Combatting work stress with soul mochas results in some caffeine anxiety on top of work stress anxiety which all leads to headaches and neck aches and not sleeping well. Or at all.

While my Sleep Cycle app is awesome for pointing the finger at my husband or dogs for waking me up at night (at 3:30am my sleep graph says! no denying it!), its also pretty awesome at reinforcing when I feel I had hardly slept.

Like Tuesday night this week. And Wednesday. Oh and Thursday, too.

It's one thing to feel like I didn't sleep, and it's quite another to have scientific proof that I didn't sleep. It's actually not all that helpful beyond being able to say to myself, "No wonder I feel like crap."

I am declaring this weekend to be one of mental health. I will do things to increase my sanity quotient and my ability to sleep.

• go to the gym
• take the dogs to the park
• paint my toenails
• watch last week's Game of Thrones episode
• make and eat pancakes
• make pictures
• turn off work email on all of my devices
• shave my legs
• drink water
• be in bed with a book and no internet by 10:30 each night

It will be magical.

But oh man, Spring Olive is a different dog. A dog with feet! And long legs! And pigtails! And eyeballs! And... a little more chub than I remember from last fall.

Thursday

Saturday

Mitzi did not get a haircut but was very interested in all of the hullablaoo and also why is Olive getting treats? Mitzi wants treats! Mitzi is a good girl!

Mitzi also isn't allowed onto the furniture and it was extremely difficult to get her up onto the bench. Once she was there it took a lot of treats and praise to get her out of the ears-back-eyes-wide-OMG-I'm-going-to-be-in-so-much-trouble look.

Thursday

Saturday

And then I made Donovan sit for me for TWO MINUTES OH MY GOD even though he's not doing anything with his hair this week. It was a traumatizing experience as one might as expect. Because teenagers.

The morning flight left at 6:00am. Let's do some backwards scheduling on that:
boarding at 5:30am;
arrive at the airport between 4:30 and 5:00am;
leave the house 4:15am;
wake up 3:30am;
go to sleep 8:30pm for at least 7 hours of sleep;
in bed with a book before 8:00pm.

I did some hard core preparations that involved a light dinner, sleeytime tea, a hot shower, some melatonin, and an eye mask.

I'm surprised it worked so well, but that 3:30 wake up time was brutal even with setting all of the alarms.

One of my first stops in Nome was for coffee. I'm not certain if the mocha tasted so good because I really needed it or because it was made well, but I didn't care. It was enough.

I got my first glance of the (icy) Arctic Ocean, and got to see Nome's annual tree forest of discarded Christmas Trees. I didn't see any wild muskox, but I did meet some wonderful people.

I flew back that night was home by 10:30pm, which made for a very very long day and I'm still recovering. If I get the chance to go again I will make it an overnight trip.

There was very little stress to the day compared to the day previous: the snow had stopped falling, the sun came out, and I didn't have to wrestle a muzzle onto Olive so that the vet could listen to her wheezing bronchitis.

I spent the morning at the coffee shop with Steve, and read about a funny camera trick using a plastic bag and you know I was right on top of that.

Like the day previous, I donned my hat and my boots, left off my snow pants and opted for fleece lined leggings instead: the height of Alaskan winter fashion. I wrapped some plastic wrap around my lens and walked to Jewel Lake, making dreamy snowscape photos along the way.

We started the holiday by dropping our car off at the body shop to fix damage from a few weeks ago (who, incidentally, had the car the entire week prior and didn't even do ONE SINGLE THING to fix the car and, oh, the words that were exchanged, and promises finally made to provide us with a free rental car for the next week while they for reals and seriously fixed our car).

Then we had a struggle with the rental car place who had "upgraded" us to a minivan that was so useless in the snow that it wouldn't even make it out of the rental car's parking lot.

After finally getting downgraded back to a sedan with actual weight over the front-wheel-drive tires, we headed to the vet to get Olive some cough medicine where they played "soothing nature sounds" over speakers in the exam room that included SNARLING RAVENOUS WOLVES. Which Olive found incredibly soothing.

After that extremely exciting Seward's Day morning of happy adventure time, I pulled on my boots and my hat and took my camera for a blizardy walk.

The trail was so quiet and empty I was kicking myself for not bringing the dogs and exercising the heck out of them in the deep snow. Until my eyes identified and followed some moose tracks right to a pair of moose covered by snow blankets.

And then I realized I, too, was slowly being covered by a snow blanket. And I was tempted to sit down on the trail and just enjoy the gorgeous snow and quiet woods with the moose pair.

Husbands are AWESOME.

It has a really fun fisheye Instagram-esque-filter look to it, but it's all old school with an actual vintage peep hole removed from a door at Habitat for Humanity ReStore screwed into a PVP pipe cover with a hole drilled into it with a Dremel.

It's pretty ridiculous looking and completely obvious on the camera. The super wide angle of the peep hole means I have to get extremely close to my subject. I took it to Friday night's Marian Call concert and had a lot of fun getting inside people's personal bubbles with it.

Took the dogs for a walk along the ice floes at Pt. Woronzof
Made some pictures
Ate waffles with peanut butter
Laundered all of the blankets
Laundered all of the curtains
Vacuumed the bedroom, and the floor around Mitzi's bed twice
Gave myself a manicure
Watched a movie I selected on my own
Read in a sunbeam
Fell asleep with my glasses on

Steve and I took the dogs to Pt. Woronzof for an afternoon walk today. The sun was gorgeous and had a hint of warmth, and I love all of the ice floes this time of year, some of which are bigger than a car.

The ice above the tideline was hard packed and great for walking along the shore, but below the tideline it was very slushy, like walking through a giant sno cone. Mitzi and I had a difficult time getting back above the tideline, but all Olive was worried about was that the difficulty was delaying her trip back to the car.

First we started with some ganache frosting because it needed to cook and thicken for a few hours.

1 c heavy whipping cream
1 stick unsalted butter
⅓ c granulated sugar
¼ tsp salt
1 pound semi-sweet chocolate
¼ c double-strength brewed coffee
vanilla extract

This frosting isn't some light and chocolate-flavored butter cream frosting, this is a serious under taking. It starts with an entire pound of good quality semi sweet chocolate. Chop it up, but don't let any fall on the floor to the hovering dogs who will not stop hovering.

Put the heavy cream and butter into a pan over low heat and stir until the butter is completely melted. Remove it from the heat, and then dump in all of the one pound of chocolate and stir until completely melted. Add in the 1/4 cup double strength brewed coffee and vanilla extract (supposedly 1 tsp of vanilla, but as Donovan puts it: we don't measure vanilla in this family).

Let the whole thing cool for about two hours, or until it thickens enough to be spreadable. I sped this up by putting it in the refrigerator after an hour because I am impatient and wanted the chocolate in my mouth. Don't be like me.

Now let's get going on the cake.

2 c sugar
1.5 c flour
¾ tsp baking soda
½ t salt
4 oz good quality extra dark chocolate, chopped
1 c hot double-strength brewed coffee
2 large eggs, room temperature
½ c sour cream, room temperature
½ c vegetable oil
vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 325°F. Crisco the insides of two 9" cake pans that you received as a wedding gift from your first marriage when you were 19, then flour them. In a bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking soda and salt.

Panic because you don't have any super dark or unsweetened chocolate in the cabinet and this never happens. Who has been into the unsweetened chocolate? Throw some accusatory glances at Mitzi, the only non-adult in the house tall enough to reach that shelf in the baking cabinet.

Consider making another trip to the store, but consider the current blizzard and slushy/icy roads and pull out some semisweet chocolate chips instead. Point a finger at Mitzi and say menacingly, "This is your fault, Moodles."

She likes being called Moodles.

Whisk the chocolate into hot coffee until it's completely melted.

In the KitchenAid stand mixer, combine the eggs, oil, sour cream, and (a teaspoon and a half? whatever) vanilla. Whisk everything until combined. Stir in the chocolate and coffee mixture.

Add in the flour mixture in three batches, waiting until each batch is combined and no lumps remain before adding the next batch. Seriously, lumps are not okay. They're fine in pancakes and waffles and whatnot, but lumps do not belong in cakes. Shun. SHUN.

At this point I recommend licking the paddle. But if you're a teenager you might complain about it tasting too much like coffee, so feel free to rip it out of the teenager's hands and keep it all for yourself.

Gain some composure, and split the batter between the two cake pans that you have had for at least... do some math... 12 years. Bake for 30-35 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let the pans sit on racks for a half hour, then run a knife along the edge of the pans and remove the cakes to the wire racks and cool them complete.

But just because the toothpick comes out clean doesn't mean the cakes will come out clean. They will come out terribly unclean and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. So it is written. Have the following conversation with your husband:

"I'm throwing out this stupid cake pans. I need new ones."
"Don't we have a million cake pans?"
"No. We have three 7" cake pans and two crappy pie pans."
"So why do we need more?"
"Because I brought these into the relationship and now they are crappy."
"Why did you bring crappy cake pans into our relationship?"
"Maybe our relationship is what made them crappy."

Frost the whole sucker anyway. It won't be the prettiest cake, but there is 1.25 pounds of chocolate in it and it will make the baby Jesus cry if you let that go to waste.

Let the cake sit at room temperature for at least two hours to let the flavors combine. Overnight is even better for flavor-melding, but the baby Jesus understands two hours is enough torture as it is.

Serve in thin slices with vanilla ice cream. Melissa would have loved it.

January 18, 12:30pm. Morning interviews completed, finally had a chance for a restroom break and walked to the car for my phone. Which wasn't there. Where could it be? I ran through my memory of that morning to see if maybe I left it at home, and called Steve to look for it. He couldn't find it. I remembered speaking with Donovan on my way out the door so I'm pretty sure I had it in the car and made no stops on my way to work. I logged into Find My iPhone and got a sinking pit in my stomach to find it a few blocks away from anywhere I'd ever been that day.

January 18, 12:45pm. Talked Steve out of coming downtown to beat up random people on the Park Strip. Remotely locked the phone and sent a message that it's lost please call me at work if you find it. iPhone immediately went offline. Cue panic about the thief turning the phone off and possibly ditching it. Set the phone to completely wipe the next time it's turned on. Posted on Craigslist and set up notifications for any pink iPhone that is posted for sale. Panic panic panic.

January 18, 1:00pm. Called the police and made a report, which included a conversation with the detective about the custom pink glass isn't really a case and there's a guy in town who does it, yes it's after-market, and it's pretty neat and not too expensive and his wife would totally love it, let me get you the guy's number.

January 18, 1:30pm. Freaked out on Twitter and got super annoyed at people chastising me for not having a passcode (which I did), not tracking it via Track My iPhone (which I did), and not calling the cops (which I also did). Lesson learned: Twitter doesn't like it when you just want to vent; Twitter wants to be all This Is What You Need To Do To Solve Your Problem even if you're all Dudes I Did All That Already I'm Not An Idiot Just Validate My Feelings Already Gosh.

January 18, 6:30pm. Steve, Donovan and I donned all of our winter gear and walked up and down the Park Strip and the surrounding blocks looking in trash cans and dumpsters for the phone in case whoever had taken it ditched it. Found nothing except some empty liquor bottles and a bag of dog poo. Stopped for frozen custard on our way back home to perk ourselves up for at least trying. Doesn't really work.

January 19, 7:30am. Arrived at Eagle River High School for a JROTC event that we hadn't realized was all freaking day of sitting on bleachers. With no iPhone and no WiFi connection and nothing to do except... watch the event. And lose all feeling in my legs.

January 19, 1:00pm. Because of Things and Drama surrounding the JROTC drill team, we didn't have to stay for the entire event (yay!). Steve and I drove to the nearest AT&T store and I upgraded to the iPhone 5. In white. Mourned my custom pink glass a little more, but it felt great to be connected again.

January 19, 1:30pm. Continued to check Find My iPhone every 10 minutes for any sign of the phone connecting to the internet and all data being wiped. Phone remained offline.

January 28, 8:30pm. Discovered Craigslist post earlier in the day for a rose pink custom glass iPhone 4. Asked Google "what to do if my stolen iPhone is posted on Craigslist?" and followed its and my husband's advice to call the police. Left a message with the burglary department. Took a screenshot of the Craigslist post. Freaked out on Twitter and declined all help to hunt the Craigslist poster down and puncture her tires. Also was my birthday. Was crabby.

January 30, 9:30am. Police finally returned my call, two days after the post had been removed. Police gave no crap about the entire thing, claimed it was a 2-person department and they didn't have time to look into every Craigslist post. He told us we should have contacted the poster and pretend we were interested, and request police meet us to see the phone and verify it was mine. Also everyone in the world has custom pink glass these days, so good luck with that. Hey that would have been awesome information to have TWO DAYS AGO when the post was still live. Steve called the poster, it had already been sold. I regretted declining the help of the Twitter Horde the previous night.

January 31, 5:00pm. Went to the gym with the family. Steve got out of the passenger's seat and called me over to look at something:

January 31, 5:01pm. Felt dumb. But also relieved no one had stolen it. Posted ALL CAPS on social media to publicly process my shame.

I am excited for 2013.

It takes a lot of work and planning and sometimes you just don't want to and everyone eats frozen burritos (unhealthy) or we order pizza (unhealthy AND costly) (but oh so cheesy).

I've always done meal planning on a weekly basis, and he picked up that process really quickly: Sunday morning over pancakes and coffee we make a list of what meals we'd like to eat for the week, and then we fill out a shopping list of needed ingredients we don't already have on hand. We shop at Costco and usually have all of the staples required for any of our normal meals.

In October we decided to try making up a bunch of meals in advance, and tossing all ingredients into a gallon freezer Ziplock bag so that it's ready to pull out and throw in the crock pot any morning neither of us wants to cook.

It worked really, really well. The initial setup cost was pretty big, but subsequent weeks shopping trips were either super cheap or non-existent. Some of the meals were bland and some we just didn't like, but there are always more meals to try.

Today we restocked our freezer with bag meals, here is how we did it.

The Recipes

Last time we wrote out the recipes by hand and tallied up how many of each ingredient we would need. But this time Steve harnessed the power of the spreadsheet and made a giant sexy list of each individual recipe and their required ingredients, and automatically tallied how much of each ingredient we needed to buy and then I fell in love with him all over again because spreadsheets are sexy.

For instance, this most recent freezer-bag-making extravaganza we made 28 bags, which required 20 pounds of chicken breasts, 4 pounds of stew beef, 3 pounds of dried beans, and "lots" of potatoes, which all gets divvied up into different bags of meals.

We had the majority of the ingredients on hand, because I love having a well-stocked pantry. I wouldn't want to know what would happen if the urge for chili bacon mac and cheese or home made Belgian waffles would strike and I was out of flour, or cheese.

Who runs out of cheese? Heathens, that's who.

Then we took our list to Costco and bought everything that is possible to put into one Costco shopping cart. We had 20 pounds of chicken breasts. We had 4.5 pounds of spinach. We had canned tomatoes and canned beans and canned cream of mushroom soup. But at least we weren't the guy with a flat full of only 10 pound sugar bags and 5 gallon buckets of vegetable oil.

Chopping of All The Things

Then we got to chopping: 6 cups cubed potatoes, and 6 cups of sliced potatoes. 13 cups of chopped onions, 3 cups of chopped mushrooms, and 4 cups of chopped spinach. 6 cups of zucchini, 12 green onions, 7 bell peppers, and 14 cups each of broccoli and carrots, all chopped.

Then there's the meat: ground beef to brown, stew beef to cube, chicken breasts to chop and/or be quartered, ham to cube.

We put everything into bowls until we ran out of bowls. Then we put things in pots. And candy dishes. And anything we could get our hands on that would hold 14 cups of vegetables.

Plus all of the canned or packaged ingredients: herbs, spices, half & half, tomato sauce, vinegar, wine, rice, beans, mustard, grape jelly, olive oil, cream of chicken soup, home made chicken and vegetable stock.

Every ingredient we needed was pulled out and placed on the counter for easy access, which was basically the entire refrigerator, freezer, and pantry.

The chopping was really the bulk of the work. We didn't really consider the amount of work it would be to chop 20 pounds of chicken and 14 cups of carrots. But two hours later we were done and ready for the assembly.

Assembly

The three of us assembling two bag meals each in my kitchen was tight, but very doable as a family. There were a few instances of tripping over each other, and one bottleneck where we all needed to use the can opener to open 15 cans of canned things at the same time, so we all stood there and impatiently watched Donovan struggle with the can opener. Because COME ON WE ARE WAITING.

Despite that one bottleneck (Donovan) stopping production for a full five minutes, it was a really fun and efficient process. We ended up with extra cheese and extra cans of cream of mushroom soup, and we tended to over-measure one pound of chopped chicken, so we had to grab two more breasts from the freezer for the last few bags.

Results are the reason

The whole process took 2 hours of shopping, 3 hours of prep and 1 hour of assembly. But we ended up with 28 meals in our freezer, ready to be grabbed and thrown into the crock pot in the morning for a yummy and healthy evening meal.

My freezer is happy.

UPDATE: I have no photos of the moose poop soaps because Steve took them.

One year we made mustard and ketchup from scratch (also no photos? what?), which was damn good. This year we kept with the same spirit and made fireweed jelly and scone mix.

We spent an afternoon at Arctic Valley picking fireweed blooms while the entire rest of the Anchorage population was there picking blueberries. We had decided that we needed 8 cups of packed flowers to make enough juice for the jelly, but eyeballing that in a plastic bag isn't as easy as we had expected and so we ended up with all of the flowers in the entire valley.

Along with all of the extra cups of flowers, we also brought home four live bees. They were very friendly and happy and high on all of the pollen, swimming around in the flowers like Scrooge McDuck. This doesn't count the two or three bees I noticed at the time I picked them and proceeded to freak right out because OMG bees.

After we sorted all of the sticks and leaves and bees from the petals, we gave everything a really good rinse and then brought them to a boil in water on the stovetop. The fireweed juice was done when it turned a fantastic purple color and the petals turned grey. Then we threw the juice into the freezer to wait until we were ready to make the jelly.

Once our jars arrived, Steve and Donovan teamed up on making and canning the jelly while I took on role of photographer and shouty-director. MOVE YOUR ARM. MOVE YOUR HEAD. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU BLEW THAT SHOT. Because the photos were more important than not getting burned.

All of the extra flowers made a ton of extra juice which made for gobs of extra jelly, about three times as much as we needed for gifts. So much that Steve ran to the store in the middle of the canning to buy more jars.

Despite all of the extra work, the heat from the canning definitely went to everyone's heads and productivity waned.

Except for the dogs who never had any productivity to begin with. Mitzi plopped her giant anchor-like self into the middle of the kitchen floor to be near her pack, because being tripped over with hot jelly jars is the same as love.

Olive took the opportunity of the entire pack congregating in the kitchen to hog the entire love seat for herself. The humans didn't know what they were missing.

After the jelly was all canned and set aside, Donovan and I made scone mix bags. We bagged twenty two scone mixes, in fact.

Do you know how much butter that is? It's a lot. Good thing I always have a lot of butter in the refrigerator. Also sugar.

Meanwhile, Steve got to designing labels. The jelly jars got round labels and the scone mixes got labels with instructions. We included variations so each scone can be tailored to personal preference. Before printing I noticed that he added one un-approved variation, and he laughed at my eye to detail. We both laughed when my niece pointed out our Use By date was the wrong year.

With all of the pieces ready, we assembly-lined the packing: folded and stapled scone instructions on the bags, labels and fireweed print fabric on the jelly jars, hand-written notes on the Christmas cards, packed into boxes with brown kraft paper and bubble wrap, taped and labeled for mailing.

It was a pretty impressive amount of boxes we had ready to mail out, everywhere from as close as Homer to as far away as New Zealand. I love having loved ones all over the world.

I am really happy with how everything turned out. The jam is yummy and the scone mix is easy to make, with or without crickets. And the branding Steve did is fun and festive.

Wishing you and yours the merriest of everything this year! Now if you will excuse me, I haven't watched Muppet Christmas Carol yet today. That needs fixing.