Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow...

Winter is slowly winding down here, and August is the southern hemisphere's February. That is, it's the worst month of winter. Sadly, though, our worst month is 31 days, not 28 (or 29). It's been extremely rainy here for days and days. I heard that on Saturday made the fifteenth day in a row with rain. Most of those days have been rainy all day long, not just a little bit of sprinkling here and there.

And that is why I took pictures this morning. THE SUN! IT STILL EXISTS! HOORAY!

Review: Baked French Toast

After reading Janssen's post about yummy baked french toast, I decided to try it. Although, I went with the recipe from the second attempt, not the first.

Here's the basics:

1. The recipe was easy to follow.
2. It did not really taste good. Sort of, but not really.
3. I will not make it again. Regular french toast for us, we say.

I made the batter with vanilla (per the suggestions), and it smelled really, really yummy. I used extra-thick white bread, which was a bit difficult to find because Kiwi bread tends to be EXTREMELY thinly sliced. In fact, what we would call "sandwich bread" in the States is called "toast" here, and regular sliced bread is even thinner than that. Frankly, I don't like it at all, but it's one of the things I've learned to deal with.

Anyway, we decided that we wanted to have the french toast for dinner, so I made the batter at home and then took it with the bread over to Makereta's so that I could use her baking pans and her normal-sized oven. Since the bread was thinner than what was indicated in the instructions, it only soaked for about three hours.

Makereta baked the bread following the instructions. The tops looked deliciously golden brown, and we were excited to pull the bread out of the oven. Only, inside was still ooey-gooey, and the bottoms were burnt black.

We ate the french toast anyway, but we were all rather disappointed with the overall effect. William (the baby) seemed to like it, but he also eats Vaseline, so what does he know?

I left dinner wanting regular french toast, and I was really unhappy that it didn't turn out as I'd hoped. In the future, it is very likely that I will add a little vanilla to my french toast batter, but I will probably just cook it the old-fashioned way and not bother baking it.

For Bart

In my 200 Things post, Bart asked a question about one of my answers. I figured it was decent blog fodder.

I bolded the statement "Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone" because I've done that- on a number of occasions.

As a kid I was very aggressive, and I had a rather short temper. Because of that I got into a handful of minor skirmishes. Usually, much to my dismay, things were broken up before real fighting began. And more often than not, the fighting or near-fighting started because I felt that somebody I cared about was being mistreated.

One time, when I was in sixth grade, I was attending an awards ceremony for a competition called Odyssey of the Mind. The competition had lasted all day long and involved hundreds of students in teams of 5-7 kids each. Each team had a "coach" or two, usually a parent. As such, the awards ceremony was always jam-packed, and you had to get there pretty early if you wanted to get a seat with your team. Otherwise you'd be spread out and might lose each other, not that it mattered that much, but it was nice to be able to sit with your team. Because of the mass amounts of people that had to fit in the high school auditorium, there were signs all over the place that said "No reserving seats."

For whatever reason, I was not with my team, but I was with my brother's team, whom my mom had coached that year. We were there very early so as to get seats together. We found a good section of seats, and we all sat down only to realize that we overflowed by one person into seats that said they were reserved. We took that one seat anyway because, hey! No reserving seats! (These seats just had signs taped to them that said "Seats reserved for such and such team"). We had been sitting there for quite some time, and the auditorium was getting very full, when Mean Lady Coach (a parent) came and told us that my mom was sitting in a reserved seat. My mom, who is a polite person, kindly told the lady that because there were signs everywhere that said "No reserving seats" we went ahead and took the seats since they technically couldn't be reserved in the first place. Mean Lady Coach then insisted that my mom vacate her seat and find somewhere else to go sit since those seats were reserved for her team. My mom, rather than get in a fight with Mean Lady in front of her children and her son's O.M. team, just decided to go ahead and move. She told us to stay there and we'd catch up after.

Enter Furious Sherry.

I yelled at my mother, "No! Mom, you sit down. No! Sit down! You're staying there." (My mom had dared to defy me). And then I proceeded to yell at Mean Lady about how she was breaking the rules, we followed the rules and got there hours early, and we weren't going anywhere. And then the lady left.

My mom was a little flabbergasted at my behavior, but I don't think she chided me for yelling at her or at a strange lady. Probably because I was right.

Some people get tattoos to show they love their moms. I just yell at Mean Ladies.

When the Branch President asked me to speak today...

The last time I was asked to speak in a sacrament meeting was in either November or December of 2004. Do not ask me how I've managed to escape having to speak for so long. All I know is that I had somehow managed to slip in and out of a number of wards without ever being asked to speak in sacrament.

Interestingly enough, I don't loathe public speaking. In general, it doesn't make me all that nervous, and in some ways I even find that I look forward to it.

Except when I have a long time to think about it. And then I start worrying about all the dumb things I could say or all the ways that I could make a fool of myself or talk for way too long or pass out (as my body does on occasion) or have a bizarre Freudian slip or something. I get a little anxious about it.

And then when the day comes, even if I really don't feel nervous, my knees will whole-kneedly disagree and will proceed to shake throughout my entire talk despite my telling them that the rest of me is not nervous and they shouldn't be either. And besides nobody can see them anyway. What have they got to be nervous about?

But I digress.

Yesterday a member of the branch presidency asked me if I would be willing to speak in sacrament some time. I told him (in a long-winded round about way, as I am wont to do) that I would willing to do so.

With that said, I was not given a time-frame. Nor was I assigned a topic. So all I know is that I have heaps of time to convince my knees there is nothing to be nervous about. Nothing at all.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

There's not much I miss about Texas, to be frank. My family. Amazing barbecue food. Tex-Mex. But, after hearing this story on NPR, I felt a sense of nostalgia for the people of Texas. Sometimes I really would like to live near people like that. Even better, I'd like to be a person like that.




And on an unrelated note, I adored The Dark Knight, and I think we'll try to see it again next week.

My flat is so cold...

Everyone in unison: How cold is it?

Okay, I've mentioned before that it's cold here. But I think that needs a bit more explanation. First of all, it's not so much the temperature outside that makes me whine about the cold. I rarely whined about the cold when I lived in Utah, and it was certainly much colder on a day to day basis than it is here in Dunedin.

The thing is, the houses are just not built the same here. How are they built?

• Most houses do not have insulation. None.
• Most windows are drafty. Very drafty. When our curtains are closed, you can see them move as the wind blows.
• Lots of buildings are quite old and therefore very inefficient to heat.
• Central heat? Almost nobody has it. Rooms are heated room-by room with various types of heaters. Natural gas isn't really used here much. Space heaters are almost all electric. There are also propane heaters. They are quite cheap to run, but there are side-effects (smell of propane, excessive moisture, inefficient).

So, when I say it's cold, I don't mean so much that the temperature is especially low. I just mean that it is cold everywhere, even INSIDE!

In fact, usually when I leave for seminary in the morning I bundle up only to get outside and realize it is warmer outside than inside. People warned me this would be the case, but because it doesn't make any sense, I believed they were making it up or perhaps exaggerating.

How do we stay warm?

• Hot showers. The only problem is that when you get into the hot shower your feet burn because they are so cold.
• Layers. I am currently wearing: regular socks, wool socks, and wool slippers (for my feet). Skivvies, polyprops (called longjohns in the States), and jeans (for my legs). Skivvies, a turtleneck sweater and wool coat (for my upper half). Fingerless gloves so I can use my laptop's mouse while I work. And I often wear a hat as well.
• Hot water bottles. Seriously, I'm cuddling one right now.
• We have one electric heater that we try to never, ever use.
• We have a propane heater. We try not to use it too much either because of aforementioned side effects.
• The sun warms the flat pretty nicely. The problem is that we only get the morning sun, which isn't as warm. AND that the sun hasn't been out in a little while.
• Two duvets (comforters) and a fleece blanket on the bed. Plus we have electric blankets that were very generously given to us from the Bowens when they moved back to Utah.
  

There you have it. It's cold outside. It's cold inside. But we manage to stay warm nonetheless.