Farewell, 2012!

You'd have to say it like "Farewell, two-thousand twelll.......ve" for it to really work but just go with it.

So, like I said I would yesterday, I'm getting back to you about Mindy Kaling's book "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns)". It was wonderful! SO many of the things she said I really connected with and now I feel like I'm best bros with Mindy, so that's pretty cool. For example, she has always had an aversion to athletic things and would rather read on the bleachers than ever participate in gym class (my life), she (obviously) loves comedy, and just doesn't know why we can't have a standard definition for the term "hooking up" (a conversation I've had with my friend G numerous times), and we have the same definition for the aforementioned term. I won't tell you what it is though, so now you have to read her book! HA! But really it's great and it's fairly short so no one has an excuse.

In other news, it's the last day of 2012, which I think is pretty great. This year was kind of weird and it'll be nice to move to a year where I can start all over, sort of. The only stupid ting is that 2013 is the grossest number ever and I'm mad that by graduating early I've moved from Class of 2014 (isn't that such a nice looking, respectable number?) to Class of 2013 (ew. just look at that 3). Aesthetics of numerals aside, I'm super pumped to be graduating a semester early. I don't know really how it happened, where I transferred and everything, but I'm certainly not complaining. Fingers crossed for jobs and other cool things!

I think that's about it for today's update. I'm cleaning my house like a madwoman trying to ring in the new year in something not so much resembling a pig sty, but one can only do so much.

Adios, friends. Adios, 2012.

'Sweezy's Back!

Woah. Okay. So. I haven't written in over a year and there are some good school-related and some not-so-good procrastination reasons for that. So overall, sorry. My b. I suck at this.

Yesterday I read Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and it was absolutely everything I hoped it would be. Ms. Fey is one of my role models and reading her story in her own words was amazing. As my family can confirm, I spent all of yesterday curled up in a chair in the corner of my grandparents' living room giggling to myself. While reading. I wasn't just sitting by myself giggling at nothing. Thanks. Anyway, read that book if you haven't already, it's great. Tonight I'll read Mindy Kaling's "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)" and I'm super excited about that too, so I'll let you know. I had to stop writing halfway through that last sentence because I realized I had left my Kindle in the car and I needed to get it before I forgot again and had to go out into two-foot snowdrifts at 3am to get it. Maine.

Anywho, things are different nowadays, I'm going to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York now, which I think I said in my last post, but that was over a year ago so who can say.
Well, turns out that by taking a second to look through my post history, I can say. I did tell you, so stop asking about it. It's fine, and I'm graduating a semester early so *yaaaaaay* to that. I don't know anything about my major, but c'est la vie. Speaking of French, I suck at it these days and I'm mad. Boo RPI for having no language classes. Luckily Duolingo exists and is beautiful and I love it (They recently added Portuguese and Italian in addition to the German, French, Spanish, and English they already had as learning options! Freakin' sweet!). 

Other news: 

• The MacBook Pro I ordered is coming tomorrow and I'm going to flip a biscuit, I'm so excited.
• ALSO it's New Year's Eve tomorrow, but you knew that, you're a smart person. You also probably own a calendar and, unrelatedly, are glad the world didn't actually end last week (and if you're like myself you never thought it would in the first place, but dream on, dreamers). 
• I just finished "A Dance with Dragons", the fifth installment of George R.R. Martin's beautiful A Song of Ice and Fire series (should I put that in quotations? hmm). SO MUCH INTENSITY I CAN'T HANDLE IT. And I can't wait like six years for the next one to come out, so speed it up, Georgey. 
• My current internet addictions: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Neopets (don't judge me, I'm bored and my 10-year-old self needs to get a game trophy), Pinterest, Designspiration, and Netflix.
• My sister got Just Dance 4 for Christmas so that's entertainment for the whole family that I would highly recommend. (Part of the entertainment is watching your family try to figure out hip-hop dance moves.)

That's all for now, I think. I can smell garlic downstairs, so I'm pretty sure that's my cue to go eat a bunch. I'll be back soon. Probably in 2013 but hopefully not as late as December  :)

Sweezy Summer Update

So I'm officially the worst blogger in the history of the blogosphere. Sorry to everyone who is even still reading this that I never update at all! Excuse time: I've been working six days a week and nothing super interesting happens to me in the time between.
Anyway, here's an update on my life:
I've transferred from BU to RPI and I'll be starting there in the fall so I have to think up a sweet new name for my blog. I'm now an Electronic Media, Arts, and Communication (EMAC) major, which means that I get to learn graphic design, animation, communication, management, and design in bits and pieces, but my main specialization at this point in time is graphic design.
Last month I bought a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet that I'll need for my classes, and I've started playing around with it every once in a while. I've been putting my favorite creations on my flickr. Here's a little preview in the form of a pig from Minecraft:

Piggers (original on top)

Aside from tablet-ing, I've been wasting the days away Stumbling in the Food/Cooking topic, and have become obsessed with foodgawker.com, a brilliant and delicious little waste of time that has allowed me to build up a large folder of bookmarked recipes. As you may have noticed, I've also been experimenting with adding links into my posts (or post, I should say). Oh, what one can learn when one actually opens one's eyes!

This post was going to be a lot longer and ended up being more like pulling teeth than blogging for fun, so here we are. Once the school year gets back up and running I'll probably be able to blog more often (a factor of procrastination rather than productivity in any sense).  As for tonight, I'm absolutely exhausted and I need some sleep to power me through my next six-day work-week. It'll be the second-to-last, though, so that's a bittersweet thought!

Next up on the blog's agenda: either a post raving about eggs and how freaking wonderful they are, or a back-to-school special. Time will tell.

'Til then, adios! :)

Cupcakes So Good You Could Die...

Every year I make cupcakes for my boyfriend's birthday. They're usually just plain vanilla cupcakes with buttercream frosting. I was ready to make the same old batch of 24 when, a week before his birthday, I had the most wonderful brainsplosion at work. KAHLUA BROWNIE CUPCAKES. Both the boyfriend and I love Kahlua brownie ice cream, so I figured I'd at least attempt to find a recipe worthy of the birthday cupcake throne. So, I present to you, Our Little Beehive's Mocha Brownie Cupcakes with Kahlua Mocha Frosting (freaking awesome).
http://www.ourlittlebeehive.com/2011/03/tuesday-treats-mocha-brownie-cupcakes.html

Now, I would've documented my cupcake-making experience, but I've been out of blog-mode for so long that I just totally forgot. Some notes about this recipe:

• It only makes 22 cupcakes, rather than the standard 24, which is a little weird, but these are the richest cupcake/brownie hybrids you will ever eat in your entire life, so deal with it.
• I used around a cup less of confectioner's sugar than the recipe calls for, but since it's added as needed, that shouldn't really be an issue. 
• The frosting ended up being this moussy, cheesecakey(almost), and delicious freaking mass that I wanted to eat all at once. I say mass because I might've made mine a bit dryer than I should've (even without the whole measurement of sugar) so it was kind of hard to spread, and might be impossible to pipe, but a little definitely goes a long way. 
• When you hear brownie cupcake you might expect the cake to be dry, but even a few days after being made the cake was still moist and amazing. Bonus points!

Seriously, once you eat one of these you'll be full and sugared-out for like three years. It's awesome. 

That is all! Please please please try these. Everyone in your life will thank you. 

Marathon Monday!?

What a ridiculously awesome holiday. Thank you, Boston, for being so freakin' cool! I stood amongst literally thousands of drunk college kids screaming for people they didn't even know. It was awesome, like the Mardi Gras of Beantown!

These pictures are from during the huge crowds of slightly more than averagely awesome runners who weren't in the front or the back of the race. whatever. Unfortunately, it doesn't really show legitimately how many freaking people there were. SO MANY. and probably more police. 

GO BOSTON!

PS Sorry that I haven't posted in a month and a half. I'm a loser with school things to do. Also I rediscovered The Big Bang Theory, so I've been watching that since the beginning of season 3. 

Simmer Down, Y'all.

So. Snowstorms. Every week? More like super weak. Everyone needs to calm down about the snow. This is New England. It's not a big deal.
Personally, I'm getting pretty sick of people complaining about "how much snow!!" we're getting in Boston. 21" is not a lot of snow. My sophomore year in high school, my town got 186" of snow. For those of you who can't do math and/or don't have a calculator handy, that's 15.5 feet. That means your first floor is now just about as bright as a root cellar and the plows don't even bother. But you know what? People suck it up and go where they need to go.
So basically, when we're talking about 2 feet, it's like calling a bittersweet nonpareil a three-tier triple-chocolate cake of evil. Or complaining about a breeze to someone who lives in a freezer.
tl;dr: Calm down and quit pretending you're so busy all the time. Why do you walk so fast, anyway? You're not going to die, you're probably just going to get school off because Boston is super inefficient with snow removal. Or you might get stuck on the T... but you still wouldn't die.

Be-Boppin on Photoshop

So recently it's been ridiculously cold in Boston. (I got back on Monday night and it's been snowing like crazy almost the whole time!) This coldness makes me very unmotivated to go out and around and take pictures for you guys, unfortunately. So this weekend I decided to learn more Photoshop techniques. I'm pretty proud of most of them, so I'd like to share my progress with you guys! Hopefully soon enough I'll be taking pictures again and actually edit them before I put them on here so they don't look so stupid.
I made a Flickr account, which I should've done under the name BeeSweezy, but I forgot, though I did remember in time to make my photostream link for your ease and viewing pleasure.
Please enjoy! Comments, suggestions, or tutorials for me to try out would be greatly appreciated!! :D
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beesweezy/
Later,
BeeSweezy