November 7, 2011

Every two weeks or so I am reminded of the height of the inconvenience and pain of doing laundry without having a personal washing machine and dryer.  I have to find a place willing to exchange bills for quarters; then I have to gather all my laundry, balancing the laundry detergent atop my leaning tower of clothes; finally, I have to make the trek across the complex to the laundry room.  After I press start, I carefully watch the time, lest someone rifle through my clothes to steal my underwear, yet again.  Unfortunately, tonight I was reminded of the extent of a person's decided lack of respect and consideration for the belongings of another.  Within minutes of my dry time finishing, I walked into the laundry room to find two piles of clothes:  a pile of dark clothes on the left, dry, and a pile of light clothes on the right, still soaking wet.  An easy solution would be to run them through another cycle while simultaneously refraining from writing a note sure to land on passiveaggressivenotes.com.  Unfortunately, I was unable to do even this as the person who felt it necessary to discard my clothes on the table, still wet, also decided to take all four available dryers.  I have no idea if one of my dryers simply failed to dry my clothes, or if the person took my clothes out mid-cycle.  Regardless, a public thank you is in order: thank you, sir or madam, for also failing to remove all of my clothes; I am now missing a number of socks and the like.  In the future, please be more considerate in your moment of deep lack of courtesy and ensure all of my clothes are actually in the dripping pile you leave on the table.

November 6, 2011

I love gloomy days, really and truly.  I love when the clouds are deep grey, threatening to dump inches of rain on the city, accompanied by loud bangs of thunder and brilliant strikes of lightening.  The tenor tends to relax me so I can remain my productive self, but with a side of slight flippancy as I work toward parking myself on the couch with a movie later in the day.  Interestingly though, the only part of the city not afflicted with the gloom today was the area around the Capitol.  Texas is famous for its ridiculously unpredictable weather, but I thought it was interesting that today's weather was so particularly selective.  If you were looking for a warm sun and blue skies today, all you had to do was take a pleasant walk down Congress to the Capitol building.

November 5, 2011

October is a wonderful month, but one I failed to take advantage of for one distinct reason: pumpkin everything.  I briefly dabbled in the world of pumpkin when I stole the Pumpkin Schmere during its first appearance on Bagel Wednesday, followed later by a few pumpkin lattes.  When I found a recipe for pumpkin cookie sandwiches, however, I knew I'd found the best pumpkin-themed treat.  Finally finding the time and inclination to try the recipe this weekend, off we went to the store to find the random medley of ingredients the cookies called for.  Not one full week into November and all of the pumpkin-related baking necessities are nowhere to be found. Instead, we found a box version of pumpkin cookies, so we resigned ourselves to that and making the icing from scratch.  Note for the future:  one pound of powdered sugar is much more than necessary for delicious cookie sandwiches.  I suppose this is the final incarnation of pumpkin deliciousness for the season, though.