Who knew faux fried chicken could be so damn good?!? That’s what the secret chicken dish was for dinner tonight and it got thumbs up.

My mashed potatoes, however, got thumbs down. I think they only got thumbs down because I wouldn’t let Jason put curry powder or lemon pepper in them and so no matter how they came out he was going to be disappointed. I thought they were pretty good for never making mashed potatoes before and making up the recipe as I went.

I would once again like to say, damn I’ve got mad cooking skillz.

I’m just so proud of my new cooking skillz (that skills with a z folks because I’m that damn good) I’m going to brag about them on here.

I never used to think I could cook anything more than a 2-step box of mac and cheese, but lately I’ve been a cooking fool. I made white turkey chili for dinner the other night and last night I made gingersnap pot roast. yuuuum gingersnap pot roast. So easy and very good, I highly recommend it.

Tonight I’m making chicken. I can’t reveal the kind of chicken yet because Jason will read it and it won’t be a surprise. (Really I don’t like him to know what the meal is supposed to be in case I screw it up. If he’s not sure what the original meal destination was then I can lie and tell him “yup, it was supposed to be blacken chicken with crunchy mashed potatoes.”) I’ll let ya’ll know how it turns out.

I’ve mentioned before that Jason and I are both monitoring how much traffic our blogs get, (go formationofme.com go!) and we’ve both noticed that the most surefire way to have your traffic spike is not to mention breasts, but have Dan Sandler mention you on his blog. Holy cow those Rice University Computer Science folks sure know how to follow links through.

Thanks Dan!

I’ve been making plans to hang out with some of my friends from B&N one last time before we leave for California and one guy, Craig, suggested we (me, Jason, him, and his girlfriend Jamie) go bowling and drinking. While trying to figure out a good time to go, Craig suggested the afternoon because “if you swerve in the afternoon the cops don’t think you’re drunk driving; they think you’re just a bad driver.”

As horrible as it is, you can’t argue with his logic.

jparks: “You know I was right.”

me: “I never said you were wrong. But you presented in a ‘I’m a fuckwad so hate me’ kinda way, so I did”

jparks: “If I present it in a I’m a sexy bitch kind of way…”

me: “No”

Today the moving lady came to assess our possessions to determine how big of a truck we’ll need to move to California. While here she told us that we are not supposed to pack our stuff like Jason had me believing and that we should leave that up to her team of professionals. Sweet. Except that I quit B&N before our vacation so when we got back I could spend my time packing. So today was my first official day as a house woman.

Kill me now. Please.

Really I have great respect for women that stay home and cook, clean, and keep their homes running smoothly, but our tiny apartment does not require much upkeep, I can vacuum the whole thing in 10 minutes. And having things running smoothly means having Jason occupied in another room so I can squeeze in one more episode of Alias undisturbed. All that was left to entertain me was cooking. So I made a huge ass pot of white chili, some veggies, and about a million Guinness chocolate cupcakes. And that entertained me for about 2 hours, after that boredom set in. Next up, shaving mohawks onto the cats.

What really worries me is that I don’t have a job lined up for California and I really am worried about finding one. I see many, many days of staying at home to do domestics things ahead of me. And the worst part is that I won’t even having the cooking to do since Jason will be working in an actual office and Google feeds their employees 3 meals a day.

I fear for my sanity.

I was waiting for Jason to turn in his notice with PalmSource before I mentioned this on my blog and since he did that yesterday I can now say that we are moving to California. I know for most people this is old news but I’m sure there are a few people I haven’t told yet.

Jason took a job with Google and we have to go out to the Bay Area for it. Hopefully we won’t have to stay very long and will be able to transfer to one of Google’s many other offices around the country within a year.

For those of you that know we are moving, this might be different than what I orginally told you: We leave for California on April 9th. Or around April 9th. Basically sooner than I probably mentioned.

While in Paris and London I kept seeing people with really great hair colors. Not your normal colors that naturally grow out of people’s heads either, but bright fun colors that made me think of having no worries and actually enjoying life. Of course I had to have fun hair too.

When we got home I made a hair appointment to have my hair highlighted in purple. Why purple? I haven’t a clue. I think I picked it because I thought it would be nice and dark and still look good against my red hair. I also wasn’t thinking lavender or anything light but rather a dark violet, almost black, color.

Before you jump ahead and think I now have purple hair, stop. It’s not purple. My stylist wasn’t sure what shade of purple I was thinking and therefore she didn’t go buy any dyes. She offered to go over the weekend and get some and we could reschedule for during the week, but being the instant gratification person I am, I told her I was open to other color options and let’s work with what she had in the salon.

Her solution was not highlights but rather a total dye job changing every little bit of hair that I have. We started by making my hair brown. A really deep chocolate brown that acts as a nice platform for the other three colors I have striped through it. She then layered an orangey red, a deep red-ish violet, and a bright red through it.

If I do say so myself, it looks AWESOME. Like, I rock and have super cool hair, awesome.

While in London I bought the best, most amazing, perfect, wonderful, great, lovely pair of brown boots in existence.

Apparently the fact that I was only looking in one country was why I never found them. Yay for London! Yay for finding boots!

In case anyone pays attention to the books I read, that last one, The Secret Life of Bees, was crap. I don’t recommend it.