A minor obsession...

I've always preferred tea over coffee.  My dad never liked coffee, and still doesn't to this day.  My mom will drink it, but not as obsessively as a lot of people in America seem to.  I've been drinking tea since I was pretty young; my mom would make it for me any time I had a stomach ache. Today, it's almost soothing for me to drink it.  

I'm trying not to drink much soda and sugary drinks.  I never buy soda when I go grocery shopping.  I try to only drink it when I go out to eat.  I drink 3 things at home; milk, water, and tea.  I keep variety in my drinking habits by buying a whole bunch of different kinds of tea.  My favorites so far are lemon and vanilla :)

Hot tea is good when I'm home and I have time to let it cool off, but not when I have a half-hour break at work and I need to go to Tim Hortons and have a quick bite to eat.  I began ordering fresh brewed iced tea, and now it's all I ever order when I go there to eat.  It's refreshing, and even though I get it sweetened they don't overwhelm the drink with sugar.  I got an iced mocha once...It just didn't compare.  

My fascination with iced tea didn't start there.  I used to get tea lot in the coffee shop in the Buffalo State's food court.  One of the guys who used to work there would make iced tea out of the herbal teas they offered.  He was one of my favorite employees of Sodexo.  I was hooked...until he didn't work there and none of the other employees knew how he did it.  I was very upset, but I still had my hot vanilla red tea to keep me happy.

I went with my boyfriend last week to his house out in the boonies.  He had to get braces checked out and I was able to go with him since I worked early the day we went and worked late the day we went back to Buffalo.  His mom had bought me a bunch of tea when I was staying at their house once because I was sick and she knew I liked it.  She gave all that tea to be to bring back to Buffalo, along with some Lipton cold-brew iced tea packets.  I was super excited when I saw this and made it right when I got home.  I've been drinking it nonstop ever since.  

My birthday is coming up, and I asked for an iced tea maker.  I'm reeeeally hoping I get one.  There's just nothing more refreshing than fresh brewed iced tea.  It tastes so much cleaner than soda and non-real fruit juice.  Ever since I've started drinking a bunch of the iced tea from Tim Hortons, I can't get myself to drink fountain iced tea from restaurants.  It has a weird, tangy taste to it.  

I'm happy about my new obsession.  It's definitely a healthy obsession.  It keeps me hydrated and won't burn my insides like soda can.  Also, there's no calories.  Yay for healthy drinks.  I do have a strong sweet tooth though, and I can't seem to drink tea without some sort of sweetener in it.  Maybe I'm just a southern girl at heart and need sweet tea flowing through me.  Either way, it's delicious and everyone should drink more fresh brewed iced tea.  

An Age of Awesome...

It's been a really long time since I've played a game that really grabbed onto me and kept me playing for days and days on end. I thought I found one last year when Ben got me Final Fantasy XIII for me for my birthday. While I enjoyed it, the game was a bit linear and held my interest for a while, but not for the entirety of the game. I liked it, but it did not become one of my favorite games.

I did not get Dragon Age when it first came out. I had heard good things about it, but living on a part-time retail salary keeps me from buying games all the time. A few months ago I finally decided to get it, and since I kept hearing such good things I made sure not to play it until I was done with all my school work for the semester. Good thing I waited so long because once I started, I didn't stop.

I'm a big fan of the LOTR series, both the books and the movies, and this game reminded me of the movies right away. An epic adventure against a great evil that would destroy everything unless properly taken care of. A typical scenario that led to greatness. I was glad my main character had a decent amount of personalization. I knew I could play the game more than once and not get bored since I would be trying to create a different type of person throughout the game play. For my first play through, I made a good elven mage. I'm currently working on a good (yet sometimes sassy) human rogue and an evil dwarven warrior.

The characters in this game are amazing. You can tell a lot of work was put into creating characters, their stories, and the voice acting. Once I met Alistair, I fell in love. He was definitely one of the best characters in the game; a silly, yet noble warrior. There was not one character who was badly created within this game. Each playable character is given a specialization from the start, but the player still has control on how each character ultimately turns out. You are able to customize each character and make them specialize in certain fighting style or magic use. A character can be different through each play-through.

I also love a game with choices, and this game is loaded with them. You chose everything. You chose what your character will say and what your character will do in each situation. The different choices that are made affect the people and places around you. All the choices that are made ultimately determine what the ending will be as well. I had to sit and think quite a few times in order to decide which side to take or how to answer someone I was talking to. If you want things to turn out one way, you better hope you're reacting in a way that will help you get what you want. It killed me whenever I chose something that made Alistair upset with my character.

It's a good thing I wasn't in school when I got the game. I would have failed out of college. I spent a good few months playing though this game. I only took a few breaks. I bought a few other games that took up my time for a little while. I also would stop once I realized I was getting headaches from staring at the TV screen too long.

I sadly do not have any of the downloadable content at the time, but I do plan on buying it all. I need to get some more money coming in before I can buy the many different additional stories I need to play.

It's now almost March, and I decided to get myself a birthday present: Dragon Age II. The game comes out a day before my birthday. I already preordered and paid for my game. I very much plan on waiting on line for the midnight release and barely getting any sleep the day it comes out. I'll also be pretty miserable that day since I'll be going home for a few days. My mind will be occupied by other things, but deep down inside the gamer will be pleading with me to go back to Buffalo and continue playing Dragon Age. I'm beyond excited to finally start playing this. I need to play and beat this game before I start graduate school.

I played the demo for this game and I'm already impressed. It's a new and improved version of the old. Faster paced fighting, better graphics, and the ability to keep conversations flowing like normal people (like in Mass Effect).

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of March 8th. That day will be bringing me much good in my life.

Steering away from the regular...

I work part-time in retail, so I'm not exactly making the big bucks at the moment. I like to play with food and make new and exciting things, but for now I need to keep things simple until I get a different job and get enough money to really experiment and go all out with my cooking experiments.

For now, I stick with simple improvements to my dishes. It's easy and I still get to experiment. I've found a few tricks that give my meals a slight kick out of the ordinary meal box.

I've discovered that adding an extract to hot cocoa mix gives it an awesome flavor that ordinary hot cocoa just can't achieve. I've only tried it with two different extracts: vanilla and almond. Vanilla is essential for baking so of course I have it on hand, and I needed almond to make my delicious rainbow cookie cake. I have them both on hand but I don't use them very often. Nothing makes a cold winter night bearable more than a nice cup of hot cocoa, so I've been keeping it on hand. While making it one night, I saw my almond extract and decided to add a drop of it to my cocoa to see how it would taste. I was delightfully pleased. I tried vanilla the next time I had hot cocoa, but I thought the almond gave the cocoa a much more enjoyable flavor kick.

I've decided my favorite potato is the red potato. I buy them all the time instead of other kinds of potatoes. They're small and I've always been a fan of potato skins and they have the best tasting ones. I was bored of just boiling them in salt water, so I decided to add a little kick to them, Once I'm done boiling them I drain them, put the stove on medium and put them back in the pot. I drizzle a bit of olive oil over them and sprinkle them with dried basil (one day I'll experiment with fresh herbs). It's such a simple addition but it definitely makes the potatoes much more special. I've made them for Ben several times and he loves them.

I've gotten bored with regular sandwiches as well, so I like to make my own little versions of quesadillas for lunch. They sell corn tortillas at Aldis that are pretty gross when you don't do anything to them, but have a nice crisp to them when you fry them. I usually just add shredded cheese and some form of meat to them and have this for lunch instead of a regular sandwich. I plan on playing with more ways to make them in the future.

Until the day comes that I can make extravagant meals every night, I'll stick with finding little tricks to make simple yet wonderful improvements to my food.

On another note, I plan on making lemon cupcakes with strawberry frosting tomorrow :). I'll let you all know how they come out.

A Possible New Path...

I went through many different career path changes in the past few years. I had many different ideas about what I could do with the rest of my life, but most of the time I realized that I'd get sick of it after a while. The one goal I settled on is not doing well in the job market. I'd love to be a children's librarian, but my cousin Megan does this already and told me it's not worth my time and money. I've heard a lot of bad things about the job market of public libraries. I don't want to spend half of my life unemployed and struggling to find a job I will like.

I've been thinking a lot lately. My ultimate goal is to become a novelist, but I know I cannot rely on this alone. I love books. I love reading. I love all forms of fiction. Unfortunately, there just aren't too many jobs out there that rely solely on these. A new idea has recently come to me, but I'm still not 100% sure if I am willing to do this. If I want literature to always be a huge part of my life, I can get my doctorate in some form of literature and spend my life being a professor, teaching the literature I enjoy most, and writing lots of papers about it.

I didn't take college as seriously as I should have. If I put my heart and soul into it, I could have gotten As in all my literature classes. Either way, I got my degree in something I truly enjoy. Getting a doctorate will be a LOT of work on my part. I will have to dedicate myself to this and be okay with being overworked and overly-tired in the future. If I do go through with it though, I'll never have to push my love for literature aside for work and will always be doing something related to one of the most important parts of my life.

Not gonna lie, it would be cool to be (I think) the first in my family to have a doctorate. Dr. Aug has an interesting ring to it. Feel free to post your thoughts and opinions. Hopefully soon I'll decide if this is what I truly want to do.

The Rainbow Cookie Cake...

I love rainbow cookies, and my friend JT loves them as well. They are more easily found in the NYC area of New York. I was extremely disappointed to discover they were nearly impossible to find in the Buffalo area. You could easily find a dozen at the nearest Stop and Shop on Long Island, but you'll never spot them in the Wegmans or Tops up here in Western NY. I was very upset and told my Western NY friends of this deliciously almondy, moist cake-like cookies that did not exist in this area.

When I met a friend who loved them as much as I did, we made it our goal to find these cookies. JT was the one to finally find them in a small bakery about 20 minutes from where I live. We were in rainbow cookie heaven.

I read several cooking blogs, and came across a recipe for Rainbow Cookie cake (Always Order Dessert). At the time of discovery, I was unable to make it cause I lacked the right tools and recipes: 3 9" cake pans, a box grater, and the key ingredient almond paste. Lucky for me, I got the pans for Christmas, I bought the box grater for $4, and JT found a bakery near his job that sells almond paste by the pound. We set a date and made the cake.

Though I looked confident as I gathered all the ingredients and assembled the cake and JT did the dirty work, I was nervous about how the cake would come out. My few epic failures have come from baking, not cooking. I would have been devastated if I couldn't handle this cake. The process wasn't difficult, but I was still afraid to waste all the deliciousness in front of me. We put the cake in the oven and waited for the results...

I'm very messy when it comes to using flour.

After the cake was done baking, everything looked cook. The almond smell that consumed my apartment was heavenly. The cakes themselves did not get stuck inside the pans. All was going well.

Once we finsihed icing this bad boy we were ready to dig in. It was torture waiting for the cake to cool so we could frost it and dig in. I've frosted a cake before when it was still warm. Did not work out well at all. The final product looked gorgeous and luckily enough, it tasted just as good as it looked. The cake was a little dry, but that was our fault since we ate dinner and watched a bunch of The Big Bang Theory in the middle of preparing the cake. We should have just eaten first. I'll definitely be making this cake again in the future. JT wanted to do this every other week...but we'd sweel up real quickly is we ate that much cake.

Another New Year...

Happy New Year!!

A new year has come once again and everyone celebrated its arrival. Everyone sets new goals for the new year and hope that they will follow through until the end. I know a lot of times people fall through with their plans unfortunately, but life has a bad habit of taking over.

I was never one to set New Year's resolutions. If I ever had any, it was because of some project we would have after the new years began in grade school. They were the typical "be a better person" or "do better in school". Yadda Yadda. This year I want to be different though. This is the year my real life begins. I have graduated from college and now start a new phase of life. This new phase started a little before the new year, but this year I want to make a difference in my own life. I have a lot of plans

Now, I'm writing this post on the 8th and not the 1st. I think If I started too early I would have cursed myself into not following through with anything. My friend told me not to start anything on the first. It's superstition, but I can be paranoid. Here are my resolutions:

I want to finally begin writing and have a short story published by the end of this year.

I know I want to be a novelist, but I have been lacking in the whole writing process. Can't become a writer without actually writing. I'm being quite lenient. I only want to start getting my name out there. One story published isn't that big of a deal if I want to become known, but it's a start. I already have some ideas for writing projects and I will be beginning them shortly. I plan on actually using my story and poem notebooks that I purchased over a year ago.

I want a to get a decent job.

My current job is not terrible, but it's mentally exhausting. Retail is difficult and since you need to deal with every type of person; the good and the bad. I did just get a promotion, but I definitely do not come home feeling accomplished everyday. I want a job I feel decent about at the end of the day. I know I still need to go through grad school, and if I had the stamina to possibly get my doctorate. I will not be beginning my career yet, but I will not simply be doing retail by the end of the year.

I want to figure out myself/my life...somewhat.

I decided that I wanted to become a children's librarian a while ago, but I need to change that if I do not want to struggle with jobs in the future. I need to figure out what I will be happy doing with the rest of my life. As much as I'd simply like to write fiction for the rest of my life, it's not a good idea to rely solely on that as income. I need something else, and once I decide that I can figure out what to get my Masters in and that possible doctorate. I also want to figure myself out, clearly not all in a year now. I want to see what makes me happy and what will keep me happy in the future. I can't figure this out all in one year. The rest of my life would be quite dull if I figured everything out at the age of 23.

I want to make sure I read every other day.

I love to read, but I haven't been doing it much lately. I have a kindle with a bunch of books on it that I need to read. Reading will also keep my imagination fueled for my own writing.

Let's get the typical resolution out of the way...I want to get into decent shape.

I'm not overweight or anything, but if I start perfecting my body now I will keep it that way in the future. I don't want to completely give up on myself after I start reproducing. I want to eat better and find out what kind of work out regiments I like the best. Part of me wants to start running, but I've always hated running. It would definitely be a challenge though. I also want to teach myself to cook a few vegetarian meals. Not eating meat all the time would be a plus. I also want to learn how to get as many fruits and veggies in my life that I can. I'll learn which ones I like...and maybe how to cook the ones I don't like so that I can enjoy them. The more the merrier.

I want to experiment more with my cooking.

I've already fallen into the habit of making the same things over and over again and I haven't even been cooking for myself for a year. I want to make sure I try new things and teach myself everything I can on my own about cooking and baking. Two near-future dishes will be rainbow cookie cake and beef stew :)

One more thing...I want to actually update this blog and get more followers.

I started this blog to get myself writing on a regular basis and I've been failing miserably lately. I plan to turn that around though.

Well, there you have it. My first year of taking resolutions seriously. Keep reading to find out how well I stick to them throughout the year of 2011.

A true masterpiece...

What was the start of all this?

When did the cogs of fate begin to turn?

Perhaps it is impossible to grasp the answer now,

From deep within the flow of time...

But for a certainty back then,

We loved so many yet hated so much,

We hurt others and we hurt ourselves...

Yet even then we ran like the wind,

Whilst our laughter echoed,

Under cerulean skies....

-Chrono Cross, PSX

I've been playing a lot of original Playstation games lately. I've been craving some of the mid generation games that I've always loved to play. My favorite game from this generation, and probably of all time, is Chrono Cross. Everything about this game attracted me: the story, the characters, the graphics. I've played a few RPGs on the Xbox 360 and haven't really been that impressed (I did just recently start playing Dragon Age and I guess I must admit I'm addicted to that game). Not many games have been able to grab onto me like this game has.

I've learned I'm a fan of the older generations of games, at least when it comes to RPGs. All the reasons I like this game pretty much sums up how these older RPGs are much better in quality than they are today. I miss when games had no voice acting. The only thing that accompanied the actions of the characters were the words that popped up on the screen. Chrono Cross came out during the time that games were starting to delve more into voice acting, but the makers of CC decided to keep their players reading instead of listening.

Each of the 42 characters had their own personalities. Many of these personalities are aided by the variety of accents given to the characters. Most of the characters have their own diverse way of talking. The heroine, Kid, speaks with a slight Australian accent, calling people "mate" and telling her enemies that she'll "kick their arses so hard they'll kiss the moons". Harle speaks with a French accent with the occasional French words and phrases gives a nice dash of sass to her character. Of course these accents can easily be done by voice actors, but it will always sound perfect when you're reading it to yourself.

One thing that will butcher a game for me is terrible voice acting. If the voices of the characters don't fit the actual characters and are just bad at acting out the certain situations, it makes me want to turn off the game and hide it in a dark corner forever. When you read, your mind takes over and forms your own version of the way a character speaks and acts. This is all ruined if the character is given an actual voice and the actor plays the part terribly. A character can be ruined by an actual voice. Part of the beauty of older games was reading whatever needed to be said. Players are able to interpret a character into the best they can be because they are partially formed within the person playing the game.

Something else that seems to be dying in the newer generations of RPG games is the silent protagonist. Since voice acting is almost a staple in games today, the silent protagonist becomes and unrealistic part of the scenario. If everyone else around the main character has a voice, there is no reason for him/her not to speak as well. Some games still hold onto it, but it seems to be a part of video games that is slowly dying. Silent protagonists gave the game developers a challenge. They had to give a character a personality through actions alone. The actions and choices are the only attributes that will give this character a bit of their own personality. The rest of the personality is up to the gamer himself. With silent protagonists, the gamer is able to create the character. A gamer can feel their own presence within the silent protagonist since they never speak themselves. I've always been a huge fan of the silent protagonist in Chrono Cross, Serge. I was able to make him into the ideal man for the situation he found himself in. The player knows something has gone wrong during the one part of the game where Serge gains a voice (well, text technically). He was a silent protagonist that was able to take his players and keep them interested in this magnificent game.

Even though Chrono Cross was one of the later original Playstation games, the makers chose to keep voice acting out when many other games were using this along with or instead of text. Now, it is hard to find a new game without voice acting, and as long as it is done well I can enjoy it. I will always have a soft spot for the more retro games though. No matter how amazing new games are, I will always be able to pull out my PS2 and enjoy playing Chrono Cross, as well as many other older games that existed before the mandatory voices were placed within video games.