Average Jane

I finally got tired of having black hair with blue highlights, so yesterday I had my new hairstylist knock things back to a uniform dark brown shade.

The blue was fun while it lasted, but a year-and-a-half (give or take) is a long time for me to stick with one hair color or style.

Now I'll be able to walk around in normal society and no one will be the wiser about my inner weirdness. Nah, I think it shows anyway.

Breanne tagged me for a "7 Things About You" meme, so I figured I'd do it now.

The rules are:

So here are seven things about me that I don't believe I've ever mentioned here before:

I hate to be a big giant rule breaker, but it's a quarter to 10 and I really don't feel like digging up the blog URLs of seven people to tag. Thus, I'm throwing this open to my entire readership. If you decide to do it, leave me a comment. Thanks!

Whew, I'm glad that's over with! I made it through my third annual NaBloPoMo, but it was far from easy. I do see the value of returning to my weekday posting schedule, but I'd like to have the weekends off again.

The new post that got the most traffic this month was my throwaway one about applying vanilla extract as a perfume while baking. I know why - it's because J-Walk Blog linked to it. Thanks, John!

As usual, I had traffic spikes on Thanksgiving and the day before as people found my various recipes via Google searches. Apparently there are a lot of people who need my help making dinner rolls, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and other seasonal goodies.

I can't think of anything pithy to say in summary so I'll just wrap this up and enjoy the rest of my evening. Goodnight!

The good news is that I had a lot of fun staying up late last night. I went over to Spyder and Kanga's house with A Librarian and we plunged into the middle of a marathon of Lord of the Rings extended editions, watching until the third movie ended close to 1:00 a.m.

Even though I stayed up until nearly 2:00 a.m., I still woke up at 7:00 a.m. That was my first mistake, but one that's easy to make when you have a young cat in your room trying to crawl up your nose to get your attention.

I went and volunteered with The Animal Rescue Alliance for a while in the morning, but didn't stick around long because they had plenty of help and I was tired (what a surprise!). My biggest potential good deed for the day was sending my sister a cell phone pic of a cute bobtailed kitten there. She's already put in an application to adopt it.

Once I got home, I surfed for a while and ate an entire box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for lunch. It wasn't long before I crawled under the fluffy fleece throw on our couch and fell asleep with cats piled all over me.

My husband eventually woke up and I transferred myself to our real bed...and then slept until 7:00 p.m. Yikes! I really did NOT mean to do that.

Now I'm fated to have another late night whether I like it or not. I just hope I can break the cycle enough that it doesn't mess me up when I go back to work on Monday.

How was your Saturday?

So Trillian woke me up at 6:00 a.m. yesterday, just like every day. She actually wakes me up about every three hours all night long, but the six o'clock wake-up is the one that sticks.

My husband had been sleeping on the couch for some reason, so I transferred him to the bedroom and we did a cat exchange so that Xena would be shut in the room with him and Trillian could roam the house free of the threat of being viciously hunted down and pummelled.

As I checked my e-mail, I went over my Thanksgiving cooking plans in my head. I'd been brining the turkey since the morning before in a mixture of apple cider, brown sugar, kosher salt, fresh ginger, garlic, cloves, bay leaves and orange slices. I figured it would need to cook about four hours (13+ pounds x 20 minutes per pound) with the stuffing inside.

After a few hours of surfing and reading, I started to get bored, which caused me to accelerate my food preparation. Even though dinner wasn't until 2:00 p.m., I went ahead and poured off the brine, rinsed and stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven around 9:30 a.m. At the same time, I started my dinner roll dough rising.

As long as I was in the kitchen anyway, I snapped the ends off the green beans and steamed them, then peeled and cut up the potatoes and placed them in a pot of water to wait for the time when I'd need to start applying heat. I mixed up the ingredients for cranberry sauce in a pan on the stove and prepared the brie I would be later be baking as an appetizer.

I know this sounds like a meal plan that would make Martha Stewart proud, but the reality is that Murphy's Law was in full effect. The rolls were tough - and I don't know why. I severely overcooked the turkey. The mashed potatoes were really dry because we barely had any milk. I hadn't bought enough green beans, so the green bean casserole was way too soupy and there was only enough for everyone to get a scant spoonful.

Did I mention that I managed to shower myself and the kitchen with red wine right as I was starting to serve the food? The white shirt I was wearing is now officially a dust rag.

Still, everyone complimented me profusely on the dinner. We had a nice time sitting around drinking champagne, wine and coffee, chatting and catching up. The cleanup was so easy that all evidence of the meal had disappeared by early evening (except for some wine stains on the edge of the counter that I noticed this morning). Oh, and there's an extra pumpkin pie in the refrigerator.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoy having people over for dinner. I think I'm due to throw another dinner party soon.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the U.S. who's reading this.

Here are some of the things I'm thankful for:

I have several hours before I need to stuff the turkey and put it in the oven. After that, I'll clean the kitchen and living room, prepare the green beans to be steamed and eventually made into a casserole, peel the potatoes and get them ready to cook later, remove the rind from the brie I'll be baking with pecans and brown sugar to serve as an appetizer, and cut up the apple for the cranberry sauce. Oh, and retrieve the utility table from the basement and clean it off so I can set it up as soon as I've confined the cats to their various rooms.

Have a lovely day!

Today seems like a great day for a meme! I picked this one up from Stupid Evil Bastard:

1. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s & father’s middle names):
Ellen Walter

2. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad):
Robert ? (I just realized I can't remember my father's dad's name. I'll add it later if I manage to look it up.)

3. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4 letters of your first name):
Licele

4. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal):
Green Platypus

5. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you live):
Alissa Mission

6. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite alcoholic drink, optionally add “THE†to the beginning):
Red Guinness

7. FLY NAME: (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name):
Cell

8. GANGSTA NAME: (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite cookie):
Cinnameg Snickerdoodle

9. ROCK STAR NAME: (current pet’s name, current street name):
Trillian Dearborn

10. PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on):
Boo Boo Foreman

The little scribbly cartoon of me that I've used as the symbol for this blog was drawn sometime around 1994 when I was working at a printing company with a great group of women. We were all English majors who had been hired to proofread and typeset custom printed invitation and announcement cards.

One thing you wouldn't know about the sketch is that I wasn't the only one in the drawing. I ran across my copy of the whole page, which depicts everyone on our shift at the time except for the cartoonist who drew it:

For the first time, meet Valorie, me, Christy and Kristine.

Valorie still comes over from time to time for game nights and other get-togethers. Christy has lived in Indianapolis for many years and I'm overdue to visit. I haven't seen Kristine since we worked together, but she was always a lot of fun.

My favorite thing about these cartoons is how much they capture the essence of each person. Thanks, Cari, for your spur-of-the-moment drawing that's become such a great memory.

Because I jumped on the bandwagon and read Twilight, then immediately went out and saw the movie, apparently I am now a "goth cougar pervert" according to a number of other bloggers/Twitterers in the same club.

Just wait until the random Google traffic from THAT phrase starts hitting...

After about a year with the band, my husband has decided that he's had enough.

He's struggled at some of our gigs with the effort of playing four rock sets and hauling gear, too. One time he got a leg cramp right before a set started and had no choice but to play the whole thing in agony.

He's 51 years old with diabetes and high blood pressure. He's not in good physical shape by any measure, so it's not too big of a surprise that he's having a hard time with the rock and roll lifestyle. He's ready to concentrate solely on his recording studio and leave the live music behind.

So now we're in the midst of auditioning drummers. It's painful. All auditioning is painful, whether you're the audioner or the auditionee.

The thing is, my husband has been a professional drummer all his life. He spent more than a decade as a studio musician in Nashville. He once toured with James Brown's Famous Flames. Even though he's older now, he's still an excellent drummer with metronome-like timing. Replacing him is not going to be easy.

As much as I'd like to talk him into staying (and I probably could), I don't want him to stay just because of me. He needs to listen to his body and do what's best for him.

I just hope the search doesn't go on too long. My husband will probably have no choice but to play at least some of our December gigs. If we're lucky, another great drummer will step right in after that to start out the new year with us.