Wine + Me + Silent Auction = My Football!

So last night, Lee and I went to this charity dinner and silent auction for one of his clients. (Lee does IT stuff that I don't understand. Have I mentioned that?) As we're getting in the car to leave for the event, I mention that we don't really have any money so we should keep the drinking and bidding to a minimum if at all. Lee comments that his boss said that bidding was fun and of course we should bid. Okay, whatever, we'll see.



Well everyone got two drink tickets and I'm a bit of a light-weight anyway and then there was free wine on the table and Christmas is coming up...

So we started by bidding on this mediocre piece of art but lose interest once it reached $20.

And then I find the autographed UK stuff. (GO CATS!) The Coach Cal autographed basketball and book were clearly my first choice, but that was a little pricey. I enjoyed bidding for the Coach Brooks football though and was surprised/excited/scared when I secured my Christmas present for $60.



For the rest of the evening I struggled with some buyer's remorse. I did just spend $60 on a football. I don't even know how to throw a football! (Ehh...this one is just for display anyway.) But as Lee often reminded me, I didn't buy a $60 football, I made a $60 donation for which I received a football. And it's a wonderful cause.

I am really excited about my football though. We can watch the games together. I can hold it and pace with it during intense football moments because Zoey dosen't like it when I get anxious and start pacing with her. 

My Journey to Make Alfredo Sauce

April 2005 Caitlin and I are in London, England for the semester. Since we're poor and in one of the most expensive cities in the world, we cook in a lot. This is my first time really cooking so Caitlin's been doing an excellent job of making sure I know the difference between a clove of garlic and a whole big thing of garlic.
I decided that I would make Alfredo sauce one night since it's one of my favorites. However, as I go to make it I realize that the cream we bought the night before had indeed expired the day before. It smelled okay, so I proceeded. In the end, it tasted like crap. I don't blame the cream, but something just didn't turn out right.

(Side story: Caitlin decided to just go with plain noodles because she was afraid of the day-old cream. However, I accidentally poured the sauce on hers and then had to rinse her noodles. I think she's just learning about this now. Oops.)

November 2006 I try to make Alfredo sauce again. Things aren't going well so I call for the assistance of my roommate Jenn, who is honestly the best cook I know. Despite Jenn's emergency whisking, the damage had been done. It turned out mediocre.

October 11, 2009 SUCCESS!!! ALFREDO SAUCE SUCCESS!!! Third time's a charm! I would like to thank this recipe, and the helpful comment about adding the butter and melting that, then mixing in the cream, before slowly adding the Parmesan. Tasty-tastiness!

Birthday Lazies

My birthday was on Monday. I am 26 which is a pretty boring age. I've decided it's the Year to Remember to Use Eye Cream Every Night (because I just remember a couple nights a week).

No good pictures were taken of me on this day, as evidenced here:



The only decent picture of me, is of me and Lee, except the way it's angled my tank top looks like a brightly colored bra under a see-through sweater. Words cannot begin to describe how much I am opposed to visible brightly colored bras (some exceptions regarding tank tops and summer).



Oh well.

I've had a difficult time shaking the birthday lazies. Have I always been this lazy around my birthday? I've been using the "It's my birthday" excuse since last Friday. I'm hoping to shake it off and start being a responsible, pro-active, non-smelly apartment 26-year-old today. *fingers crossed*

Happy National Poetry Day!

My senior year of college, to procrastinate from writing a paper that was very likely about a poem, I made a list of my Top 10 Favorite Poems. Sadly, I have lost this list, but I will try to recreate it for you now. I think I can recall all the poems, and the 11th poem that I struggled to find a spot for, but the order is a little fuzzy so I've broken it down as well as I can. Now it's more like My 11 Favorite Poems in a Mildly Particular Order.

Cute story before we begin: Lee and I had been dating for a couple weeks and this list came up in conversation. This was when I still had the list. I shared the list with Lee and he read all of them that he could find on the internet! How sweet! This was when I started to suspect he was worth keeping around. ;)


My books are organized alphabetically by author by genre. Here's the poetry section.

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
2. One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Rest of the top tier:

Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
Love is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
My House by Nikki Giovanni

Bottom tier:

Sonnet X from Astrophel and Stella by Sir Phillip Sydney
Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds...) by Shakespeare
Roma by Sarah Arvio (If you click on the link and click on "Read Excerpt", it's the first one.)
Clear Night by Charles Wright
Song Five (Give Me One Thousand Kisses/Da Mi Basia Mille) by Catullus

No More Fancy Pants

I'm one of the lucky ones. I can wear jeans to work. If there's a major ice storm, I'll even wear sweat pants. Sometimes I'll wear T-shirts and sweatshirts. Yes, it's a charmed life I lead.

I have not always been this lucky. I have had to conform to business casual standards. Friday was all the more valuable if it was Casual Friday. For awhile, I could wear heels semi-comfortably because I got used to it since I wore them everyday. (My current policy is no more heels. Ever. Kitten heels are okay sometimes. I heart flats.)

But now, I wear the jeans. Everyday. Except yesterday.

Last night I went to go see A Chorus Line at the Kentucky Center. Combine that with the feeling that I need more casual non-jeans pants because I have three pairs of jeans and yeah, the math on how often I wear them and do laundry is not math to be proud of. Plus it gets a little boring. So yesterday, to prepare for my evening outing and jazz up my work wear, I wore dress slacks. All day. And by 10 a.m. I was miserable.

Yesterday/Today by KatieEarley featuring Old Navy

From now on, no more fancy pants. Unless it's church, a funeral, or some other rare fancy event in which I will keep my jeans handy.

The Best Scrambled Eggs Ever

My Grandma made the best scrambled eggs ever. Mom (No offense.), could never replicate Grandma's scrambled eggs. Mom makes excellent monkey bread, pot roast, the sweetest sweet tea (which will someday have a post of its own) and the smoothest mashed potatoes in the world, but she never made it to Grandma-level with the scrambled eggs.

It was a sore point on Saturday mornings. Mom would make scrambled eggs, present them to the sister and I to taste, and the verdict was always, "Good, but not as good as Grandma's."

Grandma's eggs were cheesy and fluffy. While Mom would attempt scrambled eggs with shredded cheese, sliced cheese, cheddar, swiss, and who knows what else, there is only one cheese for this job. And by any rational arguments, it's not really even a cheese.

It's the Velveeta cheese log. Diced.



Once the egg and milk (and salt of course) are adequately whisked, you add the diced cheese and whisk a little more. Then proceed as normal.



These really are the best eggs in the world.



Lee prefers his without cheese, which I will never understand. It even looks inferior.

Katie Learns to Knit

Now that I've conquered the worlds of sewing and cooking (sort of), it's time for knitting. One more year (or ten) and I'll totally be able to take Martha Stewart in some sort of domestic duel.

After knitting and purling for a couple hours with Aunt Billie last week, it is now my job to take her awesome vintage knitting guide and make a scarf. So far all I have to show for my efforts are the knitting guide, but I'm surely going to have that scarf (mostly) done by 7 p.m. on Wednesday.



I have already ambitious knitting goals, of course. Can I make this baby blanket in time for a November baby shower? If not, I already have a back-up, easier (I think.) plan: baby cocoon.

UPDATE I tried to knit on lunch today at work and the book was of no help. I've had to turn to YouTube and I think I might have figured it out. I have 36 decent-looking stitches cast so now I'm ready to knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl...