11:08 AM

Desserts!

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So, here's my little experiment with something called cookie cake pie that I tried out for a housewarming BBQ I had with friends this past weekend. I saw the idea on a website, and thought what a great idea it was. I mean, I love cake, I love cookies, and I love pie, so why not have a pie where the filling is made up of cookie and cake? Someone out there is truly a genius!

The cookie base that I used was my usual chocolate chip cookie dough, but minus the chocolate chips. One of my friends who would be partaking of the pie is allergic to caffeine. I frosted it with a cream cheese icing, and the whole thing was a huge sugar rush when eaten. You wind up with a lot of left over cookie dough and cake batter, so I ended up making some cupcakes and cookies with those. I added chocolate chips to the cookies since the hubby likes them better that way.


Our house is shoved full of sweets now though. A friend of mine brought at 5lb strawberry rhubarb pie to the party too. I love strawberry rhubarb pie, but sometimes there really IS such a thing as too much of a good thing.

12:00 PM

Thwarted!

I think I mentioned in previous posts that the lady we bought the house from left us a lot of furniture. Some of it has been very useful, and some of it we really just had to get rid of. One such item that we were originally planning to get rid of was a plaid couch that looked like it was right out of the 70's. As an added touch, the lady left a mangy stuffed lion on the couch for us as well, and that was bound for the trash heap too.

That is, until our cats discovered them. Within a few days of us moving in, they had adopted the couch, and the lion, as their own. When there were boxes filling the office, only one cat could get on the couch at a time - but no longer! Behold!
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And so, there go our plans of ditching the couch and the lion. We'll probably get the couch reupholstered in the days to come.

10:34 PM

Enforced Sick Days

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling under the weather. I had a bit of a fever, a cough, and body aches. Figuring that I work in a hospital with lots of not-so-healthy people around, I decided not to go to work. I thought I could just rest lots, drink plenty of fluids, and then report back to work on Wednesday. Turns out, it's not that simple. I showed up to work today and was told that because my symptoms were flu-like, I had to go check in with Occupational Health to get the all-clear from them to return to work. I was thinking "I'm feeling mostly fine, they'll just take my temperature and then I can just get back to work".

Wrong.

Thanks to H1N1, the rules for what they send you home for have changed. Before, it was just fever WITH vomiting or diarrhea. Now, they can send you home for just a fever, cough, or any sort of respiratory problem. I told the nurse that, while I did have a fever on Tuesday, it was gone that evening. She even took my temperature right there, and I was fine. But, the rules are that I can't be at work until 48 hours have passed since my fever ended. She also had to take some swabs to send for testing. Let me tell you, nose swabs hurt! I had no idea they had to go so deep with them.

So, the conclusion of this story is that I am now not allowed to go to work until they phone me with the results of my tests - even though I feel fine now. The nurse suspected that will probably be Monday.

Extra long weekend!!