Wedding cakes and excuses

 When you're making a wedding cake the bride can get you out of anything. 

How to make a wedding cake

 This post could also be called how to become an alcoholic.

January: Agree to make wedding cake. Look for sugar skull moulds.

February: Buy sugar skull moulds. I meant to start work on it straight away but didn't. Don't worry, there's  plenty of time.

March: Crap - only a month till the wedding. Panic. Realise that this is all about preparation as I must work the week before the wedding. Beg, borrow and steal tins from mother-in-law. Make lots of lists and calculations.Realise that there is very little I can do till the week before the wedding. Again panic. Drink lots of alcohol. Look at wedding wrecks on cake wrecks. Drink more alcohol.

Make Sugar Skulls: Make sugar skulls from moulds. Leave to dry for a week. Join together with royal icing. (recipe to follow over coming days).

2 Weeks before: Individually line, mix, bake, cool, wrap and freeze each tier of wedding cake (takes whole day). 

Week before

Saturday: Cake shop open till 2pm. - buy a HUGE box of fondant. Call mother realising you don't want to carry 7kg of fondant home for 20 minutes. Realise you haven't gotten the cakes out of the freezer. Defrost cakes. Play Sims. Make Ganache. Leave to set. Obsessively look at Cake decorating forums. Practice Educause conference presentation.

Sunday: Make buttercream. Split cakes, fill with buttercream, cover with ganache. Clear out fridge. Leave to set in fridge. 

Monday: Present first ever conference paper at Educause.

Tuesday night: Colour fondant green, wrap for later. Start decorating sugar skulls. This involves making royal icing from scratch.

Wednesday night: work late - hope to dear god that everything won't be ruined because you haven't covered the cakes with fondant icing.

Thursday night: Come home, cover cakes in fondant. This is not as easy as it sounds. Spray cakes with vodka. Drink vodka.

Friday: Have day off. Realise that you have left covering the cake board in fondant far too late. Buy wrapping paper to cover board. Make fondant decorations & attach with royal icing - this sounds easy but surprisingly took all day. Finish decorating skulls. Be amazed at the amount of royal icing required for everything. Hubby helps assemble bottom two layers of cake. Pipe ganache borders. Hubby makes travelling box. Get to bed by 1:30

Wedding Day: Get up with hubby at 5:30. He switches cars around and moves cake to back of car as you realised the night before that you can't lift the cake on your own. Feel lucky you realised this before he left home. *phew* Go back to bed as he goes to work. Pack up everything needed for the cake, get dressed. Cake safely makes it to the wedding, you put on the top tier and the bride doesn't submit your cake to cake wrecks. *phew*

Also - I realise that top tier isn't centred. It bothers me every time.

I totally made a wedding cake!

If you check the date you'll see I totally blogged for work yesterday, even if I forgot to put it here.

How to hack EndNote (Part 4) - Submitting your journal article

Suddenly I feel like that's all over with - until my colleague Patrick told me I should do a how to Hack Endnote for your thesis and explained to me this problem of combining all your individual chapter's bibliographies into one. The only catch is I haven't done it before ... ever. So there may need to be some practising.

All this talk of wedding dresses! Did you know I made a wedding cake for MissSophieMac's Mexican Elopement Fiesta? I totally did! I also presented my first conference paper the Monday at Educause in the same week. Since I have so many days to fill in - I thought I'd blog some of the steps involved.

Here's a preview of it below.

Ohhh I, want to steal your heart ... and eat your brains

The lonely Island

So awesome! (Note some swearing... actually a lot of swearing. Just in case that bothers you)

Double click on yes...

Still being a dork - I'm sorry.

Part 3: How to hack EndNote: After all that effort, nothing has changed in MS word!

Also, Eddie Izzard is AWESOME.



Although - who has to do what with a fax now?

EndNote and cupcakes

I feel like such a library dork my first two posts for #blogjune are about EndNote. *sigh* Actually there will be another two in the series. I also blog at Research@UTS:Library, but have completely fallen behind with RAILS and Educause. So thought I would kill two birds with one stone.

The 4 part series will chronicle my epic adventure in referencing a journal article. I mean, who has ever heard of numbered referencing style before? The irony of this is after I spent a week learning how to do this, we didn't even make it to peer review for that journal as they publish articles that are more researchery and not so conceptual. So after yelling at my computer and sending numerous emails to my colleagues there was NO WAY I was going to let this slide by and not get something out of the experience. Hence:

1st June: How to hack EndNote: writing a journal article (part 1)
2nd June: How to hack EndNote: writing a journal article (part 2)

Also - I must learn how to do the cupcake swirls in the video below. I have the big tip, coupler and large piping bag from Wilton. It's a crime not to have used them yet.

{This Moment}

The brave gardener!!!

All the rain that has turned south Queensland into a lagoon made my backyard a rather scary place to be!!!

It's an entomophobic's worst nightmare

 I can tell you right now that in the past a GIANT spider has jumped out of that rather large sage bush! However since I haven't been in the garden for several weeks due to the rain everything was crazy. Poor Fredrick has some weird caterpillars on him.

 I mean what on EARTH is that thing? There were two, poor Fredrick. I took a deep breath, put on gardening gloves and squished them into oblivion (with a wad of paper towel). Then I covered EVERYTHING with Dipel to hopefully kill any more that come my way. He has only just started growing new leaves since the hail storm ripped him to shreds. Furthermore there were spiders curled up in his leaves and just bugs everywhere. My skin crawls just thinking about it. Why on earth did I start this garden??? However my two readers will be ever proud to note that I didn't cry and/or didn't wait till Vaughan was home to deal with it. I held onto my breath and dove in ... because when you hold your breath bugs obviously leave you alone.

To my great joy I discovered that my garden is not just home to lots of icky bugs (which are a very good sign) but also home to 4 lady beetles!!!! The most I have ever seen. When I was weeding my sweet alice (shown on the left) when something flew out of it in a mad panic and landed on my shoulder. I looked down and saw a beautiful red lady beetle!!! Which is fantastic because that's exactly why I planted it. It is meant to attract the good bugs, like lady beetle's and bees into your garden that kill pests and pollinate flowers.


As I weeded and chopped my way into the garden, I found something fantastic!!

CUCUMBERS!!!!!!!!

Look at that guy!!! That's totally a cucumber!!!!! After the hail storm I had to wait ages for the plants to recover. It's taken a month for them to grow back. I've spent ages trying to hand pollinate my zucchini plant only to realise today that I've been pollinating male zuchinni flowers with other male flowers. * blushes*

I had started to worry that I should have been pollinating my cucumber vine only to discover that there are TOTALLY cucumbers on it. Furthermore - I'm also growing carrots!!

You see those spikey leaves - they're carrots.

 The larger leaves are radishes. My mother gave me a great tip. You mix the seeds of radishes and carrots together. The radishes grow super quickly and let you know where the carrots have been planted, which take much longer to grow.

Overall - today I feel accomplished :)

{This Moment}

Extinction of Libraries

I've been working on a conference paper with some colleagues about using engagement and play in the workplace, particularly as a way to re-invent Libraries. I think it's started to rub off on me when I included this in an ALIA survey:

I think the most important issue facing our profession is that we are not moving fast enough with the times. We spend too long talking to each other about how important and necessary we are, and not enough time looking to our users to improve services based on their desires. I don't think the solution often touted by Librarians is promotion of our current services. I believe the solution is change. There are a lot of libraries doing this, but perhaps not enough.

They just wanted to know why I was a non-member. Maybe a little too heavy?

Ha!

Freedom to fail

Sometimes you just need a bowl of citrus.

Couldn't sleep last night from worrying that my work on this conference paper wouldn't be what my colleagues wanted. That they would scoff and would need to do extra work to make up for my poor efforts.

Part of what we're saying in the conference paper is that in order to be creative / innovative you must take risks and allow yourself the freedom to fail.

... maybe I need to add a disclaimer "This is harder then you might think."

#FURIOUSLYHAPPY

Oh The Bloggess how I love you.

I was having one of those days. Actually I've been having one of those days since July. It's been a fun filled 4 months of complicated parental illness, crazy software and printing problems at work resulting in some serious student complaints, a crashed car and a temporary brain injury, piles of project work that I'm struggling through and yesterday I arrived home to discover that that natural poison I sprayed to get rid of the caterpillars on my amazing vegie garden has burned their little leaves. My garden was one of the things that has held me together. It was just so amazing and green and and and... perfect. I cried. I missed Vaughan. It was quite literally a grey day. Then I read The Bloggess. Jenny you are brilliant. Bugger this! I too am going to be #FURIOUSLYHAPPY. Begining with The lonely planet...

Boys you may not want to read this. It's about girl stuff. You've been warned.

I want to take the time to apologise to my husband in advance. I have begun my time of change. For the next six months I am going to turn into crazy bitch-face wife.  It's not intentional - it's hormonal. Apparently it is also quite horrifying if you're my husband.  To make sure that we don't have any little ones, I have an implant put in once every three years. It has some wonderful positives. I don't have to remember to take medication every day. For two and a half of those years I'm a rather normal person. I will have the odd tears, but mostly I'm cheerful and enthusiastic about everything. Before I went on the implant my 'time of the month' was fairly distressing. Extremely hormonal. On the implant it's much more mellow. Except for the first and last three months. During the last three months the hormone in the implant starts to run low. My skin breaks out, I start to cry all the time and Vaughan searches the house for my hot water bottle. It starts off slow. Maybe a day or two each month ... however it starts to get worse each time. This is where we are right now.  It's just the beginning.

Do you know what's worse? I won't really reach the peak of crazy bitch face until I get the new implant put in. I go from low hormone, to the highest concentration of hormone in the whole cycle. The levels will decrease exponentially over the three years, making the first week hell and the rest of that month pretty bad. The first time I went on the implant Vaughan was afraid to breathe for the first month. The worse thing is that I had no idea I became crazy bitch face. It's like becoming a werewolf. You're like 'hey that wasn't so bad' and everyone else informs you that during your crazy time you've murdered half a village. Except in this instance that village is your husband's soul. The second time around it was still bad, but I handled it a little better. I tried to reign myself in and walk away before I was nasty to kind sweet Vaughan.

I've been stressed at work lately so I imagine this time will be no less horrifying. I apologise in advance to Vaughan.  Everyone else, please feel free to defriend me for the next six months.  Expect lots of cake related tragedies, tears and anger.  I may write several blog posts about how fat I am. It's not you, it's definitely me and my hormones.

See you all in six months.

P.S. It's 7:30 and Vaughan isn't home yet. He quite obviously has stopped loving me and run off with a pretty girl.

P.P.S. He's home. I informed him that the crazy bitch-face cycle had begun. He said I wasn't a bitch and that he loves me. That made me also want to cry. 

Touché universe. You win this round.

I had a little episode this morning. It was possibly the worst tantrum in my grown up life and if it could have involved an emergency exit, it would. I was working up to the best sulk of all time when I walked to the station and saw a woman weeping at the side of a really bad car accident.

I'm not suggesting that the slow cooker and I have come to some kind of truce, nor that I'm really happy that my meticulously constructed plans were foiled this morning. Just have my day has been and could have been much worse.

Touché universe. 

(FYI - that is my car. Not the car from this morning)

F&%K you slow cooker

I've been pretty organised this week. I will normally plan out recipes and what we're going to eat all week, I've organised everything pretty well - or so I thought. This is the lead up to the worlds biggest sulk.

It's a Tuesdays. You get to go to KC which is awesome, but it means spending 3.5 hours on the train. The Special Needs Computer at KC died which is officially the last straw with this never ending saga that started in June. Despite the fact that you weren't meant to cook dinners, you end up helping your husband because he has a headache. You get grumpy because it's the one night he's cooking and you didn't want to worry about anything, but feel guilty because he's not well. You also wash up while helping because the washing up is still there from the night before. Next morning you realise you have to wash up YET AGAIN because you live in PERPETUAL fear that you have missed the letter from the Real Estate Agents telling you they're coming for an inspection and they will just come into your house and see how you really live. You think 'lucky I'm so clever in organising my time' - I've planned a slow cooker dinner. Your mother in law promised you that they save you heaps of time. You've had to soak dried kidney beans the night before and boil them for 10 minutes this morning. Ok... phone rings ... turns out you've left your iPod, book, diary and the bloody Olympics Studies stuff you had organised to photograph with the Director of the Library today and wear Jeans to work for ARE WITH YOUR HUSBAND AT WORK 40 MINUTES AWAY. You've spent several weeks working on the project and stayed back late to make sure that all the details would fall together. Everything is Fucked because YOU forgot to get a bad out of a car. You knew your husband was working today, you knew you started late. You knew your stuff was in the car. Somehow this did not sink in.

You think about how the recipe of the slow cooker has another 20 billion steps in prep work to do.

*Rage builds and results in the following email to your husband*

That's it. Already my clean all the things and be perfect streak has failed. I just can't hold everything together anymore.

Fuck you slow cooker. I'm not using you because you make me worry too much. I'm not spending my morning getting dinner ready so you can make me panic all day that my house will burn down.


weg.khlrfsewl`

dfgdszrjwatlgkfffffffffffff

(I've added the link so you guys know what I'm talking about)

Husband calls and says - You have to blog that email. Trust me just do it.

I now know the truth about slow cookers. They don't save you time, they just cook really fucking slow. You still have to do everything you normally do - just in the morning when all you want to do is die or go back to sleep. Then they spend all day cooking something that you could do in 20 minutes when you get home as long as you add extra stock. 

I'm not even sure I can get to work without my iPod.

Gen Y Librarians make terrible shushers

I started work as an Information Services Librarian in September of 2008. This is my first library job which means that I have never worked as a shelver, on the loans desk or as cataloguer.  Apart from over sharing my history, what am I getting at? Lets just say that it is increasingly coming to my attention that I may not have the same skill set as other Librarians.  

Let me tell you a little story about shushing. A couple of years B.A. (Before Ashley) the Library tried to make our students feel welcome, feel loved and safe in our warm embrace. We relaxed the shushing.  Actually, I have no idea what happened, but this is my story. The students rebelled. Picture the scene from Beauty and the Beast - pitch forks, burning torches, wallwisher posts and long and specific complaints to desk staff. It’s exam time and people are talking on the upper levels which are zoned for silent study.  They are loud, hog tables and then reserve them for long periods while they go away for lunch. WE DEMAND JUSTICE!!!

They want us to become a big bunch of shushers. This is what lead to MissSophieMac and I creating the Library’s first ever Shush Patrol. We put on our name badges and walked upstairs. 

Holy crap on a cracker, we were not prepared.

I asked two people if they could move into the stairwell when they were on the phone to make sure they wouldn’t disturb anyone. I felt smug – I am Librarian hear me shush. I can shush with the best of them. I want to point out I wasn’t feeling smug that I was telling a student what to do, but rather that I had some Librarian skillz. Then everything started to go wrong. We heard people talking softly on a quiet floor. They weren’t in the silent area. To shush or not to shush?  On level three, neither of us knew what that floor was zoned as, so we checked a sign only to read that people are not allowed to use their phones in the stairwell!! Librarian Fail. It turns out that on tours for the last 2 years I have been giving out incorrect information. Level three is split between a learning commons type area and individual study area at the other end. Should that end part be quiet study? In the middle people on phones surrounded us. Do we shush them? Do we tell them to go down to level two? Do we shush people talking who aren’t quite in the learning commons area? Where do I draw the line?

What should I say to people on phones? “Excuse me, but you can’t talk on the phone. I demand you hang up immediately.”  Then do I stand there glaring at them until they hang up? Can we invent some sort of sound proof cone of silence so that I don’t have to say “I’m sorry but you can’t talk here. You have to go into the stairwell, down three flights of stairs and onto Level 2 before you can answer the phone. Oh and by the way, if you’re gone for more than 15 minutes I’m going to pack up your stuff and log it as lost property." It is just soooo awkward. What’s more awkward is that I also want to help students who need quiet areas to study. 

I have never been a shusher, usually I’m the one being shushed while in the library. 

(Photo Note: I can't shush, but I certainly can get a wee bit tipsy at a party and post for photos shushing. I blame Seb and my weakness for pink champagne)

Death by cornbread

Does anyone else ever worry that someday they will accidently overdose on cornbread? I do.  Cornbread is like a hidden time bomb of deliciousness. It sucks you in because it's mouth-watering and looks kind of cakey. You think - I can totally eat a huge bowl of soup and a massive wedge of corn bread cake. You pretend that you haven't been eating little pieces of cornbread while you are finishing off soup.  Then half an hour later you are moaning on the lounge telling your husband in all seriousness that you are going to die. You're so full your body surely can no longer take it. The polenta! It continues to expand after you eat it. You beg him to warn others about the dangers of cornbread - warn the children! He does not take you seriously.  THE GORGEOUS FOOL!  You start imagining your tombstone with warnings to all followed by the recipe. Because no one likes a recipe hoarder.

Alternatively, there is always the possibility that I used the wrong polenta.  The recipe calls for  instant polenta. My polenta doesn't say its instant and I get the feeling that it's 'quick' polenta not instant. Then the best answer  asks why use polenta at all? Because the recipe told me too!!!

I guess I'll just have to try again :D

To the lovely lady across the way.

Dear Neighbour

I live across from you and sometimes we accidentally see each other when I look out the bathroom window. You seem to get a fright when it happens. I want to reassure you that I'm not peeking into your apartment, but checking on Fredrick, my lemon tree. I hope this makes you feel better, and not even more scared.

Love,
Ashley