Obviously I haven’t written in a while…thank you all for notifying me of this.  Some of us are not slaves to the Internet.  Although I must say, for full disclosure, Facebook has been somewhat running my life lately.  I poo pooed it for so long, thinking ‘pshaw……only teenagers get addicted to these stupid social networks.’  Oh no….not just teenagers….it’s like they friggin’ hypnotize you with all those ridiculous games you can play.  And yes, status updates are eerily similar to Tweets.  And yes, I’m a huge hypocrite.  Thank you all for pointing that out as well.

Jerks.

Anyway, I had other stuff to do this past week besides melting my brain trying to get the high score in Bejeweled.  Other stuff…like Life-Responsibility stuff.  First and foremost, we had another cake-baking adventure to endure this week, so I’ll tell you all about that.  The 2’s were having a birthday party, and not just any birthday party.  A 50^th birthday party.  Reaching the half-century mark is traumatic enough and so to soften the blow, the 2’s held a birthday extravaganza.  I was in charge of the cake.  The birthday gal is into horror movies, and her husband was buying her a cruise for the Big Gift.  So obviously I decided a ‘haunted cruise cake’ would be appropriate.  The cruise was a surprise, but the party wasn’t….so I went ahead with the idea, crossing my fingers that she wouldn’t ask any questions about why the cake was a cruise ship and what the hell that had to do with her birthday or with horror movies for that matter.  There were approximately 60 people attending the party, so the cake had to be about the size of a house to feed everyone.  This kind of endeavor should probably normally only be performed by people with engineering degrees and endless amounts of patience.  I, unfortunately, have neither.  My decade of auditing work is less than useless when it comes to cake baking and decorating.  But that has never stopped me before…..

The cake part was the boat.  But it had to be sturdy enough to hold all of the decorations I planned on making.  So an oven-sized sheet cake was in order.  When making a cake this size, there are several things one should really think about before getting started.  First of all, don’t mess up.  You’re using a grocery cart full of ingredients and if you mess up…you definitely won’t have enough eggs left in the house to make another one.  Second of all, have some place to put it when it comes out of the oven.  Someplace where it can sit undisturbed and un-accosted by your cat that has recently become possessed by the devil.  Lastly, don’t mess up.  No really.  Don’t mess up.  Good decorations don’t make up for bad cake.  And yes there is such a thing as bad cake.

After the cake was baked, it had to be carved into the shape of a cruise ship.  And here’s me, totally useless accounting degree in hand, artsy fartsy sister a million miles away, staring at this block of cake and trying to imagine what a cruise ship looks like.  I have been googling cruise ship photos for the last week, so I have lots of intricate and ridiculously complicated designs to choose from.  But once you start hacking up your cake, there’s really no going back.  [Please see prior paragraph where I encourage you not to mess it up.]  So with my lethal carving knife in hand I start slicing off parts and stacking other parts and in a sort of art deco modern way, the cake bits begin to resemble what could be mistaken for a cruise ship.  After slathering the whole thing in 8 pounds of icing, I go into a brief diabetic coma from ingesting too many taste tests.  When I come to, the cake is ready to be covered.

Hold on a second there, Heather.  You already covered the cake in icing.  What are you talking about?  I’m talking about fondant.  You’ve seen it before, but you probably never cared what it was called.  Fondant is like play dough.  Except it actually is supposed to be edible.  As opposed to real play dough that is only digestable because the Play Dough people knew kids would be eating it by the fistful…because hey….it’s called DOUGH.  <sigh>  So anyway, fondant is edible but I wouldn’t recommend making a meal out of it.  It’s kind of like eating the wax your cheese is covered in….which probably isn’t actually edible so this analogy makes no sense, but work with me here.  It’s no good.  It tastes kind of tasteless, which would be ironic if I knew what irony was….but, more importantly than all that, it makes the cake look gooooooooooood.  So here’s what you do with fondant.  You roll it out like a pie crust, lift it up, place it on top of your cake sculpture and then press it down to make sure it stays in place and is not wrinkled up.  Sound easy?  Right?  <shaking my head>  Right.  I can hear all of you out there shaking your heads no too.  It wasn’t.  I’ve used this crap before but in much smaller doses….covering a whole cake has never been in the game plan until now.  And until now, I assumed it would be no big deal.  Yeah….it was a big deal.  It kept sticking to the counter.  And then it would stick to the rolling pin.  And then it would stick to me.  And then I would pop some in my mouth before I remembered I hated the taste of it.  And then I would be annoyed.  And oh, by the way, if you don’t roll out enough and try putting it on your cake…..it’s a disaster.  Because then you have to take it off, but there is already icing all over it and then you’re thinking - beating someone with this marble rolling pin would feel really good right about now.  Don’t ask me how I know this.

Magically, the cake got covered in fondant.  I think I must have blacked out with rage at the previous attempts, because I can’t really recall how exactly it happened.  It just did.  So now it’s time for decorations.  The decorations have actually been in the works for most of the week.  Maybe the most of two weeks.  The decorations are horror movie characters.  I had them all – Freddy Krueger, Mike Meyers, Jason, Dracula, Jigsaw, Scream guy, Chucky, and Pinhead.  I made the little horror movie people out of the fondant too….and again, some artsiness would have come in real handy.  Instead, I have to use my tried and true approach of mess up after mess up after mess up until I stop really caring if it looks that much like the characters.  Now the characters have to be small enough to stand on the cake boat.  Or at least, that was the original intention…..didn’t really end up that way but we’ll get to that later.  The characters also had to have all limbs properly attached.  In an ideal world at least.  But this is not an ideal world.  This is Heather’s Cake-Baking Inferno of Hellish Retribution for Everything I’ve Ever Done Wrong in the World.  So first Dracula’s arms fell off….then Freddy’s hand fell off….then Chucky’s head fell off.  More than one horror movie character got crushed back into a blob of fondant in my decorating fury.  In order to glue parts together, you can use several things…a sugar syrup substance, a hard icing concoction or Krazy Glue (which was the Hubby’s suggestion after hearing me curse for the 900^th time in a row and hearing the ‘splat’ of fondant getting pounded back into the table).  So when you’re gluing stuff together, you have to kind of prop it up so it can dry right and then leave it alone….unless you own a cat that has recently been possessed by the devil. 

I don’t know what was wrong with the Pumpkin this week.  Maybe she is allergic to sugar and the sight of so much was offensive.  But after Attempt #1 of several of the characters, I left them out to dry on the dining room table.  Which she never gets on.  Ever.  In her life, she has never hopped up on the table….for all she knew, there was no table, it was a black bottomless abyss that sends too curious cats into the Kitty Limbo where they have flea goop applied too often and have to eat the cheap brand of cat food.  That was the extent of Pumpkin’s knowledge of what was on top of the dining room table, until this week.  I came home after work to look over the drying progress of Attempt #1, only to notice immediately that several of my characters had mysteriously disappeared.  After ruling out that they had walked themselves away or taken suicide leaps off the edge of the table, I started hunting around the rest of the house all the while becoming more and more angry.  Pumpkin, meanwhile, sat perched on the edge of the sofa leering at me with her devil eyes secretly giddy at my fruitless search.  I eventually found one mangled character next to her food dish.  I found the other one….bent and broken to hell, in the basement.  She had quite obviously jumped on the table, taken one look at the little freaks and bopped them right onto the floor with her claws of death.  Now, I have no idea when she actually performed this heinous act, so discipline would normally be out of the question (not that this cat is capable of being disciplined) but I was so irritated by her state of calm and her little beady eyes mocking me, that I flailed the carnage of Attempt #1 around in front of her face until she walked away.  Yes, she walked.  My flailing does not intimidate the cat anymore.  She sees it too often.

So after Attempt #87, the stupid characters were done.  As well as they were gonna get done by that time.  Now for the last big hurdle of the cake-baking adventure – transportation.  Yes, I did briefly consider inviting all 60 people over to my house just to eat the stupid cake….but then realized that would entail cleaning up after the hurricane that must have hit the kitchen and living room areas while I wasn’t looking.  Sheesh….my house is always a disaster after a cake-baking adventure….not sure how the entire house gets dirty through this process….but it does.  And no, I did not have the energy to clean so now it’s time to figure out how to get everything over to the birthday house.  If I could do this by myself, it would have been less stressful.  If I could freeze time and teleport the cake there, it would have been less stressful.  When will the MIT nerds figure out teleportation!!!  Hellooooooooooooo….can we get on that please?  Since none of the easy options were available, I had to use the Hubby to help me.  The Hubby has huge bear paw hands and big fat man fingers and very little patience with me screaming at him to hold something more carefully when he already considers balancing the cake parts in one arm while he opens and closes doors to be careful enough.  If our marriage can survive transporting a cake, I think we’re good.  Honestly, there can’t be anything worse to endure than me having panic attacks the whole way there because he’s driving my car that he never drives, shifting my transmission that he’s not used to, taking turns at 12 miles an hour and not 2.  Did I mention the birthday house is only about an eighth of a mile away from ours?  Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh….it took us about ten minutes to get there.  I’m kind of surprised he didn’t stop the car and boot me out.  That’s true love people.

So once we’re at the house, and all the cake parts have made it into the house and I’ve walked by everyone including the birthday gal with the cruise ship cake, dodging questions about why it’s a ship like I just didn’t hear them….now it’s time to put everything together.  So all the little characters come out of the box I had them in and I start putting them on the cake….which is exactly when I realized I made the God***n things too big.  No they are not going to fit on the ship.  They are apparently water-walking horror movie characters.  And then to make matters worse, either because it was ridiculously humid out on Saturday or because I had too much bad karma on me from yelling so hysterically at the Hubby….arms started falling off of all the stupid characters.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to just throw the little limbs back in the box and explain to everyone that the Michael Meyers character must have hacked all their arms off.  I wanted to start mashing up all the characters in my frustration.  And instead, with rage-induced shakiness, I started…..pattttt<hisssssssssss>iently gluing all their God***n arms back on.  I propped all of them up, everybody took pictures and then it was mercilessly over.

The hubbub of a 2 party didn’t even bother me after that was all over.  The 60 people in my personal space bubble didn’t even bother me after that was all over.  The ear-splitting decibel level of the 2’s normal speaking voices didn’t even bother me after that was all over.  The rabid mosquitoes on the back porch didn’t even bother me after that was all over….west nile virus shmirus.  I ate enough pasta to offset the 8 pounds of sugar I had already consumed that week and drank enough wine to start speculating about what kind of accent the Pumpkin would have if she could ever learn to talk.  [The answer is Australian….which I came to after saying G’day mate in my head and then laughing at myself outloud].   

The birthday gal had an awesome time, made out like a bandit with the stack of gifts she got, and loved the cake.  Mission accomplished.  That was unfortunately not the end of our weekend or of my amazing adventures…..we had one more party to go to and house moving to contribute to, so by the time I rolled into work on this awesomely chilly morning, I am pretty much running solely on caffeine.  I am so over-caffeinated right now, I could probably be called a biohazard.  The pumpkin noggin keeps tilting dangerously to the side as I half fall asleep at my desk.  There are really real work reasons I’m here today, it’s not just to be a martyr even though girls are notoriously good at that.  If I pass out on my laptop and you find me drooling and snoring, please….just leave me alone.  I obviously need the sleep and whatever you need cannot possibly be as important as you think it is…..

Later gators,

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzHeatherzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ

p.s. Pictures will be forthcoming...please just hold yourselves together until I find the time to do it.

Jerks.

Are people driving much slower than normal or have I become severely retarded?  I know it’s been about a second and a half since I have complained about the driving habits of my fellow Germs or the Ballmer Balls…..but seriously?  If I don’t talk about this, there may be some serious derby car damage resulting in the very near future to the next person that decides to drive five miles an hour under the speed limit.  In front of me.  I have been stuck behind the Slowskies too many times in the last week to think it is just my bad karma catching up with me.  And then of course there was the rain….or more accurately…..the icy drops of death raining doom and destruction down on your car. So for God’s sake….for the sake of your children and all that you cherish and love….PLEASE….SLOW the F**K  DOWN.  Preferably to about 12 miles an hour which is clearly the only safe speed to drive in conditions such as these.  Retirement Plan #87 involves opening Heather’s School for Driving Like You’re Not on Meth.  I may need to do that sooner than later….in the meantime here are some quick pointers that I would like to share with you people, some wisdom I have gathered in the last decade of commuting approximately a million miles a day –

1.      Turn signals are really only worth a damn if you know how to work them.  Don’t signal left and then turn right.

2.      Of course, signaling at all would be nice…

3.      I know it says ‘Speed Limit’ and technically you would think that implies you can’t drive faster than that….but come oooooooooooooooooooon.

4.      Please show just a smidge of f**king urgency when the traffic lights are about to change.  Because I drive the same route to and from work every single day….I have it timed to perfection….and your exasperating lack of urgency to actually get through the light before it changes makes me want to beat my head into the steering wheel which never ends well for my pumpkin noggin.

5.      You do not need to look at the passenger seat to talk to that person.  Eyes on the road jackass.  That’s where the vehicular manslaughter will happen because of you not paying attention….not in the passenger seat.

6.      When the engine is running and the car is moving….that means you are now officially driving….so start acting like it.

7.      Green means go.

8.      Yellow does not mean slam on your mother-bleeping brakes.

9.      Do not ever honk at me.

10.  I appreciate that you appreciate the woofers in your car and want everyone on the entire planet to appreciate the woofers with you….but I do not want to hear the bass in your music.  Not even one little teeny tiny bit.  I do like to say the word woofer, though.  <giggle>

11.  You can see the next traffic light is red one block away….so why exactly are you tail-gating me?

12.  If you’re on the highway and you come to a gradual incline or a gentle bend in the road, this does not mean you need to slow down to half your original speed.  If you needed to slow down, the speed limit would change.  But you don’t.  Because it didn’t.  What you need to do is put your foot on the gas and grow a set of balls.

13.  Just get out of the way and let the cop pass.  They are required to take driving courses that actually teach you something.  They can drive a lot better than you and yes….since they get shot at, they get to speed.

14.  I don’t have any spidey-like depth perception…but that doesn’t mean I’m going to wait to pull out into traffic until there are absolutely zero cars in sight.  Please….if this is what you need to feel good about driving….go ahead and wait until after the zombie apocalypse is over….then you can drive again.

15.  Merging is not as hard as you clearly think it is.

16.  If you missed the exit/turn/driveway….you missed it.  It’s not my fault.  Just accept it.  God made cars that can u-turn because we are not perfect creatures. 

<sigh>  Ok…I feel a little better now.  Time for this week’s update from Audit-Land and the going out of business sale that is the State Government.  They are still paying us….but that probably won’t last much longer.  I get this gossip from the elevators and cafeteria where I clearly should not be listening to anything at all.  In my eavesdropping glory over the past several weeks, I have had occasion to witness a very unique specimen of Government Employee Types: the Absent-Minded Walker.  AMWs do not pay attention when they are walking.  They are clearly concentrating on some other aspect of their life…and not so much on getting from Point A to Point B.  AMWs are counting on you not to run into them or dump your coffee all over them.  They are counting on you to stop and step to the side as they fumble their way through the halls.  AMWs tend to travel in packs and are inevitably completely oblivious to the fact that they just ran you right off the sidewalk or into a filing cabinet.  Packs of AMWs are a hazard, plain and simple.  Nothing is safe.  Not your armful of files, your kid in the stroller or your seeing-eye dog.  AMWs are usually having a loud conversation that you will have to scream to be heard over and they usually have really annoying laughs.  They never seem to be going to the same place….which makes me think they wander the halls….aimlessly.  They may not even work in this building.  They may have accidentally wandered in during one of the eons when they were not paying attention.  And they tend to be magnetically drawn to whatever side of the hallway you are veering toward to avoid them.  Now, when an AMW knocks into you they are always real nice about it but that sorry never seems to help.  It never seems to matter at that point that he has a great smile or she looks like your best friend from college.  Too late for any forgiveness.  I know walking can be hard sometimes….but it’s still kind of necessary.  Let’s all try focusing on our walking for a day.  Focus on not running into me, knocking things out of my hands, or forcing me to pancake myself against a wall so I can stay out of your eebie geebie space bubble.  One day.  Let’s call it today.  Ballmer, the City that Walks.  T-shirts are for sale, $14.99.  Proceeds will benefit the Keep Heather Out of an Insane Asylum fund.

The Hubby offered to go grocery shopping for me last week.  After I came out of my shock-induced coma, I quickly came up with a short list that I thought he could handle pretty easily.  Item #4 on the list was conditioner.  He came home about two hours later, red in the face and sweating.  What the hell is wrong with people at that store! He screams as he throws both grocery bags onto the kitchen floor.  I smile my understanding tell-me-all-about-it smile, already knowing what he is about to say.  Who writes checks anymore?  And why are the breadcrumbs in the spice aisle, they’re not a spice?  And why do they only have two cashiers working at 5 o’clock on a Friday?  And what the hell is a bonus card?  We have like eight phone numbers, I didn’t know which one to use so I just started punching in random numbers and it worked…but what the hell is a bonus card?  And this was five for $10 so I went ahead and got five even though we use one a year.  And I can’t believe I spent $43 dollars on like seven things.  That’s ridiculous!!!!!!!!   !!!!!!  <smile>  He kept on with this monologue all the way into the family room, while he turned on the TV, while he sat on the couch.  He only stopped grumbling when PTI blipped on the DVR.  Then he was quiet.  I silently promised myself I would never let him go grocery shopping again…knowing full well he will never offer again.  I also didn’t find it necessary to point out that he picked up shampoo.  Not conditioner.  Sometimes it really is just the thought that counts.

Later gators,

Heather