vegan cupcakes

two posts in one day, huh? i'll allow it.

YESTERDAY I MADE VEGAN CUPCAKES! the baking process was really nice and smooth and productive. i HAND MIXED icing for 12 minutes. it is so delicious. the cake, not so much, but i've got some idea of how to fix it for next time.



i haven't really been trying to be vegan lately. i haven't been keeping track of what i eat on this site i was using either. i think i need to focus on becoming a better vegetarian before i take the plunge into veganism, but i will continue to try vegan recipes and eat grilled cheese in the same day. i don't see anything wrong with that.

to me, eating is almost the same as personal spirituality. i can't stand overbearing religious people who dictate how to worship, and i certainly can't stand those who dictate what to eat and why not to eat other things. i've been a vegetarian for over three years, but i still eat chicken noodle soup from time to time. of course there is no actual meat in the soup, but it is made from chicken stock. does this make me an omnivore? no, i don't believe it does.

say i was a vegan. would putting margarine on my sesame seed bagel in the morning make me not a vegan because whey powder is listed near the end of the ingredients list? again, i don't think so. however, if i were to tell someone i was a vegan and then eat a grilled cheese sandwich, i wouldn't be a vegan. i'm not a vegan, so i should probably change my "being vegan" label.

i'm going to watch trekkies now.

Addison's Birthday Party

today was addison's 2nd birthday party. it was really nice. i ate cheese pizza. i haven't eaten cheese since april, but i wasn't really in the mood to have to potentially defend my eating habits like i had to the other weekend. i don't really miss it at this point.

i was taking pictures of addison opening presents. i was across the room and used the zoom a lot. i've never really used the zoom that much. it wasn't focusing right, so i kept messing around with the settings. the flash was sometimes making everyone look gross and sweaty and red-eyed. the pictures don't look bad, but they don't look perfectly fine to me either. after the presents, we ate cake and i took more pictures. this time i put it on the movie setting, so no flash was used. the lighting in lacey's living room is so perfect for photography. the pictures turned out really well, except for a few where people were moving and therefore turned into blurs. i don't know how to prevent that.

after the party we went grocery shopping. i bought a bunch of vegan food, so hopefully i like it and can have a proper diet.

every april i get a stupid sunburn on my face. i've been waiting for it to happen, and i think it's finally here :(

today was a really nice day

(click the pictures to see MASSIVE versions.)

today was a really nice day considering nothing really happened.

last night i went to an orientation for a volunteer position i am interested in. i'm really excited to start. after i got home, i took a bath, read a little and went to bed with wet hair around midnight.

this morning i was woken up by the phone. my hair was gigantic, so it's a good thing it was just the phone and not someone at the door. phone lady said that my references haven't emailed her yet and to please get on that. so i called my aunt at work and she was like omgiamsobusygoingtocourtbye. i emailed my other reference and she faxed it in asap. she's so nice.

i cleaned my kitchen sort of and made embarrassingly empty soy tacos. i haven't been grocery shopping in like a week and a half, and i decided to make a diet change in the middle of that somewhere, so it's a good thing my aunt sent home a thousand pounds of veg penne with me from that baby shower on sunday. the bowl finally emptied today. it's also a good thing i bought organic peanut butter when i went shopping with her on saturday because i ran out of my old pb a few days ago. i think i need my own car so i can easily go shopping any time i want. i can be shopping right now. how amazing. i think i'm going to make and try pasta salad for the first time tomorrow. i bought some frozen diced vegetables the other day and this vegan book i was reading has a nice recipe in it that seems simple enough. this will be a year of trying new things. i've been stuck in a lettuce-tomato-cucumber rut for too many years.

after lunch, i cleaned up my room a bit, but books are still all over the place. the other day i took everything out of my book shelf and put it into specific piles on the floor all over my room. it's been like that for maybe two weeks now? i suck. i took pictures of my room for this lj community and i took pictures of my chloe cat because she is cute.

after that, i went to the library to return House of Leaves. i didn't get very far in that book because the His Dark Materials series took over my life. i started the third book on the bus going downtown yesterday. it's such a good series. anyway, i also went to the library to pick up the two vegan cookbooks i had put a hold on the other day. they're called How It All Vegan and The Garden of Vegan: How It All Vegan Again. the writers are young, hip, open minded girls who remind me of Tegan and Sara (one is actually named Sarah and the other's name starts with a T, so it makes sense, lol.) i also took out You Are Your Choices and Th!nk, which is a rebuttal to Bl!nk, which i haven't read because it sounds kind of dumb anyway. the weather was really nice and the sky was blue, so i sat under this tree and read the first few pages of the first vegan book. it was nice, but ants are annoying.

i walked home while reading more of the first book and waved to my neighbours. andrew, whom i've haven't seen in a year or two, called me and i thought he was dan at first. he told me about this eight person play at riverside in a few weeks. i am excited for it. it's nice that he called.

my aunt finally called me around 9:30 to tell me that she didn't get any emails from me. i asked her a million times if she checked her spam or junk folders. she was like, "what does that even mean?!?" and then she went on about how it says Spam and not Sam or Spamantha. needless to say, by the end of it all, she had four copies of my email, from two different accounts and in two or three different folders. (my aunt decided at 50 to go to a business college and become a legal assistant =|)

all in all, i had a really nice day.

ps. did anyone watch 20/20 tonight? it just showed a couple in bed with their macbooks' apple logos lighting up the room as they bid on weird politic stocks at intrade.com. it was sort of cute, lol.