I’m going to California!!

While talking to my mom last Thursday, she mentioned to me that my Aunt Sue would be driving out to California for the week of March 15th on business.  That’s spring break week for me, and my aunt agreed to take me along, so it looks like I’ll be visiting home soon!  It would seem that my aunt, who only lives 1-1/2 hours from me, drives out to California every 3-4 months, and yet this is the first time it occurred to us that I could go along and have the opportunity to see my family for next to no cost.  So, this will be the first time I’ve gone along, but if all goes well, perhaps it won’t be the last.  It makes it much easier for me to afford it, since all I’ll have to do is pay for my meals during the two days trip there and the two days trip back.

This trip’ll be good for many reasons and I’m so excited!!  With me going, my aunt won’t have to drive across three states alone, I’ll get to see my grandparents on the way, I’ll have the chance to catch up with my aunt who I’ve not seen in 12 years, and I’ll get to see my family.  I can’t wait and luckily, with the extremely short notice, I won’t have to for very long.  We leave early the morning of March 12th, head to Lubbock & Plainview to stay over night, then on the morning of the 13th we set out for California.  We’ll stay the night in either Flagstaff or Kingman and then finish the trip into California on the morning of March 14th.  We should be at my mom and dad’s around 2:30 p.m. on March 14th.  I’ll stay with my folks for a week and then she’ll pick me up on her way back to Texas on March 20th or 21st and we’ll spend two days coming home, with a stop off in Plainview to see my grandparents again.

Matt won’t be going, the notice is too short this time.  He’ll stay home with Ani and Galileo, and hopefully come next time.  I haven’t seen my family in more than two years, but they’ve not seen Matt in far longer than that.  I know he misses them, and they him, so hopefully he’ll be able to go out to CA with me next time.  This will make three visits to CA for me that he’s had to stay home.  It’s just much more cost effective this way, which is unfortunate, but a reality nonetheless.  I always hate to be apart, even for a few days, because we miss one another and because Matt can’t cook, at all, and I worry about him eating while I’m gone.  He’s been fine the other two times and I won’t be gone as long this time as I was before, so I’m sure he’ll be okay.  Still, it doesn’t keep me from worrying.

Let’s see, I’m hoping to get some visiting done while I’m out there, to see my sister and nephews, my Aunt Pam, and some of the many friends I have in CA.  Unfortunately, I won’t have a car, so getting around will be a little difficult, but I’m sure it can be worked out.  More than anything, I’m dying to see my parents, I miss them like crazy.  I’m going to take pictures of everyone and post them online, probably via Facebook, so I have up-to-date pics of the family and friends, for myself and for Matt since he’s not going to be able to go — I got a new camera in January and I’m dying to put it to good use!  I’ll probably come back with an absolute ton of pics of the landscape between here and there, of the desert and the mountains.  I miss those things here, where it’s flat and there’s not a Joshua Tree in a thousand miles.

So, there you have it.  If you missed it in all that chatter, I’ll be there from about March 14th – March 20th (or 21st).  If you’re one of said California friends and would like to get together, let me know.  I think almost everyone I know out there either knows where to find me, or at least has a general idea about where I’ll be staying and could find it with directions.

Did I mention I can’t wait?!

I did a survey through Betty Crocker’s website a while back and for doing so they gave me a free 95 page, deserts e-cookbook.  I’ve made several recipes from the book so far and they’ve all been amazing.  Anyway, this morning while searching through my pictures, trying to put them into some order, I found some of one of the recipes I made from the cookbook and was reminded that I wanted to share the recipe.  It’s easy, and something you’ve probably seen before, but I enjoyed making them anyway!

Cupcake Cones

1 box of cake mix (any flavor)
30 – 36 flat bottom ice cream cones

- Mix the cake by box directions.
- Fill each cone half-full of cake batter.
- Stand cones in muffin pan & bake for 20 – 25 min.
- Cool and frost. That’s it!

It’s pretty simple and the cones cool really, really fast.  I’ve never seen cake, or cupcakes, cool so fast.  I used Funfetti cake (Rainbow Chip frosting, not Funfetti), because it’s my favorite, but it would work with any flavor.  Like a dumb-dumb I didn’t remember that it took 3 boxes of cones, so I only had 12 cones.  Rather than going out for more cones, I made a small deviation to the formula…

I had some bowls, because Matt, who always goes rogue on recipes, suggested I try it with bowls at some point in the near future.  I had enough cake batter left to fill 4 bowls exactly half-full.  After baking them, I was really happy with the result!  The bowls sort of ruffled out on the tops and were really pretty.  Unfortunately, I put two of them in the microwave overnight so they wouldn’t get eaten by critters (Ani, Galileo, stupid evil mice) and the humidity in the small space made the bowls soft and a bit leathery.  I’m going to try this recipe again, with the bowls, and chocolate cake.  It would really work better in more dry places, but I’m going to make them again anyway.

If you’d like a copy of the cookbook (it’s a 32.5 MB, .exe file), I uploaded to to my server space.  Betty Crocker is probably going to sue me, or whatever, but I earned the thing and should be able to do with it what I like.  Click here to download the cookbook!

Enjoy!

It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow.  If it does, that will make it the fourth snow storm we’ve had this season.  Last night, when I mentioned it to Matt he said, “We’ve had 21 years worth of snow in one winter!!”  He wasn’t kidding.  Before this, in my whole almost 11 years living in Texas, we’ve had snow twice, and I was in California one of those times.  I’m enjoying it, to be honest, it’s nice to have snow once in a while.  I think if we had it all the time, the novelty would wear off and make me cranky at how cold it is.  The last time it snowed, on the 11th of this month, it was actually 60 degrees and sunny the next day.  The weather here is so unpredictable.  In years past, it was already starting to get warm by this time.

In the gloom of the last few days, I’ve found it nearly impossible to focus on reading for class.  I’m supposed to be reading The Book of Margery Kempe but I’m having a truly hard time getting through it.  I should have started last week, rather than reading for fun, but I don’t regret the time I spent reading Bound by Honor instead.  At least part of the problem right now is that I’d rather be reading Master and so reading the Kempe book feel a bit like punishment.  I’m sure I’ll get through it, but that isn’t making it any easier to swallow.

I also have a paper over Tender is the Night due on Wednesday and an annotation for the Kempe book due Thursday.  Fortunately, the paper only has to be 5 pages and annotations are fairly simple once I decide on an article to write over and get it read.  I’ve been thinking that I might do the rest of the semester’s annotations some time this week, that way I have that done and out of the way.  I always think I’ll do things up ahead of time and then never get around to doing them until they’re due.  I’m such a procrastinator.

In non-gloom, non-school related news, I had my first article accepted at Demand Studios over the weekend.  This is a big step forward for me.  I waited to do it until now because my bio was still under review with them until last week and any articles written before the bio is accepted go as anonymous.  I want credit for my work, so I waited.  My first article was over tourist attractions in Stephenville, which was a topic I surprisingly found in their database.  I chose it for my first for obvious reasons, given that I live here.  It came back for a few very minor edits and clarifications, which I fixed, and it was accepted.  I’m actually fairly excited about this!  Unlike Helium (a site I love, by the way), all demand studios articles are edited by copyeditors.  You can’t just publish anything you want.  So, to have an article published through them is very affirming.

Additionally, I just found out that my first Suite101 article, Free Software for Writers, was accepted tonight.  At Suite101, the first article has to be reviewed by a copyeditor before it can be published.  Until it’s reviewed, no other articles can be written or published.  It took me 5 hours to write that article this morning, which is a long time, I put a lot of work into it.  Once it was done and submitted, I was waiting to see if it would need edits.  It didn’t, they accepted it on the first go!  Three cheers for me!!   So, I’m going to work some tonight on a few other articles I have planned for Suite101!  So, I’m off to a good start this week with my freelance writing stuff.

Anyway, I started writing this post about  3:30 p.m. this afternoon, but Matt came in and interrupted me.  It’s 9:40 p.m. now and I’m just getting around to finishing it.  The upside of that is that I get to share with you the good news about my Suite101 article, which hadn’t been accepted yet when I began writing this post.  Matt met with his dad today, went to class, and met with his statistics group for a group project, which gave me some nice time alone today.  When he came home he wanted to go to Hastings and since we got our tax return today I got two books, Wuthering Heights and The Lightening Thief, and Matt got me “Jewel of the Nile” and “Romancing the Stone” and we would have gotten “War of the Roses” but they didn’t have it.   We also splurged a little and took our some of our best friends out for Chinese food, because we haven’t seen much of them lately and we missed just hanging out.

Tax money also means grocery shopping, which I both love and hate.  I enjoy shopping but I hate making the menu and grocery list, and trying to get Matt to go with me is like pulling teeth.  Of course, he acts like a 12 year old in the grocery store, and wants everything he sees, so taking him is always a mixed blessing.  I’m just hoping we have enough food around here for a few days, especially since it seems like we’ll be snowed in tomorrow.   Cross your fingers that it happens, I love the snow, even if it does mean being cold… which I hate.  Although, I think I already covered this.

So, I’m off to watch “Romancing the Stone” and work on some of the articles I have planned for Suite101.  Good night.