Goals

Sometimes I really set my sights too high.

Remember my list of 101 things in 1001 days? I’m just about halfway done, with less than a year to go. That means I need to get to work soon. (Of course, here I use “need” in the sense that I’d like to neatly cross everything off the list. I don’t expect any real cosmic consequences to not finishing – I’d simply prefer to feel like I lived up to the challenge.)

Here are a few selections of remaining items on my list:

1. eat a Kong Kone. One of the local grocery stores sells a really enormous soft serve ice cream cone. I mean, it’s gargantuan. I tried to eat one a few years ago. Two-thirds of the way through I vomited. I’m not exactly sure why I want to take on this particular challenge again.

10. see a movie on opening day. You know how the last Harry Potter movie comes out this week? It would be nice if someone offered to watch my kids so the Romgi and I could go see it together.

12. potty-train the Bwun. At the time I made the list, this seemed reasonable. The deadline is April 19 of next year, and the Bwun will be a little over 3 years old. Possibly doable, but, thinking about it, this isn’t something I have a ton of control over.

16. finish my degree. Technically, I’ll still have a few days left of classes/finals when the deadline rolls around, but I plan to count this as accomplished anyway.

19. hike the Y. It’s true – after living in Provo for almost 10 years, I have never hiked Y Mountain. My goal is to wait until the very last day of the challenge to do this hike. (I don’t have anything against Y Mountain; it struck me as comical that I’ve never hiked it, so I’m putting it off because it amuses me.)

56. read at least 50 of the books on my list. Right now I’ve read 45, so this will be easily done.

67. create a piece of art and frame it. All I need is the frame!

68. travel internationally. Well, I didn’t envision having a second child before the deadline arrived, and I’m not convinced that travelling internationally in the next year is realistic. Also, we’re poor, making a trip abroad even less likely.

92. do yoga 5 times. I have a yoga mat and a dvd titled “Evening Stress Release.” The problem is that our living room is laid out the wrong way to look at the tv, do the instructed poses, and not hurt my neck and/or fall over.

98. watch all the Harry Potter movies in a week. Since last Friday I’ve watched 1-5, and 6 and 7.1 are scheduled for the next few nights. I carefully planned it so I’ll finish watching 7.1 just before 7.2 comes out (and I get to go see it, because you offered to watch my kids, remember?).

I have an old notebook (my beloved Miquelrius) where I started a list of things I wanted to accomplish in my life. A lot of the 101 in 1001 goals were taken from that list. One thing I’ve noticed as I look through the notebook is that my life has changed in unexpected ways, making some goals unrealistic and others unimportant. For instance, I had planned to major in English with an editing emphasis, so I made a goal to work at a publishing company. Along the same lines I also wanted to write and publish a book. I no longer want to edit or write, so those goals don’t interest me anymore. As much as I appreciate a neatly completed list, I’m ok with leaving a few items undone – like “Use up an entire box of Kleenex in one sitting,” which now seems a little…emo. If it ever does happen, I’m fairly certain that pregnancy hormones will be to blame.

On a different note, I don’t have anything else to say on the subject.

Soon

This is one of those enigmatic posts where I tell you to be sure to come back tomorrow for something very exciting. Here’s a hint: this post you’re reading is #799. And I might feel like celebrating soon.

Celebration

Sometime in the last few years I saw an Oregon Trail birthday cake. You know, the DOS game. Remember?

I can’t find the link to the cake anymore, but it got me thinking about making an Oregon Trail cake for my sister-in-law Krista’s 30th birthday. She’s from Oregon, so…it seemed like a good idea. It actually seemed like an awesome idea right up until I tried making it.

For whatever reason, I decided to do decorations using candy melts. I’m not sure what logic told me those would be the easiest or the prettiest. I did learn from experience that candy melts are neither easy nor pretty, at least for what I was trying to do. Looking back, I realize I ought to have spent a few months learning how to work with fondant.

But, I didn’t. I spent two days figuring out how do to the cake with candy melts.

I started by making some templates.

Then I baked two very tall cake layers.

It was a messy process. Luckily I did it at my mother-in-law’s house – she has two ovens and a dishwasher!

I wanted to decorate the entire top of the cake somehow, and after looking through a lot of Oregon Trail screenshots I chose this view of Willamette Valley:

Here I encountered the major problem with my candy melt approach. My template looked amazing, but it became obvious that the piece itself would not.

The Romgi was really helpful (he did most of the cake-baking) and suggested that I do this part upside-down, so it would be a single smooth piece when I finished. That probably sounds confusing. It will make sense in a minute, I hope.

For frosting, I planned to do a simple chocolate buttercream, which was scrapped when I realized how little time I had. As a compromise between homemade frosting and Pillsbury canned frosting, I bought some chocolate buttercream from a bakery. It was such a light color that we probably ought to have added coloring, but didn’t. Oh well.

Here’s the cake completely put together:

The Romgi also did the frosting on the cakes, and did a way better job than I would have.

See how the Willamette Valley-esque part is all one smooth piece? I pictured it being a little more detailed, and vibrant. I also meant for the “i” in “Krista” to be slightly more centered so I could put a single candle there. Sigh.

We got the cake safely to the party.

And Krista knew what it was supposed to be! Purple mountains, oxen and wagons, green trees…she said it was instantly recognizable to her, as an Oregon native, as Willamette Valley. Maybe she was just being nice. But it helped.

Happy Birthday, Krista!