I hate salad.

I just ate a 7538 calorie salad. True story.

I thought it would redeem me from this weekend's food failures. And it started off so good... Lettuce, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, celery, red onions, peas, carrots, chickpeas, some lean turkey... AND THEN. Blue cheese, bacon, shredded chedder, shredded pepper jack, shredded mozzarella, cottage cheese, chow mein noodles, croutons...

...At least I used the Fat Free Ranch, right?

*headdesk* GET A GRIP, WOMAN!

--Malaya

I was going to make this post all cool and full of pictures, but my computer at work is stupid, and won't let me upload photos off of my iPhone. And I've downloaded 3 different apps onto said iPhone, and none of them will let me upload pictures, either. SO NO PICTURES FOR YOU.

I seriously ate a truckload of awful food this weekend. It started Friday night, when Skip and I were both feeling cranky and angst-y, and we were both so hungry that we really didn't care what we ate. So we settled on Chinese. And then realized that the Chinese place we went to was not a buffet. Seriously?! We had no idea you could order Chinese food from a menu. *mindblown* We high-tailed it outta there, and Skip took to the open road.

4 blocks later, we were in the parking lot of Five Guys. Mmm... Grease! Burgers! We were so hungry that the airborne calories couldn't even scare us away. And neither of us cared. THAT kind of hungry is a dangerous place to be. But I ate my giant cheeseburger (with lettuce and tomato and lard sauce) and my pound of fries dripping in cardiac arrest, and I washed it down with a Coke Zero. True story. Because the regular Coke would've really pushed me over the limit.

The next morning, Skip's mom and step-dad were in town. With two grandchildren, and one miniature yorkie. They dropped said yorkie off at our now-immaculate apartment (BECAUSE I SPENT THE ENTIRE NIGHT BEFORE CLEANING AND RECOVERING FROM A FAT-HANGOVER), and we headed out to breakfast. At IHOP. For pancakes. Seriously. I can't make this stuff up, people.

I ordered 2 eggs over easy, butter drenched wheat toast, and lean ham. I did not know that plate of goodness came with a pound of greasetastic hash browns. I did know that my intention was to only eat 1/3 of those hash browns. I am positive that I covered the whole pile in ketchup and salt, and I ate them all. And I put 18 packets of sugar in my coffee. And then drowned it in creamer. And I drank it, and it was good.

We then spent a couple hours recovering from breakfast back at our apartment... Which was mostly spent trying to keep children out of my breakables. And my toilet. And my trashcan. I was assured that I didn't need to child-proof my home, but clearly *someone* was wrong about that. I now have rocks in my reed diffuser. I don't know what to do about that. So I'm gonna just pretend like I don't see it, and let the reeds keep diffusing lovely vanilla-ey goodness into my pretty bedroom.

Several stressful hours later, the family was ready for lunch. And where, oh where, do they want to go? FIVE GUYS. No, your eyes do not deceive you. Those caps don't lie. We went to Five Guys. Again. For the second time in 24 hours. Just when I thought the grease had been filtered out of my bloodstream, we were headed back for more. *facepalm*

I still ordered a Coke Zero. Don't judge.

After lunch, was more quality time spent at our apartment. Nothing really notable here.

Dinner... Dinner was barbecue. Meat. Sauce. Meat. Fat. French fries. Ketchup. Baked beans. Fat. Bread. Sugar-coma sweet tea. I threw the Coke Zero out the window, and went balls-to-the-walls with that one. I'm from the south... You can't have barbecue without sweet tea. And it's not really sweet tea unless it makes your face hurt. And this stuff was the real deal. Like, imported directly from the south. It was so sweet, you'd slap yo' momma.

Skip and I wobbled home after that meal, and continued to feel really ill. Our weekends are generally "light eating" days... We often skip breakfast, graze for lunch, and then eat a big dinner. Three big meals was just too much for us to handle. We slept like babies. Fat, bloated, gassy babies.

Thankfully, we avoided breakfast on Sunday morning. Skip and I could not possibly handle more food before noon. Lunch wasn't anything to write home about, although I'm sure it was far less healthy than I thought it was... Because it was restaurant food, and restaurant food is always 6,429 times worse than anything you could make at home. Legit.

Skip and I spent the rest of the day Sunday laying around in misery, avoiding food at all costs. We snacked in the late evening, but that was it. Even breakfast this morning was difficult to swallow... I'm seriously still not hungry. Food is the enemy.

We also spent the weekend playing with Skip's nephews (when they weren't putting rocks in my reed diffuser), and that was fun. Kids are all cute and stuff... They make funny faces when they eat, and they repeat anything you ask them to. OH, and they think bubbles are like super awesome magic. Truth. They are. Who doesn't love bubbles?

But, spending the weekend supervising small children also reminds me that I'm not ready to be a parent. Kids are fun, and then you send them home with someone else. I like my immaculate apartment, my rock-free reed diffuser, and sleep. Kids would kind of screw up all of those things for me.

Oh, did I mention that Skip shot me in the eye with a Nerf dart gun? Oh, yea, he did. It was like Russian Roulette. But not sexy and Russian. He thought it was empty, but there was one in the chamber. And that one in the chamber ended up in my eyeball. No bueno. I've already started on the divorce papers.

But I lubs hiiiiiimmmmm. <3

(And I totally want to go put Nerf guns on our wedding registry.)

*longestblogposteveraboutnothing*

--Malaya

Finding Purpose

Since I first started this blog, I have struggled to find its purpose. Is it a diary, a food blog, a photography blog? Maybe a wedding blog? A travel blog? A blog I neglect because I'm too lazy to remember to update it?

Sadly, the latter is most true.

Anyhoo... I've really been wanting to get back into the swing of blogging, so I've been trying to figure out what it is I want to do with this blog. My life is going through so many changes right now, that it's hard to find just one single purpose. I can't just blog about food or photos or my wedding. I can't just blog about my weight loss journey, or all the places we've traveled to. I can't just blog about nothing.

So, dear readers (yes, plural, as I'm hoping there are at least two of you), I ask you to bear with me, as I try to find my blogging niche. I can't promise that my entries will always be interesting, but I'm hoping that there will be more of them. It's quantity over quality, right? Right?!

This post needs a picture. Of food.

Wow, this picture is blurrier than I thought it would be... But, through the fuzz, you'll see that these are mushrooms. Happy, delicious little mushrooms, sauteing in marsala wine. Because this photo is from a series of photos I took the other night while cooking Skip his favorite meal, Chicken Marsala.

I really hate making him this dish. Really. This is is favorite dish that I make, and it's hard to make it the same way every single time. I always feel like it's never as good as the first time I made it for him. It's a lot of pressure, for a simple meal. My palms get sweaty, the veins in my forehead start to pop out... It's just stressful.

For whatever reason, I thought this most-stressful-meal-ever would be a good candidate for an attempt at food blogging. Which was a really stupid idea, because I don't use a recipe for this. I just kind of wing it. But I thought, for some stupid reason, that I would be able to blog about it. And then, I kind of forgot to take some vital pictures. So I don't even have all the steps. I'm a food blogging failure.

BUT. I'm not a funny failure, so here are the steps, as recorded by my camera.

Step One: Arrange the ingredients, so that no one can actually tell what most of them are. Take this photo with a "cool" and "artistic" angle, to highlight the green onions... That you didn't actually use, because you forgot them.

Step Two: Take a picture of the ziploc containing the chicken breasts... Because you're funny, and labeled them "chicken boobs." Heh heh. Boobs.

Step Three: Take a cool overhead shot of the chopped green onions. Yes, yes, the same ones you forgot to use in this recipe. People will think it's artsy.

Step Four: Start seasoning the chicken. Then, halfway through, remember that you should be taking pictures. Wash one hand, and pick up the camera. Then, snap this photo of your other hand fondling the chicken boobs.

Step Five: Illustrate that you should not leave chicken unattended on the counter. Put it in the fridge, and then take a picture of it in the fridge to show the world that you're thinking about food safety, and you have a lot of crap in your fridge.

Step Six: See the container of sliced strawberries on top of the giant tub of butter, and decide it's time for a healthy snack. Cover the sliced strawberries with Hershey's syrup. Consume them in no more than three bites, using only your hands. Spoons are for losers.

Step Seven: Take a blurry/artistic picture of the canned green beans simmering on the stove. Put that candle in the background, because it looks cool.

Step Eight: Take a photo of the boiling potatoes from an interesting angle... And then realize that boiling potatoes are not, in fact, interesting... From any angle.

Step Nine: Take an overhead shot of the mushrooms cooking... Screw the chicken you just cooked in this same pan. Nobody needs to know that you actually cook the chicken in this recipe. The mushrooms are the star. And nobody needs to know that you put the wine in the pan too... You can't give away ALL your cooking secrets!

Step Ten: Show a semi-blurred picture of the chicken on a plate. Because this looks incredibly appetizing. Oh, and sneak in that little blue bowl of onions to the left... Because YOU FORGOT THEM, YOU MORON.

Step Eleven: Use this picture of the meal your significant other cooked the next night... Because it looks far more appetizing than the chicken marsala you made. Oh, and he used cool little sauce swooshes, and you can't do that with marsala.

THE END.



First Day of Spring, First Snowman Ever.

You read that correctly, folks! It's the first day of Spring, and I, at age 23, have just constructed my first snowman... EVER. I know! Epic.

Here he is! His name is Earl:


Other than snow and snowmen... Nothing is going on. LOL Pryor is more or less the most boring place on the planet, and I live an equally boring day-to-day life. Hence the reason I don't post new entries very often. Ok, I can't say that with a straight face. The truth is, I really procrastinate with these entries. I start one, wait about a week, then come back and delete the draft and try to start over. I love writing, but these blog entries are like those stupid 5 paragraph essays from school. It's monotonous.

And I really don't have anything interesting to write about. HAH.

Making muffins is still happening... I guess that's kind of exciting? I've come across some really tasty recipes, and they've been a hit with the guys at work. I love baking... It's really a theraputic type of thing for me. I like making the things I cook look really appetizing... Like decorating my muffins with just the right amount of chopped/sliced nuts, and a sprinkle of coarsely ground sugar. I like how they look when they're all done. Maybe I should be a food stylist when I grow up?

Nah. I'd much rather make a living making cupcakes. Seriously. If I could figure out how to make cupcakes into a lucrative career, I'd be on that like white on rice. If I could combine my love of cupcakes, shopping, puppies, and scrapbooking into one super-mega-career, I'd be set. But I'm thinking all of those things combined might be a disaster. But the cupcakes... I need to make that happen. If anyone has a couple thousand George Washington's they'd like to loan me to get this going, that'd be super.

OH. I also entered into this NCAA bracket thing with Skip and the guys at work... Where you pick which basketball teams are gonna win and stuff. I put in two brackets at $5 apiece... And I'm doing pretty good, all things considered. (And by "all things" I mean the fact that I don't really follow college basketball AT ALL. lolz) I'm actually kind of into it... Well, not the games, per se... But just the outcome. I love checking the ESPN ScoreCenter app on my phone to see how many wins I got. It's so satisfying to highlight the teams that won, and scratch out the ones that lost. That, and I really like repeating the name, "Gonzaga." GON-ZAAAAAH-GAAAAAH. Heh.

I'll leave you now with some snow-y snapshots... Hurrah!

--Malaya

Well, hello there...

I'm really bad at blogging.

No seriously, I suck at this kind of stuff. Well, I guess it's 50% suck and neglect, and 50% we haven't had internet since moving out of the hotel and into an apartment. Heh.

For those of you following along at home, you read correctly! We're in an apartment in Oklahoma! WOO! Well, kind of. We *should* be here until June-ish, since the construction company decided to get off their ass and do some work move forward with this phase of the project. So in many ways, life is good. We got into the apartment, which has drastically slashed our cost of living. I cook meals, I clean, I do laundry, I make the boys at work muffins... And I do their laundry, too, sometimes, and they pay me for it... Which is like, freakin' awesome. I already have about 25% of the anticipated cost of the new purple netbook I want. WOOT.

In other news... For those of you who have perhaps not been in "the loop"... My grandpa has been out here in Broken Arrow/Tulsa, at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America hospital. He has lung cancer and brain cancer, and they've been doing some really cutting edge treatments for him to help get some of this under control. Once a week or so for about four weeks, I went out to the hospital to "babysit" him after his procedures. He's finished with the treatments on his lungs, gone home for a few days, and now he's back for 26 rounds of radiation for cancer in his brain. He seems to be doing really well, but our family knows cancer all too well. Especially small-cell, metastasizing lung and brain cancer. It's the same stuff my grandma had, and she's been gone almost 3 years. BUT... Optimism is easier than realism, so that's where I'll stay.

Moving right along...

I've actually become quite the chef out here in Oklahoma. With Skip and I not dieting super hardcore, I've got a little more freedom with our dinner selections. I cook about 6 nights of the week, and I have yet to repeat a recipe. So that's roughly 24 new and exciting dishes that I've mastered. Well, mostly mastered. Some things will take minor tweaking to be perfect. I've even whipped up some pretty delicious muffins from scratch that the guys at work have just loved. And I'm pretty sure my big giant pans of lasagna that I took to them will go down in history. Just sayin'. But I really have learned to love cooking... Whereas, in the past, I kind of dreaded it. I have also found a really unhealthy love of meal planning and grocery shopping... I spend about 2 hours a week getting together my recipes for the next week, and then creating a list for the store, organized by aisle and department. Neurotic as it may be, I really enjoy it. Like, really. It's often the highlight of me week.

Other than all of that, my life is rather boring. Oklahoma is an "interesting" state... Full of "interesting" people. If I'm not at Wal-Mart, I'm playing FarmTown or FarmVille on Facebook. Or maybe I'm doing laundry... Which is now pretty much an everyday kind of task. I make muffins, I cook, I play with dogs... I'm pretty much a little old lady now!

Hah. Yeah, right.

More posts will be on the way... I SWEAR. I will not fail at this blog. I will not fail at this blog. I will not fail at this... OH LOOK!

--Malaya