I’ve been so tired lately. My body has been tired, I mean – my brain is usually in go-go-go mode so I can’t sleep and make my body less tired. Blech. That’s partly why the blog content has been so weak – I have things in my head when I’m laying down and staring at the ceiling fan at 6pm, but my brain can’t seem to convince the rest of me to get up and wander over to the computer. It’s no wonder my pants don’t fit.

Cuddling something when I’m in bed tends to help me sleep better though. I still have my baby blanket that my great-grandma made and gave to me the day I was born. Now pushing twenty-eight, Blankie doesn’t look too snazzy. The original material has almost disintigrated, so just the backing and some patches are holding it together. But it’s mine and I love it, and it helps me sleep.

I’ve had trouble sleeping over at E’s house lately too, of course. The blanket does not travel with me everywhere I go (anymore, heh) so my arms are kind of antsy when I try to sleep in his bed. I suppose I could cuddle him, but I can’t sleep like that. And if I steal his pillow to hold, his head tips back and he snores.

Last week I hit on the idea of digging out a stuffed animal to keep at his house so I’d have something to snuggle and help me sleep. I took my old stuffed pig over to E’s place the other night and informed him that I had solved my sleeping problem.

“Who has a stuffed PIG?” he asked incredulously.

“I do.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me and picked up the pig from my lap, then bounced it experimentally on his leg. I laughed a little bit while he made the pig dance and do other dumb things like he was entertaining a two-year old. We’re both easily amused. E held the pig up to his face, snout to nose, and then waved at it.

“Hello, breakfast!”

“Hey!”

“What? Pigs are for breakfast!”

I snatched my toy back from him. “Shuddup, that’s my pig-friend.”

“That’s my pig-breakfast.”

“Pig hates you.”

He grabbed the pig back and stuck its ear in his mouth. “Nom nom nom!”

“You are attempting to eat a furry pig, you realize that, don’t you?”

“But it’s bacon.”

“FURRY. PIG.”

So I’ve been a little obsessed with these cupcakes ever since I saw them on Cakewrecks Sunday Sweets.

I’ve wanted to learn how to use fondant for a long time, and these looked like they might be an easy way to start. You don’t have to drape a whole big cake with one giant sheet of it, to begin with, and it looks like the shapes are fairly simple cutouts. But I procrastinate. I look at pictures and make plans and don’t do anything. I couldn’t afford the most recent cupcake class at Kitchen Conservatory. Damn my expensive teeth. Class with Stephanie of The Cupcake Project would have been so much better than a (still-aching) mouth full of Novocaine and goo. So I just moped for awhile.

Then E and I decided that in the interest of saving money, we weren’t going to do Valentine’s gifts this year. Maybe just dinner.

THEN they took the Pac-Man game out of one of our local bar haunts and replaced it with Big Buck Hunter, of all things. He was devastated.

So I hit the interwebs. “What’s Cooking, America?” has a recipe for marshmallow fondant, touted as a good learning tool for beginners. And tasty, too! Who doesn’t like marshmallows?

I do not like marshmallows.

Sticky, icky MESS. I was slathered up to the elbows in Crisco before I could get the stuff into a workable ball. Crisco, by the way, will make you drop everything you touch. I know this sounds obvious, but when you are covered in lard and you try to pick up a marble rolling pin, it WILL fall. On your foot. And when you try to pick up your Bud Light to wash away the pain in your foot, it WILL spill. On two of your cooling cupcakes.

But it got kind of fun – coloring the mix, adding chocolate to half of it, etc. I used a cookie cutter to make the chocolate slices to sit on top of the (strawberry cake, whipped-cream-filled) cupcakes, and that went over pretty easily. Black food coloring just sounded awful, so I mixed in some cocoa powder and chocolate bricks when I was heating the mixture. Worked like a dream and gave the mix a great dark color. Cutting all of those pieces, however, proved to be a problem.

Marshmallows, even in this recipe, do not cut very well, especially when you want to cut them into small shapes. I don’t know if I did something wrong or if it is just the nature of the marshmallow, but it is inclined to poof. I could not, no matter how hard I tried, get the crisp, clean edges of a traditional fondant. I ended up taking chunks of the mix and rolling out the shapes by hand, molding them and adding details with toothpicks as probes. It took me an hour, but here’s the result:

It’s not a great picture and the flash makes it hard to see the awesomeness of the colors I used on the little ghosts. Those ghosts, by the way, ROCKED. They had little chocolate dabs for the eyeballs. And of course, this selection features both Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man, sharing their love in the middle with a marshmallow heart.

E was ECSTATIC. He took the pan around to show his friends and his family and they were wowed with my domestic goddess skills. Since it was comprised mainly of straight sugar and lard, the fondant wasn’t especially tasty – although it outruns traditional fondant by a mile. So I included a jar of dark chocolate frosting with the cupcake delivery. The fondant peels right off and we put frosting on the cupcakes as we ate them. It was maximum Frosting Freshness!

I think I’ll try traditional fondant soon… this marshmallow recipe was a good starter, I think. And anything that makes his nuts family think I might be acceptable wife material is a perk.

E’s buddy Archie is the executive chef at a Very Nice Restaurant in Chicago. One of the managers of the Very Nice Restaurant is going to be opening a new branch of Very Nice Restaurant in one of the Very Nice Casinos in Las Vegas, and he has asked Archie to help open it and be the executive chef there. Archie and his wife say they are about 90% sure they’re going to take the offer – the money is better and the cost of living is lower in Vegas, and they figure that they could at least try it for a year or two and build up some savings, then come back to Chicago if they don’t like it out west.

Good deal for Archie, yes?

Archie told E that he’ll need a right-hand man to do this thing, and that’s a right-hand man who would get paid half again over what E makes now. That is some niiice money. E is tempted – and he wants me to go with him.

Sometimes it seems like things are kind of drying up for us in St. Louis. My job is okay, his job is okay. We’re stable enough, really. But our best friends are all splintering off and doing different things, moving away, moving on. E’s best friend here is moving to South Carolina in the summer and taking his girlfriend – one of my good friends – with him. It feels like things are happening somewhere and we’re missing out. Friends move and circles change, and maybe we shouldn’t be standing still. As E and I approach thirty, we’ve been looking forward and back and what we’ve done, haven’t done, and want to do. We talk about getting married and probably having a kid sometime in the future, but that’s not in the immediate plan. We want to have an adventure, and maybe an opportunity like this coming at this point in our lives is what we need. Maybe we need to blow this town for a couple of years.

There are a lot of what-ifs and whatnots. Archie might not take the job after all, and the whole scenario would be moot. The guy starting the restaurant could get worried about the state of the economy and bail out on his plans. If we go, I’d have to sell my house. E would have to support us both out there till I could get a job. We’d have to give our parents “The Talk” in which we inform them that not only are we moving, we’re moving in together. That’s a baddie on both counts for both of our families, so we’re not even bringing it up until we decide. Or we might just straight up freak out and decided not to go because we are big chickens. We wouldn’t be alone – Archie and his wife would be there with us, obviously – but it’s still scary as shiz and so exciting at the same time. No income tax, no humidity, houses that look like overgrown Taco Bells, nearby mountains, good golf, cheap airfare deals every weekend. And no family, no safety net, no toasted ravioli, no Provel cheese (well, HE wouldn’t miss that), and a significant increase in the moisturizer budget.

It’s huge. It’s crazy. I soooo want to do it. Today, anyway.

The timeline is such that we wouldn’t move till late summer or early fall – I think the Very Nice Restaurant is slated to open in October – so that means won’t have to decide until July or so. Neither of us have even been to Las Vegas before, so I think that once Archie tells us his decision, we’ll make a little reconnaissance trip if he says he and his wife are going.

Then it’s up to us.

I became friends with Tim this summer. It was a long path from our nasty breakup (two years ago this week, wow) to an actual friendship, with a few layovers in FWB-Land in between. When our best friends’ marriage began breaking up, Tim and I found ourselves thrown into identical situations with our friends and while they were falling apart, he and I had something to share that ended up with us in a much better relationship.

And then of course, E.

Tim and E met for the first time last winter and they got along okay. Like ex-boyfriends do, Tim always thought that the guys I dated weren’t good enough. He was fine with E at first, but in the early days of an improving friendship, I made the critical mistake of calling him once after E and I fought last spring, and it was all downhill from there. E was suddenly the devil to him and nothing he did was right.

E and I broke up and Tim was pleased that I was rid of such a terrible, terrible guy. Then when we got back together and Tim was skeptical, to say the least. For the first few months of the E and Me Do-Over, he was constantly saying “Are you REALLY serious about this?” and “I can’t believe you took him back” and other stuff in a similar vein. He couldn’t believe that we were doing things with each other’s families again (because that is serious shit, I say), so when he called me a few weeks ago and I told him I was with E at his mom’s house in Michigan, I was a bit surprised when he asked:

“What nights is E off work?”

I told him. “Why?”

“We have a pool league that plays on Thursdays.”

He wants E to play pool with him? Huh? “But he works on Thursdays.”

“Yeah, that’s why I was checking. We need a girl to kind of round out our numbers and I wanted to ask you but I didn’t want to have to take you away from him if it was going to be on one of his nights off.”

Whaaaat?

After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I protested about my absolute lack of pool prowess and he explained the way the APA scores so teams need people of all skill levels – even mine. He filled me in on some of the details and told me to ask E if it was okay. “I hope he doesn’t mind because it would be really cool if you could play, but let me know and it’s cool if you can’t.”

E was fine with it. Of course he doesn’t love the idea of me hanging out with my ex-boyfriend for hours every week, but he knows that he has to trust me and so he sent me off with a kiss and some sort of just-try-and-hit-the-ball-straight advice on the first night.

“How was it?” he asked me later.

“Meh,” I replied. “I lost, of course. But I had fun, I guess.”

“Any cute boys there?” he teased.

“There was one who talked to me a lot,” I said, teasing back. “But he looks like a 12 year-old with a beard. He looks like that High School Musical guy.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“I’m not a pedophile and beards aren’t my thing, so no.”

The next week when I went back, I checked in with Tim to see when I was going to play. “You don’t have to worry about <dude> anymore, by the way,” he added after telling me to chalk up at 8:30.

“Huh?”

“He was talking about you like crazy after last week,” he said, not making eye contact. “Asked if you were single and stuff. And I said no.” He made a scribble on the score sheet.

“Good, thanks.”

“You seem really happy with E and guys like <dude> are just bad news. If he doesn’t respect that, tell me and I’ll make him back off.”

“That’s really sweet of you… especially ’cause you don’t even like E.”

“It’s pretty obvious that you’re really happy with him and he’s treating you right this time.” He still won’t look up at me.

“I am. And he is.”

Tim finally lifted his head. “Try to get at least one ball in tonight, okay?” he grunted.

I think that was Tim-ish for ‘I approve.’ And I did win one of my four games that night… only because the other girl scratched on the 8-ball, but hey. The night was full of miracles.

Vacation this year seemed a bit off. I was sick the entire time (and who doesn’t love that?) so a lot of it passed in a blur. However, in between Kleenex and shots of Cepacol, it looked something like this:

Friday:

Discovering the beauty of the borrowed iPass while navigating the Chicago suburbs to Jenn’s house.

Starting work on redesigning Jenn’s blog.

Golden Tee – a 91 foot putt!

Cold medicine, cold medicine…

Saturday:

Shopping with Jenn and Jess and getting a few sweet deals at Banana Republic

Meeting E’s executive chef friend at his restaurant and gorging on all sorts of food I can’t pronounce (free!) while waiting for E to arrive.

E getting to Chicago 8 hours late.

E getting us kicked out of a bar because he was drunk and kept “forgetting” that you can’t smoke in bars in Chicago. Me punching him on the sidewalk.

Cold medicine, cold medicine, cold medicine….

Sunday:

Lou Malnati’s deep-dish pizza.

Horseshoe Casino.

E loudly referring to me as his future wife and betting the craps table that he’d propose to me on the spot if he rolled a three.

E rolling a four. Me sighing in relief in between coughs.

Coldmedicinecoldmedicinecoldmedicine…

Monday:

Driving to Holland, Michigan while doped up on cold medicine.

Seeing E’s mom and hanging out with his high school friends.

Toothache begins.

Cold medicine coma.

Tuesday:

Hauling E’s butt down to the Secretary of State’s office to get some papers he needs to resolve The Legal Issue That Shall Not Be Named.

Chicago hot dogs and gyros at Mr. Kozak’s.

Spending all afternoon running iTunes backups for friend.

Toothache worsens.

Passing out on friend’s couch at 9:30 pm.

Cold medicine coma, coughing fits, near death.

Wednesday:

Driving home for 8 hours, still slightly hopped-up on cold medicine.

Toothache feels marginally better.

Checking odometer: 1,062 miles on the new car without a glitch.

Falling in own bed, coughing like cat with a hairball, passing out.

———————–

On Thursday I came back to work, still sniffling and coughing but feeling a bit better overall. My toothache was still bugging me though, and as one of those bad, bad people who hasn’t gone to the dentist for five years, I was getting pretty concerned. I’ve had intermittent minor toothaches for years, but the pain on the left side of my face was freaking me out, so I grudgingly called the office and they agreed to see me yesterday afternoon.

And just in case you didn’t know, your teeth should NOT be in your sinuses.

See the maxillary sinuses? See how high they are in your cheeks? When they fill up with goo, that’s why your face hurts around the eyes when you have a sinus infection.

See how your teeth should end below the maxillary sinus cavity? It appears that mine don’t. The roots of my molars are actually INSIDE my sinuses, according to my x-rays. So they hurt when the sinuses fill up with goo. Even the dentist grimaced a little bit while he was explaining to me that he wouldn’t touch those roots with a ten-foot pole. The prognosis isn’t bad – it’s just painful but not actually bad for my health. If I continue to have sinus infections and the pain gets unbearable or I experience nerve problems then I guess they do something icky inside my cheek to fix it.

I did not accomplish ALL of my vacation goals (no Bears shirt – I bought myself some cute cords instead) but I did refrain from getting drunk and hitting on boys. So that was my vacation, and all was not wasted. How are you?