I Seem To Have Misplaced my Camera

Hello Cyber World. 


Yesterday was Gerry's soccer game and sadly they tied.  They played really well for the most part but got tired in the end.  When we got home we all pigged out to the point where we had to sleep for a few hours.  


Also, the parents and I had way too many slices of the lemon pie and flan. 


We moved things around some more, and though we are no where near done and the house still looks like a mess, I think we are making great progress!


Last night I watched Casanova and thought it was a mite silly. (For me to concede that a movie was silly is kind of a big deal) But the accents were divine and I now need to marry an Englishman. Any one available?  


This morning after sifting out of a box o' my crap, I went to look for my camera where I had stored it (I'll be the first to admit it was not wise to put it in the fold up chair bag) and it was not there.  I am still sorely upset over that. Grr. So I need it back or need to buy a new one. Luckily I had downloaded my pics, but there are some left over pics that I don't like randos seeing. 


So wanna help me find a new camera??!  


Thanks! 


Dang I need some excitement in my life. Someone please help me with that too. 

What I wanted my books to look like before
realizing the sun would ruin them

So I guess I'll do what I always do and read :) or maybe write! 

Baking Fun Friday

Hello world! 

Jello Never Looked so cool! 9 Boxes Worth!

Today was a very, very productive day! Woke up at 10:30 am - but really, can you blame me? I was up late last night for your benefit so please do not judge! I meandered downstairs and while my father and I sat down to breakfast, I took a look at the bags of oatmeal bran and almond bran that were floating around in the kitchen.  My mother had all intentions of baking the last few days, but has been busy with transforming the house into something more suitable to long term living. I was intrigued that the almond bran could be used as a substitute for half of the required flour in chocolate chip cookie and oatmeal bran muffin recipes.  So, I decided to make the recipe of oatmeal bran muffins that my mother had taken out and left in the kitchen for the last week. 


Instead of individual muffins, I made 2 small "cakes" ( I call them loaves) and found that I was not satisfied with cleaning the kitchen just for the muffin mix.  I decided to make chocolate chip cookies, replacing half the flour with almond bran.  In the middle of making the chocolate chip cookies, my mother begged me to make jello and I said "heck, why not? I'm already in the kitchen!" So I made 9 boxes of Jello: peach, strawberry and orange!  I noticed that the cookies were being cooked at 150 degrees and almost cried because they were not baking right...obviously since they are supposed to be cooked at 350 degrees. I worked out the stupid problem with the oven (it was on "hold" since I had timed the muffins to be baked...grrr!) and I lamented that I had wasted a whole bag of chocolate chip cookies because they were horrible flat. and stuck together for having literally melded and melted together. I took em out, and my baker mother "eeeeeh.... they're fine."  I didn't believe her and begrudgingly went on with the jello. At this point I had burned my index finger checking on the cookies and was a bit miffed that they were flat. 


After box 6, I tell my dad to try to separate the cookies and put them on a cooling tray, and as he does, I taste them and nearly swoon. They are DELICIOUS. Seriously some of the best chocolate chip cookies I have EVER had. Mom, yours are first but mine are a very close second.  I'm not joking, these cookies are amazing, for all that they look flat and sad.  

Cookies (don't be fooled they are delicious!) Oatmeal bran loaves,
and the failed lemon meringue!

I then peruse our cupboard some more and discover two cans of condensed milk and decide I'm going to make a lemon meringue pie (my specialty, I love making them and made my first a few years ago) and for the heck of it, some flan. After all, today is Mexico's Independence Day and why not celebrate it with some flan??!  So I go about preparing the lemon meringue pie first and as I am beating the three egg whites, cream of tartar and sugar, I notice something is off.  The mix is not creating peaks. In addition, the new recipe I was using called for me to bake the whole pie together, when I distinctly remembered making the filling of the pie, baking, taking it out and then pouring the top (the white part) over the half baked pie. Shrugging, I figure this new recipe has to work. I pour the non-peaking white mixture on top of the pie and bake it. 15 minutes later it is not looking good. I take it out and trust my mother when she says it  just needs to cool and then start working on the flan.

Flan before you turn it over...stay tuned!

Flan is really hard to make! And my family doesn't have foil. And I substituted  coconut milk with coconut cream (don't know how we had all the ingredients in the house) and the pie pan i was using was hardly big enough to hold the filling. I didn't know you had to submerge the pie pan into water and bake it for an hour and a half, and then let it cool for four hours and preferably overnight. That's crazy. By this point it was already past 3:30 and I had been baking since 11 I think.  So with the flan in the oven, I made some whipped cream for the flan and realized what "peaked" looks like, and I could have kicked myself for not mixing the lemon meringue's egg whites more. Then I got ready to go to the library to pick up Changeless and Blameless by Gail Carriger like I said yesterday and kept checking on the flan.  It took an hour and 40 minutes for it to be cooked through the middle, and I set it to cool, went to the library picked up books and found more (YAY!) ate dinner, cleaned the kitchen, put the flan in the refrigerator to cool overnight, and will share the hopefully successful flan pic tomorrow!!  Also, I determined to make another lemon meringue today...so irritated with myself! 

I played two finger soccer with my little bro, complete with soccer shoes! My sister from NYC sent the set over yesterday and heres a pic of how cool it is to play this form of soccer!  I would have added a video, but it was not working and I don't know why -after 3 tries my patience wore thin, so I just put this picture in. I'll try for a video again tomorrow!

Be jealous! This method of playing soccer rocks!

Well, that was my day, pretty awesome if I do say so myself! I only burned two of my fingers! And though they still hurt, it was worth it. I can't wait to read.  Also, I need some empty picture frames so that I can start decorating my room better.  Tomorrow, Gerry has a soccer game at 9:30! Weekends + my family = FUN. 


Okay, Peace. 

I'm BAAAACCCCCCKKKKKKKK!

Hey Virtual World, your favorite GGReyes is back!

Though I am no longer studying in DC nor traveling Egypt and Jordan (check out my adventures in Egypt and Jordan in my archives!!!) yours truly is BACK. I may have to change the title of my blog now, but all in due time my padawans!

"We are so happy but why exactly are you back?" You might be asking yourself.

And I am more than happy to respond!

I am back because frankly, there is nothing better to do at 11:22 pm.

I don't have any idea if anyone else will read this blog anymore because I am not traveling, but you know what? My life is so awesome and interesting that people SHOULD want to read about my daily life. That sounded much more self-serving than intended, but I have to make myself feel better somehow. (warning, I am going to put pictures up randomly! yay!)

Also, I just finished reading a book (Soulless by Gail Carriger) -seriously check out the link!-  and you know what? I was inspired to keep writing. In any form. I, in all honestly, love to write, and why not express it in every form available to me (or you?). I write in various journals and I tweet (shameless plug: follow me if you aren't a creeper @GGReyes8) and once upon a time before June started, I blogged. Quite a bit actually! I hung out with my pals from DC: my occasional guest writer hammie aka Amalee, and Bobak and Chris.  We reminisced a whole lot about our misadventures and dissected our foibles during that time in our life. Fun times! Amalee brought up my blog, and as I find some parts of the DC experience as rather painful to recall, I took real pleasure in writing about my time there and found pleasure in re-reading some bits. It encouraged me to write again!

So now what? Well...

My hair looks wacky, but oh well, I
couldn't be happier!

Three months ago I graduated! Many a thing has occurred (does that word really have two Rs?...how peculiar!) since then, that has kept me quite the busy bee in my own right. (how do I know I have been busy? Usually busy equals stress and stress equals having my face break out, and my face has not been clear in the acne department for the last few weeks) 


So, let me break it down for you!


1)Planning my sister's wedding. Yup, she got married, I was not allowed to say anything else I would have said it the moment she got engaged that fateful day almost a year ago!


2) Sister's wedding. Why GG you are being redundant. I am not. Have you ever helped plan a wedding? Then you don't know what you are talking about and I beg you to not question me. As I have now successfully helped plan a wedding I can tell you they are stressful and expensive. As my family has not recovered from the August wedding yet, I will leave this as number 2!


3) I graduated and have NOT looked for a job.  I was interviewed for a job as a paralegal for FB but that did not go through. It would have been an interesting experience, but I would more than love to work with people who devote their life to bringing about better life opportunities for the poor and to bringing about change in our educational system. SOOO anyway  the not having a job that will trigger my sense of justice part of reason #3 is enough to make me break out for months. 

At the sister's wedding...
Of course it's a pic of me and not my sis...

4) Family issues. In my attempt at discretion I will simply sat that my family (even the extended family) dynamic is interesting.  This summer has brought about happiness, sorrow, tears, and hope. I'm growing from the experiences. Yay you now get to share in the new developed Lupe as I process the experiences. 


So that's the kind of long and short of it. I moved out of my small cramped tiny room, to my sister's bigger room (she is not living at home so I took the room and guess what? I have a closet and room to walk!!) but moving to my room was the result of moving the entire house around - i.e. I moved the computer to the boys' room, the boys moved upstairs, the stuff in my sister's room was moved to the living room and subsequently dispersed throughout the house. And we aren't even done yet. 


OH. 

Sisters! And my lovely mother! The one with the
ribbon is the bride :)

I must say that I have gone to the gym. I went to the gym yesterday (gasp!) but that's nothing! In April (I only know this because I found my contract) I signed up for membership at the local gym and I went twice a week for a good two months. Incredible eh? Whooda thought little ol' Lupe would ever go to the gym on a -sparingly- but fairly consistent schedule?? Not me. And right up to before the wedding and until really yesterday, I had not gone to the gym. Laughing hurts me right now because of the crunches I forced myself to do yesterday but in the end its worth it right?


ANYWAY. 


That was my summer, that's my life in a nutshell. I am still the quirky Lupe that has stuff happen to her daily and will write about it now on a regular basis. Can't wait. I'm thrilled, aren't you?! (That is genuine excitement, not facetiousness!)


I keep forgetting to mention some really important things. I'm awfully sorry this blog is turning into a mess, but let's face it, have you ever had a conversation with me that didn't look as jumbled as this blog?

Really Lupe, you forgot how to BLOG?!

I'm working on it don't worry, I'm usually not THIS jumbled...

So on to important things I forgot to say: 

I have been thrift store shopping of late and have come home so incredibly happy that I actually do the happy dance.  See, I got rid of over half my clothes and shoes (big deal for me---even if most of my clothes is handed down from the sisters) in a garage sale we had (proceeds were supposed to go to the wedding but it was such an embarrassingly low amount that we used it to buy food instead - saaaaaad-) and I have, in all seriousness, been wearing the same clothes all summer. Oh, I tried to vary it with the nicer clothes that I kept, but that clothes was on a hangar and I am unbelievably lazy when it comes to clothes that is hung up, in general I do have the patience to pick out clothes from the closet unless its really important, and so I wore khaki shorts that were in rotation with 2 pairs of black gym shorts. My rotation of shirts included a grey hello kitty shirt, or my grey Santa Clara University shirt or American University shirts (I only wore them because I thought I looked cool like Anne Hathaway did in The Devil Wears Prada. Showing off wear you went to school was never so cool. Of course I tried to emulate her coolness.)  

Anyway, the point is, I used the same clothes because I don't like to use the iron and I quite frankly didn't have that much clothes! So thrift shopping yielded such a gold mine! I got dresses, a pair of shorts, shirts (all between $1.99 and $7.99 no higher) and of course books! One of the belts I bought for $2.99 was a Carlos Falchi belt that is apparently quite expensive! Woohoo!  

So that's exciting. Bookwise, as of today (about an hour ago) I have read 18 books! Not bad for starting June 13 and the brief  hiatus I was forced to take for the wedding...though in the week leading up to it I must add that I was a mite happier and in a better mood because I was reading a book. I must give a shout out to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for Good Omens. I know they've received an abundance of accolades already and I am a late comer, but...Such a delightfully wicked and funny book! I make references to it at home that no one understands and so now I mostly say them to myself, but I wish I knew more people who read it so that I could talk to them about it! Hahahaha, such a great book! Check it out please and then talk to me! AND this is HUGE accomplishment because I finally read a book from my "Books I want to be Reading" list to your right! Yesssss (read that in Napoleon Dynamite's voice).

Oh and I must say that one of the highlights of my existence happened two days ago. I follow a really cool author on twitter (Brent Weeks! check out his awesome book series here) and he retweeted about another author's e-book at an unbeatable price -the aforementioned book Soulless by Gail Carriger. As the unapologetic book nerd that I am, I checked it out, bought the e-book, started reading, enjoyed it and then looked up the author on twitter after reading her author bio on my favorite website ever BN.com, followed her on Twitter.  As I am still learning the ropes to Twitter, I decided to do something daring and thank Mr.Weeks for the book suggestion, and guess what? Gail Carriger actually responded to me. A PUBLISHED author. I am not proud to say that I honestly felt like a little kid and ran downstairs to gossip with the only other person in the house, my mother. This is like a celebrity acknowledging you, but better since she's an author. And there is nothing better than knowing that Ms.Carriger took the time to respond to me. Despite this celebrity induced syndrome of giddiness, I am reasonable enough to say that I am sooo happy to have found another author whose book series I will undoubtedly enjoy, and I am going to the library tomorrow for the rest of her series.   

I also read One Day.  It was a much better book than it was a movie, but I'm a big softy for movies like that...so whatever.  The book came at an interesting juncture in my life.  I realized, much too acutely how painfully close we are to death.  Our lives are so very fragile. Note: The Following Aside may not make sense to you but I'm writing it anyway:And if there is one thing I am realizing in books, and really all around me, is that unless death occurs to someone very close to us, we are very apathetic.  I mean in books, killing off a character is no big deal sometimes.  Perhaps its because I know what it feels like to really mourn that I find it a bit callous now.  I'm not making sense, but let's just say that in the books I'm writing, death isn't going to happen at the whim of my fancy.  I now contemplate what it means when I read in the news that a deaths occurred at a plant a few days ago, the people  are grieving for their loved ones, I can't acknowledge that real pain. 

Okay, so I'm probably not going to be able to sleep do my irrational fear that I will unexpectedly die at some point without having accomplished much in the way of social justice...so I will write that one brother is three semesters away from graduating college, another is a 9th grader and the youngest kid is now a fifth grader. wow. my family is growing up. 

Also, yesterday I had the pleasure of briefly exchanging words with someone who was definitely eye-candy of the intelligent variety and I am happy to report that my incurably effervescent hopeless romantic tendencies are restored! Phew...! 

Obviously my second oldest sister is missing, but as I have no recent family photos (wedding ones haven't come in)
I put this one up to remind you of my loveably silly family!!

Alrighty then. It is an unhealthy 2.5 hours since I started writing this (but that includes putting pictures up, all the links which you better have clicked, the different fonts, ect.) and while I don't mind droning on an on, it makes it unpleasant for you to try and follow my train of thought after so long a time of stream of consciousness writing. But not before...

Trending now with GGReyes: 

Music I'm listening to:

Find it on Spotify: The Kooks: Junk of the Heart (click here!)

Book I'm Reading:

War Trash by Ha Jin (check out here- a veritable gem I found at the Thrift store, but haven't finished yet)

Books I can't wait for:

Michelle Sagara's Cast in Ruin book -here look!- it comes out 9/20, so I suggest you hurry up and read the first 6 books and Brandon Sanderson's Alloy of Law (read an excerpt here) and it doesn't come out until November 8 - such an unfortunate circumstance since the Mistborn novels are honestly one of the best book series I have had the pleasure to read. 

Online store you should check out:

HoneyHavana - vintage store! follow on Twitter @honeyhavana and like the store on Facebook HERE! store up and running soon :) I am in no way shamelessly plugging my sister's new entrepreneurial endeavor...okay fine, yes I am.  

Thank you for reading!

Peace.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                          

Yeah...I look like this on my day's off.

P.s. VIVA MEXICO!!!! Today Mexico's Independence Day!!!

P.p.s. Not bad for my first returning post! hahha....right.... 

Lupe Is Graduating

That's right y'all I'm gonna graduate in T-5 days. Crazy.  I have three papers between me and freedom. More updates soon!!

Peace and Love.

P.s. I'm gonna write on this blog again! So pumped!

Hello Friends

I have discovered that in times where school is taking over, its just nice to blog about life outside school.

...

And, oooh never you mind, I don't have a life outside of school. That's right.

This weekend in fact, was a gathering of a huge nerd convention: Model United Nations of the Far West.  I was, in ultimate nerd status, the advisor for the Santa Clara Univ. group that was going.

Yup, that's what I did this weekend. I also gained like 15 pounds for eating nothing but snackage and In n Out because I was too lazy to spend money on real food...so yeah. I'm going to the gym with my mother so that I don't feel so guilty about having eaten like Noo-Noo from Teletubbies.

Yup! That was me this weekend with dried mangoes, wheat thins, apple-cinnamon bars, and two peanut-butter sandwiches that I made last me till Sunday...haha. Well, I did go to Pier 39, and ate my second burger of the day on Saturday, but I counted that as an unnecessary expense.

Anywhoo, I have to do my hw, but before I do, I wanted y'all to know that at MUN, one of the Secretary Generals was the actress who played Kimmie Gibbler in Full House. Yes. The real one.  I was as shocked as the next person, but she left after Saturday. Sad, because I couldn't get a pic of her. But she has not really changed.

Aight PEACE!

Awesome Post

Makes me want to watch Iron Jawed Angels again!

Finals

So, I don't know how many followers I still have, but this post is to let the world know that I am studying for finals...boo. And as is the custom, I must blog.  This has been a relatively okay finals schedule so far, so  I am not freaking out...yet.

I still have to write  A LOT.

Okay, so peace, and wish me luck!

Hello Friends

Hello all!

It has been a while, and I still know not what I should do with this blog. Hmm...I may need to change the title and start it up again.

Anyway, yesterday I made a pleasant discovery! In O'Connor Hall, on the third floor is a pretty amazing computer lab! With beautiful macs on one side and PCs on the other, this lab is a dream come true. AND there is a printer.   It's a gem! It is quite and nice, and I frequented it today, and have taken a few naps (my math class was cancelled! GASP! yay!) already.  I have been using the math computer lab down stairs in the same building since my first-year, but I think I will adopt this computer lab.

Anyway, that is all. I am very tired, and I want to sleep, but I cannot...not yet anyway. Sad panda.

Okay, well that is all for now, I may read.

Oh. Yesterday was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life! At work, I was on my way to do a set up and I was kinda singing my heart out (not really singing but kind of mouthing the words very energetically - to Lady Gaga's Boys Boys Boys no less!- when I ran into this really cute guy who also works for the University (different department).  He started laughing, and I turned red and stammered soemthing about being sorry that he saw me, and he said "no no, its fine, if anything it brightened my day!" ahhh...I melted.  He spoke to me.  I was trying to say something witty but all that came out was "Well good!" maybe 15 seconds after he had said anything.  He chuckled.  I continued on my set up with the goofiest grin on my face, ever! Haha. So. Point of the story. I'm happy. I am single. And that's okay. I'm also still alive and a hopeless romantic.

Peace

One day, that will be me.

Wants and Needs

Hi People. Hope you are all enjoying the new year.  17 days into it and I am already burned out. School is kicking my butt. Washington Semester was so easy.

I need a car.

That is all for now.

Peace.