Well, it's June; what's bugging you?

[kbear]

I give up. Last spring we decided to put our house in London up for sale. Offspring were off to college in the fall so we didn’t need a big house. Cash out, get a smaller flat, travel, enjoy the empty nest etc. Then came Brexit. Even in the lead up to the vote, Viewings were few, certainly non existent after.

Fast forward a year and zero interest in the house even after a price drop so we decide perhaps we should just rent it out until it sells and go travelling. We had already mentally moved out of it anyway so we started sorting and throwing and decluttering and fixing things we would have left for a new owner…put it on the rental market and less than a month later, Teresa May calls a snap election which she very nearly lost, slowing down the real estate market even further. Hemming and hawing about what to do with the house and the pets, we decide to leave it on the market and drag the furry beasts across the ocean to stay in Canada until it’s resolved.

This morning the ex-footballer who owns the house three doors up but has left it empty and abandoned the last 10 years finally starts demolition on the house in preparation to build his new iceberg home. This is likely to take two years meaning we have to reduce the rent by at least 20% to attract a tenant and between the agent fees, storage for our stuff and the mortgage, it’s now no longer worthwhile and probably won’t rent anyway. Which means all that work for nothing, putting all our personal crap in storage and dragging poor kitty halfway around the world when we could have left her in the house with a house-sitter.

I know the London market deserves to crash but couldn’t it wait until I was out? sigh

[Catamount]

ring ring

phone answering spiel

“Somebody from your company called me.”

“Do you know what it was regarding?”

long silence

“I’ll listen to the message and see what it was.”

[overlyverbose]

Miniest of mini-rants. Part of my job is reading multiple news sites every single day. I am so fucking sick of headlines like, “What you need to know today.” “What we know about…” “What we know.” “What you should know about…” “This is what we know.” I swear to god, the same fucking thing is on every damn news site and it seems cheap and easy and sloppy. How the hell am I supposed to truly know anything from a three-second read? Is that REALLY all I needed to know for Thursday?

Oh, on an ever pettier note, I’m fighting with myself, wishing I didn’t know how to make a mug cake. I’ve been watching what I’m eating with wonderful results and I have an enormous craving for cake, but I had a cake pop yesterday. Knowing myself if I indulge more than once, it’ll be a slippery slope down to, “Oh, but you’re supposed to treat yourself every day!” The craving hasn’t gone away and I wish I could scrub the knowledge that I know how to make cake my own damn self out of my head.

[August_West]

Here’s one.

If you’re sending me a form to complete, don’t make it a goddamned Word document with this bullshit:

Name:________________ Job Title:_________________ Date:____________

where every motherfucking time I start typing my motherfucking answers in the motherfucking form, the motherfucking lines start moving and fuck up the formatting of your bullshit document!

I used to spend the time to delete and back space and make all of the pretty lines stay in formation, but I’m done. I will type my information in the spaces you provide and if it makes your doc look like a fucking e. e. cummings nightmare, well that’s your problem for not sending me a usable format.

[Projammer]

If you’ll hit the insert key once it will toggle into overtype mode then whatever you type will replace the hard coded spaces in the form. Sure, the variable character width will move things around, but it won’t be nearly as extreme.

[StarvingButStrong]

@overlyverbose

The craving hasn’t gone away and I wish I could scrub the knowledge that I know how to make cake my own damn self out of my head.

Oh, so true! And I have it worse than you: a while back I learned a recipe called “Desperation Dreamsicle Cupcakes.” (A recipe supposedly created by someone desperate for something yummie out of only the ingredients she happened to have on hand one night.) You can stir it up in about five minutes, bake them in about 12, and be stuffing one into your gob in less than half an hour.

And the real problem is it makes SEVEN cupcakes. So not only do you ruin your diet for that day, but there’s six more temptations just waiting to destroy the whole week.

[Seanette]

@StarvingButStrong

Oh, so true! And I have it worse than you: a while back I learned a recipe called “Desperation Dreamsicle Cupcakes.” (A recipe supposedly created by someone desperate for something yummie out of only the ingredients she happened to have on hand one night.) You can stir it up in about five minutes, bake them in about 12, and be stuffing one into your gob in less than half an hour.

And the real problem is it makes SEVEN cupcakes. So not only do you ruin your diet for that day, but there’s six more temptations just waiting to destroy the whole week.

Any hope you’ll share that recipe?

[Spice_Weasel]

@StarvingButStrong

Oh, so true! And I have it worse than you: a while back I learned a recipe called “Desperation Dreamsicle Cupcakes.” (A recipe supposedly created by someone desperate for something yummie out of only the ingredients she happened to have on hand one night.) You can stir it up in about five minutes, bake them in about 12, and be stuffing one into your gob in less than half an hour.

And the real problem is it makes SEVEN cupcakes. So not only do you ruin your diet for that day, but there’s six more temptations just waiting to destroy the whole week.

That’s hilarious, the way you imply that seven cupcakes would last a week. Not in my house.

[Wednesday_Evening]

It’s bad enough that the cat likes to sleep on top of me (it was cute when she was a kitten, not so pleasant now to have a 10 pound cat on my chest), but we have a new kitten and he wants to play with the cat at around 4am every morning. Which means at 4am every morning I am woken up by cats wrestling on my chest.

[Spice_Weasel]

@Wednesday_Evening

It’s bad enough that the cat likes to sleep on top of me (it was cute when she was a kitten, not so pleasant now to have a 10 pound cat on my chest), but we have a new kitten and he wants to play with the cat at around 4am every morning. Which means at 4am every morning I am woken up by cats wrestling on my chest.

So much worse in the summer.

[StarvingButStrong]

@Seanette

Any hope you’ll share that recipe?

I’m not sure it’s legal to do that here, unless someone’s trolling…

But let’s risk it.

Desperation Dreamsicle Cupcakes

Invented by a friend of a friend. Who had cleared her house of everything ‘indulgent’ since she was trying to stick to a rigorous diet, but had a major craving attack. No candy or cookies or snack things, no cake decorations or sprinkles or powdered sugar or cocoa or baking chocolate, no nuts or dried fruit even. But where there’s a craving for sweets, there’s a way.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Grease 7 cups of a (regular sized, not mini) muffin tin.

Grate ALL the rind off one orange into a medium mixing bowl.
Juice the orange into a measuring cup. You’ll need 1/4 C. Drink any excess, or add some water if it was a dry orange.

Add dry ingredients to rind in mixing bowl and stir to blend:
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder OR 1/4 teaspoon baking soda (not both)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup flour

Add wet ingredients to bowl and mix smooth with whisk:
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Pour batter into the greased muffin cups, bake in oven for FOUR minutes. They will be just starting to set around the edges but still look wet in the centers and won’t have raised very much. Don’t worry about it.

Take muffin tin out of oven and sprinkle some brown sugar on top of each muffin. I think I use about a teaspoon each, but I don’t measure, just pinch some up with my fingers and sprinkle it on. The important point is to work quickly so the muffin batter doesn’t cool very much.

Put the tin back in the oven and bake for 8 - 10 more minutes. A toothpick stuck into the center of a muffin should come out clean. (The recipe said 8, but mine always need a bit of extra time.)

And that’s it. After a few minutes cooling you can pry them out of the cups and what happens next is up to you. You could let them cool completely, but they taste fine warm, too.
Some additional notes:

If your brown sugar is loose grains, it makes a little added sweet crust on top of the cupcakes as a frosting substitute. If the sugar has clumped into smallish rocks, they might sink down into the cupcakes creating little brown spikes. That will taste fine, too.

I created a tweak for when it HAS to be chocolate: Replace the orange rind with 2 1/2 tablespoons of cocoa. Replace the orange juice with an equal amount of water. No other changes needed.

Someday I mean to try just adding the cocoa without taking out the orange rind, but I haven’t yet.

[Tranquilis]

Time to punch another Study Delivery Team.
Your Tables, Figures, and Listings? Would be sooo much trouble to deliver them in numerical sequence? Or maybe even in the same sequence as in the Table of Contents (which is equally disorganized, in a different order)…? :smack:

Fuckers.
:mad:

[kayT]

Thanks for the recipe, StarvingButStrong. I guess.

[Shoeless]

It’s happening again. Every few months I’ll start getting calls at work from a fax machine. Repeat every 5-10 minutes for a few hours until it finally gives up or I’m ready to smash the damn phone. When I Google the number, it is always a financial aid office for some college somewhere (but a different school every time it starts happening again). Very weird and very annoying. Just another incentive to look for a new job!

[Spice_Weasel]

@kayT

Thanks for the recipe, StarvingButStrong. I guess.

Haha, no shit.

I’m gonna try to pretend I don’t know.

Cupcakes? What are those?

[femmejean]

@Spice_Weasel

Not saying my problems vanished, but I learned how to get on with things. So it could happen for your friend.

What do you mean?

My friend wants has some serious problems. He was with a psychiatrist but therapy and SSRI’s completely failed to help him. He’s actually ‘insane’ in the Elliot Rodger sense and not the depressed and psychotic sense.

[StarvingButStrong]

@kayT

Thanks for the recipe, StarvingButStrong. I guess.

Sorry! I guess I should have just PMed it to Seannette.

[Tranquilis]

@Tranquilis

Time to punch another Study Delivery Team.
Your Tables, Figures, and Listings? Would be sooo much trouble to deliver them in numerical sequence? Or maybe even in the same sequence as in the Table of Contents (which is equally disorganized, in a different order)…? :smack:

Fuckers.
:mad:

Guess what?
The Narratives that are supposed to go with this Study Report (due to be signed today) AREN’T DONE. :smack: So… I threw myself on that regulatory grenade FOR NO PURPOSE.
Y’all could’ve told me that YESTERDAY, you shithooks!
:mad:

[overlyverbose]

StarvingButStrong, that looks amazing!

I’ll have to be sure to make those when the kids are around or we have people over. Kids have a tendency to limit my junk food for me.

[Spice_Weasel]

@femmejean

What do you mean?

My friend wants has some serious problems. He was with a psychiatrist but therapy and SSRI’s completely failed to help him. He’s actually ‘insane’ in the Elliot Rodger sense and not the depressed and psychotic sense.

Then he needs someone with expertise in sociopathology, not SSRIs.