It's after Thanksgiving. I'm allowed now.

After cooking apple pie, pecan pie, cheesecake, rolls, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pasta salad, and eating turkey, frog eye salad, mashed potatoes, more pie, and after enjoying the company of friends and family, and after much thanks-giving...

It's Christmas time!!! I've already enjoyed setting up a Christmas tree, cutting out paper snow flakes, buying Christmas presents, making Christmas crafts, decorating an apartment all Christmas-like, and making the season's first Christmas cookies. Now please enjoy my favorite Christmas clip. Go ahead and watch it multiple times. I won't judge.





MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Turns out I'm a sucker for pumpkin

I love fall. Fall means pumpkin. Anything pumpkin is delicious. I love pumpkin, and I overdosed on pumpkin this week--from breakfast to dessert, and everything in between. I had it all, and I loved every last heavenly bite.

My craving pumpkin week started out with making pumpkin pancakes. It was no let-down.

2 c. flour
3 tbl. brown sugar
1 tbl. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 3/4 c. milk
3 eggs
3/4 c. canned pumpkin
1/4 c. oil

Combine dry ingredients. In 2nd bowl combine remaining ingredients. Stir milk mixture into flour mixture until slightly lumpy.

A day or two later, I thoroughly enjoyed pumpkin and sausage pasta. It hit the spot on every level.

Hitting the end of the week, I still had pumpkin left, so I ventured into realms of unknown recipes and made pumpkin blondies, only with butterscotch chips instead of white chocolate chips. The new recipe was far from a disappointment. I hit success.

In between I had tastes of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and "pumpkin jems," which interprates to be something about a pumpkin muffin with some kind of cream cheese filling in the middle. Slightly mysterious, yet definitely scrumptious.

In my perusings, I restocked my pumpkin recipe inventory. I found a recipe for pumpkin nutella swirl bread. There's also always the options of pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin oatmeal, the original pumpkin pie (Thanksgiving is just right around the corner), pumpkin roll, pumpkin chili, pumpkin hot chocolate, pumpkin anything and everything! Bring it on! It seems I ran out of pumpkin though. Oh dear.

The last batch of cookies is meant to be burnt.

Sometimes it's a torrential downpour outside all day, and possibly inside depending on the leak that may or may not exist in the roof. Sometimes I have no choice but to drudge my way through the typhoon to my classes on campus. Sometimes the bottom of my pants get soaked (ew.), water leaks through my shoes (gross.), dampens my socks, and results in the relentless cold feeling that eeks through my toes and body throughout the day. Sometimes school and life weigh on me, overwhelming me. Sometimes it makes me grumpy.

Here's what I should do on said days: get up with a smile and grateful heart while counting my blessings, grab my umbrella, head off for my day, and carry on with my responsibilities--homework, studying, class attending, the usual--all while enjoying the pitter-patter of the rain, and the colorful splash of umbrellas dotting the campus, focusing on the good things of life.

Here's what really happened: I scoffed at my idealistic image of the day while trying, to no avail, to keep my sopping umbrella from flinging water all over my clothes, my backpack, the desk, other people, the whole classroom (you get the idea). I half-heartedly attempted homework assignments until defeat was admitted, found a couch in a quiet corner to take a nap while waiting for my next class to start, came home to ignore the pulling tug at my conscience to study for the looming tests ahead of me, quizzes that need to be taken, labs that need to be redone (because apparently I didn't get it the first go around), and diagnostic reports that need to be written. Rather, I watched epic TV series (cough, cough...Prison Break), listened to Christmas songs (please don't judge), and made pumpkin pancakes and double chocolate nutella cookies.

Looking back on my day, I realized how utterly and hopelessly unproductive it was. That sinking feeling in my stomach began as I pondered the things I could have done, that I should have done. Panic began to overtake my conscience as I thought of the insanely late night ahead of me while I would try to compensate for the significant lack of hard work accomplished throughout the day. These were my thoughts up until I burned the last batch of cookies, up until I had a sudden dawning of inspiration, realization, or maybe just justification. Call it what you may.

Some things are made solely meant to break the rules of our guilty conscience. It's for our own mental health. We have to have days to recoup once in a while. Sometimes it takes a cold, rainy day to get us there. Sometimes we have to realize that we don't have to do everything, that we can't do everything perfect. Sometimes it takes a C on that hard studied for test, that forgotten important meeting, or that overdrafted check to get us to that point--to step back, see the big picture, realize it's not a big deal, and return everything to perspective once again. Sometimes your cookies are going to burn. That's what the last batch is for, and that's okay.

So you have a few slightly darker, crispier than the rest cookies. It happens. They're only a few in the whole batch of delicious morsels anyway.

Confession

I've turned into the very person at whom I've always rolled my eyes. I can't seem to stop though. Allow me to explain: There was a decorating magazine on my table this morning. I looked through the Christmas section. Everytime I look at our front window, I can't help but think, that with a touch of frost, it would exactly resemble a Christmas window (you know the kind--with the white squared panes where a lonely stranger gazes in as he wanders by to see a family happily having a warm Christmas inside). My roommate and I have already strategically planned where we will place mistletoe in such a way that people will be trapped in the entryway. Christmas songs are starting to randomly pop into my head. I make very little effort to be rid of them.

I'm getting excited for Christmas.

It's only mid October.

Typical Day of Learning

Much of the past week was spent in the library, learning lots of things. Here's about how the process went:

• TBI stands for Traumatic Brain Injury.
• Blasterball on my phone is amazingly distracting and addictive.
• For every female that stutters, there are 5 males.
• It's amazing the places you can actually fall asleep when you reach a certain point of exhaustion.
• Areas of communication challenge in TBI (see bullet point 1): semantic, verbal pragmatics, nonverbal pragmatics
• When I put my Flava-craze Tropical Twist chapstick on right before I drink a bunch of water it tastes like juice.
• High school seniors aren't the only ones that suffer from seniorities.
• Something about z scores, standard deviations, normal curves, sampling, blah, blah, blah...
• Even if I'm not particularly tired, I can still manage to fall asleep studying this real special information.
• Wait until you're fully awakened before going to the bathroom after waking up from a nap in the library or you might stumble into the wrong bathroom: Lesson learned.
• There are 23 muscles that attach to the Hyoid Bone, most of which assist in the speech process.
• Fact: The day you don't shower or put much care into outward appearance is the day you will run into the majority of people you know.
• If I don't focus better, I will do very poorly on the tests I have this week...but then again, I kind of quit caring. Vicious cycle.

It's been a productive week.

Characters, real life ones

Disclaimer: All names in this post have been changed, with the exception of one. This person's name just adds far too much to his/her profile to be sacrificed.

Questionable characters from my day:

• Old man with a briefcase in a bowler hat swiftly walking/almost running past me down the infamous stretch of stairs on campus. I have no idea to where he was in such a hurry, but he looked important.


• Extremely happy young man riding on his moped--complete with long blond hair flapping in the wind and what could quite possibly be the biggest, goofiest grin I've ever seen. I have no idea what was making him so happy, but it made me smile.


• 3 boys dressed in pristine, white lab coats holding clipboards gathered around innocent ducks at a pond. I have no idea what they were studying, but it was weird.

Epic characters from my life:

• Dick - Dick and I crossed paths my first semester of college where I was friends with some of his roommates. He was a short, fiery young man who bicked his head and wore a doo rag. He was an ex cop, and somehow decided it gave him the liberty to carry around a gun on person everywhere he went. Although it was not usually loaded, He felt no inhibitions in pulling it out once in a while for show.
  
• Mr. Bee, the high school band teacher - Mr Bee is a loud, rather energetic teacher who was not necessarily a favorite among students. Not only did he frequently spit while he talked, but would have won the award for longest distance in spit track. The clarinets and flutes were among those unfortunate souls sitting in the front row. I played the clarinet. I'd like to think he had a slight anger problem in addition to his inability to confine his saliva to his own mouth. He would get really frustrated with us sometimes. There's a hole in the wall that fits his head perfectly to prove it.

• Renee - Renee was one of my many piano teachers. She is from Hong Kong, and is the sweetest girl who just loves music, and loves it played right. So as to follow along to make sure it was being played right, she would sit extremely close to the piano, and in effect, extremely close to me. When I played to loud, I would find her hands right next to mine in the "stop" gesture, accompanied with a shoosh. The usual "shhhhhh," however, was adapted to her accented "sssss." On the other hand, when I played not quite loud enough, I would hear a lofty "louder!" as she tried to be heard over my piano banging. I always knew, however, when I played at a satisfactory level due to the slight swaying I would feel coming from her direction.
  
• Dr. Spall - I have never met somebody with a more dry sense of humor. Dr. Spall is one of my professors here at school, and is every classic stereotype of a college professor. He can be found through the vast majority of the class teaching in a monotonous tone, with his back to the students, scribbling madly on the board. To top it all off, he looks like Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter minus the revolting rat look.

• Unknown mystery man - This treasure was found in a different country, and was equipped with a leather jacket, extremely reflective aviator sunglasses, and a motorcycle helmet tucked in the crook of his arm. He walked with a definite purpose in a slight saunter with the tiniest upward tilt of his chin, never lowering his gaze past the horizon, not even in a glance to descend the staircase (try it, it's hard.). Without saying a word, He demanded attention from all eyes as he walked by, yet his demeanor screamed he could not have cared less, let alone even notice.
  
• Last, but not least, let's discuss one more person, one I have known for as long as I can remember/is me. She refuses to be titled OCD, yet she gets her underwear in a bunch if she finds the toothpaste has been squeezed from the middle, or finds crumbs in her butter. She walks around failing miserably whilst attempting to be the female version of previous said mystery man, only to find herself in a collapsed bundle at the bottom of the stairs. She tries to pull off a British accent once in a while, but is never successful, yet still manages to think it's cool.

Moral of the story: I don't care how normal we think we are, we cannot escape our own idiosyncrasies. Might as well just let 'em show. It's what makes life fun, and maybe somebody else will even be slightly entertained by them.

The summer from where?

My summer "vacation" has come and gone and here I am back in another new place to live with mixed feelings as I wait for school to start on Monday. A rather large chunk of my summer was spent in agony studying for and taking the GRE, sucking everything out of me in the process, that is with the exception of the dread I would feel every night knowing I had to continue it the next day.

I could be found sitting at these tables bending over these piles of vocab cards everyday.

Another chunk was spent turning green at the grinder while I pulvarized feed samples into a powder that results in hazy air and irritated senses accompanied with itchy rashes in my elbow pits. Although not particularly fun, it was surprisingly a nice reprieve from the hours of studying many days, but other days it just turned me into a She-Hulk--green and grumpy.

I survived the dreary, however, and managed to come out conquerer, because look what I can do now...

The impecunious dilettante pretended to be a polyglot to impress the debutante, but as he spoke garrulously in different languages he didn't know on various pastiches, he made many solecisms. The effronteric girl who was initially excited to find a fellow speaker of her language who also had exorbitant ardor for art felt lugubrious at the boys affection and vituperated him for it, and then made a tangential comment to change the subject.

...make ridiculous long run-on sentences filled with big words I'm not sure I'm using right.

Not only did I survive, but I even managed to have a little bit of fun too. All the family came to visit and see the new house. It was one big party.

My parents and I took a trip to Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia where we did all sorts of fun things, including ZIP LINING!

I also better include the day trip I took with a bunch of friends to Cour de Alene to play in Silverwood.

Yes, apparantly girls still have cooties and boys still come from Mars.

Last and certainly not least, my summer went out with a bang when my old roommate came to visit where we played around Seattle and Moses Lake.

So even though I complain about how unexciting the majority of my summer was, it wasn't all bad at all, and it was definitely memorable, for the better and the worse.