February 9

Snow!!

So we got what I believe will be our final snow of the year.  We have probably gotten 3 real snows (real for Memphis) and they have been wonderful!  I have said before and will say it again...I love the snow.  My husband, does not as he always has to work in it and unfortunately had to leave at like 5:45am to make it to work.  So I do feel bad for those folks who do not have the option to work from home.  I am very, very lucky that I do.  The snow makes everything so quiet and pretty and is a good excuse just to stop and look.  

February 8

Stuffing

So just when you think your dogs have graduated from the destroy-stuff phase; you come home and find that they have chewed through the blanket you put over the couch to hide the original hole where they chewed through previously.  

February 6

Evil

This is Bela...pure, 100% evil.  Not even her fluffy exterior can hide a core of liquid, gooey evil.  She use to be my cat -- I adopted her from the animal shelter probably around 2000 or 2001 and she was a cute kitten.  But something flipped and she just became so mean and irritable that no one liked her.  Luckily, my parents took her in while I was living in Memphis but she did almost put my mom's eye out when she attacked her while she was sleeping. 

February 5

Cake

So my dad's 60th birthday was on 02/05 and such a big birthday warranted a flight to East TN to celebrate.  However, in a very unlike-Romilly fashion, I thought I'd just wing this trip -- no meticulous calculations on flights & connections, no developing back-up plans if said-connections were missed.  I just picked a flight for Friday night and picked a flight back for Sunday.  This is where I went wrong -- in trying to save precious vacation days, I decided to fly out after work on Friday.  This breaks a cardinal rule of mine - do not flight late in the day, especially if you have connections.  Flights later in the day are always behind and they limit your options to make up a missed connection later.  This bit me on the ass in that my flight out of Memphis ended up being delayed a little over an hour - which would almost guarantee a missed flight out of Atlanta.  So I contacted Delta and was re-booked for the 6am flight the next day.  Well, 4am rolled around and I'm thinking "what am I doing?".  I ended up arriving in East TN at 11am and had to fly out the next morning at 10am -- not even a full 24 hours!  I pushed full-steam ahead.  


Way back when, my grandmother use to make my dad and my aunt a German chocolate cake on their birthdays.  She ceased this several years ago and my mom continued the tradition for a few years before my dad's health put a permanent end to it.  Since it was the big 6-0, I thought one more cake would never hurt anyone so I set about making it...from scratch.  The end result was not too bad -- one of the layers did sort of fall apart coming out of the pan (hence the difficulty in making out the cakeness of the picture above) but the cake tasted good.  The coconut / pecan icing was another story...it turned out more like peanut butter brittle than icing.