My baking experiment

Y’all, I don’t know what I was thinking. I tried making oatmeal cookies without shortening or extract. I pulled a recipe off the internet and unsurprisingly, I made an oatmeal/flour goop that was sorta tasty. Just not oatmeal cookies. πŸ™ Still, bless his heart, M praised my abilities. That man rocks. He complimented my toes not too long ago and my immediate family knows what those crusty appendages look like. πŸ™‚ I’m slightly bummed out, but not giving up. On our next trip to Wally world, I’ll be investing in some vanilla extract and vegetable shortening. In short, baking stuff. However, I won’t be doing too much of baking because if it goes wrong, a lot of ingredients would have been wasted. Speaking of cooking, M introduced another vegetable in our cooking vocabulary: cabbage. I tried my hand at cooking it and adding it into whole wheat spaghetti. It was a success and I intend on using it some more.

In other news, We’ve made some small strides toward debt reduction. Technically, we’re in the black although by less than three figures. It’s small, but encouraging. Also, I recently made a video for my father-in-law on how to zip files. It was a fun little project made possible by Camtasia (version 3) which is horribly expensive, but there’s a free alternative at CamStudio. They are both basically screen recording utilities and Camtasia is obviously more powerful. I didn’t really do any voice editing (no take two’s largely because I didn’t know how to go back and forth to erase sections where I mumbled and such), but I tried adding arrows and things to visually help out the user. I hope this helps anyone out there! And try not to make too much fun of how redundant certain things might seem, but for a user who is not very familiar with the workings of Windows, it will be of certain benefit. M floated the idea of making a series of training videos about things mostly based on questions I’ve had from my father-in-law about certain tasks. I’d love to do them so I’ll be brainstorming on some fun tasks I can come up with. Enjoy!!

Beautiful in this skin. :)

Man, I feel good. πŸ™‚

Whoa-oa-oa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now
I feel good, I knew that I would, now
So good, so good, I got you

Whoa! I feel nice, like sugar and spice
I feel nice, like sugar and spice
So nice, so nice, I got you

That is how I feel this morning. I had an awesome breakfast of brown rice with steamed broccoli and I snuck some handfuls of Kashi GoLean Crunch to go with me. The simple pleasures. Yesterday was a hard day for a few reasons and it was a test that I flunked. However, I feel like a winner today. I learnt some hard lessons (this is not work related), but I am going to put my new information to some good use. I am disgustingly healthy, I’ve got an even healthier husband with a penchant, healthy family … I never thought I would say it, but I am content. I am 23 years old and that’s an eternity in comparison to peers from my motherland. However, to each his own. As I pray and bless my peers, I am praying and blessing myself too. Praying and striving for clarity and direction. Speaking of which, I had been toying with the idea of getting certified in one of the clinical laboratory sciences. Then, I sat down and thought of what those jobs involved and as much as I like the idea, I decided that I would be better off pursuing a different line of education. Taking this alternate route does not entirely close the door to any of the clinical laboratory sciences, but at this moment, it’s off the table. Which actually opens up a bunch of options to me seeing as Georgia does not have a good variety of the clinical laboratory sciences anyway.

Going back to school is very much on the mind although it will be for a shorter program like a Masters degree program or something. I’m just considering my options at this point and will need to make up my mind before the year is out if I am going to be a competitive applicant for the 2009/2010 school year. My general GRE scores were decent, but I am toying with taking the subject GRE test which will be a major undertaking, but I think I could do it if I started studying like right now. πŸ™‚ Anyhow, I’m not looking forward to the application fees and such so I will need to do some research and apply to a select handful. Just thinking out loud.