Recipe: Heart Attack Pasta

I know it doesn't look THAT appetizing, but I promise you, this is the tastiest thing I have made in years! *Also a wee bit salty. Eh heh. Yum* As the disclaimer reads, this is pasta dish with a strong sauce, and if you ever wanted to taste MEAT as MEAT SHOULD BE IN A SAUCE, or if you ever wanted to PROVE TO THE WORLD WHAT A MAN YOU ARE, you should eat this pasta! Brennan recommends it!

Ingredients:

1 package of spaghetti

Sauce:

1 pack of Club House mushroom brown gravy

1/2 can of Campbell's Mushroom Soup

6-7 Slices of bacon

1/2 a medium white onion

garlic

salt

butter

Meatballs:

1.5 pounds of ground beef

crackers or bread crumbs

Steak Spice

Grated parmesan cheese

White Onion

And you can't forget this. This...random soy sauce I found! It's like....fifteen years old!

The best part about this is that when I poured it down the drain, it came out like molasses. (EW.)

The sauce should be on medium heat, and it will eventually look like this.

While it's cooking, gently brown the bacon and onions with the garlic and butter in a pan. It will smell amazing. Don't overcook the bacon. I used 4-5 cloves of garlic, but the bacon is the main flavour, it will easily overpower the garlic. YUMMY.

Oh, and speaking of bacon! I decided to chop the bacon roughly into bits here and there. Don't be too concerned about size or shape, it's for flavour. And bacon grease. =D

Put in a bowl some bread crumbs (or cracker crumbs if you forgot to buy bread crumbs at the store like I did.) and mix in the parmesan cheese and spices. You can add more spice, it just depends on what you prefer! I added less spice because the sauce was looking way good at this point!

Roll out no bigger than dollar-sized meatballs...you won't want something bigger than that. (Speaking from experience.) The smaller they are, the faster they cook. These ones took forever, because I decided to make them huge. (I'm a dummy.)

Now you should add the mushroom soup to the gravy mix, and it'll start to smell really heavenly.

Keep cooking the meatballs! Don't forget about them! Also, make sure that the onions are bacon aren't burning!!! Once it's ready, (you should have had the bacon on a really low heat now) pour the bacon and onions, grease and all into your sauce. YUM.

It'll end up looking something like this. I promise you, the smell is amazing. At this point, you'll have to cook the meatballs for about another fifteen minutes, let the sauce simmer, stirring to keep a skin from forming. At this point, boil the past for 8 minutes, and you have a a meal! Make sure to check your pacemaker after you're finished!

Serves 2 generous portions. Add water for more sauce.

TOW: Feelings

This week I've been thinking a lot about my feelings, especially because I've been having all kinds of feelings. First I'm happy, then I'm sad, then I'm happy again, then I'm tired, then I'm all mixed up, and then it starts all over again. And again.

I'm starting to feel like an emotional washing machine. (Never mix the colours and whites in an emotional washing machine. Heh.)

It's weird because I'm usually very set and straight with my feelings. But lately I have been up and down, and all around.

With the future full of uncertainty (and plenty of unpaid internship time!) I sometimes get very up and down about my feelings. I felt like this is a while ago, right when I left Belgium--because I couldn't see the future, and it made me crazy. I need to know what my next step is. ALL THE TIME. OR I GO CRAZY. No one likes the future when it looks hazy. Especially not me.

"You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.”

So says an anonymous quoter. And I think they're right.

We can say to ourselves "Don't worry, things will turn out alright," but will they really? I have a month and a half to find a job, and to find that job while working 9-5 (FOR FREE.) and taking extra responsibility as much as possible. And volunteering. And seeing friends and other important people in my life. When am I going to have time to just be me? (Presumably when I have a paycheck attached to my name. Heh.)

Anyways, what I have been thinking about doesn't have an answer, especially because I'm so tired and literally falling asleep at the keyboard. Our feelings will show us a direction and a hint as to the state of our lives as long as we still have a heart. It's not easy to move on, change, or just do things differently. But our hearts demand that we take our feelings seriously. And if we don't we die a little inside every day.

Feelings are difficult to understand, especially when we don't understand them ourselves. But we can only have real relationships in our lives if we confront our feelings, and try and understand them, and act on thoughts and feelings that are clear and distinct.

So think about what you feel, every day, and why you feel it.

That's what I'm doing, currently.

VOW: Dramatic Cat

Cute.

Eating with Edgar!

Edgar took me out for authentic Mexican food today! Yay!







It's meat in salsa verde with some kind of cactus-thingy as a side dish. There are also traditional beans and rice. The cactus-thingy, I forget what Edgar called it, but he lowered his voice when he said, "It's like something older ladies eat." He had to lower his voice because the older ladies were serving it. Heh.








This is me taking an accidental picture of Edgar. Aha. He was going to sort of pose, and then he dropped something, and then the flash went off. Anyways, the eatery is actually inside of this little grocery store, and he just kinda...talked to some ladies in the back in Spanish, told them to make us some stuff, and basically I had so much food I thought I was going to die.

Seriously I haven't eaten that much in ages. But it felt good to eat so much, you know, and have a really hearty meal. I've been eating so meagerly lately that it'd been starting to catch up with me. I was getting groggy from not eating enough. I'm wide awake currently, however! Wohoo! =D

I would definitely go back again, but next time, I think I will be prepared to eat more. He also taught me the right way to roll a taco. Because, apparently, I made it like a wrap. Apparently that makes me a bad guy. LOL.

More pictures coming later! =D

TOW: How Needy

Love me.

I'm begging you.

If you don't, I might just hurl myself off a cliff.

Um, a...cliff....of despair?


...

High maintainence reaction aside, it's been a pretty needy week. I've been feeling needy. Why have I been feeling needy? Probably because I have finally recovered from a very long stint of bad relationships, toxic friendships, and other things that go bump in the night.

It's kind of sad to say those things to yourself, to say, "Yeah, I had some pretty bad relationships in my life. I'm kind of surprised at how easy my life is now that they're not in it."

Of course, the downside of letting people out of your life is that there are holes in your heart. AND THEY'RE STILL BLEEDING. BUT DON'T WORRY. JUST A FLESH WOUND. Er, medic?

Though all this want and desire and pain is that you still have needs. Once you have shaken all the darkness out of your hair, you can finally look in the mirror, and say, "I'm ready to be me again."

That's hard.

Because once you can say that, you can turn your emotions back on because you aren't constantly repressing how you feel. You aren't constantly telling yourself things'll get better. You can finally think that things are better, and you're in a place to enjoy life again, no matter what that means.

Loving yourself is hard.

And once you can love yourself again, you can bring people into your life, and no matter how happy or sad they are, you can love them for who they are, yes, even if they are needier than you.

But that's the easy part. Because love, in all the ways you can love, that's easy. It's when you don't have people to love you in your life that you get needy.

I used to think, it was ok to surround myself with people, and eventually something good would come of it, even if those people weren't right for me. But that's mistaking compassion and patience with your own personal values. Being yourself means surrounding yourself with people who make you more than you are.

And while we all need interaction, sometimes what we need more than anything is interaction with ourselves, so we don't forget what we want. And what we need.

What I have realized is that love doesn't make you needy. Love makes you want more good things to happen and gives you the energy to make those things happen. When we are needy it's because something in our life isn't letting us love ourselves. And we have to be aware of our feelings, so that we can keep them in check, and do the things we really want to with our lives.

Thought of the week up tomorrow

Until then, enjoy the cow cartoon!

VOW: Dancing Cow

In honour of that special day, Intergalactic Cow Day, March 21st! To all my friends!

Happy Intergalatic Cow Day!

Uh oh! It's looking like Cow has landed on some forsaken planet! Whatever will happen to Cow?

This is cool

Thanks Engadget!

Laundry Lingo

Yes, this really happened.

TOW: Putting It Out there.

What's that? You don't remember when the last time something interesting happened in your life?



Me neither. I keep waiting...and WAITING. I mean, people! C'mon! I can have a meal ready in 2 and a half minutes but I can't get any excitement in my life? Why doesn't excitement just walk up to ME? I mean, FIND me already!!!



The Dalai Lama writes and speaks a lot about happiness, which I equivocate with leading 'an exciting life'. While I am not an avid fan, someone did say something aboutthe Dalai Lama and got me thinking about what happiness means. The Dalai Lama says (and is right, by the way) that we are here on earth for happiness. Not all of us are destined for it; but we search for it every single day of our lives.



However.



We only get happiness if we, in the terms of an old friend, "put ourselves out there."



That's because happiness is not an accident. It doesn't 'just happen' to people. We create happiness and build it through our relationships . We see what other people have, we see what we want, and try and make ourselves the kind of people we want to be. We can be fulfilled as human beings.



But we don't get to be happy unless we put ourselves out there. Because true happiness is something hard-earned and found with dilligence. We have to put ourselves out there, out in the wild, where our happiness is; being happy is a combination of our own personal inner peace and our desire to help others and create happiness in other people's lives.



If we don't say, "Hey PERSONAL HAPPINESS. HERE I AM. COME FIND ME." then we'll never find happiness. Because we never asked for it. We just kept silently wishing for it. Sometimes asking for happiness is the only step we needed to tak to be truly happy.



But we won't find it unless we put it out there to become a reality, in front of our eyes. Because wishing for happiness is a nice exercise--but putting ourselves out into the world to find our own happiness--that's when we really start to live.

VOW: Michael Jackson in a Minute

I'm not going to lie...it's a little freaky..

I want one

I mean, really, how AWESOME!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I will be seeing this AS SOON AS IT COMES OUT. Who's with me??? Anybody??? Anydbody???

....

I'm still going to see it.

I'm in LOVE WITH THESE SHOES

http://holykaw.alltop.com/sweet-feet-shoes-to-store-candy


I want them. A sneaker version, please.

TOW: How Many Gears Do I Have?

Some days you're on. Some days, you feel off. Sometimes you feel like you are racing ahead in life, and other times you feel that you are coasting along, barely pedaling.



But most days I feel more like a light switch: on and off.


And other days you just want to turn off.



How many gears does any one person have?



We had an interesting guest speakers in class this week and last in career management. They spoke about what constitutued a work-life balance, and they admitted that my generation has a different idea about work-life balance than previous generations. Apparently, we work to live, we don't live to work.


Sometimes I feel that way. But, work gives me purpose, and gives me meaning. When I'm working, I'm being productive. I like living on the high tension note of break-neck speed. It's my kind of life. I like doing something that is valuable, it's not all about fun in the sun. Because for me, fun means being busy. I like being busy.

And generally, I prefer my life to be more about the things I do, than the time I spend relaxing. I'm not really one for sitting around catching up on DVDs or seasons of random shows I've missed. (In fact, relaxing isn't something I do very well. Heh. Nobody's perfect.)

I have been trying so hard to slow down things in my life, I have now officially slowed them to the point where it's too slow. The bike is hardly moving. I need to switch gears again.


The point of life is to live. And yes, we can live at our own speeds, but we have to do something with our lives for our lives to be meaningful. No one has told us how to live. In fact, more than ever, we live in a kind of world that tells us it won't and it can't tell us how to live.

And while you might think this is bad, it isn't. Because we get to decide how to live our lives. That means we have to be fearless, and not be afraid of the things we don't know and can't predict. And, when we blow a flat tire, we patch it up again. When we take the wrong road, we turn around and we head back. We take the other path we thought about taking in the first place.


Life is about balance. But we can't worry about what side of life we're leaning towards--relaxation or working too hard--because you can't count the cost of being who you really are. Pushing ahead and climbing that hill while your legs are screaming, that's fun sometimes, but we can't always live that way. In the same way, we can't just meander in the countryside for our whole lives. We get bored with ourselves, and with the scenery. A life, a good life, demands that we switch gears, and constantly try to better ourselves, and to enjoy ourselves at the same time.

How many shifts do you need to make to climb your next challenge?

VOW: Queen of the world

While I can't link it, you all should go watch Kathryn Bigelow's acceptance speech for best director at the Oscars this year. Should be on Youtube, or check Oscar.com

While I'm not a fan of award ceremonies in general, she's apparently the first women who has won an Oscar, and also won it over James Cameron, who made Avatar, and is also Bigelow's ex-husband.

The line "Queen of the World" is showing up in every form of media, much to Cameron's chargin, to be sure.

Sofa transforms into bunk bed

Amazing.

TOW: Sick

I'm sick this week. I have a lot to say, but I have too much to do! It will have to wait until another post!

VOW: Video Games Live

A compilation of some of the best music made for 8-bit, done by an orchestra. Amazing!