Weekend!!!!

My A-exam is over and I passed! And my students prelim is written, given, and graded! Which means, starting Friday night, I've had no academic responsibilities whatsoever, and I love it! Yesterday, I read part of a book and made chocolate eclairs. Now, this was quite an adventure. First, I tried using the flour mix that the recipe suggested, provided by a Baha'i family here in town a few months ago. Well they turned out like pancakes... not tasty at all. So I threw it all out and tried again, after bringing 5 more eggs to room temperature and acquiring parchment paper from my downstairs neighbor. The chocolate custard for the inside was quite an adventure, but fortunately I only had to do it once. The next time I made the batter, I used my "cookie flour mix" (different from my bread/waffle flour mix), and they turned out pretty well. In the oven, they were beautifully puffed and everything, but as soon as they left the heat of the oven, they collapsed for the most part. The cream puff shaped ones (round and small, rather than long and skinny) didn't collapse as much, so next time I'll just make cream puffs. They were pretty delicious, once filled with chocolate custard and topped with chocolate ganache :). I had a few people over to help me eat them and just hang out for a bit.
This morning began with adventures with waffles - again I tried to use the baking mix I was given, and the dough looked like bread rather than waffle dough, and the waffles were terrible. So I threw the batter away and the bag of flour mix away and tried again. This time with much better success, and tasty waffles!
Later today, I'm headed to Syracuse for shopping and birthday dinner with the girls! I'm excited to just relax and hang out with the ladies, have some fun shopping, and eat some yummy food :).
I've been reading a book, Love Walked In, I got at the Friends of the Library book sale a couple months ago (a costly 25 cent purchase ;) ) and I'm enjoying it. I particularly liked this passage, from the point of view of a 5 foot tall woman around 30:
"So, I'm pretty - pretty enough. The trouble is that my kind of pretty is not the kind I'd have chosen. I've heard all those words: gamine, piquant, waifish, what have you. I've heard elfin; elfin stings. And pixie .... pixie? A word to the wise: The grown women who want to evoke pointy-eared beings scaling mushrooms and wearing acorn caps for hats are few and far between. We all know what those words truly mean; they mean I'm teetering on the edge of cute. And cute is death. Denigration, death, and decay."
I really enjoyed this because I also have issues with being called cute... I've wondered a lot about the line between cute and beautiful, as I'm usually going for pretty, beautiful, or even just "nice" and always get called cute. I was glad to see there was someone out there who understood my annoyance ;). True I'm not 5 foot tall, but I do get called cute far too often.