Reason number 847...

.... that I know the G and I were made for each other.

Overheard at dinner last night:

Him: "You know those squiggly pasta shapes that are green, orange and white?"
Me: "Yeah, what about them?"
Him: "They make me happy."
Me: "Yeah, me too." Smile.

(Look at all those wedding announcements we made last year! Phew!)

Project 52 (11 of 52)

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! ~John Muir

Finally, a finished object and some doodle stitching

White Easter?

The view from the bedroom window this morning......

Easter wishes, some good old-fashioned Catholic guilt and a recipe for Easter Bunny Carrot Cake Cupcakes

My husband recently asked me a question that I haven't yet been able to answer honestly, and truth be told, I can't really get it out of my head either. He asked me why I'm always making things for people, buying gifts for no reason, breaking my neck to get wedding or birthday gifts out on time for friends or family whom can't even seem to remember when my birthday is. The answer is obvious to me on a certain level; it makes me really happy watch someone bite into a cupcake and do that little moaning thing while shrugging their shoulders and saying 'oh my god this is soooo good.' I'm secretly thrilled to watch my husband hunt for his Easter egg presents and see the Cheshire cat style smile on his face when he finds one.

There have been loads of weddings in our circle as of late, and as usual, I'm killing myself to try and make or get something for everyone - the G reminds me how dismal our wedding gift take was and asks why I'm trying so hard. I answer that people are busy, they probably just never got round to it. He then says 'but it never works out in return.' 'But it's not like that,' I insist, 'that's not what this is all about. I just find it really rewarding to pick out a thoughtful gift,' I say and mean it. But there's this irksome feeling at the back of my mind that I'm somehow trying to compensate for a shortcoming or leftover childhood guilt (there's a lot of that lingering around these days for some reason) or attention-seeking or some other sinister facet of my personality. Does this random insecurity strike you too and make you question your motives?
Despite my recognizing insecurity in other aspects of my life, my confidence in the kitchen is blossoming and I'm beginning to freestyle a little bit. And it's your lucky day, dear reader, since you'll benefit from my most recent act of benevolence with the following tasty recipe for some gorgeous little cupcakes. (Have I mentioned my burgeoning fantasy about opening my own little cupcake - coffee shop someday? The Queen Bean Cafe. With Hello, Cupcake! catering in the back. The afterhours music venue would be The Mean Bean. See, I've got it all worked out in my head....) I brought nearly three dozen of these beauties into work last week and they disappeared in a matter of minutes. The woodwork was concealing many more people than I had any idea that that even worked at the college who all came out and asked for the recipe. Here you go, folks. Happy Easter. Indulge.

The Queen Bee's Easter Bunny Carrot Cake Cupcakes:

makes 3 dozen cupcakes or one 9" layer cake

3 cups plain/all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tbsp baking soda
1 generous Tbsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cups olive oil
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
1 cup of drained crushed pineapple
1 1/2 cups shelled pecans, chopped
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut
2 cups of shredded carrots
1 cup raisins

Frosting:
400g full fat cream cheese, at room temperature
6 Tbsp unsalted butter, room temp
2 1/2 cups of icing/confectioners sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Juice of 1/2 lemon

1. Preheat oven to 350 F/ 175 C /gas mark 4. Line cupcake/muffin tin with paper cases or grease two 9 inch cake pans.

2. Mix dry ingredients into a large bowl (incl. sugar). Add oil, eggs, vanilla and pineapple and beat well. Fold in pecans, coconut, carrots, and raisins.

3. Pour batter into pans or cupcake tins – fill about ¾ way full as the mix will rise. For cupcakes bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick or fork inserted in the centre comes out clean. For cakes, bake 50 minutes.

4. To prepare frosting, cream together the cream cheese and butter in a mixing bowl, (if a bit stiff it helps to add the vanilla at this stage). ((Also, a note about reduced fat cream cheese: it’s just too runny for this frosting, you could try using half full fat and half reduced fat and see if that works)) Slowly sift the icing sugar in and beat until mixture is free of lumps. Stir in vanilla and lemon juice.

5. Allow cake to cool and add frosting. Garnish with chopped walnuts or pecans, or paper bunnies attached to toothpicks, if you want.

6. Devour with relish and delight. Calories don’t count on Easter.

Project 52 (9 and 10 of 52)

1st March, 2008

9th March, 2008

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. ~Marcel Proust

Are you as surprised as I am at how little change there has been in my tree over the past three months? Click on the tag below to see all the other offerings from project 52.

Project 52 (8 of 52)

'God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying Ah!'

Joseph Campbell

photo 24th Feb, 2008.

Rainy Day Weekends Are For....

Fantasizing about going back to the Lake District someday soon.

Curling up on the sofa with a lap cat, a steaming cup of green tea, and a whole season of Gilmore Girls DVD's.

Finally finishing the Pippa bag! (and also finding it a just a little bit ironic that one of my newest friends is called Pippa and secretly planning a whole series of items named after all the women I'd like to be friends with)

Making Easter bunny carrot cake cupcakes (get it, carrot cake, easter bunnies...) for my co-workers. Mostly because I love cream cheese frosting and the cute little cakes make the perfect frosting delivery devices.

Working on my very first embroidery project with inspiration and direction from this neato burrito book. If you haven't seen this already, I urge you to pick it up.

Discovering this website. And then getting completely lost in this one.

Secretly loving it when my neighbor calls me 'virtuous' for answering the door in workout clothes and I'm sure it's only a transliteration and means something completely different than intended in my American ears and then swelling just a little bit with pride. (Another trans-literation --- I've lost a stone since January! That's 12 pounds to you and me!)

Speaking of swelling, have you seen the size of my belly today? Ow.

Watching the raindrops collect on the windowpane and longing for that Arizona sunshine that is only a month away now.... that's right, I'm coming home!

Speaking of Easter, I'm resurrecting Sufjan's Illinois, Gillian's Soul Journey and My Morning Jacket's The Tennessee Fire.

Snuggling into the sofa with the man I love.

Long distance phone calls.

Saying 'hey baby wanna lick my spoon?'

A is for Ambivalence

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore. Dorothy Parker, Here Lies (1939), "The Little Hours"

I'm feeling a little bit disappointed in myself for my complete lack of follow through. I have about a million and one unfinished projects and nary a plan nor inclination to finish any of them. I'm in a bit of a lull, truth be told. Spring is flirting with me, giving me hope that tomorrow will find me more accomplished.

((A note about project 52.... I've been having some trouble uploading new photos from my camera to either of our pc's. I think it's a problem with my USB cable and my camera's a bit old school with one of those massive memory cards that doesn't fit into modern laptop card readers. Sigh... I've been taking the photos as promised and according to schedule, just bear with me to figure out a new way to upload them!!))

xx Bee

.... And They're Off!

Even though I don't think I could be any farther away from Alaska, the start of the Iditarod always gets me pumped (and just a little bit homesick, truth be told). Follow all the action from the Anchorage Daily News. --I actually subscribe to the coverage and get daily updates by e-mail, what a dork! If the Iditarod's not your thing, the ADN has amazing photo archives from Alaska, it's definitely worth a browse if you've got the time to kill.

photo: Marc Lester - ADN

InspirationThis Sunday

Snow drops, daffodils, crocuses, even the first of the season's lambs are wobbling along on knobby knees. Spring? Are you almost here? The weather report disagrees and calls for snow tonight!! March winds, April showers, May flowers, and all that.

Sunday morning finds me reading this gorgeous book on the edible rainbow garden, planning my garden and ordering seeds from Renee on this wonderful website. Finding these funky chickens from bird in the hand tucked away in my website bookmarks and I'm matching fabric from the stash as we speak. I finally pieced Pippa together while convalescing yesterday after having tucked her away for the past 3 months, hopefully she'll be finished this week and I'll be able to show her off. Reading through the archives of this blogger (and this one, oh and this one too!) and falling just a little bit in love.

B de céu azul

B de céu azul
Originally uploaded by lopes.janara

Saw this today..... I hope she'll agree to be my new mascot!

F is for Flare-up

I want to formally apologize to a certain dear friend of mine who has suffered from IBS long before I ever even dreamed it could happen to me too. I can recall a certain incident involving an emergency shit in someone's unsuspecting hedge in Wallingford on our way down to see the fireworks at Gasworks Park for the 4th of July and my obvious and insensitive annoyance of having to take you back home. There were other occasions too when you complained that you didn't feel well enough to make our dinner date or to come over to some party or another that I was throwing and I sighed in exasperation.

Vengeance is upon me now, and how! All of my eye-rolling and mutterings of 'it can't really be that bad....' started to wane when I began having emergency shits myself, mostly on holiday when dietary indiscretions are inevitable. (Forgive me please for my demarcation of that construction site in Krakow as I was stumbling back to my flat from a late night out with friends, near that pretty little alpine lake in Spain where we just enjoyed a picnic of chorizo and goat's cheese, and that poor little struedel house in Berlin, I enjoyed my wienerschnitzel very much until it turned on me.)

As I'm writing this, I'm writhing in pain from yet another flare up of this weird disorder. I, like many of you I'm sure, thought that IBS was something that was a psychological problem created by stressed out people who if they would just calm down they would feel healthy again like the rest of us. It really wasn't such a big deal, what's the fuss all about? After more than a year of suffering alternating bouts of diarrhea that strikes with cruel precision and often without warning when you're standing in line at the bank, in the car and on a long road trip or going for a run outside Coombe Abbey Country Park and there's not a toilet for 3 miles. And then there's the following weeks of constipation and the painful bloating and discomfort that comes with that and the time spent looking like Hiro from Heroes, stopping time. And then came the medical investigations - some of them invasive, but all of them time consuming, anxiety creating, and ultimately unnecessary.


Why am I going on about this? For one thing, I feel like an ass for being so insensitive (though I don't think ever directly) and not taking the time to understand what a dear friend was going through. It's embarrassing, to say the least, to sheepishly explain that you have to leave the movie cinema immediately or you might explode. I get that now. I also hope to be some kind of advocate for raising awareness about IBS, it's likely that you know someone who has it - they say 1 in 5 Americans will have it at some point in their lifetimes. Some 4 million Brits are affected.

From Heather Van Vorous, IBS expert "IBS is indisputably a physical problem. Simply put, the brain-gut interaction of people with IBS influences their bowel pain perception and motility. In a nutshell, the processing of pain information within the central nervous system varies between normal individuals and those of us with IBS, with the result that we can experience even normal GI contractions as painful. The interactions between our brains, central nervous systems and GI systems are just not functioning properly. We have colons that react to stimuli that do not affect normal colons, and our reactions are much more severe."

This morning, I measured my amazing bloated girth. Even my husband is suspicious that I'm 5 months pregnant, and he knows better. My waist is normally large at 35 inches, but it has today expanded to an incredible 43 inches. I can't bend at the waist. I don't have any clothes that I can wear comfortably, and with the painful contractions from being so blocked up that drop me to my knees on occasion, I'm really not able to leave the house today.