Last Friday, I had a small dinner party for my BFF, Di. I baked and cooked all day. I made a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting from Scratch, as her birthday cake. I even toasted the pecans that were in the cake and the frosting. Seriously, it is an amazing recipe- totally scrumptious. For dinner itself, I made baked butternut squash, coated in olive oil and spices, topped with parmesan cheese; a roasted sweet pepper salad- in which I actually roasted the peppers in the over; baked sweet potatos; and steak. What makes all of this so striking is that I don't cook, not very often at least. I live by myself and my mother is an amazing cook and lives next door. I don't actually need to cook very often. Let's face it, it isn't very fun to cook for one's self. If I can get by with chopping up veggies and whipping up a quick batch of hummus, then I'm pretty happy. The thing that I discovered last Friday is that I do, very much, enjoy cooking. Tonight, for no other reason than I felt like it and I had the ingredients, I made Snickerdoodles. They'll be fabulous with a lovely cup of tea. All of the sudden, I want to bake- everything! It's very bizarre. Is this what barely working does to a person? I don't know....

On the agenda for this evening 1. drink tea and eat Snickerdoodle (it is fun to say!) 2. grout tile downstairs in family room ( I laid it two days ago, it's time to grout! Fun wow.) 3. Talk to Boy

Can you stand the excitement?

I have finally decided upon a new user pic. I loved the old one, and I am still "SpringFaerie", will always be SpringFaerie, but even I am tired of my "sweet" persona. No one is *THAT* sweet, even me! And so, I am unveiling my new user pic. It definitely captures more of the frame of mind that I'm in- still sweet, but also sexy and little naughty. What can I say? It's been an interesting Summer! ;)

Do you have any idea how much it sucks to download music with an Old-School Dial Up Connection? It truly blows. I feel like centuries have passed since I began this quest for new music for my Ipod.

And am I the only one who misses the halcyon days of Napster, back when it was just a "Shared Music Community" site? *Sigh* Ah, the good ol' days...

I don't know how much I mentioned what's been going on in my family life over the past oooh, year or so, as I haven't been the most consistent of E-Peeps since grad. school began. Last year, my dad had a couple of very minor strokes which stymied the doctors at both Buffalo General and Gates. We wouldn't have even known that he had the strokes as, it seemed, they affected his balance. He was the healthiest person in the ICU, which was actually pretty funny. He was in the hospital for two weeks, in a rehab facility for two weeks and was back at work a month after that. And the panic had abated. This time last year my usually incredibly stoic mother was freaking out, had put their house on the market, and was planning on moving back to Lackawanna. My dad got better, things calmed to near normal levels, they took the house off the market, and were talking about when my dad retires, in a couple of years. And then in December his foot started to swell. And he went to his doctor who didn't really think much of it. And it continued to swell to the point where it looked like he had developed Elephantitis, so swollen, it was uncomfortable to look at. You would assume that my father would have been in great amounts of pain. And he probably would have been were it not for the fact that he has Diabetic Neuropathy and can't actually feel his feet. So, his foot was swelling, the foot that had been his good leg after the strokes, and his doctor isn't really concerned. Finally, four months after the swelling began, and my mother haranguing him, he went to a podiatrist who initially diagnosed his foot as a wicked case of gout. We all thought, great, Gout. We can deal with gout.

It wasn't gout. My father, due to his diabetic neuropathy developed a condition known as Charcot Syndrome in which the bones in your foot suddenly soften and begin to fracture and because he can't feel it, he kept walking on these fractured bones fracturing them further. Then, the foot got a blister and an infection. He has been hospitalized twice since May 31st to be put on I.V. antibiotics. Now, my father is retired and a stone's throw to being an amputee.

To help my parents, who have once again put their house in Colden up for sale, my fabulous Uncle and Aunt have offered my parents to move into their house in Colden because it has an open floor plan which is better to accomodate a wheel chair and have contracted to have a ramp built and the bathroom remodeled to make it handicap accessible.

Truly, my Uncle Stan and Aunt Jackie are possibly the best people I know- everything that they've done for me and now everything that they're doing for my parents... Although, this does mean, my parents are moving in with me and I have no idea how that's going to work...

I just wish that I had some sort of personal direction right now. With everything going on I'm trying very hard to not feel lost. In my family, we all do right now, we all feel lost. It's hard to feel like you're not drowning.

Rock me, Rock me, Rock me Sexy Jesus! So, last night, one of my best friends and I went to see Hamlet 2. I can't remember that last time that I laughed- genuine belly laughs!- in a movie! D. nearly peed herself- TWICE! It was just a warped, twisted, high-man-humour kind of movie, with, arguably, the BEST Musical score in History! After the movie ended, we decided to turn our evening into a double feature and went to see Tropic Thunder which was very funny, different than Hamlet 2, but still very funny. Not nearly so many belly laughs, However, that being said, Handsdown- Tom Cruise' best roll EVER! I can't stand Tom Cruise and I was actually totally impressed by him. He played with such gusto and such vigor, it was really refreshing to see him play such a balls-to-the- wall comedic character. It almost makes me not mind his crazy Scientology-ness. If you haven't seen either of them, I absolutely recommend them, especially Hamlet 2!

I'm so downloading "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" into my Ipod!!! :)