It’s snowing again.  My car has a piece of plastic instead of a passenger window.  There is nothing good on TV.  So in order to cheer myself up, let me share with you my latest OBSESSION:

It’s a Slanket!  It lets you lay around like a slug, stay warm and still keep your arms free.  It’s designed to help you stay as lazy as humanly possible.  It is marketed by some of the most awesomely terrible infomercials I’ve ever seen.  If you get it in brown, you look like a monk.

Obviously, I’m in love.  Every time the informerical comes on I get kind of giddy.  Too bad I didn’t find out about this sooner or I would have put it on my birthday/xmas list for sure.  But in case anybody is thinking of what to get me for President’s Day- *hint, hint*.

Til then, I guess I’ll have to settle for my stupid ole’ blanket.  Which is so not as cool as a Slanket.

This morning (or actually, this afternoon- we’re lazy bums and didn’t get out of the house til after 12:30 today), we walked outside to find this:

UGH.  Poor Mini!

I was totally shocked.  Serioiusly?  On our street?  Why are people such bastards?

It took us a minute and some investigation to figure out WHY our window was even broken.  The glovebox was untouched (including my very realistic knockoff fancy sunglasses), we hadn’t left our wallets or anything important in plain view, and the radio was totally fine (do people still steal radios?).  Then, upon further inspection, we realized what they had taken- our GPS unit.

Hey Mr. Crappy Car Thief-

Guess what?  That GPS unit sucks!  We spend more time trying to get it to register our location than we do using it to find where we’re going.  Our iPhones work way better.  Plus, we didn’t even pay for that- my dad won it in a raffle and gave it to us.  So there.  Oh yeah, and you know that cord that was dangling out of the cigarette lighter?  THAT WAS THE FREAKING POWER CORD TO THE GPS UNIT.  So that thing that you broke our window for and stole?  It’s totally useless.  Now it sucks as much as you do.

Sorry, rant over.  But obviously, the whole thing pissed me off and shook me up a little.  I like my car.  It’s the only car that I’ve ever had that I’ve ever been really excited about.  (Well, I was excited to have a car when I got my ’92 Ford Taurus with the fake cellphone antennae glued onto it back in high school, but I never proudly told people that I drove a Ford Taurus with a fake cellphone antenna glued on it.)  It makes me sad when it gets messed up.  Plus, now it looks really stupid with a white plastic bag taped over the window until we can take it to get fixed.

Once we got everything cleaned up and taped up the window- well, once Mike did all that and I pouted- we were able to go run the errands that we had set out to do in the first place.  Thankfully, one of our errands involved going to one of my favorite places in the world- Target.  Ah, I love Target.

As soon as we got there, I naturally went to get a Diet Coke (being able to get a fountain Diet Coke whiel you shop is one of the many reasons I love Target) I was shocked and fascinated to find that they now list caloric values right on their menu:

1510 calories for a pizza combo?  OMFG.  I wish every restaurant would list calories for their food.  I would probably stop eating altogether.  It would be awesome.

The rest of the Target trip was fairly uneventful- me wandering blissfully through aisles of discount priced clothing, camping accessories and kitchen gadgets, while Mike scoped out the latest in vacuum technology- but I did have one brief moment of elation when I spied these shoes:

They’re gold!  And they sparkle!  And you can walk around in them!

But then I realized that they are intended for 7 year old girls, not 28 year old women.  I was sad again.  Then I saw a cool blender or something and forgot about it.

And even though I give him a lot of crap, Mike totally came through and ended the errand marathon with a stop at Red Mango.  Because sour yogurt always cheers me up.

In case you are curious, I officially give their POM flavor a big thumbs up.  Yay yogurt!

I made a cake!

December is kind of gluttonous for me- between my birthday and Christmas, I get a fair share of presents.  Yay presents!  This year, one of the best was the KitchenAid Stand Mixer that my parents got me- thanks Mom and Dad!

I made a carrot cake because a) it has vegetables and is therefore healthy, and b) it’s the only cake Mike could think of that he likes.  And I think he did- he ate almost a whole piece, which is pretty fantabulous for him in terms of the consumption of baked goods.  I used Alton Brown’s recipe, partly because I’m obsessed with him thanks to having seen every episode of Good Eats ever, and partly because he only uses weight meausrements in his baking recipes.  Mike got me a kitchen scale for my birthday and I wanted to use it.

Overall I was pretty impressed with myself.  It was edible.  The frosting was frosting-y.  I definitely need to do something about presentation, but it was a good first attempt.

My main obstacle is that we don’t eat a lot of baked treats- I would weigh at least several hundred pounds more if we did.  I need to do some research, but can you make anything healthy in a stand mixer?

Like I’ve said before, 2008 was a weird year.  A very weird year.  But there were definitely some highlights- these are some of them that are popping into my brain at the moment:

• After a lifetime spent blonde, I dyed my hair.  Dark.  I’m still liking it.  Sorry Mom and Dad.
• We bought a house.  We tore it apart.  We painted the kitchen blue.  Mike spent a few weeks carrying his “Home Depot’s Guide to Home Repair” around like it was a Bible and finally got to use the table saw he bought when he first got Amazon Prime.
• I finished a triathalon without hurting myself.
• One of my best friends got married!  Yay NgBerry!
• We celebrated our first anniversary.  We camped fancy style in Santa Barbara, rode around on Segways and burnt a chicken.  So romantic.
• I fell off my bike and broke my wrist.  Then I had surgery.  Then I walked around with a giant piece of metal sticking out of it.  Fun.
• Mike got a job offer from Microsoft.  It was the worst possible time to even think about moving out of state- we had just bought a house, I still had metal sticking out of my arm and we didn’t know a soul in Seattle.  So we said WTF and moved anyways.
• I spent 3.5 months as a housewife and almost went crazy.  Then, even in the midst of a super crap economy, I found an awesome job and an awesome paycheck.
• I fell deeply in love with local produce- between my CSA and farmer’s market love, my vegetable intake has quadrupled.  Mike’s has begun.
• I went to the Bahamas with Mary and Scott, didn’t get sunburnt too badly, learned I should never drink anything that is bright orange and called “Gasoline” ever again, swam with sharks and got some much needed bonding time in with my besties.
• Thanks to knitting, that common thread that binds us all together (really, how could I resist that terrible metaphor?), I’ve made some really awesome friends up here.
• Finally, my cooking skills have improved somewhat.  I even baked a cake from scratch.  Well, as long as I finish putting icing on it before midnight, it will count as a 2008 accomplishment.

What was your greatest accomplishment in 2008?