Keeping Busy

For the past two days I have been partly moping around, but partly keeping busy so that I don't start to feel too sorry for myself and so that no one else starts to feel sorry for me. Greg has had to go back to the states. I am not really looking forward to this Skype-phase of our marriage. I want to be cautious about wishing time away, but I am pretty much wishing this time will go quickly.

The night before Greg left he decided we should make some pepparkakor. This is the standard Swedish Christmas cookie, basically a ginger snap. Normally I have a decent instinct with baking. For example, if I am looking at a recipe that requires 6 cups of flour, I know that the yield is probably a bit high for a household of two, soon to be one. But when a recipe requires 15 dl of flour, then it is just like, 'Okay where is the measuring cup?'. So after we had about half of the cookies made (using our new cookie cutters shaped like a polar bear, giraffe, lion, alligator, and camel), Greg saw that the yield for the recipe was 300. Luckily I don't roll dough very thin, so we only made about 150?



And I cleaned the windows. Riveting! Just look at how filthy they were.



And of course the first day Greg was gone I finished the rest of the Reese's trees that my mother had lovingly sent to me when I panicked about not being able to buy any here. So today I made the peanut butter balls that we had planned to make before Christmas. I guess when you buy a most-delicious cake, any pre-Christmas baking plans get delayed.



Unfortunately (fortunately), though the peanut butter balls look so spectacular in that photo (it is salt sprinkled on top! so amazing!), the removal of peanut butter balls from plate was not a smooth operation. The chocolate majorly stuck to the plate. Unless I let them warm up a bit, in which it stuck all over my fingers. Needless to say, these are not presentable and will not be shared with anyone else. Sad day for me? I put half of them in the freezer so that I wouldn't eat them all in two days. Although a frozen peanut butter ball is probably delicious...

In other news I just like reading blogs and I am now obsessed with Ana's blog. I feel so lucky to have learned about 'super bust-out mode'. Basically, set a timer, pick a task, and get as much done with it as you can in the allotted time. Aim for quantity over quality. I just busted-out on the kitchen and basically got everything done in under the 30 minutes I gave myself. But before, I was looking at all of the mess and thinking about how it would take hours to clean, a task which was too daunting to even start.

I think it helps that I've created a super bust-out mode playlist on spotify. (Spell checker wants that to say spottily.) So far it has two songs, Party Rock Anthem and Kerncraft 400. It took a little searching for that second one, because I only know it as the Hockey Goal Song.