MilSpouse Friday Fill-In #73

So, I'm obviously a few days late this month with my fill-in, but for good reason as I was out of town for most of last week visiting my in-laws.  Better late than never, right?  I'll be sharing some of the details of my trip this week!

Linked Up @ Wife of a Sailor

1. What's one thing in the past month you would have changed?  There's actually not much of anything from June I would have changed, at least nothing I can think of at this point.  The month flew by fairly quickly for me, which is always great!

2. What was your favorite thing that happened in June? Getting to Skype with my husband for the first time in a month. I missed getting to see him.

3. What did you do to celebrate Independence Day?  I spent the day with my in-laws and some of their friends. We cooked up and ate tons of food, hung out, and then went to a local park to watch fireworks.

4. When you PCS, what items do you take with you and not let the movers pack (and if you do a DITY, what do you take with you and not box up).  When we PCS, I'll be packing in the car our important documents, my jewelry, our laptops and iPads, a bottle of port wine that hubby and I are trying to age, anything we will immediately need for our pets, and then of course as much of our clothes as I can then possibly fit into our car.

5. What are you looking forward to in July?  The two things in July I've been most looking forward to are hitting the half way point of hubby's deployment and visiting with my in-laws, both of which have now passed!

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Birthday to our great nation!

And many thanks to my husband, and all of the other men and women who are doing their part to help keep our country safe and free.

How Old Do You Think I Am?

"What are you doing drinking coffee at OUR age?"

"How did you land a job working in the office?"

These questions were just asked to me by two 21 year-old students who came by the office for a little bit to get some assistance.  Apparently they do not realize I'm 28 years old, but rather believe I'm around 22 or 23.

I have come to believe that most people who work in my department think I'm a good 4-5 years younger than I actually am.  I've actually asked people with whom I work how old they think I am after they've made comments about me being really young, and usually receive shocked looks when I tell them I'm actually in my late twenties.

I know it's usually a compliment for a woman to be mistaken for being younger than she is, but at this point in my life I'm proud of being the age I am and no longer college aged.  Getting older doesn't scare me, as with age comes more experiences, and I love getting to experience new things.

Unlike others I know who have cried over leaving their twenties behind them, I am not the least bit fearful of turning 30 in a year and a half.  The only thing that worries me about turning 30 is how much of a hard time my husband is going to give me about it, as I'm nine months older than he is, so he'll still be 29 when I hit my thirties.  And the man LOVES to rub in the fact that I am older than he is.

Randomness

This is one of those mornings where I wish I had brought two cups of coffee with me to work.  I just have this feeling it is going to be one of those days that kind of drags on at work, leaving me with a need for an extra jolt of caffeine in the matter of a couple hours.  If only Starbucks delivered... I could so go for a skinny vanilla latte right now!

In other randomness... I am definitely feeling the effects of some of the exercises I did yesterday.  The mountain climbers in particular.  I just hope that Saki isn't feeling anything from my exercises yesterday, and the accidental kick in the face that resulted from him getting too close to me right as I was kicking out my left leg.  Thankfully the poor little boy is pretty resilient!  I just hope he learns not to get too close to mommy when I'm doing what I'm sure he thinks are crazy movements in the middle of the living room.  I am bound and determined to start and stick to a new exercise plan so I can work off these last 15 or so pounds from when I started working out over a year ago.  So far it's just been baby steps, but hopefully I'll get a routine down shortly!

Slutty Brownies, Take 1

I really enjoy baking.  Not to toot my own horn, but I do think I've got a bit of a knack for it.  I can at least make really tasty cheesecakes, if nothing else.  Plus my oatmeal cranberry white chocolate chip cookies are pretty dang awesome too.

Last night I decided I wanted to finally try my hand at making Slutty Brownies...

Source: whatsgabycooking.com via Andrea on Pinterest

Cookie dough topped with brownie batter, with Oreo cookies sandwiched in between.  What's not to love about this combination?

Well, they didn't turn out all that great.  I think the brownie recipe is likely a good one, however I ended up over-baking the brownies because of a malfunction with the cookie dough layer.  I ended up using the cookie dough recipe that this blogger had listed, rather than my own recipe.  I wish I had gone with my gut and switched it up to my fallback recipe when the quantity and ratio of sugars for the cookie dough set off an alarm (1.5 cups granulated sugar mixed with 1/2 cup of brown sugar - compared to my usual ratio of 3/4 cup of each type of sugar, with the quantities of all other ingredients being practically identical).

The abundance of white sugar in the recipe caused my cookie dough layer to pretty much liquify and melt (some of it actually came up through the Oreo and brownie layers to crystallize on top of the whole thing).  I had baked my brownies for the recommended 30 minute bake time, checked for doneness, and when the top brownie layer was very gooey, I put them back in for an additional 5 minutes.  After checking again to see the brownie layer was still gooey, I decided to give just another 5 more minutes.  After 40 minutes of baking, the brownie layer finally appeared to be in good shape, so I pulled the pan out of the oven and let the brownies rest on a cooling rack.

After letting them rest for a bit, I pulled the brownies out of the baking pan via the aluminum foil lining recommended in the baking instructions, only to find that the cookie dough layer was a molten mess, and no where near set up properly.  Since I had nothing to lose at this point, as I didn't want to be left with oozing cookie dough, I decided to put the brownies back in the oven for another 10 minutes.  After it had finished, I let the pan rest on my cooling rack for about 15 or 20 minutes, and then pulled the brownies back out of the pan.  Along the outside edge, the cookie dough appeared to have set up.  It wasn't until I cut into them that I discovered I was left with about 2mm of cookie dough lining the bottom of my slutty brownies.

For my one last attempt with this cookie dough recipe, I took the remaining dough I had (you only use half of the cookie dough for a 9x9 pan of brownies) and followed the recommendation of the blogger and decided to make cookies with it.  Before I made the cookies, I let the rest of the dough I had sit in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes to make sure it was chilled so the batter wouldn't spread too much.  I then scooped the chilled dough onto a chilled cookie sheet and placed the cookies in the oven, where they proceeded to spread out/melt so much that I was left with cookies that were a good 4 inches in diameter and about as thin as crepes.

The cookies ended up in the trash last night.  Most of the brownies likely will find their way there as well, after I do my best to salvage the best part of the brownies, aka the moister center.  I definitely want to try making these again though.  Next time I'll try it with my cookie dough recipe, add a tad more flour to the brownie recipe, and might upgrade to double stuff Oreos, because you cannot ever go wrong with them.  Wish me luck!

Planning Away

I am a planner.  I always have been.  I love doing research and figuring things out for the future.  Of course it makes for an interesting struggle with military life, but I do my best to plan for all of the options I can, so that way when the time comes I already have a base from which to act, rather than having to start from square one at the last minute. My husband knows very well that I enjoy planning things, so he has enlisted my help and has given me a couple tasks.  I think he's just trying to give me a distraction from counting down the days until he gets home.  But hey, I'll take it!

First, we're hoping to do something different for Christmas this year and instead of traveling to visit family, we're going to have our own Christmas with just the two of us.  If we're able to get the time, we really want to take a vacation somewhere.  The question is, where do we want to go?  While we won't be able to get anything set until after we've moved and hubby gets settled in with his new unit, and actually learn how much time we'll have to go on a trip, we already have a list of options to consider.

We're currently keeping our options open and are looking at several different places, from visiting islands in the Caribbean or going on a cruise, to heading to the mountains & Jackson Hole, and even heading further west to California to visit Yosemite National Park and some of California wine country.  It could end up that we aren't able to get more than a day or two free, but if that happens we'll be happy getting to enjoy time at home with our fur-babies and will take a trip at a later date.  Either way we're going to enjoy just getting to be together again, regardless of where we're at.  But boy could we use a vacation together, just the two of us.

The real interesting job I've been assigned is to help plan my brother-in-law's bachelor party.  That's right, I get to help plan a guy's bachelor party.  My husband is his best man, but given the fact he's deployed and will not be home until right about a month before his brother's wedding (and during that one month our lives will be crazy as we move halfway across the country), I have been enlisted to assist with the planning process, as my husband isn't about to hand over the bachelor party planning reigns to one of the groomsmen since he believes it is his rightful duty as the older brother to plan this night.

One benefit from this is it should hopefully put our future sister-in-law at ease a little, as she is slightly worried about what sort of trouble my husband might get his brother into and is hoping they have PG-13 rated fun, rather than something resembling The Hangover.  Honestly, I think they'll behave themselves for the most part anyways.

The difficulty, however, will come from the fact that I'm having to scope out areas I've never really visited before, stretching around his home in northern Virginia.  I've been instructed to look at places as far south as Virginia Beach, and as far north as Baltimore.  If anyone has any suggestions for places around the area that might be suitable for a group of 5-10 guys to get together, and likely on a Monday or Tuesday night at the end of October, please feel free to offer them up!