We don't have that, either.

So today's like the blizzardy-est (yes, I make up words) road conditions ever, but I had a cake delivery to do, AND I needed to find something call 'foamcore board', so I was out driving in it.  I actually need it right now, today, for a cake, but that's beside the point, since I didn't find it, but more about that later. 

Michael's used to have what I need, like a good craft store should, but they quit carrying it, without telling me why, but everyone (and by everyone, I mean, other cake people I've asked) keeps saying I can find it at "duh...Lowe's or Home Depot".  So I called Lowe's and asked the lady.  She looked it up and said yes, it's in their lumber department, and they have 100 sheets.  It was on my way back from delivering the cake in the blizzard, so I swung (slid) into Lowe's and went in.

After wandering around too much in the lumber dept, I finally found someone wearing the official Lowe's apparel.

Me:  Do you have foamcore board?

Guy:  What?

Me:  Foamcore.  It's 1/2" white board, not wood, with like a hard foam inside, and it's coated with polypropylene plastic-y stuff. 

Guy:  We have styrofoam sheets in the lumber yard.

Me:  No, not styrofoam.  It's like a craft product; it shouldn't be with lumber. 

Guy:  I can't even picture what you're describing to me right now.

Me:  If you have kids and they do science projects..this is the stuff that would be the back board they use. 

Guy:  I'm still lost. 

At this point a short annoyed-looking woman employee walks up.

Her:  What are you looking for?

Me:  1/2" white foamcore board.

Her:  I don't know what you're talking about.  What are you using it for?

Me:  I cut it for bases underneath cakes--

Her: --oh, you won't find anything here for food.

Me:  It's not for food; it gets covered and used underneath for support and---

Her:  --If it's for food, you're at the wrong place.

(like I've somehow stumbled into a store without realizing it's not a baking warehouse).

Me:  I buy stuff here all the TIME that's not for food, but aside from that, I still need to--

Her:  We don't have it.

Me:  But someone told me you--

Her:  We don't have that either.

Wow.

Me:  Well, I'm sure GLAD I came in here in a blizzard anyway. 

Guy:  Oh.  Yeah, drive careful out there.

Me:  Thanks.  It was great just trying to get here.  In the blizzard.

Back to the sugar mines.  I still have no idea what I'm going to use for this cake that I'm working on today.

-chef stef

A present of sorts.

       I wanted to write you something but I couldn't think of anything!

       Did anyone besides me think of swaying fields of grain when they look at my arm?

--Sabrina

Captain Bean

       I realize that I blog excessively about myself. I apologize. Today I shall inform you about Louis, my bean-shaped cat (the more I think about it, the more I have the urge to call him Captain Bean, but somehow I feel that would end badly). I believe that he has a soul, not because I am an insane cat lover (which I am), but because a soulless beast is incapable of such intemperance. Louis is a very snide, very large and slightly deformed creature. Not like twisted deformed, or lacking anything (in fact he has too much of EVERYTHING), but in that he is exceptionally contortable. He can stretch four feet to eat doll hair, or curl up in the space behind your back in an easy chair. He can take up an entire loveseat with his body when he's relaxed, and he has really long legs. He also is overweight, so he moves very little. Sometimes I wonder if the only exercise he gets is the actual movement of the feets in the six-foot-long journey getting from reclining position on the back porch through the back door to reclining position in front of the fireplace. Believe it or not, he was once a skinny, leaping critter, as opposed to this massive beast that now occupies our fireplace rug.
       In our school's Bible class, we're going through the attributes of God for apologetics. So let me give you the attributes of Louis. And apologize.
       Louis is constantly hungry. It matters not whether he could actually survive for several months before he would actually hear the belly rumble; his mind seems to believe that he has no actual stomach. So, whenever his food bowl is empty, Louis resorts to the Three-Step-Remedy:

              
       And then there's a two-step process to actually devouring the food.

       This is why Louis is obese.

       Louis has a knack for finding exactly where you don't want him.

       Louis has selective hearing. Some days, when you talk about him with him within hearing distance, he gets all miffed.
               

                         But when you actually WANT him, he becomes suddenly deaf. And when you get all mad at him, he's all like YOU CAN'T YELL AT ME FOOL I HAVE A TRAGIC DISABILITY!!! and then you feel all bad. He's really good at guilt trips. Example: He has an addiction to scratching the carpet when he comes in from being outside, flexing his biceps, all that. He knows he shouldn't be doing it. He KNOWS. I swear. And when you yell at him, or, like me, smack the top of his head (which is very broad and strangely flat) his ears go flat and he screams like you clocked him with a rubber mallet for trying to curl up with you.

       Did I mention he's very manipulative?

       Also, he has a short-term memory. If you're walking down the hall, he'll cut in front of you, and then he slows wayyy down or lays on the floor. When you try to get around him, he freaks out and starts hollering and runs away from you down the hall. Likewise, he will forget that the person he is currently cuddling with is the person who has saved him from the big bad world and promptly tries to murder them.

       I remember when we first got Louis. He had been dumped off in my friend's neighborhood. He was extremely skinny, and my friend Aleesha (bless her little heart) had named him Missy, under the notion that he was a female.

       

              It's been a while, but some things never change, like the fact that Louis and I have a twisted love-hate relationship, or that he looks like a kidney bean, or that my library books will never be turned in on time.

       Crap. There I go yammering about myself again.

--Sabrina

Rainbow Buddies

     I decided to have a little fun with my friends Austin and Ian and drew them in a wallpaper.

       To make this your wallpaper, double-click the image, then right-click it, and choose "Set as background." Make it your wallpaper. Do it. Do it now.

Aristotle Punk font curtesy dafont.com

--Sabrina

The Secret Lives Of Grown-Ups: Part I

Monday

Today, I have learned a Great Secret: I have spent a school day with a Grown-Up.

                This morning, I woke up sick again (I was sick yesterday and last month too but today I was sick also—true fact). I was (am) feeling a bit unresponsive and rather delirious.

                My parents decided I should stay out of school for the day.

                So I went with my mom to work. She gave me two Dayquil pills, which I took with a Thomas Hammer Fireball.

                After that, we went to my Mom’s shop. Apparently the propane stove has been leaking since Friday, and the building probably would have s’ploded if we had taken the week off (since the people next to us smoke like chimneys) (at least this is what my diseased brain understood the situation to be). So we couldn’t work. As such, my mom and I drove around for a while to give the shop time to air out. Our first stop was Michael’s craft store. At this point I am attempting to convey some sort of security in my diseasedness, however false (I assume that part to be the coffee and Dayquil).

                Feeling so fancy free, I decided to walk by myself around Michael’s and promptly got lost.

          Meanwhile these employee people are staring at me, as if they’ve never seen a sick teenage girl in an Adventure Time hat gimping through a craft store on a school day.

Eventually I found my mother and we went back to the shop, and I lazed around for the rest of the day. But at the end of it all, as I reconcile with my cat and think about the day, I reflect upon what I have learned. I have spent A Day With A Grown-Up; I have seen the Things Grown-Ups Do while I’m at school. And I made it out alive.

--Sabrina

Monstrous Noms.

     I get the weirdest cravings sometimes.

                   -Sabrina

Dance Of The Sugar Plum Demons

We’re waiting for it to snow.

                I live in Northern Idaho. As such, we are INTO Christmas. You think you’re into Christmas? I don’t care. We do it better. 

                Since Halloween has passed this Monday (we made Christmas cookie dough), things have changed drastically for my city. No more golden tapestries and little red maple leaves and pumpkins—oh, no! We’ve got all the Holiday Limited Edition coffee creamers out, the eggnog, the gingerbread-house-Redi-mix. Our local Michael’s store has had Christmas products out since August. We all wait all year for Christmas, or, rather, the culmination of glittery magicalness that comes beforehand. So we get impatient. But now, we legitimately can be excited. Most of the people that live here would agree with me in this: at this point, Thanksgiving is not only a holiday in itself, but a prelude to The Day After: DECORATING.

                And it’s supposed to snow. This week.

                So I’m all excited, because my mom’s getting all sage about the weather. “It’s gonna snow tonight. I can feel it. I can smell it.”

     Every year it's the same thing. The first day of snow is a huge deal for my family. Only one thing. I seem to be the only one excited in a positive way anymore. Last year I ran around outside and texted all of my friends.



    

     But give it about three weeks or so, standing in a pile of puffy whiteness begins to lose its charm a little bit.



     That aside, I'm excited.

          --Sabrina