mistressofmuses

And the final thing I wanted to bake this year:

Kolaches!

In my deep, deep hubris, I made a triple batch of kolache dough, because I remember feeling like we didn't have enough. This is the reminder to myself: yeah, don't do that? Double would have been JUST fine, lol.



I only made two trays tonight, and it is too late for me to make more right now. Apricot is one of the traditional flavors, but Alex requested peach, so I made peach and raspberry. (I may do some apricot ones later.)

About half the peach ones unrolled, but I got the dough thinner for the raspberry tray, and that helped prevent that.

I also made another tray of the yule log cookies to give to my mom and Taylor.

And Alex made a sheet of butter squares, and they're delicious!

I still have about 1/4 of my yule log cookie dough, and a bit over half of the kolache dough, so I really have to bake some after Christmas! I don't want the dough to go to waste or anything, I just absolutely ran out of time to bake the rest.

Tomorrow I've only got a half day at work, and I'll go over to my mom and Taylor's after. That should be fun. Then Alex will come grab me Xmas morning, and we'll do our gift exchange and watch movies. Looking forward to it!

Temperature dropped 37° in an hour out by the airport, and it felt about the same over here. Yuck! I don't like it!


It's only -2 right now, and the windchill is only-20.

It's snowing now, and sticking more than I would have expected... except the cold came on very quickly, so there probably was enough residual heat to help the snow stick. I'm definitely dreading the commute in the morning - it already looks pretty bad.

Got to work this morning and the power was out... well... halfway out. Apparently half of the whole complex is wired to one part of the grid and half is wired to another. Our lights and the outlets in the back room worked, but everything else was down. Similar issues in all the other businesses, with a random assortment of things working vs. not. The power didn't come on until roughly 3:30, so I basically had nothing to do for five+ hours.

Better today than tomorrow - I don't think we'd be okay for five+ hours without heat tomorrow.

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But yesterday was Truffle Tuesday! For the last several years, I have NOT made truffles, because they are a pain to make, but this year I decided to do it. They're Kahlua truffles, so basically chocolate ganache + Kahlua + some espresso. (They really mostly just taste like chocolate, even though I doubled the amount of Kahlua and of the espresso powder that it called for, but oh well, they're delicious.)



They were just as much of a pain as I remembered, especially at the end where the chocolate was getting too melty, but they at least came out well!

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Right now all I want to do is go to sleep and pretend it ISN'T snowing more and more heavily, but I really should bake something else. And today WOULD be appropriate for yule log cookies!

I hope this is a wonderful and safe Yule for everyone. Time to get through the longest (and definitely coldest) night.

Happy birthday to my younger sibling!

We had a pretty good, pretty lazy day.

Spent a good part of the day reading - we've gotten almost the whole way through Spelunking Through Hell. Maybe about 1/4 of it to go? (Plus the novella at the end.)

We also played more Nier: Replicant. We finished ending B last night, which is more or less the same as ending A (except we get to see the shades' dialogue, including the shade possessing [spoiler.]) The game now promises that if we collect all of the weapons in the game, we get to make a choice that impacts the ending, so I'm looking forward to finding out what that is, haha. This is very much a speed run this time around - we've done almost all the side quests (with one that we said fuck it on, and made peace with not 100%ing it), we've done the optional text explorations of Kaine and Emil's pasts, we've seen the additional scenes adding context for the shades, etc. So other than a few new scenes, and getting the weapons - we were missing, we think, three of them, and have gotten two so far - we can pretty much just try to blow through the plot stuff as fast as possible.
The shade dialogue still makes this very hard on me, as Being Mean Is Not Nice, ha.

We went to a used-and-new bookstore and browsed for a bit. Regrettably I found things I wanted, and I bought them. :(

Mom made meatballs for Taylor's birthday dinner, which was very delicious. Also a peach pie! Very excellent, though I definitely ate too much.

Unfortunately, I'm still painfully tired... I didn't sleep great on the loveseat, and when I did, had mildly distressing dreams. Bleh. Maybe tonight will be better.

Pitbull in the sun!

( 5 more pictures from the day: )

Definitely feeling frustrated by not seeming to have enough time to do the things I want to do. :/ I'm trying to figure out where the issue is - usually it's a time management issue, where I dick around more than I should on tumblr or something. That might be part of it - I do catch myself getting distracted on a social media scroll when I picked my phone up to check something else, but that doesn't seem like *all* of it.

But by the time we run an errand or two after work (not every day, but about half the time), we make and eat dinner, I run through my silly internet stuff, I answer comments here... it's invariably somehow 10:00 and I haven't even opened something to read or write on. (To say nothing of if there's like... household shit I have to do, or like... showering or something.)

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My terrible sunburn from cloudy Pride has started to peel. Aaaaaaaaaa

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One of the errands after work today was... my mom made homemade spaghetti sauce and wanted to give us some of it. Which fuck yeah, my mom's spaghetti sauce is the fucking best, so I am super excited, lol.

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Had a very long and very strange dream last night. Surprisingly mostly-coherent. Sometimes I was me, sometimes I was a character who was played by... Sam Neill? This may be the first dream I remember ever having where it had like... a *cast* of actual actors. It was action-thriller-y, in which I was protecting a woman and her kids. There was someone out to kill them, a sniper-style assassin (played by young, long-haired 80s Vincent D'Onofrio??) Pretty sure he'd been hired to kill them by a wealthy politician type, because she was his mistress/they were his illegitimate children.
There was some brief historical aside about the guy being a like, titan of local industry, and how important he was locally. Alex and I were for some reason just info-dumping that as a comically obvious exposition-laden conversation.
Then briefly I (as Sam Neill) was fighting assassin-Vincent D'Onofrio in a hotel.
Then back to the house, which was now haunted, and all the ghosts were helping to protect the woman and kids, and *probably* would have killed the assassin, except I woke up. Also the house was full of pride flags, and I remember thinking as an aside to myself how "damn, pretty sure everyone involved in this story is queer."

Delightful.

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I guess I need to get my butt in gear. I do need to shower, and also need to declare my Camp NaNo project! (And if possible, get at least a little headway on reading the thing I'm supposed to start rewriting.)

This sticker is the silly one that came with my birth control this time around, lol.

Also, you'd think that in the second to the last week of the year, I'd remember what I called my goals section, lol.

This was a very busy week! (Though got a surprise bingo, if barely.) Mostly holiday stuff took up my time and energy, so I didn't get a lot of writing done. But it was a good week.

My goals for the week:
- Christmas! It happened!
- I did bake both my yule log cookies and my kolaches, even though it required some late nights.
- I did read a bit more of Dark Rise
- I started the new version of Chapter 5 of Connections of the Heart
- I got gifts wrapped
- I got my last minute gift things purchased

For my tracked habits:
- Work - 3.5/7 (with Christmas off, plus a half day on Christmas Eve)
- Household Maintenance - 7/7
- Physical Activity - 5/7
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 1/7
- Meta Work - 4/7
- Personal Writing - 7/7
- Other Creative Things - 2/7, baking counts imo
- Reading - 4/7, mix of Dark Rise, fic, and starting Angel of the Overpass with Taylor
- Video Games - 1/7, Hades with Taylor
- Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words of fiction written: 558 words on Connections of the Heart

Hooray more baking!


Molasses cookies!

(These are probably my favorites of the "traditional" cookies my family makes. We've got three: these, butter cookies, and "birds nests" which are unimaginatively called "thumbprint cookies" on the recipe.)

Mom and Taylor already made the birds nests: light, slightly crumbly cookies covered in ground pecans and with currant jelly in the middle. Those are really tasty, but as Alex has a tree nut allergy, I'm glad that A) I get to enjoy them here, and B) They were already made so that cross-contamination was less of a worry.

We'd planned on making butter cookies too, but it got late, so alas. They may make those later tomorrow or on Sunday, in which case I'll just beg for some later. Maybe in exchange for the late Xmas gifts, ha.

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Taylor and I hung out. We played a couple runs through Hades (pretty ecstatic that it won the first/so-far-only Hugo for best video game.) One run was successful, because holy shit does having the right boon combo make all the difference. We've advanced all the subplots a bit more: Orpheus and Euridice, Achilles and Patroclus, Meg's romance route, and I think slightly closer to Than's romance route, too.

We also started reading Angel of the Overpass.

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So glad it was only a half day at work. I wish I didn't have to go in on Sunday, since that would have given me a four and a half day weekend, but at least it's just one day of work before my real weekend.

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The package of gifts did arrive at the post office today, and is slated for delivery on Monday.

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Now to shower and sleep. Oh how I need sleep.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Yule log cookies!

I think next time (next year) I want to try adding more spices - I added a wider variety this time, but only upped the total amount by a little bit. It's still mostly a shortbread flavor, with only slight spice to it. The frosting is really tasty, though, haha.

I do wish they weren't such a pain! Shaping the little branches and frosting them takes so damn long. Half the dough is in the fridge for a future date, because I am TIRED. (Why, oh why, did I decide doubling the recipe was a good idea? I should have remembered how unnecessary that was from last year!)

Making kolaches tomorrow is probably also going to be be A Struggle, because the dough has to chill for two hours. Sobcry, too many late nights, lol.

The missing Amazon packages were in the office. Apparently they were just tossed into the lobby (definitely still not a mailroom!). Someone in the office grabbed them so they wouldn't get stolen, but they noticed them just as they were leaving for the day. (Which is probably around the time they were delivered. Alex went down and looked maybe ten/fifteen minutes later, when he saw my text telling him the stuff was supposed to be there.)

So... my apologies for saying the driver was being shady... just lazy, turns out.

Now I'm just worried about the books I ordered from B&N. That's the vast majority of what I got for my mom and Taylor. Two books shipped separately; one arrived, and one is in transit. The others are all in one order with a mislabeled tracking number (the B&N site said UPS, it's actually a USPS number), that says only that the label was created, but that it hasn't been received by the post office yet. :/ I certainly don't mean to be Like That, I'm just chronically anxious.

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My focus was just absolutely blown today at work. I don't know why, exactly. Maybe I'm already in Christmas mode. A decade+ later, and I still miss having holiday breaks!

At least tomorrow is my last Saturday for a while, since the next two will be holidays! Though I do have to stay an hour and a half late for our center meeting, which means it'll be a 10 hour day, oof.

Still need to figure out the plan for my holiday baking. Mon/Tues seems too early for most of it, but Friday I'll be at my mom's already, and Weds/Thurs are work days. I can certainly do things after work, I guess, I just know I'll wish I could be lazy, lol.

Alex said he really liked the yule log cookies I made last year, so he does want me to make them again. So those, kolaches, pain in the ass Kahlua truffles... Alex wants to make the Norwegian butter squares, a different Norwegian shortbread cookie he made last year, and the zucchini cake. Then this morning he said he wanted to make a cheesecake, too. Lol, so much! I know he just likes baking, and we just never do it outside of the holidays. So I won't try to dissuade him. Just... so much!

Hobby lunch was good. I was glad that we did go.

Alex wasn't sure, because he's still not feeling great. Hopefully he'll be able to get a CT scan this week sometime - his doctor ordered one, but he hasn't heard back on the referral. It is probably an ulcer, and most of the symptoms match up pretty well. But I also know that they want to rule out anything else/worse, so it's a little nerve-racking not having a definite answer.

He's been on basically a liquid diet for the last week or so. Soup and broth. So much soup. And some other stuff like yogurt. It doesn't make the pain go away, but does seem to keep it from getting worse.

So going out to an Italian restaurant didn't seem like the greatest idea for him. But we went anyway, and he was able to find a couple things that were neutral enough to nibble at without it immediately turning to agony.

It was nice to see people. This included the women (aunt and niece) who let us sleep in their living room for many months when we were otherwise living in our car, and I remain extremely grateful to them. And only one of the super anti-vax types was there, lol.
Also, damn but this hobby (which is again, collecting little plastic horses and treating it very seriously) has an awful lot of queer folks, lol. Out of the ten people who were able to make it, there were me and Alex, the younger of the women we'd lived with for a bit, a gay man, a married lesbian, and another older woman whose partner came out as trans a few months ago. (It was genuinely extremely sweet to hear her talking about how much she loves her wife, how she's still her favorite person in the world.) The hobby itself feels a bit split between a lot of queer people and the absolute worst conservative trump-humper assholes, including the local groups. (Though the shitty ones mostly broke off into their own "boo hoo people don't like us anymore" contingent, and they're welcome to it.)

The weather changed FAST. We stopped on our way home to run a quick errand, and between the time we went into the store and got out of the store, the weather turned from "sunny, fairly warm, clear, breezy" to "windy, dust blotting out the mountains, and the wind is COLD." It dropped about 40° in a couple hours.

Got home. Took a nap until like 6:30, which probably wasn't advisable, but here we are.