Goodbye, 2012! Hellooooo, 2013!

2012 was a much better year than I expected it to be, when it started! Most years, I've felt pretty "meh" at the end, and describing it as a crap year, hoping for better from the upcoming year. This year, sticking with the whole "hope for better", but... 2012 was a good year for me!

Buckle in, because this post might get a bit long. Here's a breakdown of 2012 in my corner of the world:

I took part in Karaoke Ring of Death for the first (and, so far, only) time!

That same month, I decided to review an album, 

because I kind of missed writing review posts. 

Then, at the beginning of February, I decided that I wanted to blog every day

for an entire year. It only took about two months to fail....

For a little while, burritos were king. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

I was the burrito king, making a few dozen at a time, then freezing/reheating.

Gay marriage was legalized in Washington -- by lawmakers, and later by voters!

I still stand by my offer to officiate ceremonies whenever needed, too -- for all couples,

gay, straight, and anything else that Washington state allows.

I started working on Project: SAMSON, which got shelved a little while ago.

Still plan on putting it out, but I'm working on other things soon. It had an artist, and

then I lost touch with that artist. Someone else took an interest, and I haven't

really heard from her since. So, you know... shelving it made sense.

The ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE STARTED... or not. The tastebud apocalypse

definitely happened, though -- the idea for the 5-Alarm Fire Burger was born!

The Wall of Geek started small in March(left),
and has gotten much bigger now (right)!

Now, it's got one of my autographed HEROES pictures, two Doctor Who posters,

the box from my Kindle, a framed panel of Parallax beating Superman from DC's

Zero Hour (I think), a dreamcatcher that I've had for years, and 

the koi that Jynni drew for my birthday, just before we started dating.

I took a blog meme from The Tsaritsa Sez, one of my favorite People From The Internet!

Some random artist on the bus to Olympia sketched me.

We talked for a bit, he let me take a picture of the sketch

because I liked it, and I told him that I was looking for

an artist. Unfortunately, I didn't have a card, and he didn't

reach out, here on the site.

Also, I might have made a Thing. But, you know, probably not.

I did find out that wrong numbers can be fun, and had a 

bad experience with some plumbers.

With help from the Hogabooms, I even got to peer into space

and take pictures of Saturn through a telescope. Even now,

looking back at the blurry pictures of a planet that is an

unimaginable distance away, it's humbling. The universe is amazing.

I've become part of a regular D&D group, too! We've been meeting at least once

or twice a month since this summer, and have a pretty good storyline going!

I came in to my own as a pretty great cook this year, too.

With recipes and without, I made some excellent stuff -- even

baking, which is something I thought I was incapable of doing well.

Behold, the collage of deliciousness!

1) Two-cheese baked chicken

2) Steak breakfast burritos

3) Sweet and sour steak

4) Banana bread

5) Sun Chip chicken

6) Sweet chili & garlic steak cuts

7) Coconut chicken curry tacos

Not pictured: Pepperoni pizza

And I got my writing out there, too! I started writing the occasional post for 

Grays Harbor Down back in May, applied for a job as a reporter, and got some articles

about realty in a local free monthly newspaper, working with a realtor friend.

I wrote a "memorial" for an online community that abruptly disappeared, and started

WHO KILLED HERMES?, a novel that I'm always excited to write about

Lastly, I joined the world of comic book blogging with a Blue Devil blog!

The most important thing that happened this year, though, was that I fell in love. I met Jynni in May after having known her dad for years. We started dating at the end of July, and even though it's long-distance, we're closer every day. Four days in, her 8 year old brother asked if Jynni was going to get me an engagement ring.

It's been nine months since we started talking daily, and seven months since we started dating. Some people might consider it a bit early to be as confident as I am, but I can see this relationship lasting for a while. Her daughter adores me, and we want so many of the same things out of life. Considering everything this relationship has going for it, I can overlook the fact that she thinks Michelangelo is a more awesome Ninja Turtle than Donatello.

THAT was my 2012. I'm excited for 2013! There are already plans in the works, like being the minister for Jim and Wendy's wedding in a few days!

What do you have planned for 2013?

Every movie would be better with dancing Goombas!

With that title alone, this final post of 2012 makes me proud! It comes from the thread on 20SB for "so-bad-they're-good" movies, and it is part of my defense of Super Mario Bros. as awesome. Call it horrible all you like, but I will always love that movie.

You know what? Now that I'm talking about it, and thinking about it, I need to figure out what box it is in. The VCR is hooked up, the universal remote is programmed for it, now I just need to find this, so I can have fun with dancing Goombas and an ensemble of overacting celebrities that have done much more impressive work since.

Right now, though, I don't think finding this movie should be my priority. I'm working on my first pizza dough, and by "working on" I mean "finding something to do online while I wait and see if the dough will rise and I didn't fuck it all up". Maybe I should do some sort of year in review post like other, better bloggers....Nah. I'll stick with trying to not-fuck-up pizza dough, and having a back-up plan of breadsticks or crackers or something if it didn't turn out right.

Has anybody out there made pizza from scratch before? Any tips for me?

Or, on the other hand, any people aside from me love Super Mario Bros., the movie? I can't be the only one!

Uh, Domino's... I have a question

What the hell are you doing to my food?

Pizza for lunch. Or, since I got up at noon and ordered it at 3pm, maybe a really really (really) late breakfast. One of those things that you can only get away with as an adult, and only rarely for me. You know, one day off of healthier eating isn't that bad.

So, I decided to get Domino's. I didn't actually have pizza, but instead one of those sandwiches they make. They have a mango habañero sandwich, did you know that? Mmmmm. Sweet, and spicy, and with just a little crunch from the bread and the jalapeño slices. Sounds pretty good, right? It is. Or, more accurately, it was.

They also have a neat little order tracker, when you order online, with five steps. The first and second, placing the order and prepping the food, go pretty quickly. The third one, cooking the food, took the longest. Not surprising, but then I got to the fourth step: "(employee name) is checking your food for deliciousness!"

.  .  .

HOW?! Are they licking it, tasting it? Are they giving it a good rub-down and then tasting their hands? ARE THEY UNDRESSING MY FOOD WITH THEIR EYES? EYE-RAPING IT?!

Sure, it probably means they're making sure it's all up to food-service safe temperatures, but is "checking [it's] deliciousness!" the right way to put that? Now, if I ever go in there and see that employee, it might get awkward.

Challenge, ACCEPTED

It's been a while since I mentioned him, but remember Tony? We've been friends for a long time, and he knows my love of spicy foods -- he can't stand them, but since he knows I love them, he issued me a challenge when I got to work tonight.

Koibito Sushi in Lacey has one of those "eat ___ in ____ (time)" contests, and now that Tony's told me about it, I am down like a clown. According to Tony, it's a spicy tuna roll with habaneros, jalapenos, and "ghost pepper". A blog post that I found that talks about it says that the sauce the peppers are in seems like mostly sriracha sauce.

If I successfully eat it all in half an hour, I get a cool shirt, a free sushi roll, and 10% off for life as long as I wear the shirt when I go in there. It sounds like fun, and a good way to see just how much spicy food I can handle -- plus, if I have 10% off forever (as long as I wear the shirt), it'll give me an excuse to go back to Olympia and visit Jim and Wendy more often. :D

On the menu tonight...

I've joked before that I'm going to make a good wife for some woman some day. It's a slightly sexist joke regarding the gender expectations that society has of the wife being the cook and such, and the sexism part is why I don't make the joke anymore -- although I still hear it when I tell some of my friends about how much I love cooking, or if a recipe turns out great and it's simple enough to feel like sharing with my less skilled-at-cooking friends.

Lately, I haven't been cooking much aside from the quick-and-easy stuff like pre-made sausage patties on toast (part of my breakfast routine lately), but today has much more appetizing plans -- slow cooker chicken parmesan, pasta, and two loaves of bread; one is banana bread, and the other is strawberry-banana bread.

The original plan was just to make the strawberry banana bread, but my mother is allergic to strawberries. I decided to make a second loaf, of regular banana bread, so that she would be able to sample my potential brick(s) of failure along with me.

I say "potential brick(s) of failure" because I do NOT bake. I cook very well, but most of the time when I bake, it turns out as either a brick or tar. So far, that's only been with things from a box, so I'm hoping that taking great care with the recipes that I've got for the strawberry banana bread and the regular banana bread gives me more luck.

The slow cooker chicken parmesan is something wonderful, though. I don't remember how I found Emily's blog of Weight Watchers friendly recipes (www.emilybites.com), but I love that I did. Almost everything there sounds delicious, and in moderation, will help me lose weight without sacrificing food quality. I don't actually do Weight Watchers, because even just the online version requires a good chunk of money that I can't afford to bother with, but I know enough to use it to monitor my daily intake.

So, if everything turns out well tonight, I'll have a "Justin-flavored" post soon for the bread. I haven't really made any changes to the chicken, so I'm not going to bother with repeating Emily's recipe until I change it up. If I do. I mean, it's hard to mess with perfection and still have hope for something good.

Oh, and one other thing: check out this blog! It's just started today by a Twitter friend, and from the sounds of things, I'll be joining on as an ebook reviewer very soon -- it says so in the welcome post, and I look forward to writing with Kerri on it! See you all tomorrow!

UPDATE: After noticing the time, it looks like I'll be making the chicken tomorrow instead of tonight. It takes five or six hours to cook, and I hadn't realized how late it already was today. Instead, I'll be going with Sun Chip Chicken tonight, I think -- now THERE is a Justin-flavored post that I should put up soon. Probably tomorrow!

Sometimes, I'm pretty awesome

Know what a great way to wake up is? A damn good breakfast.

Know what a damn good breakfast is? One of my BREAKFAST BURRITOS!

I made these a few days ago, and since the package of steak I used turned out to be a LOT when I diced it up, I used up the rest of the tortillas. Filled them with steak, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and some cheddar jack cheese, folded them up, and then tossed them back in the resealable bag that the soft tortillas came in and froze them. Reheat, maybe pan-fry a little bit to make it golden-brown and crispy, top it with salsa, and proceed to OM NOM NOM.

Now that I've started doing that, I think I'm going to use the "cook a lot, freeze, reheat one at a time" method more often. It lets me control what goes in the foods I'm eating, and is a handy way to preserve leftovers for a little while. Plus, who doesn't love a good burrito, amirite?

I would give a recipe, but there wasn't really a whole lot to it. I'd bought a pack of "beef tips for stew" because it was a way to get a good price on steak that I was going to dice up anyway. The hash browns were pre-packaged, and I scrambled up about seven or eight eggs to go with it all. You can probably make it healthier by making your own hash browns rather than buying them pre-made, which I'm thinking about.

What are some other good burritos that I could try and make? I'm definitely buying more steak and tortillas on payday, but I'm thinking about barbecue beef (or chicken), maybe some sort of red pepper chicken, and all sorts of other varieties. I like the idea of burritos as a good thing to start with.

OH! And I bought a slow cooker! But we can talk about that whenever I actually use it. Probably within the next week or so. :)

Mmmmmm…

You know what was kind of a trip? Walking in to the restaurant here at work to get some coffee earlier and seeing my boss (the general manager of the hotel) behind the line, cooking.

 

Turns out that she was cooking lasagna for the “pasta and karaoke” night that they do every Wednesday. I think it’s one of the (very) few times that she has cooked here at work, but holy crap, it turned out great.

 

That’s right, I saved some of that shit. That’s gonna make for a GOOOOOD lunch tonight during my work shift. It’s probably the best homemade lasagna that I’ve had since before my grandpa passed, since he was the only (good) cook in the family aside from me. He’s the one I learned from, too.

 

Anyway, yeah. Fuck yes lasagna. Garfield would be jealous. Fat cat can kiss my ass.