My Kind of Average

Happy 2014!

First: HAPPY 2014!!!! My family heralded the new year with sparkling grape juice and a brie loaf. If you don’t know what a brie loaf is, you’re missing out. So I’ll tell you: You basically take a round of brie cheese and put it on a pan. Then you surround it by French bread dough and bake it. Brie + loaf = Brie loaf. See? Now that’s some math I can do.

It ends up looking like this:

brieloafselfie

I apologize, but that was the only picture I had. I took a selfie with the brie loaf to send to a friend who is deprived of this delicacy. Anyway, if you can get past the general awkwardness of the picture, you’ll notice I’m holding  a jar of cranberry relish that you put on top of the brie on top of a slice of the bread while it’s still warm and gooey and awesome. I’ve got a picture of this, too, but unfortunately I’m not in it (except for my thumb):

pieceofbrieloaf

While I was sitting here blogging about the beauty that is the brie loaf, my sister Erin decided to make an illustration of it using Microsoft Paint.  I’m thrilled with it and feel so honored that she’d share her artistic genius on my lowly little blog. BEHOLD:

fanartforthebrieloaf

Oh, so epic. We’re all about the brie loaf, in case you couldn’t tell.

So now that I’ve devoted so much blog space to bread, cheese, and relish, I’ll move on…

***

Last Christmas I wrote a post called "Holly Jolly Christmas". It was about some of the more…interesting…festivities I experienced. I planned to do a post similar to that this year, but I was too lazy busy. You know how it goes.

But I still wanted to share some things with you that I didn’t have space for in my previous post:

Every year, my dad’s office is decorated for Christmas. He has this “life size” Santa that that talks, sings, dances, and even lets you use a microphone to literally put words in his mouth. Or at least, that’s what Santa used to do. With age comes issues. These days, his hip creaks when he tries to do something that disturbingly resembles the Wobble and his lower lip just kind of flops onto his chin.

I’ve never actually been around for the assembly of Santa…until this year. Turns out, this can happen:

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Which means you can do this:

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Yeah. Those pictures leave me speechless, too.

Ho-ho-whoa.

***

Okay, I recovered from my speechlessness. That never lasts long. But I honestly forgot what else I was going to say.

Oh! Right!

I was going to tell you that I went back to school today (technically yesterday, since you’re reading this a day later). Here’s my First Day of the Spring Semester picture (which happened to occur on like the coldest day in the history of ever). Or, as my mom called it, “The First Day of the Second Half of Sixteenth Grade” picture. I personally like Mom’s version better.

firstdayofthesecondhalfofsixteenthgradepicture

You can’t see it, but I’m hiding cold meds behind my hot tea and Pop-Tarts. My dad and youngest sister had the flu, so the doctor put the rest of us on a ten-day round of preventative medicine.

So one of my sisters (who had both the flu shot and the preventatives) ended up with this mega-cold and then so lovingly passed it on to me, which meant I spent a couple days maintaining a steady diet of hot tea with honey, warm blankets, and Disney Channel. Apparently, Tamiflu can hold off some pretty intense influenza strains, but it can’t ward off a cold? I mean, how much sense does that make?

(I’ve been informed by Erin and a friend, both of whom are nursing majors, that this actually makes a lot of sense because it targets different kinds of bad things, but still).

My plague only lasted a couple days, though (the cough is another story), and I got to use my deep, dashing, handsome voice while I was sick. That always makes for a good time.

***

Finally, I’ll fill you in on some of the  “real” blog posts I’ve been working on for the coming weeks:

  • My word for 2013 was “know.” I’ll spend some time recapping what that meant to me and how, looking back, I can definitely see how it applied to my year. I’ll also talk about what I’m striving for in 2014.
  • A post about mourning, joy, and when the two collide.
  • Updates on that novel I’m working on.
  • A post about faith, real life, and “modern” Christianity.
  • My blog is turning three next month! So I’ll have something special for my 3rd blogiversary.

I think that’s all for now! I’d like to thank DayQuil for faithfully doing its job and giving me bursts of randomness in the process which I channel into blog updates. If you’d like to be notified when I share the upcoming posts I just mentioned, you’re concerned yet somewhat fascinated by my brain, or you just really like brie loaves and awkward Santas, you can subscribe to my blog on the right side of this page. Just enter your email address and you’ll be notified!

Until next time,

Anna

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