To Illustrate

I think graduating college has been good for my appearance.



2004 2010

I'm randomly at my lowest recorded weight since 2003 (the only upside to stress and long hours) so I realized before church this would be the perfect time to wear one of the skirts my mom made that are kind of tight at the waistband. Good choice, turns out at five pounds less they fit great.

Yesterday I went to an ice cream tasting thrown by a couple I know from church. (Balsamic Strawberry - yes. Miso Peach - no.) The husband told me that my Facebook post about salmon-flavored burps made him laugh so hard he wasn't able to post a comment. That makes a couple of people who have told me they like my Facebook posts. It's weird because they just come about because I have friends from every aspect of my life so I can't post about work, I try not to be about church all the time, I don't like doing politics, and that leaves the random little stuff. Like saying that after two years I finally got tired of Frosted Mini Wheats which bizarrely garnered the most replies I've had. It's nice to amuse people though I guess.

This week I've been eating cauliflower with American cheese melted over it. That always reminds me of food coloring.

When I was 13 I wanted to learn how to decorate cakes. The Wilton class at the party store was canceled so I taught myself. But my mom didn't believe in artificial food coloring, so I was limited to coloring frosting with cocoa, spinach juice, or beet juice. While I made some very pretty monochromatic cakes in shades of chocolate the Wilton yearbooks had amazing cakes in a rainbow of colors.

But then there was an incident that made my mom change her mind. One day I wanted to make a cake with pink frosting all over as the base for monochromatic roses and leaves. My mom remembered we'd had beets for dinner earlier that week and instructed me to use the collected juice from the bottom of the jar where the leftovers were stored. So I did.

But when we tasted the cake something was horribly, horribly wrong. What my mom hadn't remembered and I, at 13, didn't think was important, was that my dad had put the beets away in the same container as cauliflower with cheese. So by using the juice in that container for the frosting we had ended up with a cauliflower-, cheese-, and beet-flavored cake.

And after that I was allowed to use fully artificial, fully rainbow food coloring.