This people? This is called being delusional.

Would you please look at this bottle of ketchup? Look at it! How cute is that??? I want to wrap it in a blankie and push it in a stroller. And feed it cheerios. And I would name it Herman.

I'm sorry. But not really.

I know I said I'd post the grape kool-aid snorting story today. But I've been busy.

I finally dragged myself out of bed after hitting the snooze button nine, count 'em, NINE times this morning and then I got ready for work and then I got to work and checked facebook, pioneer woman blog, my online bank account, hotmail, got some coffee, talked to a few coworkers, did a bit of work and then it was lunchtime and I got to Chick-Fil-A and placed my order but then I forgot the new Spicy Chicken Sandwich had come out and I wanted to try it but had already ordered so I just stuck with my original order and then I got back to work and checked facebook, pioneer woman blog, my online bank account, hotmail and got a Diet Coke, talked to a few coworkers, did a bit of work and then it was time to go home, so I got home and made myself some dinner and then I had to go pick up my cast iron skillet from Julie and stop by my parents to pick up the pants my mom hemmed and then to drop off some Fat Rolls at my aunt and uncles house and by that time it was time to go babysit some rugrats named Jack and Phillip who just might be the cutest eight and four year old rugrats I know and we watched a Clint Eastwood movie and played Halo and then we played a boardgame and then their daddy came home so I got to go home and when I got home I put my pj's on and watched Top Chef with my roommate and then we gave each other tickly back scratches and now we're watching this new art show on Bravo that's pretty dumb but at least it's better than that dumb hair cutting show on Bravo called Shear Genius and man isn't that Tabitha girl on that show one big bitch? So that brings us up to now. Sorry peeps.

Don't hate me because I'm busy (lazy).

I'm calling these "Fat Rolls"

I made cinnamon rolls the other night. Just like with most of my other baking endeavors, I had some early onset anxiety about making these puppies. But it turns out, as long as you've got some patience, they're pretty easy. And delicious. And if you ate one of these a day for the rest of your life, you'd eventually be as big as a house. No, a skyrise. Ok, no, maybe just a house. No. You'd be as big as 10 whales. There we go. You'd be big. You'd be blubbery. That's why I'm calling these Fat Rolls.

I'm not going to go through the recipe with you because there's a lot of steps, and well, I'm lazy. You can go here to check it out. Instead, I'm just going to walk you through the pictures. And please excuse the blue hue in the photos. I have these really stank nasty under the cabinet flourescent lights and they don't do much for picture taking. As usual, my baking project started out this way:

"Scalding" the milk, oil, and sugar:

Here's how it looks after you've added all the dry ingredients and t's risen:

The dough it very, very elastic:

So you divide the dough in half (each half makes 2 dozen) and roll it into a rectangle:

After you spread on the butter, sugar, and cinnamon, this will happen if your butter is too hot. And the recipe called for 2 cups of butter; in the second batch, I used a half a cup and this did not happen:

Yeah, that was not fun:

See, here's the second batch. No mess:

Aren't they cute? They look like roses to me. After cutting them, you have to let them rise again for a few minutes:

Rise, dough, rise!

See how they got puffy:

And here are the little babies after they come out of the oven:

You pour this delicious maple glaze over them:

I wish you could smell them. Oh man. The smell. I want perfume that smells like this:

I'm a proud mama:

And then I cleaned up my kitchen, because after all, I am working towards my goal of becoming Ms. Domestic U.S.A.:

And then I cleaned out my pantry:

You wish you were me.

And that, my friends, is the story of the Fat Rolls. Come back to story time soon. Maybe we'll travel to Italy and I'll teach you how to make Focaccia Bread. Toodles!

About Me #4

I crushed on the same guy for about ten years. Because of this crush, one day, I ended up snorting powdered, grape kool-aid up my nose in the back of his yellow Camaro.

But you'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to find out why...

Beat the Heat

It's hot here. It is so dang hot. Perhaps you're a PeyPey reader who resides in a more balmy climate, such as Portland Maine, where it's a cool 74 degrees outside and where the wind is blowing in from the north at 13 mph (it is, I googled it), and do not dread walking outside. However, I'm not an idiot and I realize that the good majority of you (ok, all of you) are residing right here in this fiery furnace called Georgia.

So I have done what comes as second nature to me and compiled a list of things I enjoy doing when it's a hot, wet, 100+ degrees outside.

1. First things first, I'll make no apologies about this one: Please someone put a frozen margarita in my hand. Once I've got the cold, frosty glass resting safely in my palm and the straw - the vehicle which brings that icy smooth concoction - on my tongue, I begin to settle down a bit.
2. Give me a float, I'm going swimming. With my margarita in my hand, I slip down into that cool water with my sunglasses on and am instantly refreshed. Unless of course, the pool is never in the shade and therefore it feels just like bath water and oh my gosh, gross who wants to take a bath outside in a bathing suit when it's scorching hot outside and there's no fun bubbles and you start sweating and getting hot while you're in the pool when your one ambition was to get in there and cool off. No one wants that!
3. Only eat cold foods for one of your meals. Try it! Maybe sushi. Maybe a bowl of fruit. Maybe gazpacho. Or perhaps an entire carton of ice cream. Mmmm, or margaritas with chips and salsa. Speaking of...
4. Someone refill my frozen margarita glass please!
5. Men, disregard this one, unless you actually take the time to smooth on lotion. Which, maybe you should. I mean, I like a rough, tough man just like the rest of 'em, but some lotion on your crusty feet or elbows might do you some good. So go ahead and put your lotion or, ladies, other beauty products in the fridge. You have no idea how good this feels until you've tried it. It's so stinking refreshing.
6. Fans, fans, fans.

That's about all I can think of right now. Wish I had a margarita. And a pool. And some ice cream. Oh well, at least it's air conditioned in here.

A quick post

As most of you have figured out, everything's usually all about me 'round these parts. If you're new to this game, simply go here or here or here or here. Okay, you get the idea. I like me. And what better way to celebrate me than talk about the day of birth?! My birthday is coming up. Okay fine, it's still 45 days away, but I wanted to go ahead and compile a little list of things that I want, in order for you to have ample time to save and shop.

1. A diamond ring. That goes on a certain finger. And to be asked a certain question. A simple, four word question. Five syllables. To which my reply would be "YES". Moving on...
2. A Kindle.
3. A Keurig.
4. The Pioneer Woman Cookbook. (By the way, have you read her blog? I'm pretty much in love with it.)
5. A cast iron skillet. My friend Julie has an extra one that she's never used that she's giving me! Yay!
6. Glass canisters for my flour and sugar.
7. iTunes giftcard.

That's really all I can think of. So why don't you readers get together, throw in a little cash money, and buy me a birthday gift (from choices #2-#5, because getting #1 from anyone besides Mark would just be awkward).

Oh, and on a side note, I started writing a book today. So there's that.

About Me #3 and a little bit of a Thoughtful Thursday

So do you feel like you're getting to know the real PeyPey yet? I hope so. Who knows how long these posts could go on? Seriously. Who knows? I have a lot I want you to know about me, ok?

Ok, so I haven't done a Thoughtful Thursday in two months and I'm hoping that this About Me can double as one of those, because what I'll be writing, although snarky, will be thoughtful.

First, let's review.
About Me #1 - I make friends easily.
About Me #2 - I am a brothers girl. 

So making it's Thursday debut, here's your About Me #3.

3. I love the beach. And I'm actually leaving today to go to the beach for a long weekend with a bunch of girls. There will be wine coolers, sunburns, headaches from twelve different flavors of perfume, a multitude of hairdryers, all with a side of "Beach Bitch" thrown in, I'm sure. (That's the term I use when a group of girls go on a beach trip together. Some bitchiness is inevitable. Am I right or am I right or am I right? Right?) So yes, at 5:30 today, I'll be beach bound.

Girl beach trips have been a staple for me since I was about fifteen. I usually go at least once a year with a group of close girlfriends. And there have been times over the last five years when I've gone with Mark and his family. But one thing I haven't done in the last, oh, ten years is go to the beach with my family - mom, dad, Brad, Alex, and Molly (you may remember her better as Victoria Marie).

We used to go all the time growing up. We usually went with my dad's parents, Papa (pronounced PawPaw. This is important to mention because Papa, pronounced Pa-puh, and Papa, pronounced PawPaw, are two different names entirely. Ahem, yes, where was I?) & Granny. Papa & Granny (Alvin & Nell) were mill workers their entire lives for Swift Spinning Mills. Granny sewed denim jeans and I have no idea what Papa did. They lived where most of the mill workers in my city lived. It was a small but quaint house in all its asbestos-siding glory, with olive green kitchen appliances, linoleum floors, a cement front porch, lacking of central heat and air conditioning and it was in the not-so-nice area of town. There was a shed out back where Papa kept his tools and where Brad and I found, ate, and subsequently got sick from packages of MRE's left over from Vietnam (but the hot sauce bottles were just so dern cute!). Papa grew a huge garden every year. Granny smoked a pack a day. Papa watched Wheel of Fortune, went to bed, and was up and sitting on the front porch at four the next morning. Granny took me to the beauty shop every Friday with her. The ladies french braided my hair. Sometimes, when my mom had to be at work early, Papa would drop me and Brad off at school in the mornings. Before we got out of the car, he would say, "Y'all don't take no wooden nickels, ya hear?" And then, like clockwork, he'd be back to pick us up from school later that day and he'd ask, "Ya'll didn't take no wooden nickels, did ya?" I had no idea what this meant. Still don't.

Although my dad's parents never had a lot of money and lived life pretty simply, they could always afford a week-long beach trip with us. (Back then, it was just mom, dad, me and Brad. Alex and Molly were just one failed contraception device away though.) To afford our trips, my Papa would collect coke cans for a whole year, turning them in when he knew he had enough to pay for our accommodations at a pretty basic, ocean-side motel called "The Wind Drift". I don't tell you this so that you will take pity on me. No, not at all. Instead, I'll ask you to smile with me. Smile with me, remembering the dedication and discipline required of my Papa to collect thousands upon thousands of cans. Smile with me, knowing my Papa would do something that would be considered socially unacceptable to most, all so he could take a vacation with his family. Now laugh with me, thinking of just how many coke can filled garbage bags there had to have been in my Granny & Papa's backyard before he had enough to amount to the money he needed for the trip. The lesson I learned from this: if you need money, just collect some cans.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, my grandparents had a Chevy conversion van. (My dad was an only child. Who was grown. Who only had two kids of his own at the time. Yet, they needed a conversion van.) It was one of those that seat, like, ten people and have the curtains and mini-blinds you can pull over the windows. That's what we always took to Florida. I. LOVED. THAT. VAN. And if I had the chance to drive one now, I would. In a heartbeat. Papa would blare southern gospel until Brad would sneak in his Dino tape (ummm, Summer Girls? Best song ever. If you don't click on that link, we're no longer friends.)

We'd spend the week at the beach. My mom would claim she got "windburns" but she said her "windburns" would eventually turn into a "windtan". (People? She is crazy. There are no if's, and's or but's about it. She is crazy. I thought the crazy didn't show up until a few years ago, but remembering her "windburns" and "windtans", I know now that the crazy has been around for quite sometime.) I got "suntans" because I have this really great olive skin that never burns, unlike my mom, whose skin is prone to "windburns". (Ok, I'm done with that one.) My dad would walk the beach for hours. And hours. And hours. And come back and show me and Brad all the treasures he'd found. My Granny would smoke a pack a day. Papa would fish. Or he would put goggles and a snorkel on and spend all day looking for coke cans on the ocean floor. (Just kidding. He was looking for loose change.) We'd have dinner somewhere unfancy and then walk to get ice cream. The Wind Drift was across the street from FunLand, a Chuck-E-Cheese type place. We'd go there after ice cream and play for hours.

Even though I've been to some pretty great places with friends and with Mark, nothing, I'm telling you nothing, will compare to these lazy, unpretentious, paid-for-by-a-thousand-coke-cans vacations with my family and grandparents. Granny and Papa passed away when I was still pretty young, but I will be honest with you. I would give back every single vacation, girls beach trip, weekend road trip with Mark to be able to go to the beach with my Granny and Papa. Maybe Papa would let me drive the van (which would be AWESOME!) I'd still sneak in the Dino tape. I'd get tan, mom would get windburned. Granny would smoke a pack a day. I'd share a diet coke with my little sister and then we'd hand over the empty can to Papa, who'd throw it in his coke can collection bag for next years trip. I miss them very much.