Party animals (but don't label us)
My parents went out last night, to the annual tree trimming party hosted by their friends. Dad won third place for his ornament, which I think was a little cabin that lit up. Mom made me look at pictures on Facebook. They didn't get back until close to 1 AM, and were not up for much today. Dad didn't even get up 'til almost 11. Luckily, mom thought to sort the laundry yesterday, so I was still able to do that this morning, save for the darks since I wanted to be sure dad's pillowcases got washed. We missed them last week, which I recalled when mom returned Friday night, walked in the house, and went, does it smell like old man in here? (All I could smell was rotisserie chicken. I had known, as soon as I'd talked to dad on Thursday about dinner on Friday, that mom would find a way to get a chicken. Sure enough. Have I mentioned I am not a fan? Yeah...at best, I am indifferent; at worst, I am grossed out. Friday night, the smell had me leaning toward the latter. But I digress.)
How did I spend my weekend? I baked for part of it. Yesterday was biscotti day, where I made my lemon blueberry batch. I sort of squared off the logs before baking, so they're not very long, but they likely taste okay. I had enough crumbs and things that I never had an official piece. Then today, I made regular cookies; I've been thinking about chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips, and I discovered a recipe in my binder. What amused me was that the Reese's bag of chips had the same recipe on the back, except every ingredient was halved (or roughly so) save for the chips, which were still the full 10-oz bag...and yet the recipe still supposedly yielded the same amount of cookies. I noticed this while the older recipe was underway, so I kept going with that. Everything went okay except when I mixed the wet and dry ingredients. I don't use the shield on the mixing bowl; I probably should. I got cocoa/flour dust all over at one point. Oops. I should mention this was after I'd put in the flour mixture a spoonful at a time for roughly the first half of it. But the cookies turned out fine. They're a little on the soft side, which I like, which is why I think I'll stick with this recipe. Oh, the other issue is that I only have two round wire racks for cooling, which don't quite hold a dozen cookies each, and I baked 30 cookies at a time. I had to use a plate to help with cooling, which didn't really work right. Hmm, maybe I should ask for a bigger rack for Christmas... (Because I make so many cookies. Mom would totally go for it, though.)
I could've done both batches yesterday, but I opted not to. It's tiring to spend hours in the kitchen in one go. I mentally set aside three hours for each batch of biscotti, which is why I chose to make just the one batch, and the regular cookies took two, plus a little extra for cleanup--and I'm totally a person who cleans up as she goes. Anyway, knowing I had the house to myself last night, what did I chose to do with my time? Play MySims Kingdom. Yeah. I did. This was one of the games that came with our Wii, so it was one of the few things we had when we first got it. It's such a cute, benign game, and I like the exploring part, and upon getting into it once earlier this week--Wednesday, when dad was gone for the turkey collection--I realized I hadn't touched it since 2012. Makes sense. Kinda hadn't played since I went back to work. I remember back in the day finding a website that led to all the hidden places to find certain treasures, and I have it all written down somewhere, in this graph paper notebook I have. I'm not *that* hardcore that I went to dig that out; I mean, I don't know how soon I'll play it again. But I spent four and a half hours on it last night. This is why I don't allow myself to play games much of the time; I easily get sucked into things. (I've allowed myself to play some games via the Trib's website on my phone, under the guise of killing my battery before charging it back up, but in the past week or so there's been a problem and the page won't load, so no games for me.)
This afternoon, mom attempted to be productive. Last year, she'd made labels for the Christmas card envelopes to help out with that, and she wanted to do that again. She updated all the addresses; my California aunt moved, for example. She came to a point where she could print. However, something went wrong, and several hours later, no labels. Not that we've been trying to do that all this time, but still. Part of it is that we'd downloaded a template last year, so she went back into that, but instead of doing "save as," she overwrote the original file (I could tell since, when dad and I came over to help, the file name was "Christmas Labels 2018"). We don't know what the original file was, since it should've been in Word, but this file got saved to Publisher. However...she doesn't have Publisher on her computer. And Word kept saying her subscription was expired (how does Word have a subscription?) and it wouldn't let her do anything. Okay, well, dad, why don't you email it to yourself and see if you can open it on your computer? Long story short, no. Okay, I have Open Office; dad, email it to me so I can see what happens. Well, what happens is I get page after page of number signs and that's it. As in, the entire page is just the sign over and over again. By this time, I suggested that dad make his Portillo's run (he knew he wouldn't want to cook today) while mom and I puzzled over things on her computer. She did find another appropriate template, and was able to save it to her computer...but there's an error code at the top of the file, and the note about the subscription needing to be updated, and she's all raring to go to type in all the names. Mom. Don't go through all that work again only to find out it was a waste of time...again. First off, we don't even know if we can print this. It's a rigamarole to print from her or my computer for whatever reason; let's see if it'll print, and correctly. And use regular paper; don't waste the labels on this. (These thoughts did not occur to my mother. She's clearly never been a receptionist.) That's as far as we got before dinner, and I don't think anyone's gone back to it. Dad said he might try to do it on his computer, but who knows when that'll happen. All I know is, I want no lip from my parents about when I'm getting my cards out this year. They'll get done. I just usually do them very close to the actual holiday.
How did I spend my weekend? I baked for part of it. Yesterday was biscotti day, where I made my lemon blueberry batch. I sort of squared off the logs before baking, so they're not very long, but they likely taste okay. I had enough crumbs and things that I never had an official piece. Then today, I made regular cookies; I've been thinking about chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips, and I discovered a recipe in my binder. What amused me was that the Reese's bag of chips had the same recipe on the back, except every ingredient was halved (or roughly so) save for the chips, which were still the full 10-oz bag...and yet the recipe still supposedly yielded the same amount of cookies. I noticed this while the older recipe was underway, so I kept going with that. Everything went okay except when I mixed the wet and dry ingredients. I don't use the shield on the mixing bowl; I probably should. I got cocoa/flour dust all over at one point. Oops. I should mention this was after I'd put in the flour mixture a spoonful at a time for roughly the first half of it. But the cookies turned out fine. They're a little on the soft side, which I like, which is why I think I'll stick with this recipe. Oh, the other issue is that I only have two round wire racks for cooling, which don't quite hold a dozen cookies each, and I baked 30 cookies at a time. I had to use a plate to help with cooling, which didn't really work right. Hmm, maybe I should ask for a bigger rack for Christmas... (Because I make so many cookies. Mom would totally go for it, though.)
I could've done both batches yesterday, but I opted not to. It's tiring to spend hours in the kitchen in one go. I mentally set aside three hours for each batch of biscotti, which is why I chose to make just the one batch, and the regular cookies took two, plus a little extra for cleanup--and I'm totally a person who cleans up as she goes. Anyway, knowing I had the house to myself last night, what did I chose to do with my time? Play MySims Kingdom. Yeah. I did. This was one of the games that came with our Wii, so it was one of the few things we had when we first got it. It's such a cute, benign game, and I like the exploring part, and upon getting into it once earlier this week--Wednesday, when dad was gone for the turkey collection--I realized I hadn't touched it since 2012. Makes sense. Kinda hadn't played since I went back to work. I remember back in the day finding a website that led to all the hidden places to find certain treasures, and I have it all written down somewhere, in this graph paper notebook I have. I'm not *that* hardcore that I went to dig that out; I mean, I don't know how soon I'll play it again. But I spent four and a half hours on it last night. This is why I don't allow myself to play games much of the time; I easily get sucked into things. (I've allowed myself to play some games via the Trib's website on my phone, under the guise of killing my battery before charging it back up, but in the past week or so there's been a problem and the page won't load, so no games for me.)
This afternoon, mom attempted to be productive. Last year, she'd made labels for the Christmas card envelopes to help out with that, and she wanted to do that again. She updated all the addresses; my California aunt moved, for example. She came to a point where she could print. However, something went wrong, and several hours later, no labels. Not that we've been trying to do that all this time, but still. Part of it is that we'd downloaded a template last year, so she went back into that, but instead of doing "save as," she overwrote the original file (I could tell since, when dad and I came over to help, the file name was "Christmas Labels 2018"). We don't know what the original file was, since it should've been in Word, but this file got saved to Publisher. However...she doesn't have Publisher on her computer. And Word kept saying her subscription was expired (how does Word have a subscription?) and it wouldn't let her do anything. Okay, well, dad, why don't you email it to yourself and see if you can open it on your computer? Long story short, no. Okay, I have Open Office; dad, email it to me so I can see what happens. Well, what happens is I get page after page of number signs and that's it. As in, the entire page is just the sign over and over again. By this time, I suggested that dad make his Portillo's run (he knew he wouldn't want to cook today) while mom and I puzzled over things on her computer. She did find another appropriate template, and was able to save it to her computer...but there's an error code at the top of the file, and the note about the subscription needing to be updated, and she's all raring to go to type in all the names. Mom. Don't go through all that work again only to find out it was a waste of time...again. First off, we don't even know if we can print this. It's a rigamarole to print from her or my computer for whatever reason; let's see if it'll print, and correctly. And use regular paper; don't waste the labels on this. (These thoughts did not occur to my mother. She's clearly never been a receptionist.) That's as far as we got before dinner, and I don't think anyone's gone back to it. Dad said he might try to do it on his computer, but who knows when that'll happen. All I know is, I want no lip from my parents about when I'm getting my cards out this year. They'll get done. I just usually do them very close to the actual holiday.