12 Days of Christmas

Over at Tally I'm participating in a 12 Days of Christmas challenge. For the first 12 days of December a new challenge is being issued every day. No idea what I'm doing for yesterday's challenge yet, but I have some good ideas for today's. One element for today's challenge is that it has to include a Wordle, so pictured is the one I created, using the words to 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. If only I could be at home scrapping.

In other Christmas news, since probably 1999, every year we get together with my dad for Cookie Baking. Originally it was one of his theme weekends, but due to schedules it's now pretty much become a one day affair. We use to schlep all of our stuff out to Secret Lake, but in recent years we've had it at our place.

Anyway, in 2002 I started to make an annual cookbook, including pictures and recipes from that year. Last year I was stressed with a number of different things, so I didn't make the cookbook. A couple of weeks ago I had a coupon code for a free photo book and I'd been hoping to finally make a book for last year. That's when I found out that due to a computer crash I lost all historic record of last year and that is bumming me out a bit. I tried looking at pictures of what we made, but many of them are blurry and I can't tell what anything is. (Also, many of the bars end up looking similar.)

So now I'm starting to look at digital scrapbooking items and wondering if I can essentially make the book ahead of time so that all I'll have to do is drop in the photos for this year. Anything to make the process go more quickly, right?

Bowling, Birthdays, and Baking... oh my!

So every couple of weeks we get together with some friends (mostly Chris’ co-workers) for Game Night. This week we decided to go bowling and it became a larger than normal affair with some extra people invited. It also was semi-close to various people’s birthdays, so we took the opportunity to celebrate. And of course we had to try to embarrass them with party hats and balloons.

Given the number of people I picked up two cakes. And we combined the ages and put the number “81” on the cake (York and Kristin were both turning 24 and Esch is 33).

The timing actually worked out rather well since we got there towards the end of the league so we went into the lounge for drinks and cake before the lanes opened up.

And then it was cosmic bowling. Any ideas on what light setting to use when taking photos under a black light? All of my pictures are blue and blurry. The blurry I understand, but I’d like to know how to avoid the blue if at all possible.

Our next Game Night will be on Sunday afternoon and we’re doing a Yankee Swap. We’ve bought one of our gifts but still need to get one more.

Saturday I had my second skating lesson and realized that I’m the worst skater in my class. I think I’m ok with that, but it’s frustrating at the same time. One problem I have is that I feel the teacher goes over too many techniques in one class so there is no opportunity to actually master any of them. Finally, rather than trying something I didn’t feel comfortable with; I just started doing my own thing. And as a result, I actually got better at skating backwards- one of my goals. Now if only I could master stopping.

After skating I came home and finished prepping for the annual Cookie Baking day. Maybe other years are just as bad, but this year I felt it was exceptionally stressful- mostly because of my dad.

So first of all, my dad has a recipe that calls to be baked "in a moderate oven, 350-400 degrees". Sometimes they come out hard as a rock, this year they all fell apart. Find a temperature and stick to it! You can't bake something in a 50 degree range.

Then he had another recipe and after he's added most of the ingredients he realizes he used baking soda instead of baking powder. He thinks he can just add the other one and it will be fine. We tell him no- throw it out and start over. He says, what, we're not going to bake these as is? No, throw it out! In the end, he did throw it out and they came out fine, but I can just imagine the disaster otherwise.

And as to the timing- since I had skating in the morning we decided we would start at 11. But then they were late. And then we had to have lunch. So it was easily 12:30 before we started. And then they had to leave (not sure of the time, 4-5 maybe) because Hanna had to go get a tree with her dad. What? Why couldn't they do that a different day? Aaaargh!

We did manage to get most of the recipes made before they left- just one other that had to go into the oven. As a result, we got all of those cookies for ourselves.