By The Numbers

I did the math. 

(It hurt my brain a little, but I did it!)

This is a graphic representation of my adult life, calculated from the day of my 18th birthday through this Friday, May 16 (a period of exactly 97 months):

The first month of being an adult, I was an unemployed college student. Easy peasy.

After exactly one month of unemployment, I began my internship at a local utility company for the summer. I spent seven months there. Again... super easy.

Then, halfway through December of that year (eight months after I turned 18), I got the job I have today.

I've changed positions within the company.

The company has changed around me.

But for 89 months I've called this my job.

(That's one month shy of seven-and-a-half years.)

And so, today... I announce that Friday May 16 will be the end of my tenure here.

It's exciting.

It's terrifying.

It's a lot of things, all at once.

And it's going to be an adventure.

Grate-itudes

Lots of changes have been changing lately. And with all that's going crazy, it feels like it's time for me to take a second and appreciate everything that's solidly right in my world.

Sunny's Top Ten Things She's Grateful For:

10. The undying optimism of my dog. Whether he's certain that today is the day he'll conquer the neighborhood squirrel, or that today is the day he'll get a second breakfast... his glass is always half full. I can learn a lot from that.

9. Organization. As long as I'm willing to accept its position in my life, it's a Godsend.

8. Travel mugs. When I can simultaneously drink my coffee and escort the Young Master on a poopedition, (poop-expedition), that's a win.

7. A working oven. Whether it's baking dessert, boiling dinner or just standing there holding up the spoon rest... it's there for me. And that's solid.

6. Dance. Sometimes it's good... sometimes it's not so good. But it's always movement, and that's always important.

5. Music. If I'm making it, or if I'm moving to it, or if it's just wafting around me... that's alright in my book.

4. Large bodies of water. Or appendages of water. Lakes... Rivers... Oceans... their lapping waves seem to wash my very soul of its insecurities.

3. My home. Mister Amazingness and I have a beautiful roof over our heads that we share with the aforementioned bundle of optimism. It's my haven, and I love it.

2. Mister Amazingness. Who, incidentally, has requested that I arrange myself as his Missus of Amazingness. Which makes me all the luckier, I think.

1. Love. Family and friends and even kind strangers throw love my way all the time. I'm a lucky girl.

Cookies

Lately Boyfriend of Amazingness and I have been frequenting the food and cooking stations of our cable feed. Originally it was because it was on, and we didn't know what else to watch, and we'd heard that Alton Brown guy was pretty funny. Now it's because we actively enjoy it, and the soothing sounds of cooking seem to help the Young Master not be a springtime spazoid.**1 

Unfortunately there are some side effects of watching food preparation channels that I'm starting to see in my day-to-day life.

For instance, my pantry full of pasta now looks pathetic and boring.

Also, regular workaday food isn't nearly exciting enough. Everything must include vegetables and sauces and dirtying every bowl in the kitchen.

And finally, I'm starting to think I can actually cook.

This is what worries me most.

Partly this is because I'm making decent pie crusts and biscuits for the first time in my life. I have, thus far in my twenty-something years, never pulled off a successful pie crust or an edible biscuit. They're always rinse-and-reuse-able, likely because I beat them to death and then struggle to get them into their baking tins. But lately... I can make pie. I can make yummy biscuits. It's like I can't fail. I'm blaming it almost entirely upon my beautiful marble rolling pin that showed up at Christmastime, courtesy of Boyfriend of Amazingness.**2

Partly this is also through a series of happy accidents, like the one where I learned to properly slice an onion without bursting into chemically-induced tears. And the one where I found out we only had half a jar of pasta sauce left, so I stirred in half a jar of stewed tomatoes to stretch the sauce over the full pound of pasta I had cooked and felt so clever about my "quick thinking" that I had to call my mom.

Partly this is because of the food preparation networks, because one cannot watch hour after hour of mire poix-ing and roux-ing and general cookery without absorbing some of it.

No matter what's at fault, it's happening. I'm becoming an adequate cook.

And as I become adequate, my fear is coming to light:

That I will become A Food Snob.

It started innocently enough: A co-worker who doesn't cook bought a bag of insta-cookie-mix. Just add egg and oil, and Ta Da! Instantly (after baking), you have cookies.

Snobbism #1: I failed to see how practically ready-to-bake cookies fall into the "Cooking" category, and didn't understand when she approached me with the mix that she was insisting that I cook them for her.

Snobbism #2: When first I accepted the "challenge," I explained that I would have to put frosting on them if they were going to be edible at all. I just knew they were going to be gross.**3

Snobbism #3: After baking them, I decided that I couldn't put frosting on them, because that might have made them taste better than they really were and they needed to succeed or fail entirely upon their own merit.

Snobbism #4: After baking them, I felt like I had cheated on my kitchen so I had to whip up a batch of cookies from scratch to reset the cooking juju. I didn't want to offend the Powers That Bake, for fear that they take my pie crust and biscuit skills away again.

Snobbism #5: Upon bringing the insta-cookies into the office, I put them into an unlabeled container so that no one would know that I baked them.

Snobbism #5.1:  I also told the non-baker that she needed to keep the cookies at her desk, and tell people she made them while I took the scratch cookies to my own desk. Instead, what she's doing is saying "Have one of the yummy cookies Sunny made!" Which I fear is tarnishing my reputation for cookie awesomeness.

It's all happening so fast. Tomorrow I probably won't even be able to bring in leftovers for lunch, but will instead need to bring in a hot plate and a chicken quarter and cook it right there at my desk with roasted veggies and rice or some such nonsense.

Even I won't be able to stand me.

**1 Spazoid (spaz-oid) - One who is a spaz, and is succeptible to unanticipate-able bouts of jubilation, excitement and joie-de-vivre simply because it is spring and one is alive. 

**2 And here you thought he just locked in that title all willy-nilly. Pshaw and fiddlesticks - he earned that title right and proper by being my boyfriend, and by being amazing.

**3 Because they're root-beer flavored cookies from a box. Ew. EwEwEw.

Just Kidding!

Hope your holiday was full of the very sweetest tricks!

Birds

There is a new phenomenon sweeping my backyard.

If I'm being honest, it's probably sweeping the back yards of lots of folks in my neighborhood. And county. And state. 

But they don't have blogs, so I get to talk about it.

Muahaha!

So.

Birds.

They exist.

And this time of year, they exist A LOT.

Particularly noticeable in my little slice of heaven is a trio of jerkfaced robins.

This is a male robin.

image courtesy of www.wikipedia.com

Except right now, male robins around my home look more like softballs with feathers. The suckers are huge. And they're hungry. And they're horny.

It's been a long winter for the poor little turdus migratorius. So now that spring is... well... springing, they've got business to attend to. 

First and foremost is feeding their prodigous girths with all the grubblies and wigglies and icky-grossities that my yard can produce.

To that I say Go Get 'Em. I don't want them, you can have them. Knock yourselves out.

But secondly, they must find a lady friend so that they can start making little birds. But in order to win over a ladybird, they must do battle with one another to prove themselves the most manly and worthy producer of baby-bird-gravy.

Which has led to some interesting viewing on the front yard channel of my local living room television.**1

Most recently, we watched on Saturday as a pair of robins started to puff and fuss at one another.

Their first step, it seems, is to fill themselves so full of air and attitude that they puff beyond the extent that you'd think their little birdy skin would go. When this fails to scare off their equally-puffy combatant, they resort to dirtier tactics.

Now, in my back yard is a fabulously springy pine tree. It has long, lithe boughs that bend and swoop with the wind... or, for instance, under the weight of a fat-and-horny robin. Our combatants alighted, one each upon the lowest boughs of the tree. But as it is a product of nature, the boughs are not symmetrically aligned along the trunk. No... one is higher than the other. This created the issue... and the solution.

Upon realizing that his higher station provided him an edge in combat, the higher-lit contestant seemed to ready himself and then attack. He would, in one quick movement, jump from his own station and alight on the bough of his counterpart. The doubled weight upon the limb would cause it to swoop low, but the attacker was ready for this. As soon as the bough reached its lowest point, and before it started to spring back upwards and reset, he would spread his wings and take off on a diagonal plane so as to break free of the upward trajectory of the bough... effectively flinging his opponent into the air, and causing a great amount of displeasure.

At least, it did for them. They battled back and forth, flinging each other and resetting and then flinging each other once more until finally they either declared a winner or forgot what they were fighting for. They weren't seen again until the next morning when they both ran around the snowbanks out front and drove the dog to the brink of insanity.

It's going to be a fun Spring!

**1 It's the Young Master's favorite channel, best watched by turning wrong-way-round on the couch and mashing one's nose against the window behind, whilst one's tail drapes off the edge of the couch where human legs typically go. But at the very least, he looks comfortable. It doesn't work for me, but he's happy.