Macy's Thanksgiving Balloons

The night before Thanksgiving I went to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon Inflation.  Basically the night before the parade they blow up all of the balloons outside of the natural history museum and you can walk around and look at them.  It was a lot of fun even if there were ALOT of people there.  Also my new pet peeve is people with strollers.  Just because you keep ramming me in the back of the ankles with your stroller (with your child in it!) doesn't mean I can move any faster when I'm in a crowd of people and can only go as fast as the people in front of me.

Lots of pictures!

I also spent Thanksgiving in Indiana this year!  It was really fun to be with family and getting to see my grandparents as well as my aunt and uncle and cousins (including the baby!)  I just have a few pictures, one of the things we did was go to the botanical gardens and part of it was decorated in a Grinch Who Stole Christmas theme which was cute.  We also saw the Festival of Trees at the Embassy because Santa was there and we took the baby for his first picture with Santa.

Nice Work Pumpkins

Yay for fun weekend activities!

This weekend my roommates had a Pumpkin Bread Bake Off.  Apparently they both had recipes so they wanted to put them to the test.  Both were actually pretty good even considering I don't really like pumpkin that much.  Monica's was in a bundt cake pan and reminded me a lot of a spice cake.  Kari's was in cupcake form and included chocolate chips.  But both were yummy.

Monica's pumpkin bread in the pan

Monica's pumpkin bread out of the pan

Kari's pumpkin bread muffins with chocolate chips

Another random story:

There's a cute coffee shop near me and they had the funniest sign out the other day.  I thought it was cute.

And then today I saw Nice Work If You Can Get It with Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara.  It was sooo cute.  The music is all Gershwin music that I knew and the whole plot is silly and fun with lots of dancing and funny moments.

Basically I realized that the last musical I saw was Avenue Q in September and I get cranky if I go too long in between seeing shows so I decided I needed to see something.  My roommates were busy but that didn't stop me!  Seth was super sweet and offered to hang out with me in line.  He wasn't super excited to see the show so he waited with me and then after I got my ticket we hung out until the show started.

Again, the show was so much fun.  It basically takes place in the 1920s during prohibition and Matthew Broderick plays a kind of dopey, not very smart, rich guy and Kelli O'Hara is the best bootlegger in the business.

Aaaand compulsory show clip :)

Weekly Highlights

Here's the rundown on exciting things this week:

Obama will be president for another 4 years!  This makes me happy.

This week was also my away day for work.  On Thursday we had all day meetings outside of the office.  We went to a hotel called Yotel where we basically had a lot of presentations regarding all of the various aspects of my department and the industry in general.  The hotel is kind of strange and futuristic, but it was interesting.  Here is the what the room we were meeting in looked like:

After all of our meetings we all went bowling, which was a lot of fun.  The bowling alley was probably the fanciest bowling alley I think I've ever seen in my entire life.  We even had our own private lanes in our own private room!  They also had ordered these things called beer towers which was kind of a funny sight.  My coworkers are so much fun and so silly.  We had the best time rooting each other on.  I did find out that I am a terrible terrible bowler.  The first game I bowled a 35....sigh.  Oh well.

Then today my roommates and I went to go see the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I read the book on Friday before seeing the movie and I have to say they are both really good.  I think I like the book more, but that's not surprising at all.  They are also pretty heavy but definitely a good read/watch. Here's the trailer for it:


I also finally saw The Hunger Games movie which I had been wanting to see for a while.  I enjoyed it, but the book is definitely way way way better than the movie.  I think they left out a lot of important things.

And that's about it for me.  I'm getting excited for Thanksgiving to be here soon!

Hurricake Pops

As many of you know there was a little thing called Hurricane Sandy earlier this week.  First of all, fortunately I'm fine.  The power didn't go out, it seems there was minimal damage to structures in my area and overall the effect has only been in public transportation.  Basically at the moment traveling anytime is like traveling at rush hour and traveling at rush hour is MADNESS.

So what does one do when one has the day off from work in preparation of a hurricane?  One makes Hurricake Pops of course! I had bought this kit at Target because I thought it looked fun for Halloween themed cake pops that looked like eyeballs.  I've never made cake pops before but since they always looked so complicated I thought having a kit that had all the ingredients and told me what to do would be the way to start.  Basically cake pops take a long time to make because there are a lot of different steps.

First off is to bake the cake part.  In this case it was red velvet cake.  After baking the cake as normal you put it in the fridge for about 15min or so to let it cool.  Meanwhile you mix together a small amount of frosting.  After the cake is cool, you cut it into cubes and crumble the cake into a mixing bowl with the frosting and mix it together until it is a consistency where you can shape it.

Cake/frosting mixture

After you have the cake mixed, you use it to form little balls that then get popped into the freezer for about 20min to harden.

Cake balls

 After the cake has hardened, you melt these things called melting wafers and after inserting sticks, coat the cake in the melting wafer frosting and then stick them upright so they can dry.

Drying cake pops

After the cake pops have dried, you can decorate them with regular frosting!  Since these were Halloween cake pops they were all supposed to look like eyeballs, but that got boring so I ended up making several different designs just for fun.

Finished cake pops!

The pop on the left Monica calls my "Lambchop Cakepop"

I brought in some of the leftovers to work on Thursday (when I could finally get into the office) and they were a big hit!

Another random story:  I had heard that if you think your power is going to go out you should freeze gallon size ziplock bags of water.  That way if the power goes out you have extra water to drink, but also the giant ice blocks help keep your food colder for a longer time.  My roommates and I decided to do this just to be on the safe side and after the hurricane mess was mostly over we took one out and defrosted it in the sink.  It was so funny because it looked just like a pillow!  Well until we had to run the water and the water melted a hole in the middle.  Then it was a donut pillow.

Donut Ice Pillow

And then finally, I alluded to this earlier, but this is a picture I took at the subway station when I was on my way home from work on Thursday:

Luckily I'm smart and realized that if I walked up and around to a different set of staircases at the other end of the platform there were far less people.