musing minds

For the Teacher Appreciation Luncheon today:

Teacher Appreciation Cake

Close-up of just the cake

Busy weeks ahead! Which is fun, but also exhausting.

Last week was the Chicago Tea Party on Wednesday, Scouts Thursday, PTO Movie Night Friday, Six Flags Great America on Saturday, and cooking a turkey and cleaning house on Sunday. And then there’s still SPRING CLEANING to get all the dust off the high places… and to wash everything on top of the kitchen cabinets as those items get grease and dust built up over time…

I have a cake to make for Friday, for a luncheon for our teachers at school. Chocolate Lollipops too. Tomorrow I go on a field trip with The Little Guy’s 2nd grade class to the Milwaukee Public Museum. That leaves just Wednesday and Thursday for most of my cake work. Since I’m not Duff Goldman, and I don’t have a staff to help, I have to do all the work myself – baking, icing, decorating… But I love it.

The following week we have Fun Fair at school, which takes a lot of work up to the day and a lot of work on the day.

The next weekend is my 11th wedding anniversary (Saturday the 9th) and Mothers’ Day the day after that, then surgery for my mother the day after that.  All this and I’m scheduled for a colonoscopy on the 6th.

From a charity recording made with the local newspaper, The Daily Record, back in 1999

Stills from Britain’s Got Talent

Click to embiggen – There are more on Flickr…

We met Anne of Backyard Conservative – she got a shot of us with our signs:

I am not that short, I was sitting on my Rollator rolling walker thingy that has a seat. I wouldn’t have been able to stand that long, but sitting right next to the stage was fine.

Here are the two signs we made for the Chicago Tax Day Tea Party today. We’ll be there, watch for us!

Tax Day Tea Party Signs

Easter Cake Yesterday:

Candies and cakes and good food makes one tired.

Wednesday is the Chicago Tax Day Tea Party. I am planning on going. I will take pictures as I can.

John 3:16

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Easter Cross

Found Mike’s Harder Lemonade (must be 21 to enter). It is definitely harder. And quite good.

Woke up to snow again today. Started yesterday afternoon. It started as sleet, then was sleet mixed with snow, then went to snow by itself. Streets were okay, but grass, roofs, etc were covered once again. Just not as bad as it was last Sunday.

I’m working on designing my Easter cake. Making some gum paste flowers and deciding what to  bake. By that I mean what shapes to bake (rectangular, square, round) and how to assemble them and shape them after that. I will post pictures of the final product, and perhaps some intermediate pictures as well as I continue on my new journey baking cakes.

We saw a few good movies this weekend. Marley and Me is cute. Seven Pounds is really sad, but very good. Will Smith is such a good actor. Remember a box of Kleenex for Seven Pounds. We also watched a film called What Just Happened with Robert DeNiro, Robin Wright Penn, John Turturo, Stanley Tucci, Bruce Willis (as himself), Catherine Keener, and Sean Penn (as himself). It’s a strange movie about the film industry in Hollywood. We do get to see Sean Penn die many times during the course of the film (as a result of watching the ending of the film within the film several times).

It’s the first official day of Spring Break today. Yesterday we woke up to lots of snow. All the kids off school and there’s a lot of snow. I see snow people…

Six Flags Great America here in the land between Chicago and Milwaukee is opening up on Friday. Yep, Friday. Weekends only until Memorial Day weekend, but it’ll be open. They have a new water ride called Buccaneer Battle, where you are in a boat with water cannons and you shoot other people as you go on the winding path of the ride. That, I’m sure, won’t be open this early. Especially with all the snow that’s on the ground today.

We’ve had season passes for a quite a few years in a row now, so Six Flags sent us our season passes for this year in the mail. With pictures and everything. Definitely convenient. No lines, just go in. Yay! With the snow we got overnight Saturday to Sunday though, I don’t know if we’ll go for opening weekend this year…

My sister has decided after seeing the cake I made for my cousin’s baby shower that I am now the official cake baker. She wanted me to make a lamby cake and a bunny cake for Easter. I don’t have the molded cake pans to do that (and don’t have the funds to purchase said pans) so I’ll be making some kind of Easter cake, just not molded lambs covered in coconut wool or a molded bunny. I may try to carve a bunny and put it atop a sheet cake, but we’ll see what happens. I will post pictures once I have it finished.

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If the AIG employees who were supposed to get the “bonuses” were only paid $1 a year (with the assurance that they would receive these “bonuses”) couldn’t they sue because they weren’t even paid minimum wage? Even at a normal 2000 hour work year, $1 comes to $0.0005 per hour. I think that’s a helluva lot less than minimum wage…