cheers to better health and crazy kittens.

ok, so here we are a mere seven months before getting hitched and i am sick. and not just flu or cold sorta sick.... i have lyme disease. and let me tell you it sucks. it sucks because i am not sick enough to stay at home and really rest and yet i have a hard time reading a long document and coming up with the right words to say in the middle of a sentence. it's really bad when you are explaining that you have a bunch of stuff that needs to be thrown out of that....that...what's the word --- oh yeah file cabinet. i mix things up and get tired really easily. last night i went to whole foods for coffee and totally forgot what i was there for -- ended up coming home with soy milk, tempeh and flowers.... and no coffee.

luckily i now have a reason why i have been so out of it and feeling so crappy. and it is definitely consoling to hear after multiple drs visits over at least the past year that i did not make up this stuff in my head. i am also lucky that wookie pushed me to find a new doctor and go in when my hands and feet were all pins and needles (read: called and made the appt for me). he takes that in sickness and in health thing very seriously!!

it's been two weeks of super duper antibiotics and all i have to show for it is a little more stamina, a lot less sleep and a growing addiction to probiotics. but i am on the mend!! one more week of antibiotics to go then a visit to the neurologist and infectious disease doc (i am that cool). i have my wookie and my little man, heathcliff (look at how cute and big he is!!) to keep me company and make sure i take my meds.

in the meantime, life goes on. work is totally picking up! i haven't been able to do much yoga but it's a good time to reflect and still teach. we also are still full steam ahead with the wedding planning. we even got to go to a sip and scan event at macy's where jared got lots of glutinous goodies while i scanned more items onto the registry. then when we were ready to leave, we got a gift of two nice wine glasses!

so.....cheers to better health.

Omg Diana Ross!

The golden blob in the foreground is her.

Two words: total diva.

The party.

They have people on fucking stilts juggling!!

bake fail.

the first time jared came to visit me in nj, i was waiting anxiously for him to arrive and decided to have a go at making what in my mind was a gluten free version of apple crisp. substituting quinoa for oats and wheat flour.

unfortunately, i decided that all the quinoa needed was some water and it would cook just fine. So he arrived and there was the smell of yummy apple crisp -- i looked like the perfect girlfriend who was cool and could bake!! we had awkward conversation, since this was our first time seeing each other after only meeting twice in chicago a month before and communicating with each other every single day via phone, chat, im, text and email.

i nervously checked the damn stuff about 50 times -- adding more and more water hoping for some magic change. the quinoa never popped. jared was really antsy to try it, and i thought it got sort of mushy so we ended up trying it. at first taste it was all yummy but it had a crunch that suspiciously resembled uncooked quinoa -- or in layman's terms uncooked rice -- and not in a good way.

jared brings this up whenever he says something about my cooking, as in, you always cook great stuff except for that time when i first came to visit and you made that apple stuff -- that sucked. and i laugh, because i totally agree -- it sucked.

regardless, there really hasn't been another time where i had a repeat of that failed attempt, except this sunday when i had a bake fail from a box mix. it happens, people. it usually happens when you don't follow directions (note: i don't really like to follow directions).

anyway, we were out of butter so i substituted smart balance in the betty crocker gluten free chocolate chip cookies box mix (which i might add, i got at the lackawana pathmark in montclair). the damn things wouldn't come off the cookie sheet and true to gf baked good form they were crumbly. BUT -- they tasted damn good. we scraped them off the sheets and ate the cookie crumble out of a plastic baggie.

my review -- follow the directions and you can be reminded of why chocolate chip cookies taste so good. it was easy and i am sure they will work with real butter. i did put some in a small loaf pan and they came out fine.