Happy Birthday, To Me!

This year's birthday was bittersweet.  On one hand, I'm living my dream in Oregon, something I had hoped and dreamed for over the span of three years.  Everyday is amazing here, even on the days when I'm missing my friends and family back home in Wisconsin.  On the other hand, this was the first birthday in years where I didn't go out for dinner and drinks with twenty-plus friends.  What I did do though was go on a road trip to the coast with Cole and my friend, Renae.  I stopped to take some roadside photos on the way there, we ate lunch and dinner at two of my favorite restaurants and even watched a storm roll in from the beach.  That is exactly how I hoped to be spending my 35th birthday when I declared, last spring, that I would be moving to Oregon.

Storm rolling in at Oceanside Beach on my birthday

Nature's fun little birthday gift this year was to bless me with seasonal allergies, something that is completely common here to far too many people.  I'm lucky in the sense that so far, it's just a lot of coughing and not itchy eyes and runny nose.  It did come on in conjunction with another nasty cold, bringing my cold count to 4 since I've been here.  I guess you can say I truly am a nature junkie now since nature literally makes me sick but I won't let that stop me from enjoying it every chance I get and there's absolutely no way in hell I'm leaving Oregon.

I do find myself feeling rather alone here.  There's something to be said for having people around you who've known you more than a few months.  I ran into an old from Wisconsin by accident the other day.  It turns out both of us are living in Portland and neither of us knew.  For a moment, it was such a relief knowing that I had an old friend here, someone I've known for 15 years.  That was unfortunately short lived when I learned he would be moving to Tennessee in August.  I'm happy that he will be pursuing his music career, after all, everyone should know the joy that comes from following your dreams, but the selfish side of me wishes he would stay put a little longer.  I'm hoping we get to spend some quality time together before he moves away and I look forward to knowing someone who lives in Nashville, a place that has been on my "to travel to" list for some time.

At the Station after the Badgers won on Thursday. Go Wisconsin!!!

I have found that there is a good sized group of Wisconsin people living here in Portland.  I was lucky enough to discover the UW Alumni Association - Portland Chapter.  They gather for Badgers sports events and although I am not an alumni, they welcome all Wisconsinites to their gatherings. It's been fun meeting people from Wisconsin who live and love it here like me.  It's funny how something as small as where you come from can bond you so quickly with a stranger.  Or maybe it's just that Wisconsin people are so friendly?  Either way, it's been a welcomed turn of events and helps make me feel less alone.  

I have another Wisconsin friend coming to visit next weekend, the third of my friends to visit me here, and I'm looking forward to giving her the grand tour of Oregon, well, at least what I can physically cover in just two and a half days. I'm thinking we'll start on Friday with a hike a Silver Falls State Park, followed by dinner and drinks at a couple of cool spots in Portland for her birthday celebration. Saturday, we can start the morning by visiting the Saturday Market, then take a drive through the Gorge, stopping to see a waterfall or two, before driving up to Mount Hood, grabbing a bite and drink at Timberline lodge.  Sunday will probably consist of a drive to the coast, stopping to see and explore a few of my favorite places on the Northern coast.  Of course, this all depends on the weather and as I've come to learn, as in life, it can change so quickly here.  Check back soon to hear all about it!

Check out my new photography website here!

 

The Great Cupcake Debacle of 2015

Image from the Betty Crocker recipe for Boozy Bourbon Chocolate Cupcakes

The picture above was the expectation for my "Almost Birthday" cupcakes that I set out to make on Wednesday night.  I wanted to bring them into work to share with my co-workers on Thursday since I was taking off on Friday (my actual birthday) for a road trip to the coast.  The end result, and process leading up to it, went nothing as planned.

I had purchased all the ingredients on Tuesday night but I forgot to get containers to transport the cupcakes in so Wednesday night, after work, I stopped to pick up some containers.  Google told me there was a Walmart nearby my work but when I got there, I discovered it was a Walmart grocery store, not retail store.  Luckily, I found a Fred Meyer not too far away but the added driving made me a little later than I wanted in getting home to get started.  

I got started on the recipe around 7:00 PM. After carefully pouring the cupcake batter into each individual cupcake pan liner, I realized that I didn't put the bourbon in.  I proceeded to pour each liner's batter back into the bowl so I could mix in the bourbon.  Once all the batter was back in the bowl, a painstakingly slow and messy process,  I realized that the amounts of oil and water on the recipe were different than on the cake mix box.  Since the recipe said to follow the box directions, those were the amounts I used.  What the recipe actually intended was to follow the procedure on the box but use the ingredients and amounts from the recipe.  So now that my oil and water amounts were off for the cupcakes and I couldn't proceed any further.  Wanting these cupcakes to be perfect, I determined I needed to start over.  Not wanting to waste the batter, I poured it into a cake pan and made a booze-free cake.  I then headed to the store to pickup another box of cake mix, more eggs and some frosting for the cake.

I got back from the store with my replacement ingredients around 9:00 PM.  I proceeded to mix everything together correctly and poured the batter into the liners, again, and baked the cupcakes as directed.  In the meantime, I mixed the ingredients for the filling and the ingredients for the frosting. Neither went smoothly.  The frosting turned out too thin but the recipe said to add more powered sugar if this happened until it was thick enough.  I kept adding more and more and more powered sugar until finally, it seemed to be thick enough.  Then, I read that the filling needed to cool in the refrigerator for at least 60 minutes before I could put it on the cupcakes.  So around 11:00 PM, I cut off the cupcake tops in anticipation of putting the filling on top.

Unfortunately, the filling did not thicken as it was supposed to in that 60 minute period of time so I put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes, hoping that would help.  It didn't.  I kept checking back every 10 minutes or so to test the filling to see if it was getting thicker.  By 1:00 AM, the filling was still too thin to use so I decided to let it sit in the refrigerator overnight and put the cupcakes together in the morning before I went to work.

After walking Cole, I grabbed some ice out of the freezer so I could bring a glass of ice water into the bedroom with me.  When putting the ice cubes in the glass though, I noticed that the cubes were solid on the outside but watery on the inside.  I noticed the refrigerator wasn't making any noise. I opened the freezer and there was no cool air coming out or moving around.  The same thing was happening (or not happening, depending on how you look at it) in the refrigerator.  Realizing that my refrigerator was not working, I started to fear that not only would my filling not thicken overnight, but that I would lose all my food too!

I fired up my computer to get the after hours maintenance number from the property website but discovered that the website was down for maintenance. My panic mode kicked into higher gear and I called the number listed on the "down for maintenance" page but the woman who answered was of no help.  Apparently, she wasn't able to look up any numbers for the property either with the system down and made no attempt to offer any advice on what to do next. Luckily, after hangup up with her and calling the main number, I got the after hours maintenance number from the recording.  After explaining the situation to the answering service, they said they would have an on-call maintenance person call me.

Five minutes later, the refrigerator magically came back on.  It was a miracle!!  One minute after that with my cell phone in hand about to call the answering service back, a maintenance guy, visibly tired and irritated, showed up at my door.  After explaining that it was working again, and reassuring him it really was not working just a minute ago and that I wasn't crazy, he left, clearly irritated and I'm sure, thinking I was a complete moron. At 1:30 AM, I finally laid down to try to get some sleep.  The moment my head hit the pillow though, my month-long cough kicked into action and it was clear I would not be sleeping anytime soon.  After about an hour, I decided that maybe a hot shower would help calm things down.  By 3:00 AM, I was back in bed and was able to fall asleep, eventually.

At 7:00 AM, Thursday, March 19th, my alarm went off and I quickly ran to the refrigerator to check on my filling.  It was thicker than when I last checked but still not the consistency that I wanted it to be.  I had no time left and therefore no choice but to use it.  After putting the filling on top of the cupcake bottoms, I put on the cupcake tops and then piped on the frosting I had made the night before, which seemed like a decent consistency. Unfortunately, five minutes after putting the frosting on the cupcakes, I realized that it was starting to lose it's form and run down the sides of the cupcakes!!!!

At this point, I felt completely defeated.  With all my running around, hard work and lack of sleep, they still didn't turn out when all I was trying to do was something nice in sharing a treat with my co-workers.  All I could do at that point was bring them in to work and explain that they may look bad but assure my coworkers that they tasted good.  Everyone agreed, they were delicious!  And since no one knew what they were supposed to look like, no one knew how truly ugly they were. They just assumed that the cupcakes were covered in icing.  Yes, that's it, I meant to make icing, not frosting!

Below is a photographic journey through the Great Cupcake Debacle of 2015.  Next year, I'm buying a cake!!!

The ingredients

Battered is poured into the cupcake pan liners

What attempt #1 turned into:  a cake minus the bourbon

The cupcakes are cooling

The cupcake tops after being cut off

The cupcakes bottoms and tops

The cupcake bottoms with the filling on top

The finished product (container one) after 1 minute :) 

The finished product (container two) after 5 minutes :(

Kristin Roosmalen Photography is Officially Up & Running!

Proposal Rock, Neskowin Beach

For the past two weeks, I've been battling a pretty nasty cold, at least that is what I think it is.  It started on a Sunday and just kind of sneaked up on me.  A friend noticed before I did because of my voice. When confronted with her "are you sick" question, I had to pause and really think about it.  I had been so busy unpacking my eagerly-anticipated boxes from Wisconsin that I hadn't stopped to take a breather.  When I did, I had to admit I was feeling a little under the weather.  By the end of the day, there was no question about it, I was sick.

I went to work Monday morning and was promptly sent home and told to rest up and get better. After three days of rest and working at home, I felt a lot better and went back to work and finished out the week.  I was feeling so much better by Saturday that  I decided to take a low-key trip out to the coast and soak up the sun a bit on Sunday.  I didn't do anything too strenuous, just some leisurely walking on the beach and a lot of driving.  When I went back to work on Monday morning, my cough was a little more prominent.  By Thursday, I felt completely devoid of any energy so I worked from home in the afternoon and took Friday off to rest.  And rest I did, I ended up sleeping the entire day. Apparently my body knew what it needed and decided to take it.

Wanting to feel better as soon as possible, I committed to resting the entire weekend.  This was no easy feat since it was predicted to be sunny and near record breaking temperatures of 70 degrees in the Portland area.  There was so much hiking I had been looking forward to doing earlier in the week before my health decided to decline again.  Such is life though and I decided if I were going to be stuck inside at home, I was going to make the most of it.

I've spent the entire weekend diligently working on my photography website, a project in the making for weeks.  Well, at least in the sense of actually owning a website that just needed to be built.  The photography that goes into it has been years in the making and deciding which photographs to sell was no easy task. It required looking through thousands of photographs and trying to predict which ones someone would want to hang on their wall, let alone pay for.  Even after selecting photographs I think would meet both criteria, there was another step, editing.  This was definitely the most time consuming part of the process.

I am pleased to report that I do have a site that is ready to share, although a little more work is needed as far as refining some photos I want to include.  After that, the next step is marketing and there is a list a mile long of tasks that I need to do with that but at last, I have a place to share my best work that not only can be seen but also available for purchase by others who enjoy the wild places that surround us.  This way, they too can keep a little piece of it for themselves.

Click here to visit Kristin Roosmalen Photography.