Helloooo. Is February over yet? I wish. Instead we're getting handed another blizzard tonight, yay.

I'm definitely sick of ugly winter, so I bought myself a bouquet of cheap pink garden roses from Trader Joe's. Best idea ever! $4.99 of joy and pretty. I should probably do this on a regular basis.

I'm also really proud of myself for starting a book club! We had our first meeting last Friday. Our first book was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened, which as a quirky and expletive filled comedic memoir doesn't really purport itself for deep challenging discussion, so we just ate pizza, drank wine, and read the craziest chapters out loud to each other.

The next day I baked the leftover pizza dough into rolls and made prosciutto mozzarella paninis mmmm.

We never order pizza because it's cheaper and almost just as easy to make it yourself. The trick to yeast bread is letting it rise in a warm oven (turn it on for a few minutes, turn it OFF, put covered dough in for an hour).

And since I'm not working this week my mom asked me to come visit for a couple days, using the excuse that I should teach my little sister how to play the trumpet so she can be in jazz band (apparently they don't allow clarinets into upper jazz bands, which seems kind of discriminatory). I played the trumpet for 12 years, and I do sound like a professional compared to Nicole (although she is definitely doing a great job so far and has learned five notes in one day, not too shabby for having woodwind chops). Our cat will be forever traumatized.

Oh, and since I'm sure you've always wondered what the landscape between Chicago and central Illinois looks like in winter, here it is. MIND NUMBING. Or starkly beautiful? Nope, mind numbing.

And there in the distance is my home town, population 6,000. My family lives on the outskirts now, behind a few fields of corn/pumpkins/soybeans. You can vaguely make out both of our watertowers in this shot, which incapsulates the entire city. And yeah, it's technically called a city.

And finally, here's the line-up of what I've made recently!