Snow White Vanilla Birthday Cake

So, this is not my recipe, but rather, one I got off of Pinterest a while back. I decided to make it, and freaked when I noticed that the original link didn't work! I finally found the recipe online, but I couldn't pin it because it lacked an image (sigh). So, here's the whole recipe, in all its glory:

Snow White Vanilla Birthday Cake         Described as Geburtstag Kucha (Birthday Cake from Rebecca Weber) in Food That Really Schmecks by Edna Staebler "Snow white and light as a feather; baked in layers." Ingredients 1/2 cup butter 2 cups white sugar 3 1/2 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 1/2 cups ice water 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 teaspoon almond extract 4 egg whites beaten stiff Method: Add sugar to the butter and beat until light. Sift dry ingredients and add alternately with ice water and flavourings, beating thoroughly after each addition. Fold in the beaten egg whites. Pour into greased layer pans and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. Cover with Angel Feather Icing and be tactful about the number of candles. www.sweetapolita.com

Madison Bucket List

Madison Bucket List
Well. It's official. I'm moving back to Milwaukee. I can't help but have mixed feelings because I've fallen in love with Madison and this is where all of my friends live. So, in the spirit of leaving, I've compiled a list of all the things I'd like to do before I move on (I know that some most of these things are not in Madison, but I doubt I'll have time to do them when I begin student teaching!):

• Go on a tour of the Capital
• Get a picture on Abe's lap
• Go to a waterpark in the Dells  - Completed 7/3/12
• Go to a fish fry at Toby's
• Visit Gov. Dodge State Park
• Go to the Farmer's Market  - Completed 6/16/12
• Go to the House on the Rock
• Visit Aztalan
• Have a picnic at Picnic Point 
• Visit a museum in Madison
• Go to Johnson Creek Outlet Mall
• Go to a drive-in movie in the Dells
• Tour the Ale Asylum Brewery
• Visit Mt. Horeb
• Visit the remodeled Chazen Museum
• Win money at Ho-Chunk in the Dells
• Go to Cave of the Mounds
• Mine for gems in the Dells 
• Bike around Lake Monona
• Have a drink at the Terrace  -  Completed 7/2/12
• Hike Devil's Lake

Ren Faire minus the LARPing

Here in the middle of my literacy class we've been given a break and I had a thought. I think I'd like to go to the Renaissance Faire and Medieval Times. No particular reason why other than sometimes it's fun to be nerdy.

I wonder if they serve fries there...

New Styleboard

Enjoy!

Pop of Black by mlmillard

P.S. I did find a great Kate Spade hat that just didn't go with this getup:

Candy Realization

You know those "a-ha" moments that change your thinking about something? An epiphany, if you will. Well I had me one of those today: I was watching tv this morning and saw an ad for Cadbury's Easter candy (see below) and my mouth started watering for delicious Easter candy (hollow chocolate bunnies in particular).

I got to thinking about how long it would be before some of that chocolately goodness would be mine (I am a post-holiday bargain shopper) and I realized that I'm still working on my VALENTINE'S DAY candy! Before that, I ended up tossing a bunch of Christmas candy that went bad. Are St. Patrick's Day and Thanksgiving the only holidays where we aren't encouraged to gorge ourselves on sugary delights? I mean, think about it:

February: Valentine's Day (chocolates, primarily)

March/April: Easter (all candy)

March/April: Spring Break (eye candy) 

July: 4th of July (parade candy)

October: Halloween (all candy)

December: (all candy)

St. Patrick's Day: No candy emphasized

Thanksgiving: No candy emphasized

I know it probably doesn't seem like a bit deal, but I think it does reflect our society's belief in providing young and old alike with excuses to indulge throughout the year. Just kind of interesting to think about. 

Am I missing any holidays? These are the ones that come to mind right away and make me think that maybe I should leave the chocolate bunny on its lonesome shelf come this year's post-Easter sale.

Busy!

I'm trying to keep up with this blog, but it's been so hard lately! I know I complain about being busy from time to time, but really, this is the busiest I think I've ever been. Let's just say that in the last two weeks, I haven't had any time to sit around. Here's my week:

Monday & Wednesdays:
Wake up at 5:40am
Leave to teach at 7:00am
Teach from 7:35am to 8:35am
Work from 9:00am to 4:00pm
Class from 4:30pm to 8:30pm
Homework/Sleep 9:00pm-5:40am

Tuesdays & Thursdays:
Wake up at 5:40am
Leave to teach at 7:00am
Teach from 7:35am to 8:35am
Work from 9:00am to 6:00pm
Zumba from 6:45pm to 8:00pm
Homework/Sleep 8:10pm to 5:40pm

Friday:
Wake up at 5:40am
Leave to teach at 7:00am
Teach from 7:35am to 8:35am
Work from 9:00am to 5:00pm
Hip-Hop Hustle from 5:10pm to 6:00pm
Relax :)

Ahh I have another month and a half of this to get my teaching hours in! Crossing my fingers that I make it!

On the Calendar: Dirty Girl Mud Run

I just signed up for a mud run in August! Woo-Hoo! I'm really excited to be getting out there again and doing an event, especially one that looks so fun!
It will probably be me, Lynn, Jen, and Lauren participating in the Hartland area Dirty Girl Mud Run on August 19th at the Camp Whitcomp-Mason campgrounds. (This is where we went to camp in 4th and 5th grade, so let the nostalgia and reminiscing begin!)

This little 5k will be something fun to train for and it'll kick me into gear regarding how I'm going to keep up with my fitness. I've been very diligent about working out at least 3 times per week at the Princeton Club (got a sweet Groupon there) but my membership expires 2/29/12 and I simply can't afford $44/mo for the next year, or $36/mo for the next two years. So, I'm looking into taking Zumba (my favorite class EVER!) through the local parks and rec. department or lately, a co-worker has been trying to talk me into doing a 10 week fitness challenge through FXB. It sounds like fun and is about $300 or so, and might be easier to commit to going to a class that meets 6 times per week than just going to an open gym and having to work out on my own. We'll see.

Next goal: to give up soda. For real.

Google News Badges are Ridiculous!

I've stopped updating you all on my new discovery of Google News Badges because they have gotten out of hand. Really. Here's a current shot of my badges:

I know, right?! I used to put stock in these things as identifiers of my interests, but clearly things have gotten out of control. Google seems to just dole out random badges for articles that make no sense. I have a Britney Spears badge that I earned yesterday....yet I don't recall ever reading an article about her (or one mentioning her, for that matter). An Airlines badge? Huh? That's how I'd describe a lot of these badges: ridiculous.

Hopefully, this will be my last update about them. Maybe a year from now I'll have 100 of them for all sorts of random things I don't read about! :P

Pinterest and Styleboards

So you may have noticed that I've taken a break from blogging. That's what happens when your life is consumed by work, school, teaching, and going to the Club (Princeton Club is a local gym where I scored a 2 month membership for only $50!). This weekend has been busy, in a good way, and today I thought I'd browse Pinterest. I've been on there for a while and within the last two weeks, I swear that every girl I know on facebook has started following me and my boards (along with, of course, every other girl on Pinterest). Where I once thought I was in a utopia of breathtaking images, inspiring attire, and beautiful baubles there is now an abundance of self-promotion ("Check out my jewelry on Etsy!") and feverish pinning (sort of a "Look what I found! I saw it first!" attitude with seemingly haphazard pinning) that have come to clutter the field. That isn't to say that these types of pins are caused by my facebook friends, but since the bandwagon is overflowing, everyone seems to want to hitch up another wagon and hop on before it's too late. On the other hand, when you refresh the page you will see a barrage of unique images every time that you might not have otherwise seen or considered pinning in the first place!

Anyway, I digress. My point was, that rather than repin a cute sweater for the 10,000th time, I decided to explore something relatively unknown to me: Styleboards. While I may have been in the know about Pinterest when it was just beginning to catch on, I am only recently exploring styleboards and creating them on Kaboodle. Just for fun, I created this one (see below) which I call "Daytime Romantic". Fun, flirty, and casual elegance define this look.

Daytime... by mlmillard

I should probably note that posting this board is not for shameless self-promotion, but rather, I can't find a way to pin it onto one of my Pinterest boards without hosting the image elsewhere (which will inevitably cause unintended self-promotion) :). Maybe the self-promoters and "I pinned it first" pinners aren't so bad after all; I mean, the point of Pinterest is to collect images of the things you love and cause inspiration (and maybe some people's inspiration comes from pinning like mad!).

I'm sure there are more styleboards in my future!

New Year's To-Do's

I've been in a "bettering yourself everyday" type of mood lately, so I don't have an end goal to complete any particular resolutions per se this year. Rather, 2012 is going to be all about being a better me in general. That said, I've come up with a list of things I'd like to accomplish this year (and beyond). Here it is:

Adventure

1. Visit Aztalan (see wikipedia photo --->)

2. Take a road trip
3. Visit Katie in Spokane
4. Visit Elizabeth in Arkansas
5. Go to a state I haven't been to before
6. Go to Canada, eh

Fitness
1. Do a bike race
2. Do a sprint triathlon (Danskin, probably)

Outdoors
1. Go camping
2. Buy a State Park pass
3. Go hiking often
4. Go cross-country skiing

Self
1. Whiten my teeth (or stop drinking soda!)
2. Wear more sunscreen (though I do look awfully nice when tanned) ;)
3. Join the Optimists

More to come!

G-dub badge

I just read an article about a new prep school being proposed in my area and how UW-Madison should have been backing it all along...yada yada yada. Anyway, I read the article after taking the screen shot in the post below, and as I scrolled down the page, I noticed a new little gem there (see right). Interesting! Apparently it took 8 articles to earn! What?! 

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I don't lean democratic...I'll add this one to my Tea Party and Mitt Romney badges.

I also wonder what the delay must be for posting newly-earned badges..

Badges and Badgers

Tip of the day: I just learned how to print screen on my Mac: Hold down Command, Shift, and 4. Drag the cursor to capture the desired area, and it will save to the clipboard. Pretty fancy not having to open Paint or anything :)

Let me get the Google Badge Updates out of the way so I can actually write about something else (shocking, I know!).

Here's what's up:

Check it out! An Ultimate badge! That's right. Reading 54 articles about Space will earn ya that one! I did earn a Tea Party badge at some point. not sure when that happened! You might also notice that I've got an Archaeology badge....it took 15 articles to earn it. That seems like quite a bit, considering my Biebs badge required a mere 8 articles read before that baby was on there (pardon the pun).

I should probably fess up about why I've been so lazy about updating the badges I've discovered: I stumbled across this link one day: http://goo.gl/4ipaA and it is an ongoing list of badges that is editable by anyone (think: wikipedia). I'm proud to say I've added a few on there myself :D but really, this guy is good! I would go there for more up-to-date info (but there aren't any pics, sorry!).

So...on to Badgers!

I got together with Katie E, Cait, Amy, Liz, and Ashley H. this weekend and it was SO wonderful! I won a free night's stay at the Marriott Residence Inn from a Relay for Life raffle and it had to be used by the end of the year, so there was no better time than now to try and get all the girls together. Steph, April, and Beth couldn't make it, but otherwise it would have been all of us Badgers! It was really, really, hard saying good-bye to everyone this morning as they went on their own way. I guess that up til now I hadn't given much thought to the fact that because we do all live all over the state and country, we don't get to see each other day-to-day and just catch up. Granted, I do see Steph the most and it's soooo great, but I forgot how much I really love the rest of our group and miss getting together with them as often as I do Steph. It was especially hard saying bye to Katie who lives in Spokane and is engaged. For the first time, I almost resented her getting married one day because we'd never have fun times like we did back in Old Ogg, 111, and 44#2. Those times just can't be beat and it's sad to think we'll never really have time together like that again. Just a part of growing up, I guess.

I should mention, too, that during that hotel stay my friend Lisa watched my little Popcorn and that was great too. I feel so very fortunate to have such wonderful people in my life, whether I see them regularly or otherwise. I guess it just means there are a lot of roadtrips in my future! :)

Sports Badges

I've got a friend, Stephen, who was kind enough to let me take a peak at his badges. Here are two he's got that I haven't seen before:

Happy Thanksgiving!

New Day, New Badges

It's been a while since I updated my Google News Badges, so I'd say it's time to show off my shiny new ones. Here's the whole collection:

You'll see that there a few new ones mixed in there, and that some have (surprisingly) moved up the ranks while others leave me wondering how they got there in the first place.

Let me break it down for ya:
Platinum Badge: Space (46 articles)
Gold Badge: Mobile Industry (42), Google (36), and Apple (36)
Silver: Android (28), Steve Jobs (16), Kristen Stewart (10)
Bronze: Politics (20), Music (14), iPhone (13), Nutrition (10), Netflix (9), Mitt Romney (8), Justin Bieber (8), Kindle (8), Kim Kardashian (7)

Whew! Just today I noticed a new Mitt Romney badge and a Nutrition badge. As of late I've been reading a lot of articles about the President and health, but I never imagined getting those two badges as a result. Weird....

So here is the full list of known badges:
Android
Apple
Barack Obama
Blackberry
Business
Chicago White Soxs
Dell
Democrats
Dominican Republic
Finance
Germany
Google
Groupon**
Harry Potter
Harry Reid
Hulu
India**
iPhone
Iran
Justin Bieber
Kim Kardashian
Kindle
Kristen Stewart
Lady Gaga*
Lebanon
Libya
Microsoft
Mitt Romney
Mobile Industry
Motorola
Music
NATO
Netflix
Nokia
Nutrition
Politics
Rand Paul
Republicans
Russia
Samsung
Skype**
Sports**
Somalia
Space
Steve Jobs
Stock Market
Sun
Syria
Tea Party
The Phillippines
Ukraine
US Elections
Warren Buffett
*See citation here
** See citation here

If you think these blog posts about the badges are egotistical, that's ok. I think it's fun to see which new ones come out and how they are earned and what divides badge levels from one another. I know, I need a better hobby. But between teaching, work, and school, this is all I have time for!

Extreme Couponing...here I come!

Today I went to Old Navy and shocked both myself and the cashier when I rang up. I had some coupons with me and there was a 75% off sweater sale, so I knew I'd be getting a good deal, but never did I think it'd be THAT good!

I bought $209.52 worth of sweaters, fleece, and going-out shirts, and spent $19.19 total! I had two $30 Supercash certificates which meant that for every $60 I spent, I would save $30, so between two transactions I expected to pay about $60 total. For some reason, the Supercash rang up before any discounts were applied but then went into effect AFTER the 75% discount was applied to the sweaters, so for my first transaction of $66.82 I paid NOTHING! The second transaction of $123.51 cost me the whopping $19.19. I am SO excited to be saving money - and today alone I saved almost 91%!

I told Ronnie that I know I've been shopping more than I have in the past, but it's hard to pass up stocking your wardrobe for under $20, which is cheaper than shopping at the Goodwill!!