Shopping! Continued

You may or may not remember that I went on a shopping expedition last fall. There's more to the story.

It turns out that the phrase "40 dollar suit" strikes terror in the hearts of people who are older and wiser than me. I know this, because they read this blog. And because they are my parents, and they have a fairly direct manner when they think I'm making mistake.

If it was just them, I might argue back a bit. I find that the "machine washable" trait of the clothes I bought is priceless and therefore should boost the overall value of my clothes. Armed with this rebuttal, I came home for Thanksgiving, fully intending to be quite satisfied with my decisions.

My mom saw it coming a mile away.

And then she enlisted the neighbors. She fights dirty.

I don't actually know how this all went down. The version I got was that one of our neighbors offered to come on a shopping trip with me to help me pick out additional wardrobe elements. So this is how I found myself, the day before Thanksgiving, in Syms with my mom, my neighbor, and my neighbor's daughter.

In my last post on the subject, I impressed the importance of having a forthright, decisive, honest, and frank shopping companion. It turns out I didn't know the meaning of any of those words. We spent 3 hours in the store. My mother and my neighbor were handing me jackets at an alarming rate. I tried them on right on the sales floor, and I'd be able to wear one for all of 3 seconds before a verdict was reached. Most of the time it was "no."

We found a few suits that met with approval, and then we headed over to the separates section. Of particular note was a bright red wool blazer. I wasn't too certain about it. It had a weird 3 pocket thing going on. I was assured, however, that it fit perfectly and looked fabulous and that I should get it. So I did.

And I didn't get a chance to wear it until today, when I had a job fair. I was going to go with a suit, but I decided the blazer looked better, and it was warmer. After I got assurances from Chris that a blazer was plenty formal for the job fair, I headed out the door.

I won't go into details here, but it was the right decision. I've never had a job fair go as well as today's did. And I credit it at least partially to the red blazer, because everyone else was wearing black suits and I stood out really well.

New Blog

I have some pretty serious kitchen plans coming up. Serious enough to warrant a new blog. And conveniently enough, there is, in fact, a new blog to handle it. From now on, all food related posts will be at Kitchen War. I'll still keep this one around for the more mundane stuff.

And the winners are...

For those playing the home game, I ended up making the Pumpkin Mousse for the party. The recipe from Frog is really easy, and it turned out spectacularly. I substituted Buttershots for half of the rum.

I was getting sick of making chocolate, hence the mousse. Chris, however, has not gotten anywhere close to being sick of eating chocolate, so he felt compelled to make the flourless mocha fudge cake. He did it. Yes really. All on his own. We had an icing piping lesson, and then he decorated the cake, pastry bag and all. I think he has more fun in the kitchen than he lets on.

Now he wants a chef's hat. I think he's serious. He said he was willing to sacrifice his hair to wear one.

Baking Fairies

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a group of friends who mostly liked to do stage crew and take apart computers. But sometimes, when we didn't have a show and computers got boring, they'd bake. And they called themselves the Baking Fairies.

Just so we are all agreed on the image, "fairy" is not the first thing one would think of upon meeting any of this group. Not the second, or the fifth, or the last. So I really don't know where the name came from. But they earned it, in my eyes, with their Bomb Cake.

My freshman year, we had a few bomb threats at our school. Not many, and nowhere near the numbers to which we would climb by my senior year, but a few. This was also pre-9/11 so the bomb threat procedure involved sending out a note to the parents explaining that a threat had been made, but police were fairly certain that there was nothing to worry about. Parents had the choice of keeping their kids home.

This was back in the days when we had snow, as well. And there was one February morning when we all trudged to school looking like lawn gnomes with our snow gear. It was snowing hard by the time I got to school. And I had gotten up at something like 6 am to wait for a bus in the snow and the cold, and it was never on time, and I was probably a little bit grumpy. I think this was before I drank coffee.

When I got to school, I had some time before homeroom, and I found some of the Baking Fairy contingent huddled around some sort of package in the lobby (not all of the Fairy folk were still in school). They were looking triumphant, and when I elbowed my way into the crowd, I was confronted with a chocolate sheet cake. It had bright green icing, and, carefully spelled out in multicolored sprinkles, the word "BOMB" on the top.

Right about then, the assistant principal noticed our small gathering and decided to investigate, so we invited him to cut the cake. Pieces were passed around, we had cake before homeroom, and then there was enough snow that we all got to go home early.