A Valentine's Day To Remember

In the past I've always hated Valentine's Day or Single's Awareness Day as I tended to call it along with the myriad of other people who didn't have a significant other to spend the day with.  I would get depressed that I was still single after however many years it had been since my ex and I broke up.  So I would spend Valentine's Day depressed that I was single and annoyed every time I saw some giggling couple go by.  For the most part I've gotten better with it and just tried to focus on other things and convince myself it wasn't a big deal.  This year was slightly harder because within the last couple of months several people I know have either gotten married or announced that they're expecting kids.  Normally I wouldn't think much of it except for the fact that they're all three, even four years younger than me.  Much as I am happy for them it does make me very aware of the fact that I haven't had a real date in almost exactly four years now while many of my Facebook friends, most of whom are my age or younger, are raving about their fantastic boyfriends or girlfriends and the latest date they've gone on.  And I know, nobody wants to date the fat girl, but when most of the girls at my work who are my size or bigger are also raving about their fantastic boyfriends or girlfriends, I start to figure something must be seriously wrong with me.

The Journey Begins

As many people know, last month was National Novel Writing Month.  I'd heard about for a couple years but never participated mostly because I was a bit daunted by the idea of having to write 50,000 words in one month.  On top of that, I usually didn't have the time to just sit down and write or when I did have some free time, writing was not what I wanted to do.  This year, however, I decided to give it a go.  Years ago, back when I was still in high school, my two best friends at the time and I decided that we should each write a book.  In some ways they were similar because we were really into dragons and fairies and Japan at that time so they had those elements in it and then they also all revolved around three girls we based off of ourselves and our friendship.  I never got far with mine.  I would get a couple chapters in, give it to my friends to critique and then re-write parts of it with their suggestions.  I think the whole concept of the story changed at least three times.  It had been years since I'd even glanced at the manuscripts I had so I honestly didn't remember a whole lot other than the very general idea, which I still liked.  I had just never been able to find a way to go with it and write what I wanted to.

Caramel Apple Cake

For Thanksgiving this year, I decided to go ahead and bake the dessert and try something new.  A month or two back I had picked up an issue of Food Network magazine.  It had some really good recipes in it, but the recipe I really wanted to try was this cake that had been made to look like a caramel apple.  It was absolutely amazing and it was rated as easy, so I figured it would be something fun to make for Thanksgiving to kind of shake up our normal menu.  Since I had to work Thanksgiving, I made the cake the night before.  The recipe said that it would take about two hours, but with it being my first time, I figured it might take more like two and a half to three.  It took five.  For all that the recipe said it was easy, it was not.  I'm guessing it was rated easy because you made the cake using box mix instead of from scratch and there weren't all that many ingredients.  Actually building the cake though was far from easy.