The Mickey Mouse Cake

Charly and I had a group date the other night. It was Disney themed and so Charly decided to bake a cake and two cupcakes and put them together to make a Mickey Mouse cake.

Obviously the cupcakes finished baking first but because we were all busy with the date we took the cake out as well... It wasn't done yet.

"Charly, this cake isn't done yet," I said. Charly gave me a concerned look.

"Oh no," She said.

"Let's put it back in," I replied.

We put the cake back in and went downstairs to play games. We played a name game. At the end of the game I realized that we had left the cake in the oven for the ENTIRE time.

"Charly!" I exclaimed. "We left the cake in."

She gave me that same look and we both ran upstairs.

"It's not burt," Charly said. "It's not moist either though."

Charly got the cake and the cupcakes and put them together.

"That looks like Winnie the Pooh not Mickey Mouse," I said.

Charly gave me a fake hurt look, "How could you say that she said."

I smiled back at her.

I did not burn the cake ...

Friday night, Ben and I planned a group date with some of our friends. We decided it would be fun to theme the evening around Disney. We listened to Disney music, played Disney board games, had Lady and the Tramp Spaghetti and Meatballs for dinner, and I wanted a Mickey Mouse shaped cake for dessert. 

Ben and Jon and I made dinner and the cake right before everyone else arrived. I was therefore putting the cake into the oven right as the last couple arrived. To make the cake the correct shape, I put part of the batter into two cupcakes and the rest into a circular cake pan. I wasn't really paying attention, however, and set the timer for a cake made in a rectangular pan. 

We finished getting the dinner ready and everyone started dishing up. The cake had been in for almost fifteen minutes. I checked on it and both the cupcakes and the cake in the pan were looking very golden on top. There was still almost fifteen more minutes on the timer, however, so I let them be. In the middle of everyone dishing up, all of them gathered around the counter and stove, I realized my mistake and decided to pull the cake out of the oven. In the midst of the chaos, I didn't check it with a toothpick. 

After dinner, Ben and I were doing the dishes when he noticed that my cake did not look done, and mentioned it to me. There was nothing to be done except put it back in the oven and hope it cooked right. After we put it back in, we went downstairs with our group to play games. 

Not our smartest move, I'll admit. 

We played a game called the Name Game, Disney style. That's when Ben gave me a look. 

"Oh no, Charly," he said, his eyes a little wide. 

"What?" 

"The cake." Ben said. 

My stomach dropped. I felt like crying. How could I forget the stupid cake? I ran upstairs as fast as I could, Ben following me. 

We pulled it out and, miraculously, it wasn't burned. It was definitely well done, but not burned. We let it cool off with a sigh of relief and served it to everyone. They all said it was fine, but I could tell the extra cooking time had taken its toll. Plus, Ben said it looked more like Winnie the Pooh than Mickey Mouse. Meanie. 

But, after all, I didn't burn the cake. 

Vegan Chili with Beaf

So a few days ago Charly and I decided to have chili for dinner. I was excited because I like chili. This time was different though. Charly and I had some canned chili and I wanted to add some vegetables to it so I looked up a recipe online and completely ignored the instructions, using the picture as a reference.

"Charly do you want some vegetables in your chili?" I asked as I chopped up the sweet peppers and spinach. She looked over at my preparations and gave me her look.

"No thanks," She said.

"Come on!" I insisted.

"Nope," She answered again.

"Just try some," I said, holding out a chip with some chili on it.

"Ok," She said." Charly ate the chip with my chili on it.

"It's pretty good actually," She said with a smile.

"I know!" I answered excitedly. "I didn't make this one up like the corn soup Charly. I found a real vegan chili recipe online."

The excitement left my voice as I looked down into my bowl.

"Oh no! There is beef in this chili!" I exclaimed. "I made vegan chili with beef in it!"

Charly just laughed.

Ben's Version of Vegetarian Chili

This past week was finals, so I didn't make any elaborate dinners. When Ben got home from work and school on Tuesday, I had a can of Chili on the counter ready to make for dinner. Ben got really excited when he saw it. 

"I really want Chili for dinner," He said in the kitchen, I was putting something in the spare room. 

"Okay," I said. 

"Is that why you have the Chilli on the counter?"

"Yes," I said, walking back into the kitchen with a smile on my face. I sat down on the couch, opening my computer while Ben got the Chilli cooking. 

"Can I put peppers in it?" He asked. 

"No." 

"What?" Ben protested. "Why not? I found a real recipe, online. We could probably add spinach and it wouldn't make a difference."

I thought about spinach and peppers in the Chili and made a face. "How about you put them in your half and I'll just have normal Chili?" 

Ben pulled out the peppers and spinach, dicing them up. "I am so good at this," he said. "Chopping vegetables up really small." He scooped the vegetables into his Chili, ignoring the face I was giving him. 

"Want to try some?" He held out a chip loaded with Chili from his bowl. 

"No."

"Come on! Vegan Chili!" 

"Ben," I laughed. "This Chili has meat in it. You know that, right?" 

Ben shook his head and held out his chip again. "Vegan Chili ... with meat in it." 

I ate it. It actually tasted pretty good. 

Starving for a Sandwich

Last night, I got onto my email account and lo and behold I have an email. It says, "Charly has invited you to contribute to a blog". I know Charly minimally ... as in, I have seen her twice and gone on a double date with her once, so to say that I was confused is an understatement. I considered writing something yesterday, just for the heck of it; it was my birthday, after all, and I obviously can get away with anything and everything on my birthday--even if it was potentially causing havoc and ruin on the blog of someone who I barely know who, without meaning to, allowed me to contribute to it. My more charitable side decided that was a poor decision, so I didn't. Then I get home today and I bring it up to my wife, thinking she will be just as confused as I am. She wasn't. Turns out she had roped me into being part of this blog then forgot to tell me that I was being roped into it. I will have you know I am coming into this kicking and screaming, or at very least pretending that I am. 

Anyways apparently I am supposed to respond to the stories that my wife tells about us, so you can get both sides of the story. So I shall.

I was at work, and I had no idea what was going on. But that is not the true tragedy of this story. I went into work at 11 in the morning, and I, foolishly, had not taken food to eat while at work. Add in the fact that I had two "midterms" (two weeks before finals) the next day and several person (or personal if you want to read it that way--I personally like both) issues at the time and you can imagine my mood going into work. I had pointed out the aforementioned shirt to my coworker because it is gorgeous and the only really red shirt that we sell there. Then I had pushed through the day like a trooper.

About four in the afternoon, who should come to visit me but my dear wife. She is so very sweet but I am a self proclaimed trooper and, having to live up to that fact, I was busy working, helping out as many customers as I could feasibly help while giving my wife as much attention I could give her, which was very little. Next thing I know, she is being sent to go get us sandwiches. Now remember who has not eaten since that morning; yes, I am talking about poor, starving me. So the guys give my wife money to go down the street and get sandwiches from probably the BEST sandwich shop in Salt Lake (the Gandolfos on main street). She wanders off and I continue troopering on. She comes back, and this is when her story takes place. (Insert wife's story here)

Now back to my story. She had gotten sandwiches for the guys, including a foot-long for her and me, buy I didn't have a lot of time to sit down and actually eat it. The problem is that it was connected to hers and if you read her story you can guess where that sandwich went. That's right, while she was being mischievous and conniving, she took my half of the sandwich and walked RIGHT OUT THE FRONT DOOR. There it is right there. The fact that because my loving beautiful wife wanted to surprise me with something for my birthday, I had to starve....

So it really wasn't that tragic and let's be honest, I look dang good in that shirt, but WHO DOES THAT!?!?! Oh, wait, my wife.

Surprise Presents

KC loves clothes. He likes to look good, to put it more accurately. Most of the time he uses that to get me nice clothes, but that's not what this story is about. It's about his surprise birthday present.
We usually get KC's clothes from Jos A Bank, since he works there. Unfortunately, that makes it very difficult to surprise him since he's always there when I am. His birthday was coming up, and I wanted to surprise him with something. I'd gotten him lots of clothes for birthday and Christmas, but he knew about all of them. (I almost surprised him with some vests, but the store called his phone to tell him they had come in. Ugh. Thwarted again.)

One day, I went to Jos A Bank to visit KC. They were very busy and we only had a few minutes to talk. I waited a couple hours. While KC helped a customer, I talked to Richard, who wasn't busy at the moment. Richard mentioned a burgundy sport shirt that KC liked. I brightened up. 

"Is that the same one he showed me the other day?" I asked. 

Richard shrugged. "I don't know. Let me show you which one it is." 

We walked to the sport shirts. He grabbed the burgundy shirt and showed it to me. I grinned. 
"That's the one." I had a mischievous look on my face. "KC thinks we don't have any money for any more presents. But I still have plenty saved up. Could you ring me up while he's distracted?" 

Richard looked back at KC. He was still helping the customer in the back, out of sight from the register. He nodded. "Yeah, not a problem!" 

I handed him my debit card and walked away so that if KC glanced over, he wouldn't be suspicious. Richard quickly rang the shirt up and paid for it with my card. While he put it in a bag, I walked back to KC. I had realized that if I waited around any longer, he'd see me with a bag and he'd know what I'd done. I'd already been there for a couple hours, so it was time to leave anyways. He looked disappointed that I was leaving, but we said goodbye and I walked to the front of the store. Richard handed me the bag and I left.

KC didn't have a clue. 

I'm Picked On

So Charly and I are trying our best to save money. There are lots of things we are doing to save money but one of the things we do is we make sure to turn the thermostat off when we don't need it. It's great and we are pretty good at it. Our electric bill has only gone up a few extra dollars since winter.

One of the drawbacks though is that every morning when we wake up it is freezing in our apartment and so neither of us (actually mostly just me) don't want to get out of bed. The other problem is that my hands and feet are almost always cold... like so cold that Charly won't want to hold my hand.

Now in my mind, the solution is simple, I just turn the thermostat to 90 degrees every morning while I shower. It works great! When I get out of the shower the apartment is nice and warm, my feet are nice and warm, and my hands are nice and warm. Perfect right? I thought so.

However, for some reason Charly always turns the thermostat down to like 70 degrees... freezing... Does she not want to hold my hand? I'm not sure. It doesn't really matter though because I usually just sneak it back up to 90. Don't tell Charly I said that though.

90 Degrees

"Benjamin!" I called out from the bedroom. It was starting to get really warm in here. Ben was working on homework in the kitchen. "What do you have the thermostat on?" 

"Wha-at?" Benjamin asked in his I'm-picked-on-I-would-never-do-what-you-think-I-did voice. "I don't know." 

"Benjamin," I said again, this time with a laugh in my voice. "Is it on ninety?" 

"Of course not ..." Ben said, using the same voice. Not exactly reassuring. I jumped up and came into the living room to check. Ben has a habit of turning the thermostat on really high to warm the apartment up fast. Sometimes he turns it up without even looking to see what temperature it's at. 

It was at 75 degrees. I turned it down a little. 

"Was it on ninety?" Ben asked. 

"No," I said, ignoring his triumphant grin and "told you so" as I walked back to what I was doing before. 

The Christmas Present

"I bought some Christmas decorations from Wal-Mart," Charly said as I got home from work.

"Really?" I asked skeptically.

"Yup," she said, "Come look."

I followed Charly over into the living room. She was practically glowing with excitement.

"I bought these candles, and these window decorations, and these lights, oh, and look. I bought two kinds of wrapping. One color is for you and the other is for me. What one do you like the most?"

I looked down at the two colors. "I like the silver one," I said.

"Good, I like the white one more," she replied with a grin.

A week later and after Thanksgiving day, Charly and I were in the house. We had aquired a small Christmas tree from Charly's mom and decorated it. The tree looked really good. Charly had hand made a ton of small paper snowflakes, we had borrowed some hand made ornaments, and even made some on a date together. Charly walked over to the tree. She was holding a large box. To this day I'm still not sure what was in it.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's a Christmas gift," She answered.

"Is it for me?" I asked again.

"No silly, it's for both of us." She replied smiling.

At that moment I was struck with the realization that our brilliant plan in having two colors of wrapping paper, one for each of us, was flawed. My face fell and I looked at Charly with an expression of grave concern on my face, "If it's for both of us how are we suppose to wrap it?"

She just laughed at me.

A Christmas Present to Us

My mom has a Christmas tradition with Christmas presents that I love--every year, instead of writing the person's name on every single one of their presents, she has a specific wrapping paper for each individual person. It's really fun, because in the weeks leading up to Christmas, you can try to figure out which wrapping paper is yours. This is a tradition I wanted to continue in my own family, so I bought two different rolls of wrapping paper at Wal Mart. 

While I was Black Friday shopping, one of the few purchases I made was a ten dollar griddle. I decided to wrap it, so our cute little tree would have plenty of presents underneath it. This week, Ben grabbed the griddle and went to open it. 

"No, no!" I shouted, in my typical panicky voice. Ben says we have a good chance statistically of dying at the same time, since he's older and a guy but never stressed, while I'm younger and a girl but always stressed out. 

"What?" Ben asked in sincere innocence, not letting go of the griddle. 

"The griddle," I said, walking over and taking it away from him. "I'm going to wrap it."

"Oh," Ben said, giving me a puzzled look. "Who's it going to be for?"

"Us, of course," I laughed. 

"Both of us?" Ben asked. 

"Yes ..." I said, looking for the trick in the question. 

"But ..." Ben grinned his teasing-Charly smile. "What wrapping paper are you going to use?" 

I just rolled my eyes, though I couldn't help grinning along with Ben. 

Locking the Door

Tuesday morning Charly got up to get ready for school and found the bathroom door locked from the inside. I have a funny habit of locking doors, almost an obsession with it actually. I guess I locked the door while leaving the bathroom.

We didn't have a key for the door.

"You must have locked the bathroom door," Charly said to me. I was still in bed and was planning on sleeping in just a little because I had been up late the night before working on an assignment.

"Try the little wire," I replied sleepily from the bed.

We have a wire we use to open our front door sometimes. We only have one key but the wire lets us lock the door and then open it no matter who gets home first or who has the key. I could hear Charly fiddling around with the door but she couldn't seem to get it open so I got out of bed and walked over.

"The wire won't open it," She said. I tried it anyway, like most stubborn husbands would. Sure enough, it didn't fit.

I was fully awake now and for some strange reason I was enjoying this ridiculous challenge. I grabbed a screw driver from a kitchen drawer and started taking the door knob off. I had replaced door knobs before so I knew what I was doing. I was able to remove the door knob and then unlock the door. Afterwards I put the knob back on, vowing to never lock the bathroom door like that again.

I think I might have gone back to bed but I don't remember... I felt silly for locking the door but I'm pretty sure Charly was impressed with my amazing door knob hacking skills.

The day my husband locked me out of the bathroom ...

After Ben and I got married, I learned that Ben always locks the door. Always. Normally, this is fine. This week, it proved to be slightly problematic. 

Tuesday morning I woke up very groggy. Ben and I had had a very late night Monday and I did not want to get up early to catch the bus. While I was at dance the night before, Ben had fixed our car and it was very tempting to sleep an extra hour and simply drive. 

"Ben," I asked, leaning across the bed. 

"Hmmm?" Benjamin asked, his eyebrows pinching together. That's his I'm-tired-why-are-you-talking face. He doesn't know he makes it. 

"Can I drive today?" 

"Why?" Ben didn't even open his eyes. 

"So I can sleep in a little." I said, a little impatiently. 

"Oh. Yeah, that's fine." Ben rolled over and fell back to sleep quickly. I rolled over too, but didn't find sleep as fast. I needed to go to the bathroom. 

With a sigh, I got up and found my way through our maze of clean and dirty clothes strewn around the room (I hate putting away laundry ...) and found the bathroom door shut. Ben likes to keep the doors closed in our apartment so it looks nicer. I turned the knob only ... it didn't turn. I turned it again, no luck. I fumbled back into the bedroom. 

Uh-oh, I thought. I went outside to get a broken piece of hanger, attempting to use it as a lock pick. No luck. 

I fumbled back into the room and said in a loud, half whisper, "Ben!" 

"What?" he asked, his voice slurring sleepily. 

As I answered, I knelt down next to the alarm we had set the night before. It was supposed to go off at 6:30. It was 6:23. "The bathroom door is locked." 

"Turn it really hard, sometimes it just gets jammed." At this point, Ben was probably mostly asleep still.

"Okay," I said, doubting it would work even as I agreed to it. "I'll try it, but I turned it hard before." 

After shutting off the alarm so it wouldn't wake Ben up, I went back to the door. and twisted the knob with all my strength. Once, twice, three times. It still wouldn't budge; I could tell it was locked. I knew I needed to get the door open so I could go to school ... I'm not the kind of girl who spends a ton of time in the bathroom, but there was no way I would go out in public without at least doing my hair first. I decided to take advice from Ever After and got a screwdriver out. 

I was trying to get the screws off, but it was tricky with how they were positioned when Ben came out of the bedroom, still half asleep. He must have heard my clumsy attempts with the screwdriver. He took over and had the door handle off and the door unlocked in less than five minutes. 

"Thanks Ben," I said, rewarding his efforts with a kiss. "And now that I'm awake, I can take the bus!" Ben just laughed and went back to bed.