I'm gonna make this look good

I pulled my hair out of my face today just to realize I'd moved enough back to show off a new highlight I'm sporting.

I've seen smaller ones around my hairline. Those first started appearing when I was 24 (when K was in Iraq and I was planning our second wedding). But this one is a full strand, somewhere in the middle of all my hair.

I'm pretty unphased about the gray itself. Honestly, I'm just excited to see that it's still curly. My hair was straight until I hit puberty, so I've worried that it could return to that texture just as easily as it switched before.

Another bonus: This strand totally matches my earrings!

Thank God for kickball

I really, really, really hate my job. I've been compiling a pro & con list about it in my head lately. Unfortunately, I'm probably going to just keep toughing it out because I like using my degree (it means those student loans and college education weren't a waste), I like having a paycheck, and I like feeling like I'm contributing to society (not that not working means you're not contributing).

But today is Wednesday. That means my night has in store for me a fun time with 20 great friends. And on this special kickball night, we have a later game, which means we're all gathering to eat pizza & have a beer before playing one of our favorite teams on the field later tonight.

I need this.

Good thing baking's my specialty!

K and I spent last weekend in PA visiting his family for Easter. I realized early last week that I wasn't at all excited about heading up there.

I guess it makes sense to not be gungho about driving so long (in one weekend) to spend the holidays with someone else's family, but they're my family too, even if they're not the family I grew up spending holidays with.

K's family definitely has different traditions than mine. Since they're Italian, pasta is pretty much always on the menu for holidays. That and antipasto. Both are delicious. Those are the staples, and all the others vary. Most of them, I haven't heard of.

It's very different from my family. With my family, there's always a ton of meat on the menu -- part of being a butcher's family. And my grandma and great-aunt make sure to keep us full with everything else. There are veggies, salad, iced tea (sweet, of course), and delicious rolls (though those aren't always homemade).

But the part I look forward to most is the dessert. The fruit salad in the red Jell-o (with nuts and other goodies) and the pies and the cookies (and fudge at Christmas!) that my grandma makes from scratch. They're all delicious, but the best one of all? Her peach cobbler. It's to-DIE-for delicious.

The dessert table at my grandma's house last Christmas. Everything here is made from scratch. And it doesn't even show her homemade fudge! (There's more!)

K's family, though, has no dessert table. When I spent Christmas with them last year, I couldn't wait to see what they had for dessert at the end of the meal. (Who doesn't look forward to Christmas dessert?)

Only there was none. There were only two tiny plates of tiny cookies. One looked like chocolate, though, and the other looked like some sort of cookie rolled in powdered sugar (my guess was a pecan cookie or something). I could handle those. Except that when I ate the cookies, the "chocolate" one was a pepper cookie, and the pecan powdered sugar cookie was something that tasted like black licorice (yuck!).

Last week, as I remembered that disappointment, I realized what my purpose was at K's family gatherings: to make dessert!

Obviously, I was going to go straight for the big guns: grandma's recipes. I could try her delicious peach cobbler, or go for her famous Italian cream cake. I let K make the decision, and he chose Italian cream.

I'd only made it once, and that was with Grandma when I went back home after Christmas in 2010 -- over a year ago.

It's one thing to bake with Grandma. It's quite another to try to bake like her ... and without her help.

So I did what I always do in this situation: Start baking, and keep the phone handy. I called my mom a couple times to decipher Grandma's recipe (She doesn't give all the instructions, and the recipe was in a weird order, since she had rattled it off to me off the top of her head.), and I called Grandma for the big stuff (Why can't I get my egg whites to look like meringue? How long do I have to wait to assemble the cake after it's done baking? [Can I wait a couple hours?] Will it be safe to store the cake in the garage when it's 50 degrees outside, since the refrigerator is full?).

In true MLIB style, I managed to make a pretty serious cosmetic error -- I was so worried about properly "folding in" my egg whites (now in proper consistency, thanks to my stand mixer and the super-duper high setting) to the rest of the batter that I forgot to fold in the pecans and coconut along with the egg whites. And I didn't realize it until I had already divided the cake batter evenly among the three cake pans.

My mom had stressed to me how important it is to properly fold the final ingredients. If you do it wrong, it evidently makes a pretty big difference. Do it right, and your cake is fluffy and fabulous.

So I sprinkled the coconut and pecans on top of the batter in each of the pans. I folded them into one of the pans, but I felt like it looked a bit flat. I just left the others and hoped they would somehow fall in as the cake baked.

And for extra measure, I added some pecans and coconut in the icing between the layers.

I was nervous the next day when it came time to cut into the cake and give it a try. K's family knew it was my first attempt at the cake and that I'd made the whole thing from scratch (including the icing).

The verdict?

Delicious. In fact, my FIL couldn't believe I'd never baked a cake (from scratch) before.

From now on, I'll never have to ask what I can bring for the holidays with K's family!

Last one of these I'll see for a while ...

Full, anyway ...

Not that we're planning on starting anything or trying anything or expanding anything ... just taking steps to be ready when we're ready.

Yikes ...

I may not be awesome, but I'm not un-awesome!

I am not that awesome at kickball. I kick inconsistently, I can't throw as hard as I want, and sometimes I just feel like a total girl (in a bad way) when I'm playing.

What I can do is catch. I like combatting my girlyness (-iness?) by jumping right in front of a ball that's screaming right at me. If I have to let it bounce off my face to get it, I'm going to stop that ball, dammit. That mindset has worked well for me, and it's gotten me a fantastic spot as our third baselady.

It's an important base, and I don't like seeing people reach it.

I told you I don't like seeing people there.

I tell the people in my running group that the biggest challenge in running and cycling (in a lot of things, actually) is the mental part. I've seen people cry because the remaining distance of a race is more than they think they can handle ... and I've seen them so proud of themselves when they hit the point they know the actually can finish. It's awesome.

Last night, I realized I might have the same problem with kickball. When I go up to kick (my big weakness), I am thinking negatively: Great, I'm going to kick it up, and it's gonna get caught. Or if I somehow manage to get a good bunt, I'm not gonna get to first in time. A guaranteed out. 

Even if I do kick well, I manage to find some fault in it -- either I didn't get to score, or someone else got out (If I kicked it better, they defense wouldn't have gotten to the ball). This is just how I play.

So imagine my surprise when I saw our post-game write-up last night. My kick actually brought in my team's final point in the game. Somehow, I hadn't realized that.

I guess I need to take my own advice to my running group.

And even if I'm not awesome in every aspect of kickball, evidently if I stop looking for my errors, I'm making some pretty dang good contributions!

Screw you too, job!

I have officially been in my job for a year. Yesterday was the day anniversary, but today was the actual date anniversary. Now, no matter how you look at it, I have been sitting at that desk in that job for a full year. Three hundred sixty-five days.

At my first job out of college, they surprised me with goodies on my one-year anniversary (there were actually two of us who started on the same date, so we got double the goodies!). 

At my second job (the one I had to leave when we moved to VA), my one-year anniversary was even better. I arrived to work to find a large gift back on my desk, filled with the company's standard, cutesy one-year gift: a retro silver lunch pail (with thermos, I believe) and silver CD case with the company logo. My boss took me out to lunch, and the other people on my team came along. We'd have drinks at lunch, and there'd probably be an afternoon beer at my desk to continue the celebration. 

Obviously not all workplaces are as laid-back (or awesome) as that job, so I know not to expect anything like that again. 

However, I do expect some sort of mention. I mean, maybe it's silly, but I think it's a big deal to reach one year at work. It should definitely be celebrated with a cake, or lunch, or even a half "Congrats!", half "Thanks for your hard work" email. (For the record, I'm all for any excuse to eat cake -- especially at work.)

But here, at this job I've been uncertain about all along ... at this job where I make about half of what I made in Dallas ... where I can't wear jeans daily to work, or bring my dog, or drink a beer at my desk ...

This job is the one that didn't acknowledge the one-year milestone.

Just a mention was all I wanted, really. 

Instead, it felt like a slap in the face.

Saturday 10k

K and I ran a 10k on Saturday. Considering we haven't been running consistently pretty much since our marathon, we were a little worried about how this would go.

We finished 4 minutes slower than we did in this same run last year. Still, though, we were under a 9:30 pace.

And with such beautiful weather and scenery to enjoy, it was hard to care too much about a silly thing like pace.

I was feeling superduperawesome at this point, so these are the pictures I took during the run. I hope to take more during our half-marathon this weekend, since it's in a location I haven't been to before.

Are they trying to get rid of me?

When I was a music major in college, my Music Ed professor told me I should be a writer -- this based on an email I wrote him about my uncertainty about my music major future. He said I was a great writer.

When I worked as an editor, my boss encouraged me to consider writing -- this based on emails I wrote to others in my department. She said I had a great voice for it.

Today, I am a writer. Only I do lots of other things at my job -- including photography and videography, in small, informal scale.

And today, my boss told me I should consider doing photography or videography someday. (Granted, I really enjoy both of those -- particularly the first one.)

Either I'm really good at a lot of (journalism-based) things, or my supervisors are always wanting to get rid of me.