Happy 4th of July!

I think that I always think every holiday is my favorite when it's here, but right now the 4th of July is my favorite holiday.  Come Thanksgiving I will probably say that is my favorite holiday.  Maybe they're tied.  Here are some reasons why I love today so much:

1. It's totally normal to spend the day at the beach.  I like any reason to encourage beach-going.

2. The holiday food consists of BBQ and other grilled deliciousness.

3. Fireworks!

4. Apple pie.  Or any other kind of pie really.

5. People dye their baked goods and other foods red and blue.  I love good use of food coloring.

Happy Birthday America!

Well-Balanced Meal

Having a bowl of canned green beans and then a mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwich for lunch is healthy, right?

After all, they're both green...

Isn't that how it works?

Things I love: Someone else doing my eyebrows

Today I went to the Aveda school to get my eyebrows waxed.  I wouldn't have gone all the way down there just for that, but Kathryn wanted a hair cut, and I am not going to turn down the opportunity to have someone else deal with my eyebrows.

I hate plucking them.  Excuse me, tweezing.  (The girl who did them today said "we pluck chickens, we tweeze our brows".)  It takes forever and I often make them lopsided.  I'd much rather pay $10 every few months for someone else to thread/wax them and then make a half-hearted effort to keep them up myself in between.

I've gotten them waxed at Aveda once before, so I assumed it would be the same routine.  However, as soon as I get there the receptionist walks me past the little waxing station in the front, opens a door in the back, motions me in, and leaves.  The room is pitch black very dimly lit, and I immediately text Kathryn "she just closed me in a dark room".  After my eyes adjust, I realize it's a waiting room.  A very dark waiting room.  It was a little odd.

After waiting there about 10 minutes, a girl comes and takes me back to a room, and I realize this is actually the fancy spa part of Aveda that's supposed to be soothing and relaxing.  Other rooms had people getting massages and facials.  Uhh, hi, can I change my mind?  I want that too.

To sum it up: best eyebrow waxing experience ever.  She took like half an hour to make sure they looked good.  This was way better than the front of the salon little waxing booth where you're done in 5 minutes.  And still only $10!  I need to figure out how to get that again the next time I go.  "Hi, I'd like to make an appointment for an eyebrow waxing, but can I make it for the fancy back room instead of the front one?  Thanks."

English Muffins!

I go through food phases. I find one thing I enjoy eating, and then I eat that thing for many meals at a time. It's probably not very healthy, but it is convenient when you're only feeding yourself and always have leftovers. They get eaten.

Lately my food phase has been whole wheat english muffins. In case you don't buy english muffins, they're almost $4 for a pack. I didn't buy them for a very long time because that was just more than I was willing to splurge on bread. However, I saw them on sale for buy one get one free recently, and for the first time it occurred to me that "no, I can't eat all those before they get stale, but I can freeze them!". (Little did I know that no, actually, I can eat them all before they go stale.)

I decided that making english muffins would probably be cheaper than buying them. (Okay you got me, I ran out of english muffins and was too lazy to drive to the store. Only I would think that mixing dough and letting yeast rise and spending two hours making english muffins is "more lazy" than driving half a mile to Publix.) I looked for recipes on the internet, and the internet delivered.

I used this recipe because her blog (I'm assuming it's a her, but maybe it's a him) looked legit and the pictures looked delicious. I didn't have high hopes of mine turning out actually looking like english muffins, but I figured I would be happy with just some homemade bread. However, I followed all the instructions and MINE LOOK LIKE ENGLISH MUFFINS!

I can't find my camera, and my phone isn't connecting to my computer, but just take my word for it. They look like actual english muffins.

And they are delicious.

I made half the recipe and wound up with 7 of them. This should last me a day or two.

Etsy

I can lose hours of time by "just looking at one thing" on Etsy. It's never one thing.

The other day I was perusing Etsy's recommendations of "what I might like", and I came across this:

It is a "Custom Embryo Tie Tac" by NB Designs. A little creepy yes, but I could see the appeal if I was in that field of science. It's very creative. What really went through my mind was "what in the world have I favorited on Etsy for them to think I want that??"

I did figure it out. I favorited this very cute sloth necklace sold in the same store:

I love sloths. It's a life dream to hug one.

TED talk of the night

I love TED talks.  I especially love all of them by Jacqueline Novogratz.  She is a smart, smart lady and she makes me think.

Free Art

I found this website today:

http://indiefixx.com/Feed_your_soul

They have free art prints for download as pdfs.  And they are amazing.  And I can't decide which ones I want to print out first.

Things I love: chocolate.

But who doesn't?  I think this is Dove's way of nicely saying "no really, you shouldn't eat this entire bag by yourself, please don't".

Things I love: Baking

Well, I really love to eat baked goods.  And the dough stage of baked goods.  And the final, fresh from the oven product.  So I suppose baking is just a secondary love to all of that.

I made cookies today! Chocolate chip, my absolute favorite:

To let you in on a little secret, here's how I bake:

1. Start craving cookies.

2. Find an acceptable looking recipe online.

3. Wash all of the dishes that you need (because really, why would they be clean already?).

4. Begin to get out ingredients.

5. Search the fridge in depth for that butter you know you have somewhere in there.

6. Clean out all of the old food from the fridge because it's gross and crowded.

7. Find the applesauce you were going to use as oil, and then throw it away because it's gone bad.

8. Resign yourself to not baking anything, because you don't have what you need and it's better for you this way anyway.

9. Get antsy and decide to make it work.

10. Start putting ingredients into the bowl, in approximately the right proportions that the recipe says.

11. Use substitutions that may or may not work (shortening for oil? sure they're the same).

12. Get tired of using measuring devices and start just eyeballing it.  

13. Change the type of flour and sugar because it'll taste so much better that way! (Or more realistically, because you're out of normal flour.  Self rising is fine as long as i don't add the baking powder, right?)

14. Just keep adding things until it looks about the right consistency.

15. Take the bowl out of the mixing stand and bring it to the couch.  Eat it while writing about how delicious it is.

Oh, you want to know how the cookies actually baked?  I'll let you know when I bake them.