The Finals Diet

If I kept a food diary, this is what the last 24 hours would look like:

Dinner last night -  a mini bag of baked potato chips, orange juice, and one bite of disgusting macaroni and cheese, made with canned whipping cream instead of milk

Midnight snack - tortilla chip fragments from the bottom of the bag

Breakfast this morning - 1/2 a mini bag of baked potato chips and a handful of sweetened coconut

Lunch - a can of green beans and three oreo cookies

The conclusion?  Studying for finals and trying to finish several massive papers = no time to cook or go to the grocery store = a wonderful way to encourage creative meal planning. If I don't get off Blogger and finish footnoting my paper, dinner tonight just might be canned tuna and ranch dressing over spaghetti noodles.  Yum!

"Cookies" and my anti-climatic visit to a bar

In case it hasn't already become apparent, I am completely obsessed with desserts. In fact, some of the highlights of my week have been Rhubarb-Strawberry Cobbler and Zucchinni Chocolate Chip Cake - and it's been a really good week.

So last weekend, when some of my classmates invited me to go to a neighboring city's summer festival, my first thought was naturally about the bake sales. After watching the little parade (the town has a population of less than 2000, so the parade was basically a procession of horses, firetrucks, and regular cars with posterboard advertisements taped to the sides) and wandering around the craft fair, we went to go get food, and I began scoping out the dessert options.

Unfortunately, my options were limited by the $1 I had in my pocket, so the chocolate dipped cheesecake on a stick was not a possibility (Mike, who was working, usually carries all the cash, and I had forgotten to borrow any). I looked over the booths run by local church groups, hoping to find some home baked brownies or pie.

The only brownies I could find, though, were being sold by a weight-loss group and, with visions of artificial sweeteners and whole grain flours ruining the chocolatey goodness, I passed them by. At the next booth, though, I spotted a bunch of elderly women selling cookies, 3 for $1. The cookies had obviously been donated by different women - in the peanut butter cookie basket, for instance, there were smaller cookies and larger cookies and some that had been rolled in sugar. They all looked delicious, though. After much indecision, I decided to buy some oatmeal cookies - there were several different kinds in the basket with delicious looking chocolate chunks or dried cranberries.

When I handed over my $1 to the woman at the booth, she reached in the basket of oatmeal cookies and handed me a baggie of cookies. I was disappointed to see, however, that my cookies did not have chocolate chunks or cranberries or even raisins. In fact, they looked very odd - flat and perfectly circular. After one bite, I realized why. These weren't bake sale cookies! They were the Great Value brand oatmeal cookies sold for $1.50 a package and found on the bottom shelf of the Walmart snack aisle. I was grandly disapointed - although I did still eat them. After all, they were vaguely cookie-like.

In other news, last weekend was also the first time I'd ever gone to a bar (the law school was hosting a social event to help welcome new students to South Bend). I was very excited to finally get to go to one of these things - I missed most of the law school social events last year because they were all in bars and I was still underage. When we got to the bar, I realized that I'd left my ID in the car, a few blocks away. Turns out, though, that I didn't need it. No one ID'd us when we went in (the ID checker didn't appear to watch the doorway until about five minutes after we went in) and the waitress missed me when she ID'd our group before taking drink orders (of course, I did only order a huckleberry lemonade, but she checked Mike's ID, and he only had a water). It was nice not to have to go back to the car to get my license, but also vaguely disapointing to know that it wouldn't have mattered if I had still been 20.

So now I have two more tasks to add to my To Do This Summer list - get (or make) some real oatmeal cookies, and be ID'd. It's going to be a busy three weeks :)

I ♥ Sleep!

You know you're an adult when you keep a running countdown in your head to track the hours left before you can go to bed.

Ok, so maybe I used to count down to bedtime as a child too, but that was just because I was worried I wouldn't get through my stack of library books before my mom made me turn the light off.

Mmmm... sleep.... only 11 hours and 16 minutes to go!

*thump**thump**thump*

As I type this (and for the past several hours), a herd of elephants is parading about above me.  Ok, so maybe they might actually be roofers with nail guns, but the unpleasant effect on my sanity is the same.

In the good news, I'm not dead - just lazy.  I'm enjoying my new job, but working full time has left me with considerably less free time than I was envisioning for this summer.  Plus, the monstrous law review packet (which finally arrived) may not have taken up all my spare time, but it has done a pretty good job of ruining those free minutes with gnawing sensations of guilt.

I did finally see Benjamin Button.  I don't know why I'm so drawn to stories and movies that explore the brevity of life and the tragedy of mortality - I always end up in tears almost from the start.  It was pretty good, though.

And I just finished reading The Prophecy of the Stones.  Maybe it doesn't quite count for my literary accomplishment for the summer, but it was really good - and written by a 13 year old, to boot.  It makes me so old to realize that I'll never be a teenage author... or an Olympic gymnast... or tall.  That's probably the best part about being a kid - your life has infinite possibilities, and there doesn't seem to be any reason that you can't grow up to do and see and be everything you want.

Well, I need to go figure out what we're having for dinner.  I'm really in the mood for some cake, but it's much too hot in here to turn the oven on.  I might have to settle for some ice cream (we just bought a tub yesterday, so it should hopefully still be icicle-free, despite our evil freezer).

Freezer Burn Is Not My Friend

And I wanted ice cream so badly... 

:(