Obsessed!

I have a new obsession.

Well, let's call it a hobby so it doesn't sound creepy.

I recently tried making homemade bagels and I am hooked!

Despite the abundance of bakeries here in Germany that offer a variety of fresh breads and baked good...the bagels are MIA. I have a good friend that works at my school who mentioned how she really misses having good bagels for breakfast, so I told her that I would figure out how to make them for her. After looking up some recipes, I realized that I would need yeast, which I was not able to find here. I am sure it's here, but I just can't find it, which is common for some baking products I am used to from the states. When I was home for Christmas, I got a jar of instant yeast, so I was really excited to try out the recipe.

I used the recipe and video from this link to learn how.

Surprisingly, it was really easy and fun!

I decided that I want to make a little tradition of making homemade bagels every Sunday. I have experimented with several different kinds so far and they have all come out pretty good. I double the recipe to get a total of 16 bagels, so I put a few in a bag for three of my friends at school and bring them to work on Monday morning.

So far I have made:

plain

everything (with onion, sesame seeds, and caraway seeds...couldn't find poppy seeds)

chocolate chip (the chips also had to be brought in from the U.S)

cinnamon raisin with cranberry

German gingerbread with chocolate

cranberry

cinnamon sugar

pumpkin spice with raisins

I just keep adding different yummy ingredients to the dough to see how they come out.

For some reason the act of making homemade bagels seems somewhat oldschool to me, yet it's the perfect activity for our quiet Sundays because nothing is open here on Sundays. I love the process and I love sharing them with friends. My husband even asks to have some to bring to work for his buddies.

Here are some pics of how it's done...

German gingerbread with chocolate

cranberry

pumpkin spice with raisins

before baking

***

after baking

and what goes great with warm bagels fresh from the oven?

Nutella.

mmmmmm.....

What is your favorite kind of bagel? I need some ideas for what to try next week!

The Power of the List

I have a secret.

I have this amazing ability to be aimlessly, utterly unproductive. I'm talking still wearing pajamas and haven't brushed my hair at 5:00 unproductive. Usually that occurs on Fridays because I don't work on Fridays. I can sleep in and do what I want because I don't have anywhere to be. Despite the fact that it seems near impossible to not get in a workout and get lots of stuff accomplished on a day when I don't work....it happens.

I started to get really bothered by my lack of motivation and the increasing number of Fridays that passed without getting anything accomplished. I felt like I was wasting precious days of having the apartment to myself, yet not doing anything remotely useful.

I decided I need an intervention.

Enter: the list.

Making a list has this incredible power over me because I crave the satisfaction of passing my permanent black sharpie over an item that I have completed. I go so far as to write "extra" things on the list, like make the bed & shower,  just so I can have more to cross off. Those kinds of things should be a given, yet it feels so good to cross them off when they're done.

Yesterday I made a list of all things I wanted to get accomplished which included grocery shopping, returning bottles and getting more water from the beverage store, reading a an incredibly long and boring chapter in my text for homework, working out, taking out the trash,  cleaning the bathrooms, and doing laundry. Whew! Lots of things to get done, but I crossed off each and every one! It felt so good to have a productive day and I give all the credit to my little list.

It sucks to feel disorganized and unroductive.

It feels great to look at a list with every item crossed off, knowing that the laundry is clean folded and put away, that the fridge is full of groceries, the apartment is clean, the toilets have been scrubbed, the homework is done, my body has worked hard, and I can look back at my day and know that it was not a waste.

I love the power of the list.

Sad Face

I have some sad news for the day. My mom's kitty Lucy, who was my childhood pet, was put to sleep today because she was fighting some medical problems and not doing so well. It was such a hard decision for my mom to make because she loves her pets so much, but we were starting to notice that the quality of her life was diminishing. I still remember the day my dad brought her home in his big truck, telling me that she sat on his lap the entire way home. She was the tiniest gray ball of fluff and  drank from a baby bottle when she was really young. She used to sleep on my bed every night in a little wicker basket and sometimes she would have "sleepovers" in my mom's room. I would carry her basket in there and she would get to stay the night.

My husband is allergic to pet dander, so I no longer have any pets. It is sad to lose the ones that I loved growing up becauese I know I can't have more. My mom had warned me that things were not looking good for Lucy when I was home during the holidays, so I am happy that I at least got to say goodbye and give her some last pets and kisses. Although I have not lived at home for quite some time, she was my pet for 19 years, so it's a sad day...

Still in the works....

I am still trying to create a new blog design, but I have lots of reservations about actually installing it on this blog. It looks pretty good on the test blog, but when I cut and pasted the html code to this blog and just previewed it, some things were not looking right. Since I did not design what I currently have, I would have no way of reverting back to it once I start making changes., so I am not feeling ready to commit to that quite yet!

So for now....you can see my new blog design here...and hopefully someday I will get brave enough to move it over and work out all the kinks.

I really wanted to design a custom header and since I don't have any cool programs, I just used Microsoft Word and then printed the image, scanned it, and uploaded it to my computer. The image came out a little grainy, but it's a start. I think it came out cute. I really want my blog to reflect my personality so I am having a lot of fun making tweaks here and there, so you can see a little bit more of my personality in the changes.

I promise to post about something more interesting tomorrow!

Hooray!

Notice anything super exciting?

I figured out how to add a super cute font for my post titles and the date!! Woot Woot! I played around a bit on my "test blog" and once I was successful, I decided to be daring and change my real blog. I tried out two different fonts and decided that I liked this one better because the first was too thin and not bold enough to give the titles the true pizzazz they deserve. I was so intimidated by the tutorial yesterday, but I actually pulled it off.

Interested in giving it a try? Here is the tutorial I used.

Now that I have mastered super cute fonts, I really want to figure out how to make a cute collage-ish header that incorporates different elements from the everything-to-do-with-teaching scrapbook kit I downloaded from Aja Abney. I am thinking that I will need one of those fancy design programs and I know that some are free, but I haven't found one yet that works with a Mac. Any ideas? I don't want to buy one yet because I want to investigate a little bit and maybe just try my hand at it before I spend money. I just want to be able to play around with the design and make the header lots more fun and exciting.

This is so addicting! Check out the custom signature I made too!

I would also like to mention my excitement at now having 90 followers! That's only 10 lovely bloggies away from the big 1-0-0! Never in a gazillion years did I imagine when I started blogging that I would have that many people interested in what I have to say. It's funny, at this point I can't even remember what life was like before blogging! I enjoy it so much and live life with posting on my mind! I always look forward to sharing something about my day and different tidbits about teaching. I also really look forward to seeing what my bloggy buddies have been up to and I don't know what I would do without this great format for connecting with so many different, amazingy wonderful and fantabulous people.

Seriously...I'm in AWE

Today I became slightly obsessed with the notion of learning how to do my own blog design. It seems like such an amazingly cool thing to know how to do that I thought I would give it a stab. Some very nice bloggers out there actually took the time to write and post detailed descripions/instructions for how to do things like making custom signatures, inserting a custom background, and adding some graphics.

Thanks to the help of this site, this site, and this site (where I found out about those other two sites), I was able to learn some great stuff. I decided that rather than mess around with the beautiful template on this blog that was designed by Leslie (who by the way is a very cool teacher/blog designer on the side who does fantastic work that I could never in a million years live up to, but I still want to try...), I would create a new blog just for messin' around. That way, I can try some things and have a place designated just for learning until I actually get the hang of it enough to really change my design....

So, I created a new blog which you can find here. Take a look and let me know what you think of the design elements that are on there so far! I have to say, it was completely, utterly, and seriously addicing to play around with this stuff today! I can see why people get so into it! It took me such a long time to figure out the few elements that are there...hence the title of today's post....I'm in AWE of those who have the mad skills to do awesome blog designing!