My Favorite Peanut Butter Bars

I know it sounds crazy for a school lunch menu to contain the "best" anything, but when I was in high school, the cafeteria made the best peanut butter bars (sidebar: always, always served on Pizza day, for some reason)...and somehow, shortly before graduation, Levi talked the cooks into giving him the recipe. I generally remember to make them about once a year, and just made a batch this morning to munch on during the football game.

And after keeping it my little secret for more than 10 years...I'm sharing it with you.

The ingredients:

• 3 1/3 c flour (that's three-and-one-third)
  
• 1 1/3 c sugar
• 1 1/2 c brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 2 jumbo or 3 large eggs
• 1 1/3 c shortening
• 1 Tbsp vanilla
• 2 c peanut butter

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a 9x13 cake pan (or two, if you have them) with nonstick spray.

Combine all ingredients except flour in a large mixing bowl. (Personally, I like to use half creamy and half crunchy peanut butter, but I rarely have both on hand.)

Stir in flour, one cup at a time. Mixture will be stiff and almost crumbly.

Press half the dough into 9x13 pan. I find it easiest to use my hands. You want to really press the mixture together into a solid sheet, eliminating as many cracks and crumbles as possible.

Bake in preheated oven 10 minutes - no more. Remove from oven before appearing fully cooked. Cut into bars with a sharp knife while still warm. Cut slowly, or they'll crumble!

Allow to cool before serving. Cover pan with lid or foil, or transfer to airtight container.

Makes TWO 9x13 pans, 18-24 bars each. Yum!

A funny for football fans

The scenario:

Levi and I are watching the Vikings game last night. It's the 4th quarter: newly drafted quarterback Joe Webb takes the field.

Commentator Mike Mayock: "...like most rookie quarterbacks, Webb has no concept of pass protection yet..."

Me (pausing TV): "Okay, explain exactly what he means by 'pass protection.' "

Levi: "You know how every play, Peyton Manning is constantly yelling directions to his receivers and line? That's because he can look at the defense and see there's a blitz, there's whatever, et cetera. That's pass protection.

Webb looks at the defense and thinks, "Hey, there's eleven guys."










Okay, you probably had to be there. But I'm still giggling.

Job search update

The job hunt continues. It's worth noting, I think, that so far I've gotten rejection letters from about half the companies I've applied to. Of course, no one likes hearing they weren't good enough, but the novelty of actually receiving a written communication from a company despite being eliminated as a candidate - much less a full 50+% of them and most of those through the US Mail(!!!) - definitely caught my attention. My experience - and that of most every job seeker I've ever known - is that the job search process generally goes like this:

1. Send out your resume and personalized cover letter
   
2. Make the appropriate follow-up noises
3. Hold your breath for about two weeks
4. Give up on that position after never hearing a peep in reply (unless you make the cut for an interview).

I'm not quite sure what this reject-letter business means. I'd like to think it means my resume made it through a leg or two of the consideration process before being trashed...it seems crazy to me that in this economy, with the number of applications each position probably gets, companies are suddenly choosing to MAIL letters to every single rejected applicant. But I suppose it's just as likely that churning out rejection letters is built right into their computerized resume-scanning process. :op

Anyway. When Cindy and I discussed the reject letter phenomenon (and the jobs that I assume I've been eliminated from due to not hearing anything), she zeroed in on the truly important question: why am I not making the cut? We concurred that the biggest hurdle is probably my lack of college degree. Now, I'm not putting my career-transition plans on hold for 4-5 years or more while I bang out a bachelor's degree - not just no, but Hell No. But Cindy feels, and I agree (and thankfully, Levi also agrees), that if I don't nail down a job - or at least start seeing some positive responses to my resume - in the next month or so, I might get more consideration if I'm at least actively enrolled in a degree program.

So, how does a 30-year-old woman with a full-time job, two kids, and a husband who also works full time, find time to go back to school? Oh, I have a plan, I do...but this entry is already getting long, so I think I'll save that discussion for a future post. ;o)

Garage Sale Wrap-Up

Ahhhhhh, done! (Well, nearly...)

The garage sale went spectacularly well! We made more $ than DH would've made by going to work last week, which is all I was really hoping for on that front, and I think we sold about half our stuff, including ALL of the large furniture pieces except for the hide-a-bed. We got lots of compliments on how well organized everything was, and on my directional signs (which, sadly, I did not take a picture of). I also wish I had taken more before-and-afters of our setup so I could impress upon you exactly how much crap we were trying to get rid of (and how much we GOT rid of, LOL!). And that's not even taking into consideration the bags and bags and bags and bags and bags of trash and the mountains of cardboard recycling that we cleared out in the two weeks before the sale. But our friend Ryan dropped by, and snapped some pics with his phone:

sea of shoes!

household table...and part of the mountain of clothes

ALL of this driveway stuff (except the poor couch) was gone by the end!

Garage Sale Tip: our sale was Thursday - Saturday, but we did about 75% of our total sales the first day, less than 10% the second day and the rest on day 3. IF I ever get it in my head to do this again, it will be two days only, Friday-Saturday. Friday to catch all the eager beavers, and Saturday for all the folks who work like normal people. Our middle day was dead, dead, dead. Also, 8-6 makes for a loooong day, but we did plenty of sales between 5 and 6, catching the after-work crowd. I really don't understand people who do their sales Wednesday-Friday, 8-4. They'll never get my business.

Sunday I spent about four hours (no joke) neatly packing the kids' clothing and toys into 12 -count 'em, TWELVE - boxes to take down to Once Upon A Child (OUAC). We dropped off 6 boxes - that's all they would take since it was an hour to closing - and they bought...wait for it...approximately 4 items for a total of $8.55. JACKPOT! LOL. Seriously, though, they are very very very very picky about clothing. Toys, it appears, have much more relaxed standards.

Monday and Tuesday was back to work, then Wednesday Levi and I were both off so we worked on packing all the unsold stuff for delivery to the local LoveINC Thrift Shop (it was *really* handy having a place just a few blocks away! If they hadn't been, we would've bagged everything and scheduled an ARC pickup). It took Levi THREE trips to get all the clothes, toys, and miscellaneous household stuff (coffee mugs, baby bottles, etc.) over there. Then, Levi took the kids' clothing that didn't make it into the first OUAC trip, as well as several boxes of leftover books - and three boxes of old LPs that didn't make it into the sale, oops - into town. The clothes he dropped at a different UOAC and the books and records he took to Half Price Books (HPB).

If you have a HPB in your neighborhood and haven't checked it out, DO. The cool thing about HPB is that they take EVERYTHING (books, anyway) that you bring in. Cheesy romance novels, old textbooks, car buying guides from 1999, a copy of "How To Father" from 1974 - you name it, they'll take it. (Their buy policy says that they donate unsold/unsellable books to "various charitable organizations around the world," but I've got to think that some stuff goes straight in the recycling bin or is sold for insulation or something.) They took all the books and 2/3 of the records and gave us $43! They DID give us back the records they weren't interested in buying - I don't know why that policy is different from their book policy....but it makes for a much more manageable ebay project than the original 200+ records that Levi's mom gave us to try and sell.

(Side note: I've already established a HPB Bag for all the books that I keep stumbling over and going "WHY did I keep this?" I'm also NEVER buying a book for retail price again. This place seems like a great compromise between paying $8-15 for a book, reading it once, being unimpressed and stuffing it on a shelf for all eternity, and my complete inability to ever get library books back on time.)

Anyway...After he finished at HPB, Levi swung back through OUAC and picked up those rejects - and $21. Woo hoo! All that's left to do is run the OUAC boxes over to LoveINC, and find a home for the poor couch, and the garage sale - and the garage clean up project - will be really, truly, FINALLY finished. In the meantime, though...check it out!!

YAY!!!!!

The 'I' in INFP

If you've ever done a Myers-Briggs Personality Profile, you'll recognize "INFP" as the acronym for Introverted-iNtuitive-Feeling-Perceiving - which is my personality type. I took a new Myers-Briggs when I first started my career counseling sessions, with the report being (duh) career-oriented. It was really interesting, but it's the "I" - Introverted - that's on my mind at the moment.

You see - the test results for each section of the profile came back as a "score" on a continuum of -30 to +30. On the extrovert/introvert scale, I scored...

+1.

For real. I was one point off of dead center, in favor of introversion. And thinking back to the test, I can even pinpoint the questions that I wavered on, that might have pushed me a point or two toward extroversion instead. I've always thought of myself this way - I like to call myself a "shy extrovert" or an "outgoing introvert" depending on my mood - but it was interesting to see it laid out in black and white. Cindy (my career coach) came up with the perfect analogy for this middle-of-the-road-ness...she said, "I bet you're the type of person who likes to go to coffee shops to read or study. You like being around people, but you don't really need to interact with them." So true!

The whole reason this topic is on my mind is a result of the garage sale - I've had more face-to-face social interaction in the past two days - with strangers, even! - than I generally have in a month. And I've really enjoyed it, but now that we've closed up shop for the day, I want nothing more than to pop in a movie, crawl into bed and not talk to anyone for the next 12 hours.

Adventures in Big Boy Bed Land

So far the transition to big-boy bed is going well! I was concerned that sneaking out of bed to play with toys would be an irresistable lure that first night, but much to my surprise, J took the "Stay In Bed" rule to heart. (He also fell asleep almost immediately, so that helped.)

Night 1: Bedtime at 8:00, peeked at him around 8:30 and he was sound asleep under the covers. Peeked again about 10:30, and he had wiggled himself on top of the covers and done a full 180 so that his feet were resting on the pillow! Levi put him back the "right" way. Checked again about 11:30 before going to bed myself, and he had wiggled up so his head was touching the wall, but at least he was pointed the right direction. I made sure to go in there right away in the morning so that he got the idea that we would get him up, and wasn't tempted to let himself out of bed.

Night 2: Bed at 8:00, up at 7:00. Stayed under the covers all night.

Night 3: Ditto. The bedtime transition appears to be a success!

Today, we attempted Nap Time in the big boy bed for the first time. He was good, although not sleeping, for the first hour. Then I heard creak-SLAM! "Mommy! It's awake outside!" J had started fiddling with the windowshade, and upon realizing it wasn't nighttime, determined naptime must be over. Since this was breaking the Stay In Bed rule, he had to spend the rest of naptime in his crib. OMG, talk about The End Of The World. J starts sobbing, "Moooooommeeeeee!!! Noooooooooo!!! Seeeeeep in my big boy bed!!!!!" The wailing seems to have stopped, but we're definitely not getting any actual napping accomplished.

Hopefully the quick visit to Baby Prison will still be fresh in his mind at bedtime. ;o)

Project Progress!

It's so nice to see projects that you started 6 months prior, finally starting to come to fruition! You may recall this, my second Random Apples post ever, where I talked about my linen closet and decide on a big-boy bedspread for Josh. And this, a few weeks later, where I briefly showed you the disaster that was my kitchen catch-all counter.

6 months later, my linen closet STILL looks awesome (although I did have to go look up that youtube video to refresh my sheet-folding skills the other day), and as for the other two projects, well, let's take a look, shall we?

Kitchen counter

Looked like this

receipts, mail, tupperware, small appliances, toys, junk, an award from 2008(??), my three-hole punch(!?!), etc., etc., etc., all jammed together so that stuff was routinely falling on the floor or worse, into the trash.

Yesterday, I did this
ahhhhhhh.....blank slate...

And now it looks like this!

Things are still not quite as compartmentalized as I would like, but I cut our plastic storage by about half and only kept the ones that I know we use most often. And I've trained Brianna, whose responsibility it is to empty the dishwasher, to nest things neatly instead of just haphazardly stacking stuff every which way so that it all inevitably tips over and crashes to the floor. That pile to the right is stuff that needs to go back to Levi's mom, and a stack of lids with no bottoms (which I should pretend to throw away and see if it brings their better halves out of hiding...), and a collection of pens-pencils-markers that still needs to be thinned out, but at least they're contained. To the left is the blender, the charging cord for my phone, and our change jar. And that's it! Most exciting of all, I cleaned out the eleventy-billion* paper grocery bags that were taking over the under-counter space to the point that the trash can was living in the middle of the room (ick)! I know a lot of them are going to get used for the garage sale (yay!) but I'm also awaiting delivery of a second recycling bin that is ONLY going to be for storing grocery bags...and they are all going to stay in the garage. Woo hoo for organizational baby steps!!

*really. I counted.


Josh's Big Boy Bed

...is in!

I couldn't find my post about how I eventually snagged the pirates bedspread, so if this is repetition I'm sorry, but I snagged it on clearance from Sears.com for...wait for it...ELEVEN DOLLARS. (Yep, I definitely remember typing that before. Weird.) Anyway, it's absolutely precious and I'm so glad I went for the full instead of the twin size. Josh is going to flip when he gets home this afternoon and sees it!