I was not focusing on my blog as much as a real blogger should, anyway—too busy with school and work and the other stuff that seems to take over life away from the internet. (Boo!) I graduated from college 2.0 last month, so at least that’s a weight off my shoulders. My life does not magically seem less busy, though. That was disappointing to discover, since I haven’t played nearly enough video games lately. I want to play Portal 2 (it’s all the rage, and I want to know why!) but I have to finish Epic Mickey and Super Mario Galaxy 2 still. And Ben just fixed the original Xbox this weekend, which means I now have access to games I haven’t played in a long time: Simpsons Road Rage, Tetris Worlds (because I can’t play Tetris ANYWHERE ELSE), and Dance Dance Revolution.

Oh! But Things in Life That Actually Matter, I have those, too. I’ve made strides in cleaning and organizing certain areas of my house, and now I can see portions of my actual office desk. I’m now officially a web marketing consultant (for money!), trying to decide if I like it enough and can be successful enough to go permanently full-time. Lumped in there are goals for certain websites that already exist and some that are in the planning/work phase.

It’s also way past time to update the Geek Test again. Pretty amazing how a year can make so much difference in the content of the test. The Geek Test Facebook fan page is approaching 3,000 fans, which is pretty exciting. And last week, on Geek Pride Day, a Norwegian blogger mentioned his test score and posted some screen shots on his post Geek og Stolt (“Geek and Proud”) which contributed to a 400% spike in traffic for the day. I knew I picked the right country in which to be an exchange student all those years ago! Some of the traffic spike was of course from people who learned about the test from their Facebook friends or were just searching for a way to answer the age old question, “Am I a geek?”

Well, little Johnny, if you have to ask… the answer is probably yes.

In conclusion, there’s a lot for me to do in the near future. This has been awkward for me to write since it’s been a while. I look forward to bringing you more frequent awkwardness this summer. Good day.

(I SAID GOOD DAY.)

What I did over my Christmas vacation

• Hosted a kickass adults-only Christmas party with kickass white elephant gift exchange and kickass imbibing of beer, cheese balls, and sugary snacks. The being-feverishly-knitted-at-the-time hat was stolen from me at the gift exchange, so I ended up with a Miracle Bread Stamper, Utah-shaped cookie cutters, and three packets of official Mormon orange jello.*
• Had a somewhat crappy pre-Christmas that I was in no mood to blog about.
• Had a good and snowy Christmas Morning at home, failed to go caroling at Senior Centers with friends in the early afternoon, and then Ben and I spent the early evening with a former coworker who is undergoing cancer treatment.
• Played our newly acquired Rock Band 2 (for Xbox 360). A lot.
• Played Killer Bunnies with friends and cursed the impracticality of the rules. It gets a FAIL for intuitive gameplay. Though the ways that bunnies died were amusing (for most of us, anyway).
• Played Rock Band 2 with friends, for which gameplay was more than intuitive; It was AWESOME.
• Met with my government-issued Employment Counselor to discuss taking classes at Utah Valley University—the cost of which would be covered because I was laid off from a company that sent jobs overseas. Signed some papers that were immediately wrapped in 4 rolls of red tape.
• Celebrated New Year’s Eve at home with Ben, with Fuzzy Navels and another new game, this time for the Wii: MySims Kingdom. It started off slow (survivable with a light buzz and sarcastic/inappropriate comments) but actually turned into an enjoyable game for me. Lots of collecting things and some puzzle-solving—a perfect blend for my OCD tendencies. Ben zonked out on the couch for a little while, and for some reason we watched the ball drop on TV. Every year we turn off the TV at 12:01 and wonder why it’s a tradition to watch it, and then make our first official resolution: Not to bother watching NBC’s “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve” next year.
• Saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Ben on New Year’s Day and most definitely cried in the theater. There were a few small incongruencies that didn’t make sense to me, but other than that it was a great movie. Also, see: Brad Pitt Is Hot.
• Flew to Denver on Jan. 2 where I met up with my mom and we spent a few days visiting my sister and her Norwegian holiday house guest (who happens to be my “little brother” from my year in Norway, whom Monique invited out after they became friends through that magical place called Facebook, and whom she is not dating because that would be some sort of weird incest even though they’re not related).
• Bought an ugly sweater at Monique’s favorite Arc thrift store in Denver.
• Attended an Ugly Sweater Party at Monique’s house and finally met a bunch of her grad school and French Club friends.
• Tried a weirdly delicious spiked blueberry lemonade at Bar Louie in Denver, which accompanied a $1 Tuesday Night Special burger ($3.50 with my desired toppings).
• Saw Marley and Me with Monique and her roommate. It’s a good thing we had some extra restaurant napkins on hand to catch all the chick flick crying that was going on. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to movies regularly, but I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I’ve seen two tear-jerkers within one week. It’s like if there were a Lifetime Channel movie theater or something. But seriously, Marley and Me was better than I expected.
• Flew home on Wednesday, dropped off my bags at home, and drove up to the Sundance Resort for my training/orientation for the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. I have more to share about that, and won’t diminish its coolness by including it in this update-vomit.
• Met with a UVU adviser and registered for a full courseload of classes that, if completed, would award me with an associates degree in business management. Because I already have my BA, all the general education requirements were waived so I’m free to start taking electives in Digital Media. I’ve already attended a couple classes, but that is also worthy of a separate blog entry.

Next time there might even be some photos of some of the aforementioned events. Hey, it doesn’t take a BA in English/Creative Writing to know that you have to give your readers a reason to come back!

* There actually was a little vomit involved in Denver after eating some presumably shellfish-tainted restaurant chicken. Monique was sick, too, and is also allergic, and the non-allergic person who also ate chicken was not affected. I’m sorry to bring vomit to my blog. It’s a new high for me, to be sure.

** Distributed by the church. Seriously. “You can’t BUY that, you know,” said the giver. (I don’t like jello [brand name Jell-O or generic gelatin] much in the first place, but I certainly won’t touch it if it has shredded carrots mixed in. Is that a vegetable? Dessert? Trans-fat? I haven’t seen it in person, but many Utahns have reported that rumor to be true. I think I’d rather have a stapler in my jello.)

Cool-weather potlucks are easy because I fulfill my duty as a Midwesterner to make green bean casserole. Throw some green beans, cream of mushroom soup, milk, and some French’s fried onions together and heat until bubbly. Best served with loud discussion, poultry, and wine. And an extra can of those fried onions because who can eat just one (can)?

My new favorite sugary treat is also easy to make, but a little hard to share: Cranberry-Almond Ghirardelli Brownies. Mostly from a box.

My family never really baked from scratch, so I didn’t start out with a box full of secret family cookie and cake recipes. I started out with a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix.

I’m not a huge chocolate eater—something related to an overdose of fundraiser chocolate bars when I was eight— but having a box of brownies on hand for chocolate emergencies is standard protocol. So when I found a big 4-pack of Ghirardelli brownie mix at Sam’s Club, I decided to give the fancy mix a try. With the standard recipe, they’re really good. But if you add almonds and cranberries, they are AMAZING brownies.* And I don’t even really like cranberries.**

Would you like the recipe? I’ll walk you through step by step with some commentary (because I’m feeling clever). Let’s start with the ingredients.

Your brownie base is the good-on-its-own Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate brownie mix, sold individually in grocery stores or in a Quadruple Pack at wholesale clubs.  The other ingredients needed are oil, water, whole cranberries, sliced almonds, and an egg. I forgot to take a photo of the egg. Sorry, I decided not to recreate the moment for the sake of this blog. I think you can imagine what a carton of eggs looks like, m’kay?

That’s Canola oil, which is healthier than standard Vegetable oil. I recently learned that “Canola” was originally a brand name given to it by its hippie creators. That’s right, there is no such thing as a Canola plant. “Canola” is short for Canadian Oil, Low Acid. Booyah, genius! Those Canadians sure love to put “Canada” in everything they can. Canada Dry, Canada Goose, Canada Flag, etc. I bet Canadian citizens’ birth certificates show that every baby’s name begins with Canada. Actually, my dad’s side of the family is Canadian. I don’t think that last part about baby names is true.

Preheat the oven to 325°F.

Follow the instructions on the back of the box and put the brownie mix, egg, water, and oil into a bowl. I used this nice vintage mixing bowl that originally belonged to my Canadian-born grandmother. The colored fruit has mostly worn off the outside, but it’s the only bowl that looked decent on my crazy marble counter that the previous homeowner chose.

Mix it up with a spatula (you might call it a rubber scraper, which I guess is okay). If some of the batter accidentally falls onto your finger or into your mouth, go ahead and enjoy it. It’s a proven fact that salmonella from a raw egg won’t affect females with a raging case of PMS. Because it doesn’t DARE go there.

Pause for a moment to watch your cat Phoebe, who is sitting on her favorite perch (the lid to the garbage can), sneak her paws onto the counter to steal a piece of plastic from the bag of brownie mix. She’s not as stealthy as she thinks she is. Throw the plastic away and distract her with a more appropriate cat toy, like a “homemade” green M&M, and then get back to work.

Scrub the sink so that people won’t think you’re a disgusting slob when they see a photo of it. Rinse the cranberries however you see fit. I like to use water and a colander.

Let’s talk for a moment about the cranberries. In the fall and early winter, bags of whole, fresh cranberries start to pop up in grocery stores. You can easily find buy-one-get-one-free sales, and I recommend that you take advantage of them because you can freeze one bag to use someday in the future. For this recipe, you could probably use dried cranberries or maybe canned cranberries (not the canned jelly) in a pinch. But if you’re springing for the slightly more expensive Ghirardelli brownie mix, why not go for the primo taste of fresh berries?

Speaking of fresh berries, you should throw out any bad berries you find while rinsing. Good cranberries are hollow and will actually bounce when tossed on a hard surface. Bad cranberries look and feel different, like the one on the right in this next photo.

Some cranberries will be a little squishy but are probably okay for baking in brownies. What an artsy photograph this is! (You should see how crappy the other 34 turned out.)

Now that the cranberries are rinsed and your almonds are sliced (because they come that way in the giant bag you purchased from Sam’s Club), add them to the brownie mix. I used 1 cup of cranberries and 1 cup of sliced almonds—half in the mix, half sprinkled on top—during this photo shoot. Unless you’re a huge fan of almonds, you might want to consider reducing the almond level to between 0.5 and 0.75 cups.

Catch Phoebe in the act again—this time because of a stray almond. Sigh. She thinks the “no cats on the counter” rule doesn’t apply if she still has one or both feet touching the top of the garbage can.

Once the cranberries and almonds are mixed in, pour the batter into your greased pan of choice. I only have one 13×9″ glass pan, so that’s what I use.

Sprinkle the remaining almonds over the top of the batter.

Now put your pan into the pre-heated oven (which was ready several minutes ago due to the photo shoot taking longer than expected) and bake for the amount of time specified on the back of the box in accordance with your type of pan. Don’t overbake them. I actually prefer mine a little underbaked because then they’re nice and gooey.

Let them cool for a little while, then cut them with a sharp knife (for cleaner edges). Shove a large piece in your mouth to “taste test.” If it’s too delicious to share, declare that “the brownies didn’t turn out right” and make another pan for the others if you’re so inclined. Any brownie that makes it to a fully cooled-of state should be stored in an airtight container.

Serve it with a scoop of Breyer’s vanilla bean ice cream, and… I’m sorry, I’m about to pass out from the happy food pleasure that’s overtaking my imagination. I better go cut myself another chunk of that batch of brownies that “didn’t turn out right.”

*My mom had actually been brownie-free for quite some time (due to allergies) until she happily discovered that she could eat all the ingredients in the Ghirardelli mix when she last visited me. Many thanks to her for the add-in recipe idea and for feeding me these brownies at Thanksgiving despite my initial objection to the cranberries themselves.

**I bit into a whole cranberry while I was rinsing them to make sure that my dislike for cranberries was not just a holdover from my stubborn childhood tastes. This was a bad idea—it was incredibly sour and disgusting, and sent pains of bitterness shooting into my bloodstream. Granted, I do have a heightened sensitivity to bitterness. Even if you like cranberries, though, I think they need to be mixed with some sort of sugar to counteract the sour bitterness.

You can blame my friend Jenny for my conveyance of this video with a catchy little tune. You can even view and listen to it on a neverending loop here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbPDKHXWlLQ

I hate to admit it, but I CANNOT get enough of that song. I may have listened to the loop for a little too long… but it just melts my brain into goo and makes me stupid and happy.

Company is currently looking for a Sales Assistant! Selected individual will demonstrate ability to think on his/her feet.

Duties may include but are not limited to the following: managing sales processes and reporting, Responsible for providing feedback to the marketing group concerning communication needs, product development and pricing.

We offer excellent salary, commissions, benefits and 401K with a first year potential of $60,000-$70,000.

If you are interested in knowing more about these positions please send your resume to$ If you are interested in joining us, please contact us position.to.increase.income@gmail.com

Okay, it really should just be filed under targeted, Are You For Real spam. This type of scam spam may not be Snopes-able, but there are so many things wrong with it that I can’t believe anyone would actually fall for it. And yet, we know that someone out there probably will.

Sigh.

I’ve noticed this happening more and more with the dozens of emails I receive every day. I eagerly scan the incoming subject lines and who they’re from, and more often than not, I sigh and lean back in my chair because it’s all junk. Maybe junk I opted in for, or junk that I am sort of interested in but just not in the mood for at the time. In any case, I find that they mostly fall into one of these 5 categories:

1. Spam, spam, spam. It’s not even creative anymore. And those phishing attempts? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But the fact that people are still bothering means that there are a few suckers out there keeping the needle in a haystack method attractive for unscrupulous folk.
2. Newsletters. Most of the time there’s a sale announcement or a coupon from stores/companies/organizations for which I am a patron, which is fine. But after a few newsletters, I usually realize that the content is the same and the email’s only worth opening if I have a specific need to purchase something. I probably subscribe to too many newsletters, but I have just enough interest in their content or products to put up with frequent emails.
3. Boring. Bills, statements, order information, automated notifications or confirmations. All that business-y types of stuff that is relevant, but not usually exciting.
4. Semi-interesting. These are usually emails that seem interesting upon first glance, but turn out to be forwards, rickrolls, or misleading subject lines. Or from an email group that sometimes has useful or interesting content.
5. Good stuff. Personal email from acquaintances, friends, fans, and family. These are always the first ones I open (even if I’m a horrible slacker and don’t respond as quickly as I intend to).

I think my inbox apathy really mirrors the allure of personal snail mail; The best kind of mail to receive has a familiar return address and your name hand-written on the front.

When’s the last time you sent a handwritten letter to someone? I sealed up a letter to my teenage cousin a couple hours ago and will send it out tomorrow. It definitely takes more time, thought, and effort to write a letter the old-fashioned way… but as a recipient, that’s what I value the most.

It looks like I’ll be getting a bicycle next week as an early birthday present from my mom, who’s really into her racing-style street bike and has wanted to buy me a “real” bike for a few years. I’m not interested in hunched-over spandex-laden street biking, so I’ve selected an Electra Townie, which is a model that’s a couple grades above the cheapo bikes I’ve previously owned. I almost didn’t consider that model because of its name… “Townie” was a (sometimes derogatory) term used for year-long residents of my college town. I got over that, though, because it’s a really sweet bike. I have the highest aspirations to ride it to the grocery store and to the little town center that’s 1.5 miles from my house, where I’ll visit the library, post office, pharmacy, etc.

I attended an SCA event yesterday for the first time in a couple years, and while I think I had a good time overall, it wasn’t like events I remember fondly from my college years.  The medieval reenactment population in Utah is much more sparse than it was in SW Ohio, and this particular group is much more family-oriented than the late Teens to late Twenties group I initially joined. It’s a great group for my friends who have kids, and it might suit me better if I actually had kids and/or had a husband who was more into it. There are still some fun aspects like being at a campground, seeing everybody dressed up in various forms of garb and armor, and eating a quasi-medieval feast with friends. But the whole experience doesn’t click with me the way it used to.

However, I still have an explicable desire to Create Pretty Garb. Talent notwithstanding.

Next weekend, my in-laws are visiting us in Utah for the first time since we moved here. We’ve kept the house in a much more presentable condition lately, but there’s still a lot to do this week. The front flowerbedis covered with bindweed again. The best remedy for that, next to “persistence and patience,” is to move.

Mario Kart Wii rocks the hizz-ouse.

During my blogging hiatus, I was enveloped in archiving family history… scanning and touching up old family photos and playing around with a free trial on ancestry.com. I still haven’t traced my dad’s family line back to Charlemagne like my uncle once claimed he’d done… I have some serious doubts about that being fact vs. plausible sensation.

I was impressed with Cornell University’s ornithology website (which is what you’ll visit if you click on that first link) both for the multiple photos and the ability to listen to a clip of the bird’s song/noises. I’ve definitely heard that bird outside our house before, and it’s really cool to know what I’m hearing now.

I’d been sitting on that blog post for a few days, all the time wondering what kind of bird that was and trying to figure it out from online searches and my two birding books (National Geographic Field Guide and Birds of Utah). I finally decided to email Sharon Stiteler over at Birdchick.com to humbly request assistance, and was surprised by her lightning-quick response with a positive ID of the bird! She said that she was checking email at the time and thought my question was a fun challenge. And then she linked to this blog and challenged her readers to ID the bird…. cool!

Incidentally, Sharon’s profile claims her blog’s purpose “To show the world that you can be a birder without being a geek.” Well, I’m a geek, so I hope it’s okay that I want to be a birder!

I started reading Sharon’s blog at some point a while back when Neil Gaiman linked to her. They’re friends who pursued (and subsequently blogged about) a joint beekeeping adventure. And since I’m a wannabe birder, I stuck around and love looking at all the pretty birdy pictures and hearing about her adventures.

I’m a wannabe birder thanks to my good friend Susan from college. She was a fellow zoology major (until I switched gears and majored in English) and ended up in the field of ornithology after graduation, where she’s been ever since. Susan introduced me to pishing, which I’d like to try more often. I am jealous of all the exposure she’s had to owls. Because I think owls are neat, even when they’re being fed frozen mice.

While hunting for an ID for my mystery bird, I also came across the Utah County Birders, who apparently go on field trips (field trips! wheee!) and have monthly educational meetings. I don’t think that I will ever be a hardcore digiscoping birder, but I am definitely interested in learning more about birds. And since I neglected my natural interest in college by only attending one or two Naturalist Club meetings (before the field trips! boo!), I might just check them out.

The cool thing about learning is that even if you become a primo expert in a certain field, there’s somehow always more to learn. I don’t expect that I’ll become an expert in birds. I just want to know more about them!

And maybe find out which birding book should be the next addition to my library?

His first question when we sat down was “What do you read?” though he wasn’t familiar with anything until I mentioned X-Men. He’s writing a screenplay with the title “Flapjacks: The Movie” about life in San Diego and when I told him I was a writer, he offered me a comic idea that had been floating around in his head and said that I should write it.

He pitched a story about a worm who wiggles around and recognizes places in the earth he’s been before, then discovers the surface of the ground where he is plucked up by a boy who puts him on a fishing hook and introduces him to the water.

“How does it end?” I asked. “Is he eaten by a fish?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied. “I leave that up to you, the writer. It’s your story now.”

Then conversation turned and he asked where we were from, and never just wanting to say “Utah” I responded “Originally from Ohio.”

“Not from Cleveland, I hope,” he said. Ben and I glanced at each other.

“Yeah, actually…”

He apparently knows a guy who is a security guard at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and opened up a binder filled with looseleaf notebook paper to write down his name for us.

“Next time you’re there, we’ll have to work out a practical joke for you to play on him, to really freak him out.” He had a huge grin on his face s he mulled it over. “Maybe you can pretend to have ESP. Yeah, that would be great.”

He handed me the paper with just the guy’s name on it and slowly shared more ideas and talked about his friend’s good sense of humor. We just sat there wide-eyed, listening and nodding our heads, alert to the bizarre nature of the moment.

I asked him to write “security guard at R&R Hall of Fame” on the paper, which he took back from me and happily did. He also wrote down his email address so that we could contact him to discuss the details of our plan.

Then the trolley stopped and he looked up and told us he had to get off – that his stop was a long time ago and he’d have to take the next train back to his destination.

We said goodbye and I folded up the paper and put it in my purse. I don’t think that I’ll contact him to plan a practical joke on his friend, but if I ever write his worm comic, I think I will drop him a line. He’ll want to know how it ended, I’m sure.

The Doing time was more tedious and less rewarding than I would have liked it to be, but I tied up some loose ends with my former employer and spent some time on my resume and job sites. 

Then the Thinking time took over and caused bouts of anxiety about The Future and Becoming a Writer. Oh gawd, THIS again? Haven’t I already droned on about my "becoming a writer" drama enough, like back THEN and THEN and pretty much every November when NaNoWriMo comes around? Yes, I have. And yes, it all still scares me.

Reading time was the highlight of the day for me, because I caught up on blogs, news, random internet pages, and a book that one of my coworkers loaned me a couple months ago that sat neglected on my shelf for too long (Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale, which was a good YA story based on a fairy tale but with some distracting choppiness). For me, Reading time generally leads to Thinking time, which then sometimes leads to Writing time. Obviously, it’s Writing time as I write this.

My friend Steev is in the throes of a defining period in his comedy career with Blewt Productions, and I’m wildly happy for him and my other friends from college who have followed down that same path. If they make it big, it’s because of serious hard work and dedication in addition to raw and crazy talent and imagination. I feel really lazy in comparison. But I found inspiration in something that Steev wrote while blogging his adventures in L.A.:

"Act like a big production company, do the things a big production company does, and before you know it, you’re a big production company."

I’m starting to act like a writer and do the things that a writer does. Sooner or later, I hope to discover that I’m actually a writer. Until then, I have a lot of work ahead of me.

(But oh, please, never let me stoop to even whispering the cliche that it turns out I was a writer all along, even if it’s really true.)