I can't cook but I can bake like a MO FO

So I had some left over bananas sitting on my counter that were way too ripe to eat. So I decided to make some home made banana bread. After scanning the internet for a while looking at the basic ingredients for the bread I decided to make my own version. Lets just say I will be making this again because it was the best banana bread I have ever had in my life.

Ingredients:
3 ripe bananas
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 egg beaten
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of baking soda
two generous scoops of sour cream (maybe 1/2 cup)
Handful of chocolate chips
handful of walnuts

Step one: Preheat oven to 358F

Step two: Mash your bananas with a wooden spoon or what I prefer to use...

Step three: Mix in sugar, egg and cinnamon to mashed bananas

Step four: Add baking soda, salt and sour cream. Mix well then add chocolate chips and walnuts.

Step 5: I like using rectangular baking dishes, so I would suggest a 4X8 baking dish for your mixture. You could be boring and use a square if you'd like.

Step 6: Bake for one full hour.

Step 7: Take out of oven and let cool for a few minutes, cut yourself a slice and NOM NOM NOM

#199 wake up before 6 a.m. for a week straight

I should have been more clear when writing this on my bucket list. I wanted a reason TO get up this early in the morning for a whole week.
Well, my wish came true. For the last 9 days in a row I have had to be at work at 4 a.m. Yes, that's right folks, 4 in the morning I had to BE at work.
My alarm went off at 2:45 every morning. Which sucks even more is that the employees at my work were directed to a new parking destination...

So I had to walk along this path to get to that building up there. Who is surprised? This girl! When is the earliest you've ever had to wake up?

#132 Learn How to Cook

(Mexican taco soup)


Obviously this learning how to cook thing is a working process. I figured I would start with crock pot recipes. They seem like they are pretty easy, a lot of them are just "throw in ingredients and ignore". Which I LOVE.

So, I came across this recipe when I was partaking in a bloghop and I HAD to try it (http://somethingdeepwithin.blogspot.com). Anyways, it is very simple!

Ingredients:
1.5 lbs of meat
Can of pinto beans
Can of black Beans
Can of kidney beans
Can of corn
Can of diced tomatoes
Ranch seasoning packet
taco seasoning packet

How to make (so simple!):
1. Empty all canned goods into crock pot or slow cooker
2.Brown meat
3.Drain meat and insert into crock pot with ranch and taco season packets (make sure to open them and pour the contents out into the crock pot)
4. Cook on either HIGH for 3 hours, or LOW for 5 hours.
5.Dish out, put some sour cream in there and enjoy


Easy enough right?

I was being crafty around the house

Being crafty hasn't always been my thing. I remember when I was younger, about 8 years old, I had told my mother about my interest in arts and crafts and she put a table in our garage organized with shoe boxes filled with different craft supplies. I remember having a box of crayons, colored pencils, I even had a hot glue gun and different cloth material and sewing needles. I also remember nothing coming out of that glorious craft table, besides the table itself that my friends and I decided to color all over and decorate. As soon as I hit middle school the craft table became more of a work bench for my step father. It wasn't his fault, I just simply outgrew making terrible art.

My craft flame never re-lit until my Junior year of high school where I had the best art teacher of all art teachers combined, Mr. Hotaling. Mr. Hotaling taught me to be more serious with my art. As soon as I started getting more serious, my art became a lot better. I had serious intentions of going to art school to become an art teacher just like Mr. Hotaling. Unfortunately, Mr. Hotaling had bigger and better plans for himself and his family and bought a ranch out in Colorado. He is doing fabulously by the way.

My parents were quick to tell me that my dreams were just that, dreams. As they began to discourage not only their faith in my dreams but their faith in myself, I started looking at other college majors.

Anyways, story aside the reason for this post is because I got a sewing machine for one of my wedding gifts and just thought I would let my readers know what I have been up to with my new fond love of arts and crafts...

So I get a serious attachment to cards. I love getting cards, I love reading them and I love to have them sitting around forever until my husband throws them away. For our wedding, I told my husband, I NEEDED to save our cards. I just couldn't go through with throwing away all of them because to me they are a reminder that our family not only shared that special day with us, but they all had something different and nice to say. All the cards were so sweet! So I came up with the idea of putting them altogether in a binder. Well, trying to find a nice looking binder with our wedding colors proved to be a real challenge. So I decided instead of driving myself crazy looking for one I would make it! That way it can look exactly like I want it to AND it will give me something to do during my free time. So here is a little step-by-step process for anyone interested in doing the same.

Above are my basic supplies. I had to buy a spray glue because I went to three different stores and they were all out of glue guns. Personally, the glue gun is the way to go the spray is hard to control. The "fabric" I used ended up being a tablecloth because I just couldn't find a good fall fabric here and it was cheaper anyways.

As you can tell I did the inside panels first. Then the outside was just one piece. Then I folded over and pasted the outside.

I didn't use the spray for the ribbon because it was really sticky and bled through so I ended up use ModPod which takes a while to dry so I left a heavy object (the wine bottle) on top during the night.

Then you just punch holes in the cards a Voila! Not a hard project for my first in a while!

Read all TIMES 100 novels

Today I am checking off...

American Pastoral written by Philip Roth.
It took me quite a while to get through this book. I feel like I said that about the last book on this list. The kindle has seriously made me underestimate the thickness of a novel but I have a feeling this one was pretty long.
I have never read a book by Philip Roth until this one. Roth is a very detailed writer. I enjoyed this book because the whole story is a flashback of the All-American-Boy Swede Levov, whose life turns out to not be so picture perfect as everyone around him thought it was going to be. In high school he was the city champ of practically every sport, joined the marine to serve his country, and after the marines ended up marrying Miss New Jersey,not to mention being a very wealthy man from taking over his father's glove business. Picture perfect American right? Until his daughter ruins everything.
I give it 3 out of 5 stars, only because it took me forever to read it and it wasn't a page turner for me. But I did like it, I enjoyed the sequence of events and the writing of course.

Favorite quote from American Pastoral... "What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly ski of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup."

#184 Make a list of 100 books I want to read and read them all!

So I just joined the website www.goodreads.com which made it very easy for me to compile a list of 100 books I want to read. I actually am going to have 110 books on this list and it's because a couple of them are also on my "All TIME 100 novels" list and I just don't think it's fair to myself to have the same book count for two different items on my bucket list. I will link this list on the top of my blog so if a reader ever wants to go back and read what books I have listed they will have easy access to that.

1.The Night Circus- Erin Morgenstern (Review)

2.     Bright Lights, Big Ass- Jen Lancaster

3.     Still Alice- Lisa Genova (Review)

4.     1984- George Orwell

5.     The Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger (Review)

6.     One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

7.     Chronicles of Narnia (series)- C.S. Lewis

8.     Catch-22- Joseph Heller

9.     Slaughterhouse-Five- Kurt Vonnegut

10. In Cold Blood- Truman Capote

11. Water for Elephants- Sara Gruen

12. The Kite Runner-Khaled Hosseini

13. The Time Traveler’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger

14. The Book Thief- Markus Zusak

15. The Secret Life of Bees- Sue Monk Kidd

16. The Hunger Games- Suzanne Collins

17. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

18. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen

19. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn- Betty Smith

20. A Dog’s Purpose- Bruce W. Cameron

21. The Shadow of the Wind- Carlos Zafon

22. Sarah’s Key- Tatiana de Rosnay

23. Wicked- Gregory Maguire (Review)

24. Midwives- Chris Bohjalian

25. Freakonomonics- Steven D. Levitt

26. Extremely Loud and Incredisbly Close- Jonathan Safran Foer

27. Running With Scissors- Augusten Burroughs

28. The Five People You Meet in Heaven- Mitch Albom

29. A Walk to Remember- Nicholas Sparks

30. Jumanji- Chris Van Allsburg

31. Life of Pi- Yann Martel

32. The Host- Stephanie Meyer

33. The Thirteenth Tale- Dianne Setterfield

34. Everything Is Illuminated- Jonathan Safran Foer

35. The Shack- William P. Young

36. Fast Food Nation- Eric Schlosser

37. My Sister’s Keeper- Jodi Picoult

38. Catching fire- Suzanne Collins

39. A Thousand Splendid Suns- Khaled Hossenini

40. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies- Seth Grahame-Smith

41. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter- Kim Edwards

42. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time- Mark Haddon

43. The Pillars of Earth- Ken Follet

44. Speak- Laurie Halse Anderson

45. The Tao of Wu- The RZA

46. The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephan Chbosky

47. Breakfast of Champions- Kurt Vonnegut

48. Fight Club- Chuck Palaniuk

49. Cat’s Cradle- Kurt Vonnegut

50. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt- Beth Hoffman

51. Possession- A.S. Byatt

52. The Best of Me- Nicholas Sparks

53. Can You Keep a Secret?- Sophie Kinsella

54. Damned- Chuck Palaniuk

55. Zone One- Colson Whitehead

56. The Marriage Plot- Jeffrey Eugenides

57. The Stranger’s Child- Alan Hollinghurst

58. The Pale King- David Foster Wallace

59. The Leftovers- Tom Perrotta

60. Steve Jobs- Walter Isaacson

61. Between Shades of Grey- Ruta Sepetys

62. State of Wonder- Ann Patchett

63. Sleeping with Mortals- Cathrine Goldstein

64. The Cat’s Table- Michael Ondaatje

65. The Dovekeepers- Alice Hoffman

66. Touch- Alexi Zentner

67. Hot Pink- Adam Levin

68. Tell-All- Chuck Palahniuk

69. Frankenstein- Mary Shelley

70. The Da Vinci Code- Dan Brown

71. The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold

72. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer- Patrick Suskind

73. Go Ask Alice- Beatrice Sparks

74. Dracula- Bram Stocker

75. Roots- Alex Haley

76. The Things They Carried- Tim O’Brien

77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being- Milan Kundera

78. Watchmen- Alan Moore

79. And Then There Were None- Agatha Christie

80. Sophie’s Choise- William Styron

81. Into the Wild- Jon Krakauer

82. Native Son- Richard Wright

83. A Little Princess- Frances Hodgson Burnett

84. Johnny Got His Gun- Dalton Trumbo

85. The Godfather- Mario Puzo

86. V for Vendetta- Alan Moore

87. The Jungle- Upton Sinclair

88. A Fine Balance- Rohinton Mistry

89. A Child Called “It”- Dave Pelzer

90. The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison

91. The Plague- Albert Camus

92.  The Satanic Verses- Salman Rushdie

93. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas- John Boyce

94. While Mortals Sleep- Kurt Vonnegut

95. Diary- Chuck Palahniuk

96. A Visit from the Goon Squad- Jennifer Egan

97. Freedom- Jonathan Franzen

98. The Surrendered- Chang-rae Lee

99. Man in the Woods

100.                The Lonely Polygamists- Brady Udall

101.                To the End of the Land- David Grossman

102.                Vestments- John Reimringer

103.                Room- Emma Donoghue

104.                Super Sad True Love Story- Gary Shteyngart

105.                Faithful  Place- Tana French

106.                Major Pettigrews’s Land Stand- Helen Simonson

107.                Ship Breaker- Paolo Bacigalupi

108.                Anthropology of an American Girl- Hilary Thayer Hamann

109.                Winning Mr.Wrong- Marie Higgins

110.                It Rains in Febuary- Leila Summers

#40 Go on a cruise

One thing I checked off my bucket list while I was on my honeymoon...

Go on a cruise! I was a little worried going on a cruise because I haven't really talked to anyone that has actually gone on one, but my husband assured me that it was going to be a good time so I trusted him. I am really glad I did!

We went aboard the Carnival Splendor ( http://www.carnival.com/cms/fun/ships/carnival_splendor/default.aspx?shipCode=SL )

It had a lot of fun things to do on board.

I did this random competition that was going on the second day on the boat where we had to do some random activities, like pour the pool water in the bucket. Our team won but for some reason the judge seemed pretty bias and shut us down. Anthony took part of a contest too, he was in the hairy chest contest!

He didn't win but he was one of the last men standing! They made him bark like a dog which was a little odd. There was also live band karaoke.

And mini-golf.

On this boat they also had a piano bar where we spent a few of our nights at.

The piano guy was pretty legit. One of the first nights we were there I requested a Jack Johnson song and he didn't know it but he told me to come back on Friday and he would have it. Needless to say, we went back on Friday and he sang and played it like a champ. Was a little disappointed that he didn't know "Peaches" but really, who really does know that song anyways?

We had a great time. This picture from the plane ride home explains it all...

Zonked!