Say Goodbye to Summer...

and a sighing hello to school. again. sigh. i can honestly say this has been one of the laziest summers i've ever had. it didn't even really feel like summer. it just felt like one REALLY long weekend. oh how the days go by...

since it's august, i have to mention the very many birthdays that come with this month- including mine!! yay!! happy 18th birthday, elaine! what's your gift, you ask? college, of course! you get a school you don't know anything about, filled with thousands of students, all of them complete strangers!!! yippeeee!!! you can probably tell by now that i already started class. sigh. it's time again for new classes, new school, new people. i guess i'm just not up to it all. so far my actual classes have been fine. it's the people; everyone already seems to know each other, but i can't even seem to find out where my next class is! or even just the bathrooms for that matter...

i suppose i just need to wait for things to get in their natural order, when everything doesn't seem so new. hopefully that'll be soon :)

now, back to birthdays. in my family, august has 7 birthdays- 5 of my cousins, one aunt, and my birthday.

we celebrated my birthday with korean bbq. mmm... the reason i post this picture is so that you can see the tremendous amount of food there, and also that shirt i recon-ed out of a really old eddie bauer shirt i found at goodwill. it's from an angle that is just far enough so that you can see the jist of the shirt, but can just barely see my horrendous tanlines... because no one wants to see that.

two of my cousins, who were turning 23 and 20, had a party last saturday, and my gift to them were "make your own birthday cake kits" that i made, including a mug, chocolate cake mix, a whisk, a measuring spoon, chocolate fudge icing, and candles. originally i was going to just sew up a bunch of plushies for them, but then i realized how old they were. i wanted to make something that they can actually use rather than just toss aside after saying how cute it was. so what do you give to a couple of people who describe themselves as lazy? 5 minute chocolate cake! i swear, this is one of the LAZIEST ways to make a cake, but it actually came out kinda good. you just gather all the ingredients, mix it in the mug, and bake it by microwaving. the only problem i have with this cake is that you have to eat it almost immediately after you cook it, otherwise the texture changes a lot... and not in a good way :(

sprinkles cupcakes. i've never been to sprinkles, but i intend to taste what all the hype is about. after recently finding a recipe for their strawberry cupcakes, i knew i had to try it, because we all know that strawberries are the best fruit EVAH. and i have to say, they were delicious. drool. obviously i didn't make the ones in this picture, but when i made the cupcakes they didn't seem to last long enough for me to take a picture. that's a good sign, right? i didn't make it with the same strawberry icing, i just used some homemade whipped cream. after a VERY long search for the perfect buttercream icing, i just decided to give up. i soon realized that i never really liked icing... at parties i would always just eat the cake part, pushing the icing to the side. whipped cream always has a subtle sweetness to it, which i like more than the overly sweet buttercream.

mmm. whipped cream... :9

All American Food

this week was a lot more eventful than i thought it would be. thursday the new Chick-fil-a was opening here, so of course i had to check it out. Chick-fil-a has this promotion where the first 100 customers in a new location get a year of free chicken sandwich meals. long long story short, they decided to give it to the first 120 customers instead, and guess what number i was? 124. gay gay gay.

the reason why i woke up so early. mmm.

the crazy asses who tented out all night for free sandwiches. i even saw someone unpack a whole couch. ugh.

the rest of the day was good though. i got to embarrass myself continually, got to rant with laura and reinalyn, and just chill and watch tv with them (Saved By the Bell and Yo Gabba Gabba!). i also got to see chris' house for the first time. i still can't believe he has a house cleaner. we did a lot of spontaneous stuff on a day where i just expected to get breakfast and go home. :)

later that night i left home to spend the weekend with my cousins. on friday stacey and i baked an apple pie. god pies are tedious. but i had fun making it, and at least this time around i had some company for help.

there it is, in all it's gloriousness. i'd say it's pretty good for the first time that either of us has made a pie.

later we ate lunch at (where else?) Chick-fil-a and then stacey took me to Trader Joe's for the first time. so many choices! i ended up buying dried hibiscus flowers, mainly because i was just curious. i mean, it's supposed to be like dried fruit but it really looked like a bag of dried sea creatures. who could resist? anyway, it ended up just tasting like a really big dried cranberry, something i think should be eaten in small proportions. let's just say i only ate one of them.

after one of her friends showed up we started making cranberry oatmeal cookies, but alas, they turned out really weird (hence, no pictures). there wasn't as many cookies as promised in the recipe and they ended up tasting like dried cake and just looking like mounds of stuff. several hours after, i realized that we forgot to add the brown sugar. i was so disappointed in myself!!! augh!

saturday was fun as well. after dropping by my cousin's aunt's birthday party, kelley, aimee, and i ventured to the OC Fair, which was riddled with traffic and bad drivers. when we actually got to the fair we wandered around trying to find some good fair food and this is what we came up with:

sigh. frog legs. what a disappointment. for $13 all we got was 2 sets of frog legs on top of fries and a soda. lame. they don't taste that bad; it tasted like a combination between fish and chicken meat, but i don't think it's worth trying again. blech.

classic kielbasa and sauerkraut. the kraut definitely tasted different from what i've tried before. i just want to know, is it supposed to be soft or crunchy?


the ferris wheel! too bad we didn't ride it this time, but i thought it would be nice just to add a pic of it. haha. isn't it pretty?

the very last ride we rode, Dizzy Dragon. it made my arms and my stomach hurt.

i've decided i probably need to stay in a little more this week, as my sunburn from last week finally started peeling. also, i need to put my internal clock back in place. everything always seems a day off for some reason. :P