Oh mah GAWD. White chocolate chip cookies, "stamp" cookies, and puppy chow are the things I made today!

I wanted to make the peanut butter cookies and peanut butter blossoms today, but I just didn't have the energy. So, that'll be for tomorrow, along with peanut butter cup surprises, and maybe butter snowmen. Cookies, that is, of course. The only non-cookie I've made for the holiday is puppy chow. I think maybe next year, I'll just make double batches of only a few cookies, instead of picking ten or eleven different ones.

By the way: "Stamp" or as the recipe calls them, Stamped by Design cookies, are made from chocolate cake batter, eggs, and veggie oil. Ball them up, smash them down with the bottom of a glass, bake them, and push a cookie cutter just into the cookie while it's still warm, making an indentation. Let them cool, then decorate with icing.

The woman that made them told the magazine that she thought these up because she was afraid icing-decorated cookies would stick together during shipping. These stamp cookies deflate slightly inside the indentation of the cookie cutter, which allows the icing to sit inside of it, making for easier cookie stacking.

The stamp cookies I made today got iced, all except for the candy cane ones, which I didn't have enough icing for. However, when I iced them, the shapes from the cookie cutter got a little lost, and will probably need to be defined a little later with some detail.
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Toodles!
~SgL

Oy. So I actually wanted to practice coloring digitally last night. I opened up Photoshop and went to play with the brush options. Then, I played around a little to see what it looked like on the canvas area. However, when I picked up the pen to my tablet to actually start something, I found that whenever I touched the pen to the surface, it jumped away from the area I was trying to paint on the screen.

At first, I thought it was just the brush settings. So I went to change them all back to normal. No dice. So I went to try and open a new document to see if that would help. Again, the cursor jumped away, and ended up closing Photoshop. I retried this a few times, and it all repeated. So I decided to unplug my tablet, wait a bit, then plug it back in. Nothing was fixed.

With that, I unplugged it again, and let it stay unplugged all day until just fifteen minutes ago. I plugged it back in, hoping that it would work. Lo and behold, it had died. Just died. No little blinky light, no 'device has been plugged into usb' sound, nothing.

*Sigh* It was a good little tablet. Got the job done. Not the best tablet, a bottom line Nisis with a pen that I lost the battery stopper to, which I replaced with a mechanical pencil eraser encased in a pencil grip. Ghetto, yes, but it worked.

I've thought about asking for a better one for Christmas, but three hundred bucks seems an awful lot for my parents to shell out after everything else. Maybe I'll revise the list and make it much shorter, and add the tablet. Eh. We'll see.
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On a non-annoying note:

I recently took a trip to Illinois to visit my boyfriend, ~DCSoltari. I had a lot of fun there, stayed for a week. We played a few video games, I met his crazy little dogs and his sleeepy looking big one. Also met some of his friends, and his sister, who are pretty awesome.

Also had chinese food. YAY chinese food! (Yay, because I don't get it often here because my Mom has it so often for lunch at work, she doesn't want to eat it when someone else in the house gets a craving. That, and most of the chinese places around here aren't that great.)

All in all, it was a good trip. I had lots of fun!
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That's about it.

Toodles!
~SgL