So besides all the pics where I got in front of my own camera, I also managed to horn in other people’s camera shots. Bonus? You not only get to see me get progressively inebriated, but you get to see my roomie, Colleen (no, not me…the tall Colleen), who was so sweet and fabulous, letting me tag along to meet folks that she knew since I’ve been sort of out of the blogosphere for the past 8 or 10 months. You also get to see many of my other bloggy friends who are even nicer and more wonderfuller than they seem online, and all my new bloggy friends who weren’t put off by the short, camera-hogging wino (no, not me…oh wait, yes, that would be me).

Also? I’m a bit of a spaz, even when I haven’t been drinking (much).

Here are some videos I took while at the MamaPop Sparklecorn Extravaganza:

MamaPop Sparklecorn Party Meets Blair Witch Project from Colleen Rummel on Vimeo.

Whit Should be Dancing from Colleen Rummel on Vimeo.

(yes, even though I learned some new writing skills, I’m not sharing them with you yet because I stink and I’m tired and dude, JUST LOOK AT ALL THE COOL PICS CUZ I MIGHT BE A BIT HUNGOVER STILL AND LACK ADEQUATE BRAIN FUNCTION!)

I’m a little nervous and very excited, to the point of near-spaziness (yes, that’s a word in our house) about going to BlogHer. And here’s why:

• I will be getting out of the house, taking a much-needed break from my family and my job. Don’t get me wrong. I love my family, but with all the extra-special “quality time” the kids and I have been getting with Justin being gone so much, having to turn down invites to join the local Mom’s Club, play dates, missed community meetings, thrice-scheduled hair appointments, and left the house more times that I can count where I hadn’t washed my face with anything besides a baby wipe from the package I keep in the car. I deserve a few days away so that I can come back feeling refreshed and ready dive into the insanity again.
• I really enjoyed going to the BlogHer-DC road show last fall. It was neat to meet other bloggers, most of them from my area. Now, this conference will be like five or ten times bigger with women (and a few brave men) from all over the country and I can’t wait to meet more folks in person! The only problem is, I’m not sure who else is coming besides goofy me and a bunch of A-listers. So I created that poll you see over on the right…please vote. Though is it really called “voting” when you’re just really answering a question? Anywhoo, I’d love to know if you’re coming so I can look for you. Or work on my Five D’s dodge-duck-dip-dive-and-dodge to avoid your pepperspray.
• Am I allowed to say I’m excited to be rooming with my roomie? Am I allowed to say who she is? Or if I divulge, will I need to utilize my Five D’s with her? At any rate, I’m very very excited to be hanging with a gal whose writing style I admire, whose blog I love reading, who seems to have a similar sense of humor, and who also is raising two silly boys. And I’m looking forward to finally meeting her in person. Can’t wait for the first time I scare her with my cackle.
• Dude…I am really looking forward to the parties! The buttons below the poll are only the beginning! *sigh* That’s one thing I really miss from ye old college days.

Now if I could just figure out what to pack!

I bought this Pampered Chef deep-dish mini-baker about 4 years ago…maybe 5. Used it a hundred times to make breakfast casserole and was considering making it this morning. Until it broke in the oven while baking my salmon last night. Not sure what happened…checked the salmon about two minutes prior and all seemed to be fine. But at least I was able to verify my fish was finished!

And now I’m not quite sure what to do with is since I seemed to have kept every Pampered Chef receipt EXCEPT for this one. Do I clean it up and mail it to them with a WTH note? Do I put it in the garbage? Or maybe the recycling bin since it’s stone and all-natural and what-not?

Well, the kids weren’t too upset about it…this morning they got mini-blueberry muffins instead (yeah Jiffy!).

Seriously, though…have I mentioned it? Cuz I am NUTS about this pressure cooker. I keep wondering how I cooked anything decent on a weeknight without it. Oh wait. I didn’t cook anything decent on weeknights. I made my family live off of a diet largely made of convenience foods, like frozen pizza, pizza rolls, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, instant rice, pasta (angel-hair…cooks faster), canned corn, or baby carrots. If we got home “early” (before 6:30pm), we might get crazy and make tacos. But generally nothing terrible healthy since that would require me to take something out of the freezer more than 10 minutes before I want to eat it.

But now? Now I make 1-inch thick boneless pork chops in about 20 minutes. From frozen. Yes, I said frozen. That 20 minutes, by the way, is prep AND cook time. And the chops were so tender that we could cut the meat easily with a fork.

I also can make frozen boneless-skinless chicken breasts in about 15 minutes. And earlier this week, I cooked a whole chicken, about 3-1/2 pounds, from frozen in about 90 minutes. When I opened the pot, we almost had to use a fishing net to pull out the chicken because it had fallen apart, the meat falling off the bones, and even the bones were falling apart (dude, I grabbed a drumstick and the head of the bone broke off in my hand). The meat was so juicy and tender that my ravenous kids kept asking for more chicken…I had to go so far as to bribe them with the chicken in order to get them to eat their rice and vegetables first. Crazy!

I wish I had paid more attention to my mom when she was cooking with her pressure cooker. Some of my earliest memories include the sound of the steam regulator on her pressure cooker rattling away as she cooked some stew or a roast for Sunday dinner after church, so I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me sooner to get one. I guess part of it is that I didn’t realize how much quicker I could get dinner prepared. When I first started researching, I thought I had misread that you could cut your cooking time down to half, or even a third, of what it might be in the oven or in a regular pot on the stove. But as it turns out, my critical reading skills are still relatively intact, and my cooking experiments (and lack of food poisoning) are proof. And I can still wait to pull stuff out of my freezer at the last second.

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Complete and total sidenote:
I’m sure a few of you have noticed what a mess my site has become. I had a few glasses of wine and thought I could play in the Stylesheet editor. Well, I supposed I played just fine…just didn’t actually do anything constructive and now I can’t figure out how to fix it. So once Justin wakes up from his nap, I’m going to park him in front of my computer to fix my page so that it looks half-purdy again. Though the random pics that are normally in my header won’t be showing up until our server in the house is resurrected from the dead. Which could be a little while. Maybe around Easter since that’s the season for things like that to occur (hey, not being irreverent, just making a really bad, round-about reference to tax-refund season).

Also, can I see a show of hands of how many of you, after seeing my titl now have Queen’s “Under Pressure” stuck in your heads? And how many of you, after realizing that Vanilla Ice stole the bass-line from Queen, now have “Ice Ice Baby” stuck in your heads?
You’re welcome.