Making choices

I make decisions every day. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but ultimately they're mine. But if you've been following the news at all you'll know that in South Dakota I am evidently unfit to make one of the most important choices there is.

Recipe of the week

This weekend I felt the need to use up some of the bananas that are in my freezer, but I didn't want to make banana bread. I ended up stumbling onto a wonderful recipe for mocha chocolate chip banana muffins at allrecipes.com. I modified the recipe slightly and made the best banana muffins I've ever had. If you want to see the original recipe, click here

Here is the recipe with my few modifications:

INGREDIENTS:

* 1/2 cup margarine or butter
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1/2 cup brown sugar
* 1 egg
* 3 ripe bananas
* 1 tablespoon instant coffee granules, dissolved in
* 1 tablespoon water
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Blend butter or margarine, sugar, egg, banana, dissolved coffee, and vanilla for 2 minutes. Add flour, salt, baking powder, and soda, and blend just until flour disappears. Add chocolate chips and mix in with wooden spoon. Spoon mixture into 15 to 18 paper-lined muffin cups.
3. Bake for 25 minutes. Cool on wire racks

Yummy! Enjoy!

Book of the week

Today at lunch I read Every Person on the Planet by Bruce Eric Kaplan.



This is a delightful little book that takes only minutes to read - it's a picture book for adults about Edmund and Rosemary, a couple who decide to have a holiday party and end up inviting every person on the planet. And then everyone actually shows up (except for the ones who got bad directions and couldn't find the place).

This is a great book if you've ever had anxiety about throwing (or attending) a party. And really, who hasn't?

A complete waste of 140 minutes

Last night I decided to watch Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. I'm amazed and appalled that so many reviewers gave it a good rating. This was, beyond a doubt, the worst movie I've seen this year. Possibly the worst movie I've seen since the last Star Wars movie. It's the usual suspects for me: badly written dialogue, wooden line readings, to many explosions and not enough character, and this time even the special effects felt fake and flat to me. It wasn't even fun in the "wow, let's watch things blow up" sense. I really like Ewan MacGregor, and I think, possibly, he was trying to do some real acting here, but it failed. I like Natalie Portman, but she wasn't even trying. A waste, I say, a total waste of time.

In order to cleanse my mental palate, I felt the need to rewatch one of the funniest Star Wars spoofs ever. It's an old one, but Troops always makes me giggle.

Tonight I watched the previous night's Amazing Race (Damn you, CBS, for running it an hour later this year and making me unable to watch it the night it airs. I refuse to abandon my precious lying in bed with a book time just because my favourite reality show is now on at 10 instead of 9) to wipe this execrable excuse for entertainment from my memory.

Treats from the street

I usually go to work every morning by meeting up with my walking buddy Rachel on Broad Street and heading up from there. This week, however, I've been meeting up with my backup walking buddy Micaela and then walking across Market St. Let me tell you one of the Market Street advantages (besides being about 3 minutes faster): Free food!

For the past two days there have been people giving out Quaker Oats Breakfast cookies to pedestrians.


Over the past little while, while walking along Market Street, I've gotten yoghurt shakes, coffee, granola bars, gum, and Quizno's coupons. And a group of us did get $5 Starbucks cards while strolling in Rittenhouse Square last year. Walking up Broad Street - nothing.




Nothing else really exciting, I just wanted to share my love of getting free stuff.