack's Gourmet and then to the movies. I agreed.

As the week wore on, I questioned why we were going to Jack's Gourmet since its a pretty fancy place for a dinner and a movie date night. I asked people at school if they had been there before but no one had and the consensus was that it was a pretty fancy place followed by schoolgirl giggling about how maybe it was the night Joe was finally going to ask me to marry him. I denied this since I knew that he was probably going to buy a ring at the end of the month. I asked Joe if he had done any research on Jack's before choosing it. He hadn't. At this point, I wondered if I was now going to get proposed to at IHOP. But Joe made reservations (even though once there, it was clear that he didn't have to), and so we went at about 6:30 for dinner.

Joe and I ordered an appetizer-toasty little squares with this creamy stuff, salmon and capers. Then we ordered the main course. In addition to the main course we got a little cup of soup-Joe got French onion soup and I got this creole creamy potato with sausage. Then came salads. Then the main course. By then, Joe and I were pretty full for our 'Easter slaughter'. Joe had duck breast which was super rich with duck confeit and roasted carrots. I had lamb chops with rice (which wasn't very good) and spinich which was fatty and yummy. We ate most of this, sharing too. I wasn't super impressed by my lamb. It didn't taste differently enough from beef for me to be like lamb. Now at least I know that I will eat lamb.

After dinner, we had some time to kill before going to the movies-Cop Out. So I insisted that we go to the mall and look at engagement rings. I promised Joe that I would be well behaved. (Esp. after since the last incident.) We went to Helzberg diamonds and a sales clerk promptly started to help us. She was crazy, overbearing, and well just not someone that I wanted to buy a ring from. Regardless, we found about three rings that I really liked. I couldn't rank them unfortunately. This one I have looked at before-its a whole set. It looks sort of small on my hand before you add in the wedding band. Its called Emma. Then there was the one that we referred to as the cheap ring, but then because that biases you against it. I insisted on now calling it the super sparkly ring. The third ring that we looked at was a larger ring with three oval cut stones and then more diamonds down the sides. It was nice but out of Joe's price range. Since looking at the website, I have found this one which is like the cheap one except a single stone and then this one which is just pretty. I need some second opinions. I think that going ring shopping was important for Joe to see what a ring looked like on my hand. Maybe then he can use the types of rings that we picked out to pick out a nice one for me. I think that Jackie is coming with me next week to provide an opinion.

After the exhaustion that was ring buying, we went and saw Cop Out. It was okay. Joe's choice. Then we went to bed and went to sleep. Seriously.

I had a fantastic date night. Tonight, Joe and I lie to ourselves about cleaning the house and then maybe play some Beatles Rock Band

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 12, 2011.]

MySpace-March 10, 2010-When I Grow Up...

When you’re a little kid, you’re often asked what you are going to be when you grow up. I’ve pretty much always answered that I was going to be a veterinarian. Yes, I was that person. Its always been my dream to be a vet. There were occasions when other choices sifted through my mind-teacher, archeologist, meat inspector, dairy farm manager. But really, I’ve never strayed far from veterinarian.
I find myself answering the question of what I am going to do with my life more and more as classmates try to sort out who has jobs and where and who doesn’t. Unfortunately, I don’t have a job. I’m worried about this. I have decided that I do in fact have a pretty fantastic resume and that I am much more capable than I give myself credit for; that bravado however doesn’t get you employed. In fact, it might work against me. Luckily, with the exception of just now, I have rarely stated this fact.
So the real question is: When do you officially become a ‘grown up’?
Is it when you turn 18, or perhaps 21, perhaps 25? All milestones in of themselves. Ages when the government says you can smoke, gamble, vote, join the military, drink and rent a car. I’m past those. They may have made me feel MORE grown up, but weren’t really being a grown up for me.
Is it when you move away from home, go off to college? Maybe. I’ve done that and again, I feel MORE grown up but not really grown up.
Is it when you have your own apartment? I’ve had multiple for years. I’ve been responsible for having utilities turned on and turned off. Responsible for bills for years. Still not a entirely a grown up.
Is it when you get a degree? Hold down a steady job? Live pay check to pay check? I’ve done that depending on your definition of a steady job. I’ve worked 40 hours a week at one job. Still not entirely a grown up.
Is it when you have someone in your life that you intend on spending the rest of it with? I’m on my second one of those. I’ve had Joe for four years. Even though an engagement and marriage are on our future, I still don’t think it makes me a grown up.
FOR ME- being a grown up is exactly the answer to that question I was asked in kindergarten. What do you want to be when you grow up? For me, being a grown up will be when they hand me that diploma on May 14^th. I will be a veterinarian. I will be a grown up. Now having a job, that may be another story. Maybe when I’m actually practicing veterinary medicine will I be a grown up, because really, that’s being a veterinarian.
And being a grown up will only snow ball in my grown up-ness. Eventually, there will be that marriage. And kids. And a house. And a farm. And calves, chickens and ponies. Probably lots of other fun things too. Then I’ll really be grown up. I can’t wait for that life to start.

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 12, 2011.]

MySpace-March 9, 2010-RIP Dade Mercer

One of my goals during my very, very long two weeks in DeSoto, was to clean out all of the stuff that I have remaining at my parents’ house. Originally, my goal was to sew my graduation dress-a pink and white seersucker sundress-but after realizing how much I had in my car, I realized that sewing wasn’t probably going to happen. Here’s hoping that I can get it done during my three weeks in Columbia.

Anyway, when going about sorting out the stuff, I made what essentially amounts to three piles-1) keeping forever, but staying with my parents (which was/will be repacked and most likely gone through again sometime when I have a midlife crisis and decide that half a dozen Cherry Merry Muffin dolls aren’t really worth keeping anyway), 2) stuff that I want ‘now’ (now being when I move to that fantastic place in which I have a job) and 3) stuff that I have decided that I don’t want and should be put up on Ebay or in a yard sale. My mom and I have been having some disagreements about what should go in #1 and #3-I argue that the bells my grandparents so thoughfully collected for me as a child should move to #3, while my mother argues that one day, I’ll have a china cabinet in which to display such items. There’s a lot of such items-bells aren’t the end of it. I do wonder what some of them are going for on e-bay. And the nearly 100 Breyer horses? I’m not all that partial to every one. Some could fund paying back student loans.

I have also had to fight my mom in the fact that the kitchen things-mostly fruit and vegetable knick knacks-that I collected when I was like 12 are not exactly what I am going for now. Some things would be sort of helpful-such as salt and pepper shakers and a crock (which was already recruited for back at my current apartment though not in use), but really some of the others are just plain ugly. What was I thinking?! And how many sets of silverware-good silver, mind you-do I really need? Two? Because, that’s how many I have. Two. In wooden boxes.

So in this process, I have found some boxes that contained notes written from friends while in high school. In reading these notes, some as far back as freshman year, I have realized that I am very old and that I am for the most part no longer  in contact with any one of these individuals. An occasionally Facebook or MySpace message, perhaps I saw them in Columbia if they went to MU, but nothing earth shattering. I’m not going to be anyone’s bridesmaid anytime soon.  I think somewhere too is a bunch of letters from a boyfriend I had that was in the army. At least I hope I kept those. Those would be fun to read though I highly doubt they were all that interesting. Probably no manifests of undying love.

Back to the high school notes, as I read them, I had trouble remembering who these notes were often talking about. Matt who? Which Matt was I supposed to ask out? Who were all these people that Lacey talked about from Pondo (Ponderosa, where she worked)? And factor in the fact that its probably been like 9 years since I read Lacey’s tiny handwriting, makes interpreting these notes even harder. Luckily, I only need a magnifying glass and not the Rosetta stone that you would need to interpret Dr. Barnes’ (an ophthalmology resident) hieroglyphic like handwriting. Sure I recognize Joe Regna and Mike Budde-they were our teachers, gym and geometry respectfully that were young and newly hired our sophomore year. And well adored! I recognize the names of my friends from DeSoto/McDonald’s but some of the others...and some of the inside jokes, which at the time would surely have sent us rolling in laughter down the halls of Pius are falling flat. Is it because I am nine years since high school? Is it because I haven’t talked to these people in most of that time? If I had, would the inside jokes and stories still be as good as they were when they were written in pink ink on a page ripped from the geometry notebook? Maybe.  I would hope. But I know that sometimes, I get hung up on the past. I get hung up on things that only I saw as significant. I don’t think that even Martha or Erick would appreciate some of the old time stories about our dorm days the same way I do. If I asked Erick about EZ Chez ponies, would he know what I am talking about? (When we were drinking once in the dorms (completely illegal for multiple reasons) I was trying my hardest to draw ponies onto Ritz using EZ Chez (recently discovered by myself). Every time I messed up one, I would lick it off and try again. After finally succeeding, I gave it to Erick who promptly ate it.) OH AND ABOUT THE TIME BRAD TRIED BARFING ON ME IN ERICK’S BED! WHO REMEMBERS THAT?!?!

So who is Dade Mercer? That was Lacey’s made up FBI name from when she was obsessed with the X-Files, which is how I really like remembering her. And we once dressed up her cat that didn’t have a tail in doll clothes and took all sorts of pictures but the camera didn’t have film. At Kari’s house-‘My stomach hurts. Oh! Cheez Puffs!’  I kind of miss being in high school. Maybe things could have been done differently. Maybe not, but I certainly wouldn’t worry as much if I had to go back. Wouldn’t worry because I KNOW I’m cool. I’m going to be a doctor damn it!

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 12, 2011.]

MySpace-March 9, 2010-En-Durian-ce

I’m known for being a picky eater. I don’t think that judgment is very fair. Its more that I am very vocal about what I will and will not eat. I don’t like gravy. I don’t like eggs (mainly because I can taste/smell the sulfur in them. I am very sensitive to metallic smells such as in large quantities of muscle, organs or blood. ) I don’t like many vegetables. I blame this one on my mother. BUT I have expanded the vegetables I will eat to include fried green beans, cold peas in ranch dressing, sweet potatoes (baked or fried, never with marshmallows) and spinach when its well hidden in other things, a trick I often play on myself!

I digress. Joe and I have taken to challenging ourselves with strange foods and strange food combinations that may or may not often involve bacon, such as bacon donuts or the bacon candy bar. Joe and I went to the Korean/Japanese place and I loved kim chee, but my ‘Japanese’ was too American since I’m pretty sure I had a similar meal at Jimmy’s Steak House earlier that week. I’m not above trying strange new foods (like yuck bag). I just like to know what I am getting into. I know that I don’t get into many things that are spicy so Thai and Indian foods are out.

Joe and I had once seen a fruit called durian on the Travel Channel on Bizarre Food. It’s a fruit that is so smelly that it is banned from hotels and buses. Apparently, it smells like feet and tastes like cheese. Apparently, it has, because of its prickly, hard outer shell (?), been used as a weapon and has killed people. We would talk about durian every once in a while though I am uncertain of in what context.

Somehow, after about a week of my absence to California, Joe took a journey to the Asian market. There he purchased a durian, which was frozen whole. Additionally, he purchased a packet of sheep meat that was unrefrigerated (the translation was pretty poor, but funny! I wish I remembered what it said but one direction included ‘with as much water as you wish’.), some real Ramen noodles, a jar of mudfish (which looks like mud) and some other things.  He was scheduled to eat said durian during my absence but the guy that also wanted to try it chopped off a finger in a car door. So he couldn’t come. Lucky for me, this meant a half rotten (possibly, who could tell?) durian thawing in the refrigerator for me upon my return.

Let me describe the durian for you. It’s a light brown tan color. Its roughly the size of your head. It is covered in sharp spikes about an inch long. It is sort of shaped like a peach with a more pointy end and a crease down it.

It didn’t really smell. My house seemed durian free. Even up close, it didn’t smell. I think it was because it was frozen. THEN Joe chopped into it. At first, I questioned if it wasn’t something burning in the oven because Joe and I tend to spill things under burners and don’t pick them up.  (Okay, its mostly me.) Then it quite clearly was coming from the durian. It quite clearly was a smell that didn’t belong naturally on this earth.

Once the durian had reached two halves, Joe and I set about eating it as I photographed and videotaped the event. Joe took a fairly good sized bite and made yuck face. (The videos of both of us eating it is on my facebook site.) He repeated the process for another video and in this one described it as ‘caseous’ which in medical terms means ‘cheesy pus’. I took a tiny wimpy bite and tried not throwing up. Joe and I discussed the various qualities of the fruit-how if it hadn’t been cold, it might have been improved, how it tasted like sweet onions, how it had the texture of cream cheese-like the really good stuff that’s in Danish. We thought that if one of these qualities had been eliminated from the picture, our brains may have been able to override the vomit thought a little harder. (No one threw up luckily during this durian experiment. The dogs wouldn’t even come into the kitchen for a taste and they want everything we’re eating. Except apparently, durian.)

Now we were faced with the fact that we had a ten pound fruit that smelled horrible and tasted like sweet onions. Joe somehow had the idea to make a cake out of it. I can only assume that he had found out about durian cake while doing some research on the fruit. So Joe scraped out the stuff, I complained and we saved the durian for the next day.

The next day, after doing some converting of grams over to cups and doubling the recipe, Joe and I made a cake out of the durian. Joe mashed the smelly fruit. It was somewhat the consistency of mashed bananas. Once added to the cake batter (to which I added vanilla because I wanted to and I had seen it in another recipe), the smell of the durian had turned down a notch or two. We kidded that our appliances were questioning what they had done in a former life to deserve such treatment. After a final mixing, I offered Joe the beaters to lick off. I really meant it and didn’t think about them having gross durian on them. He refused. We laughed and put the two cakes in the oven.

Somewhere along the line, I thought that perhaps icing the cake would cause it to become more appealing and by more appealing I think I really meant-edible. I mixed up some cream cheese frosting, appropriate I now think because of the texture of the fruit in the cake it was covering. How did I decide on cream cheese? I think I was still stuck on bananas since really the cake looked pretty close to banana cake. Forty-five minutes later and the cake comes out of the oven, golden brown and only mildly smelly. Our house smelled sort of okay. Sort of not.

Joe would ice the cake and take it to work. I think he advertised it as it was-being a durian cake. To which, the Cambodian population was all over it. By midnight, it was at least half gone. By 3am, it was gone and the plate that it came on was washed. Joe said some little lady (that I can only assume to be Cambodian) came up and complimented him on the texture. Needless to say, Joe and I make one mean durian cake! I told him it was the frosting. Frosting, like bacon, makes everything better.

In conclusion, we tried durian. We will not try it again. We also would win in a Cambodian bake off by entering our durian cake. Where and when this will happen is yet to be decided but I can safely say that it won’t be in our apartment. Durian is hence forth banned from our apartment like many an Asian bus or hotel…I’ll go someplace else and bake that cake. Amberle, can I borrow your kitchen?

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 12, 2011.]