Halloween Cupcakes!

I will begin this post by saying I was a little too ambitious this year with cupcakes. I just spent the last 5 hours making these beautiful baked goods (okay there was an hour break for dinner but still) My hands hurt, I have several burns, and my kitchen is a disaster. But I think it was worth it because I had a ton of fun! 

First up, some cupcakes for the office tomorrow. I made Red Velvet cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting....

With a little bloody glasses added on top!

Of course its not real. I made sugar glass. It was very stressful. Basically you mix sugar and water and boil it for a very long time until the temperature reaches 300F. Then you quickly pour it in a pan and reharden it. Smashing it up was my favorite part. 

Hopefully everyone gets a kick out of it. I am making a little sign that says "WARNING: Food Safety Hazard, eat at own risk!" 

Second up was cupcakes for the party I am going to tomorrow night. I made double fudge cupcakes with a milk chocolate frosting. And I made white chocolate spider webs to go on top.

I think they look pretty cool

But more importantly taste amazing.

Well thats all for me today. I am extremely exhausted from my cupcake adventures and I need all my energy for tomorrow! 

Oh and I am on day 4 of no TV! I missed a ton of shows tonight, including How To Get Away With Murder which is one of my new favorites. 

No tv day 3: pumpkin carving!

Well still avoiding TV for the week. So I missed the World Series (and don't care). 

Instead, my coworker and I decided to get in the halloween spirit and carve pumpkins! 

So we headed to our local pumpkin patch. 

It was dark so pictures aren't that good.

My coworker was more ambitious then me and carved this.

That's a pumpkin in a pumpkin.

Here's mine

I also spent a lot of time laying with her cat, Nittany (she went to penn state too) 

And her bunny

Tomorrow is cupcake baking time! Get ready for some crazy ones if all goes to plan! 

Shows I missed: Arrow, Nashville, american horror story...I can't remember what else...

No TV Week!

I have been watching WAY too much TV since I moved to Bakersfield. It's basically all I do on weekdays when I'm not at work. I decided I need to take a break. We use to have no TV weeks when I was in elementary school, but I never actually did them. But! This week I am not watching at TV or Netflix. The netflix part is going to be harder. 

Tonight, since I did not watch TV I was able to:

1. Cook an awesome meal while listening to a podcast titled "Can you live without a Refrigerator?" 
2. Sweep the half an inch of dust the accumulated on my balcony during this weekend's dust storms and prune back my crazy plants. 
3. Write this blog post about not watching TV.
4. I am going to spend the rest of my night practicing piano because I got a nice electronic piano from Goodwill.
5. I also have a really good new book called Proxy that I am going to read on my now-clean balcony.

Shows I will be missing tonight: Gotham, watching Bar Rescue and Once Upon a Time from last night. 

Let's see if I can make it the whole week! 

Overly ambitious bike ride

Today was perfect weather (as usual) and I got a bit ambitious to see how far the bike path by my apartment goes. So I hopped on my bike and took off westward 

Well 10 miles out and I still hasn't found the end. Just endless wasteland 

But Ide used to keep on truckin! So I went another 10 miles. 

Aaaaand still no end. I decided to not kill musc so I turned around a biked home, defeated. I ended up doing just under 40!! miles today in 3 hours and 6 minutes. And now I can't get off my couch. 

I'm off to eat everything in my kitchen. According to my biking app, I burn 858 calories on my quest to find where the bike path ends. 

That's like 4 Haagen Dasz bars. 

Time to move

Just saw a tarantula by my stairs. Too dark/I'm not going near that thing for a picture. Time to call up my boss and tell her I'm moving 20,000 miles away. 

Add this to the list of coyotes, vultures, and snakes I've seen and this is a slightly terrifying place to live.

The hummingbirds are cool though. I like them. 

Some Desert Hockey

So there's a minor league hockey team in the middle of the desert, who knew? I went to game with a couple coworker's tonight and it was actually a lot of fun.

Sadly the condors lost 3-2. But there were 7!!!! Fights in the game. The refs had no control. It was basically boxing on ice. We loved every minute.

Old and the new

Parked next to an old beetle today. Oh how times change. 

Hiking in Hollywood

I took a trip down to LA to hang out with my high school friend, Cameron. It was a beautiful day to go hiking, but every day is beautiful here. I often forget it's mid-October and not July. 

Our first stop was to IKEA because I wanted some lights for my apartment. It was fun to walk around and sit in all the living rooms and such. It was the same IKEA where (500) days of summer was filmed, so I liked that. Also I got to try Swedish meatballs. 

We hiked up to Griffith Observatory, which contains a bunch of hige telescopes that observe the sun. 

It was a pretty intense hike for just outside LA. I was very surprised the bleached blonde starving artists could handle it. And it was ambitious for me since I was very sore from my soccer game last night (we got our first loss, very sad) 

There were familiar sights along the way 

And once we got to the top it was awesome.

It was really hazy today and hot. There hasn't been rain in LA in a few months. It's weird we were so close to the ocean and couldn't see it through the smog.

Hiking worked up a appetite so we went to a cool place called Stout 

We got amazing burgers and onion rings. Perfect post-hiking meal! 

I loved driving back and forth (just an hour and half drive) in my new beetle. It was my baby cars first road trip and I loved it! 

Another work week is ahead of me. My friend and I are planning a big adventure for next weekend so stayed tuned! 

Thrift Shopping

Turns out Bakersfield has some pretty awesome thrift shops. I went with two of my friends downtown to try to find halloween costumes. We discovered this cave of wonders 

I can't begin to describe the amazing and strange things we found in our two hours in this store. I should have taken more pictures of our amazing finds. Like this one: 

They had a whole vintage costume shop in the back of the store. It was filled with old showgirl costumes from Vegas.

They were very tempting. We sadly didn't find anything to buy, a lot of the cooler costumes were out of our price range. But we still had a ton of fun trying on all the ridiculous stuff. 

Cooking lesson with my team!

KLast week I was in Oakland with my co-workers for an off-site meeting. It was nice to meet all of marketing and our corporate partners, but the best part was our "team building" activity: cooking lessons in Berkley at a place called Kitchen on Fire. 

We made a full French meal under the teachings of Chef Olive (seriously). He was a crazy french man who collaborated with UC Berkley microbiologists, chemists, and nuclear physicists (seriously) to make the best food and teach his students the science behind cooking. Since we are all food scientists, it was a perfect evening. 

The food was amazing. And I don't even like french food. 

We made zucchini and tomatoe gratin

Some chicken dish (wasn't paying attention to what It was, other then delicious)

Stewed carrots with grilled skirt steak 

An apple plum tart 

The whole meal looked and tasted amazing.

Add in all the French wine, and it was a great way to complete a long day of troubleshooting our teams biggest issues and arguing with marketing. 

The day ended with a group trip to the hotel bar for a night cap. 

Overall it was a great trip. My favorite part may be that I saw rain for the first time in 2 months. It's weird how much I miss it. 

During the meeting I got two new projects, so it looks like everyone will get to see a Katie-developed product in March! If everything goes to plan, which it never does. 

Earthquake Drill

Just another part of living in California 

Parents weekend

Mom and Dad came to SoCal this weekend to visit (and help me buy a car) We ate a lot of good food, including Caribbean tapas, steak, and Mexican. Saturday was the best, with a trip up to Sequioa Forest (second time in three weeks for me!)

We saw the biggest tree in the world by volume. I still wasn't that impressed. Neither was Dad. 

We saw lot of big trees....again.

We went to Moro Rock, which was 350 steps and around 7,000 feet above sea level at the very top. It was quite a struggle up. The air was thin and it was in direct sunlight. 

But I think it was worth it. 

You can sorta see the road we took up to the top of the mountain winding through the trees. I got really nauseous. It was like a 45 minute roller-coaster.

Dad was taking in the views 

Here is mom and I at the very top! (Dad fell behind)

Mom and Dad got a rare photo together. 

By the way, that blue sky? That's every day here. 

Here is me putting up my diamond for Penn State THON! 

We did some more talking through the forest. It smelled so good. Because I live in the city with the worst air quality in America, I really appreciate clean air now. 

Oh and Dad got to drive under a fallen tree.

Afterward I got to relive childhood and have my parents at my soccer game. We won, but I didn't play well at all because I was tired from the day in the forest. 

More dreams coming true

I've always wanted a VW Beetle. And now this baby is mine!

Lab Clean Out Find

Today we cleaned out our lab, and found lots of interesting ingredients. My personal favorite was 100lbs of sprinkles. 

Just another part of working in an ice cream factory. 

I work with fun people

So this appeared on my desk today for no reason:

 And they said scientists don't have fun 

Classes They Should Teach in College (But Don't)

This week I have been dealing with my first real work crisis. As I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off, I have realized that in college I took some really useless classes (intro to guitar, racket ball, physics) and missed out on some key learnings that would be useful at work. So I have some ideas for better college classes. 

1. How to Make People Respond To Your Emails 101
Half of my emails are asking people if they recieved the previous email. All of my phone calls about asking people if they recieved the email asking if they recieved the previous email. 

2. Intro to Managing Your Schedule
There is a big difference between three of my friends are having parties at 11pm and I have three important meetings at 11am. Partying hopping is not a thing in corporate land and it's not cool if you show up 30 minutes late.

3. The Art of Eating Your Lunch in 10 minutes while Answering Emails
Luckily I have only done this once so far, but it resulted in ice cream all over my keyboard.

4. Corporate Abbreviations as a Second Language
I'll have your PO once the NPM is back from PTO and log it into NPDI for NDIC under the NIMS tab.
Okay....thanks?

5. Basics of Talking to People Outside Your Company
How much am I suppose to tell people about projects? I need help but can't actually talk about the specifics. Cool.
Excuse me, I need 100lbs of your chocolate chips but I can't give you a reason. I just need them. 

I am sure I can come up with more, but I had to bring work home with me and I am trying to avoid an all-nighter. Which college did prepare me for, but I have no desire to do again. 

Horror Night in Hollywood

So yesterday was an awesome day. My four coworkers and I packed up the car and did a day trip to Hollywood. First stop: Mambo's Cuban Cafe 

I had some real delicious pulled pork and my coworkers had Cubam Sandwiches. We also go the Mambo Combo which was filled with delicious Cuban snacks. Will finished it all off with Mojitos which were perfect in this October heat wave! 

This was a Diners, Drive in and dives location. We are trying to eat at as many of them as we can in coming months!! 

Next it was off to Universal studios 

Sorry for the bad quality, only had my phone and it was dark. But dark was good because we were there for Halloween Horror Nights! 

They turned all the back lots into haunted mazes based on movies like The Purge, Alien vs Predator, Dracula, and the TV show walking dead. A lot of the scare zones were on actual sets. We saw the original house from psycho, the plane crash from War of the Worlds, Whoville from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and more. All with zombies on them. 

It's opened up with The Purge, which is a movie about how the government allows people to murder others for one night  only. When the gates to the park opened, the siren blared and tons of people with chainsaws ran out and chased us! It's was fun. 

My favorite was the clown house. It was in 3D and really trippy. We couldn't see the people half the time because they were painted into the walls. I screamed the most in this house and I don't get scared easily. 

Another good one was the Dracula house, which was all mirrors. Only some of the mirrors were windows....with people behind them. 

The best part of the whole thing was the make up and costumes. They were unbelievable. Sadly I could get many good pictures. 

I got this one of a purge guy. The Walking Dead zombies were amazing but they would jump out and go away too fast.

The best was the Facepff house, which was done by a syfy show that is a horror makeup competition show. They had a zombie DJ and people running everywhere on stilts and in the walls. The costumes were crazy awesome. 

There was a lot of waiting on lines but we kept ourselves busy with snacks, like this crazy Simpsons donut. 

Afterward we had a stroll in universal city 

Overall it was a fantastically scary and fun night. I would totally recommend to anyone (except scardey cats) to go. I can't wait to go again next year! (Hopefully)