Shoe Sale!

Dan's been complaining that I haven't written a new blog.  He also complains that I have too many shoes.  So I'm giving away a bunch of shoes on my blog in hopes he'll stop complaining about both things.  I told him this idea and he said, "You mean you're gonna write a blog to Jess telling her she can have your shoes?"  Yeah, basically.  And that brings us to the first pair.

Purple and teal plaid, open toe, Baker's Shoes, Size 8

Jess Egan has attempted to steal these shoes from my closet on more than one occasion.  She gets first dibs.  And only if she passes on them will they become fair game to the general Blogger public.  You know you all want them.  I can see you gasping through the screen now.

Steve Madden, Black leather, Size 8

Only worn once.  While going through my closet, I put these on to show Dan.  I paraded out into the living room and said, "What do you think?  Keep or give away?"  He said, "Those look like [an invitation to engage in adult activity] heels."  I definitely don't need to send that vibe out, but if you want to send that vibe out I'm not here to judge, I'm just here to give you the shoes.

Purple, open toe flats, Old Navy, Size 8

So I bought these at Old Navy.  I guess for the same reason you buy anything at Old Navy, they're cute and cheap.  Then I never wore them, as, again, is the case with most things I buy at Old Navy. So now they can be yours for the low low price of not-a-damn thing.

Brown Cowboy Boots, Cathy Jean, Size 8

Cowboy boots...what can I say?  I bought them for a Halloween Costume.  Yeah, cowgirl.  Then I lent them out twice to someone who needed them for a cowgirl costume.  You can feel free to use them for whatever you want, no cowgirl outfit required.

Tan Mary Janes, Nine West, Size 8

Ok, yes, these are a little boring.  But if you're forced to dress up for work like I used to be, these are your best friend.  They're closed-toe so they adhere to any pesky shoe rules your office might have, plus they're low, easy-to-walk-in (or run, depending on your situation) dress shoes.  Slightly more worn than the rest, but still in good condition.

Grey Suede Bootie Flats, Steve Madden, Size 8

I thought these were super cute and seemed to be all the bootie/flats rage.  Then I got them home and remembered I'm 5'3" when I jump in the air so I probably don't need boots that emphasize shortness.

Shiny Mustard Yellow, Chinese Laundry, Size 8

These are totally, 100% comfortable.  Like pillows on your feet.  That's why I've chosen to get rid of them.  Trust me.  Anyway, they're an excellent shoe if you need a POP of color.

Purple & Black plaid, Steve Madden, Size 8, run small

Caption says it all.  They were cute.  They were on sale.  I brought them home.  I wore them once.  They hurt my toes.  Now they collect dust.  I'll clean the dust off if you want them.

BCBG, Size 8, Multi-Colored Wedges

So hip, so modern, so not made for walking long distances.  If your main job in life is to stand still and look pretty, these are your shoes.  They're worth the sacrifice.  I think I'll miss these most of all...

Grey, Keds, Size 8

And last but not least, these comfy kicks.  Worn once, then sat in my closet until I realized no person in their right mind needed 3 pair of grey sneakers.  These can easily be funked up with colorful shoelaces, which was my original plan when I bought them, but now I'm too tired for funk.

Seriously, if you want any of these shoes, just comment below or message me.  If I like you, or if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, they're yours free of charge.  If I don't like you, you have to pay shipping.  I'm not a shoe bank, ya know.  So why am I giving away so many pretty shoes?  Because Goddammit, my feet hurt and my closet is small.

 

Christmas of Firsts

This was the first Christmas I ever...

- spent with Dan. Last year he was at sea doing secret squirrel Coast Guard stuff, and while we celebrated Christmas during one of the few days he had off last December, it sucked pretty hardcore to be away from him on Christmas day.

 - had pizza for Christmas dinner.  Most people have turkey, some have ham, we had a large cheese pizza and a side of chicken wings.  I was fully prepared to make a real, big-kid Christmas dinner, but Dan convinced me to wait until Sunday.  In his family, it's tradition to sit at home in your p.j.'s all day on Christmas and play with the new toys Santa brought you.  Then on the 26th, head to your family's house for the big dinner.  So I absolutely sat in my p.j.'s all day, played with my Christmas presents and opted to make our big dinner of ham, pineapple stuffing and potatoes on the 26th.

 - watched Goonies.  Don't judge me.  I was only 3 when that movie came out, and I didn't watch anything but Disney movies until I was about 10.  By the way, mom, that shit wasn't cool.  You should have rented cooler movies for me to watch.

 - watched Top Gun.  Again, don't judge me.  And see previous bullet point for explanation.  Dan is constantly amazed at the number of "classic, must-see" movies I've never seen.  So I bought him these two on blu-ray for Christmas and we had a "Jamie needs to catch up on the last 20 years of cinematic excellence" marathon.

 - received a piece of a Quaker Oats box as a Christmas present.  Dan ordered me an album for Christmas, and when he found out it wouldn't arrive in time, he printed out the album's cover art, with a note saying when it would arrive, scotch taped it to a piece of Quaker Oats box and wrapped it in Christmas paper.  Gotta say, it was the most creative gift I ever unwrapped:)

 - didn't go home to Kansas to spend Christmas with my family.  Typically at Christmas I get shuttled from house to house, help my Grandma wrap hoards of gifts, then go into a diabetic coma after eating sugary goodies for a week straight.  And that's all tons of fun, but staying home was definitely nice and relaxing.  At least it was relaxing between the hourly work-related fire drills.  And Dad, the invitation still stands for next year!

Thanksgiving! The Live Blog

9:03 pm: The night before

Something I noticed between shoving piles of delicious food into my face at my Grandma's Thanksgiving dinners was that she always had the pies ready before anything else.  In fact, she baked them the day before!  Clever granny.  As Dan and I embark on our first Thanksgiving together (and without the fam), I thought, "I too must implement this ingenious bit of time management skills!"  And so, when I finally stopped working my 'real job' at 9:00 tonight, I set to work baking my first ever fresh-from-scratch-(almost) Apple Pie.  So I cheated a little and bought ready-made crusts...it happens.
I peeled and sliced the apples, mixed the ingredients and threw them into the pie crust.  On a whim I topped off the filling with a few dabs of Orange Blossom Honey.  Then it was time to cover it up with the top crust.  A few days ago I thought it would be cool to cut designs into the top of the pie.  Then Dan convinced me to do a weave like you see in all those cookbooks from 1976.  Now I don't so much give a shit.  So I slapped on the top crust, sans any fanciness, only to discover it, uh, wasn't exactly proportionate.  It seemed much bigger than the bottom crust.  No bother!  I just peeled off the excess and sealed 'er up.  Cut a few slits in the top and into the oven it went for 40-50 minutes.


9:30 pm: Turkey-lurky for me, turkey-lurky for you
Time to brine the turkey!  I did this once before with Champagne.  It didn't really taste much different than any other turkey I'd had, but I decided to do it again merely for the cool-kid factor of cooking with Champagne.


9:40 pm: Ten minutes later
Realize turkey is still, in fact, quite frozen.  No Champagne brine this year.  But then I realize this means I can drink the Champagne, and I feel much better.


9:50 pm: Time to take a peek at the pie!
It looks lumpy.  Quite lumpy.  In fact, I didn't know pies could look like that.  Even though I know it's nearly midnight in Kansas, I post the following message to my aunt's Facebook: I'm baking an apple pie right now, my first ever.  The top is lumpy.  Is the top supposed to be lumpy?  I don't think so.  And I put honey in it.  The recipe didn't call for honey.  But I put in some honey.  Maybe that wasn't such a great idea.  It's probably burning from the inside out.  Crap.  This is what you're missing.


10:15 pm: That's the pie?
I google "How to tell if an apple pie is done" and by the search results determine that my apple pie is done.  I remove it from the oven and discover part of my crust has sprung a leak and the filling is seeping out into the pie dish.  Perhaps that excess top crust I so hastily ripped off was there for a reason.  This kind of shit would never happen to Sara Lee.


7:30 am: Thanksgiving!
The puppies let us sleep in a whole hour - yeah!  First order of business is to call the fam back in Kansas to see if they're surviving.  The phone gets passed around for an hour while I attempt to get the turkey out of the fridge, make some coffe and start cooking the appetizers (meatballs and deviled eggs!)  


9:30 am: I forgot to get ice cream.
Open my laptop to update a few things and make the mistake of checking my work email.  One hour and multiple angry emails later, work "crisis" is averted.  (The use of quotation marks around the word crisis indicates that even though others viewed this as a crisis I, in fact, could not have cared less.)

Dan took the doggies to the dog park and stopped at the store to get vanilla ice cream for our apple "pie" (use of quotations around the word pie indicates that it doesn't really look like a pie.)  There's another person already in the aisle grabbing a tub of vanilla ice cream when he gets there.  They stop, look at Dan and say, "Apple pie?"

10:23 am: Let's eat turkey in a big brown shoe!
The turkey is finally thawed enough that I can clean it and take out the neck and giblets.  According to multiple videos on You Tube, these are usually stored in a plastic bag inside the cavity that you can easily pull out.  There's no plastic bag in my turkey's cavity.  Shit.  I make Dan shine a flashlight into the turkey so I can see what's going on down there.  "There's the neck," he says, "grab it and pull it out!"  Of course, like I do this all the time.  I pull the neck out while simultaneously making a few gagging noises. "Where are the giblets?" I ask.  "Look up it's ass," he said.  Technically, I was already looking up it's ass, but I knew what he meant.  I flipped the bird over and found another hole with a handy-dandy bag of giblets for me to pull out and throw away.  That Dan, he's so smart.  Into the oven goes the bird!

12:30 pm: As in Blanche Devereaux?
I decide to scrap the macaroni and cheese bake as nothing over 1" tall will fit in the oven with that bird in there.  I prep the taters and get those boiling for mashed potatoes then move on to snapping the green beans.  I purchased 2lbs of fresh green beans at the farmers market a couple weeks ago and put them in the freezer so they'd stay good until Thanksgiving.  The idea was to thaw them, snap them, then sauté them like I do all the time with fresh green beans.  But when they were done thawing, the beans were soggy.  Whoops.  Dan's mom informed us via phone from Pennsylvania that you're supposed to blanch vegetables before freezing them in order to keep them crisp.  The only Blanche I'm aware of is the one on Golden Girls.  Lesson learned.  I make an executive decision to turn sautéed green beans into green bean casserole and send Dan back to the store for fried onions.  Now I just have to find a dish to make it in that's less than 1" tall.

1:27 pm: Sorry 'bout that taters:(
I seemed to have inadvertently whipped the potatoes into submission.  But, upon further inspection they are quite tasty.  So I decide to pass it off like that's what mashed potatoes are supposed to look like.

1:42 pm: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...hey, what's with the Green Bean Casserole?
Ok, so the executive decision to switch to green bean casserole probably would have worked better if I'd gotten new green beans.  Apparently the soggy ones were retaining water and in the course of baking, transferred said water to the fried onions, which turned soggy, but the green beans ended up crisper than before.  I find this odd, and very unappealing, but the dogs seem to love it.

2:15 pm: You better start googling it.
I inform Dan it's his job to carve the turkey.  He plays it off like he has no idea how to do this, so I tell him to google it quick because everything is done.  He knew exactly how to carve it...slacker.

2:30 pm: Time to eat!
We declare the turkey to be delicious and the potatoes to be perfect (as long as you close your eyes).  At this point Camper has been trolling the kitchen for a solid 5 hours.  I reward him with a piece of the delicious turkey and he takes 3 of my fingers with it.  Ouch.

All-in-all they day seemed to be successful for my first Thanksgiving without the fam.  I only ruined one dish and only sent Dan to the store twice.  If only one of those times hadn't been to get an ingredient for the dish I later ruined:-/  Sorry hun!

Now, let's see about this deformed apple/pie/cobbler/baked thing-a-ma-jig...