Early Morning Photo Shoot

I took this picture at about 5 a.m this morning.













My cat Paisley has a habit of climbing onto my back while I sleep and just hanging out. Sometimes, he makes biscuits. I sincerely love it.

True to form, I took about 10 other pictures, seeking out the "best" picture of us.

Here's that photo shoot.

My claws really need to be clipped, Mom. 

Ugh, I'm over you. 

Is it picture time?

Well in that case ...  

(He's trying to act like he doesn't care, but I know the real Pais.)

See?! 

Peek-a-boo!

I gotta go!

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Blogger's Note: There's nothing like a 5 a.m. photo shoot to make you consider eye cream. Holy bags, Batman!

Things That Make Me Well Up: Mitchell Marcus, Special Needs Basketball Player

I'm a sucker for an inspirational sports story. They get me every time.

Mitchell Marcus is a special needs high schooler and the team manager of his high school's basketball team. And, he is plenty content spending time off-the-court. Imagine his elation when the coach gave him a jersey and put him in the game.

I won't ruin the end of the video, but I will be shocked if you don't end up welling up like I did.

Let's Not Call Little Girls "See You Next Tuesdays"

This is Quvenzhané Wallis.

It's pronounced (kwa van je nay). 

From all that I've read, she pretty much knocked it out of the park in the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. She must have. She was nominated for an Oscar. At nine years old. At nine years old, I didn't have the where-with-all to take the spatula out of my Easy Bake Oven and forever warped it.

She's also super cute and has a collection of puppy purses that she brings to all the award shows she attends.

Well, I had really never given her much thought until I was cruising through my Twitter and saw that the people who were live-tweeting the Oscars were all of a sudden outraged. People were outraged for two reasons: Seth McFarlane's off-color,  marginally funny joke and The Onion's crude, really inappropriate joke.

McFarlane seemed to be trying to take a stab at George Clooney, stating “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.”

Not bad, just weird. And not that funny, Seth.

But the shit really hit the fan when The Onion posted this tweet:

Um, what? Let's not go there. Let's not go and call a nine-year-old, that really and truly did nothing wrong a "see-you-next-Tuesday."

When I read the tweet, I was like "really?" When a lot of people from the Black community read the tweet, they were upset, furious, pissed. Really, really mad. The tweet that was supposed to be light-hearted and satirical, became a huge race thing. Here's a sampling:

As someone that believes herself to pretty racially aware, I didn't get that from the tweet at all. The tweet stopped me in my tracks, made me audibly gasp, but not because it was directed at a little black girl but because it was directed at a young girl. Someone innocent, naive, unadulterated by all things Hollywood. All I keep thinking is that when she's older, she'll Google herself and likely come across that tweet before positive reviews of her work. And that's an incredibly sad fate for someone that is the youngest ever Best Actress nominee.

ThinkProgress.com sums it up better than I could:

In other words, of all the available targets at the Dolby Theater, all the directors who have asked the actresses in Seth MacFarlane’s boorish musical number to take off their tops, all the executives who are obsessed with their bottom lines until the couple of months a year when they’re required to talk about great art, and the great age and overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the Oscar voters, you pick a child? Courageous humor punches up, rather than down, and effective humor exposes something meaningful about the target. Maybe the Oscars stage with that vaunted billion-person audience isn’t the right place to tell big truths about Hollywood, but it’s not a hard position from which to reveal some small ones with craft and finesse.

Essentially, The Onion missed the mark on the funny. They could have taken a stab at literally almost anyone else in that theater and probably gotten some positive retweets. We as a country have learned to laugh about most things. But the young ones haven't had that lesson yet. To me, it just seems unfair she'll have to learn it sooner rather than later.

Recipe Success: Chocolate Sheet Cake

Disclaimer: This recipe isn't paleo or gluten-free or even remotely healthy. This recipe literally involves pounds of sugar and almost four sticks of butter.

That being said, that this recipe is incredibly delicious* and can feed a small army, if need be.

Tomorrow is my boss' one-year anniversary at work. And work anniversaries are kind of a big deal to him. He loves the company, and the job that he does. And since he sought me out and recruited me for my job, I feel like a cake is the least I can do.

This is the only cake that I've heard him explicitly say that he likes. And lucky for me, the Pioneer Woman has a recipe that she calls "The Best Chocolate Sheet Cake. Ever." When it comes to cooking delicious, rich, buttery foods, she is your lady.

Here's the recipe, which was adapted from The Pioneer Woman.

Chocolate Sheet Cake 

What you'll need for the CAKE:

• 2 cups Flour 
• 2 cups Sugar 
• 1/4 teaspoon Salt 
• 4 heaping tablespoons of Cocoa Powder  
• 2 sticks Butter 
• 1 cup boiling hot Water 
• 1/2 cup Buttermilk 
• 2 whole Beaten Eggs 
• 1 teaspoon Baking Soda 
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla 

And, what you'll need for the FROSTING:

• 1/2 cup finely chopped Pecans 
• 1 3/4 stick Butter 
• 4 heaping tablespoons of Cocoa Powder  
• 6 tablespoons Milk 
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla 
• 1 pound (minus 1/2 Cup) Powdered Sugar (about 3 1/3 cups, if my calculations are right**)

1. In a saucepan, melt butter. Add cocoa. Stir together. Add boiling water, allow mixture to boil for 30 seconds, then turn off heat.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt.

3. Pour over flour mixture, and stir lightly to cool.

4. In a measuring cup, pour the buttermilk and add beaten eggs, baking soda, and vanilla. Stir buttermilk mixture into butter/chocolate mixture.

5. Pour into sheet pan (18 x 13) and bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

6. Chop pecans finely. Melt butter in a saucepan. Add cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat.

7. Add the milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar. Stir together. Add the pecans, stir together, and pour over warm cake.

And there you have it - a delicious cake, made-from-scratch, that didn't take a century! Enjoy!

* To keep things 100%, I've only tasted the cake batter and the frosting. But, both were delish.
** I don't have a scale, so I can't measure the powdered sugar exactly, but Google showed me the way. Just go with it.

Pinterest Success: Lightened-Up Pumpkin Cheesecake Mousse

This quick and easy recipe appeases my sweet tooth and doesn't make me feel like I am ruining a "good" day of eating. It's low in sugar and high in protein. And, it's pumpkin. Can't beat that.

Lightened-Up Pumpkin Cheesecake Mousse

recipe adapted from FitSugar

1 fat-free cottage cheese
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1/4 cup vanilla almond milk
1 tbs. sugar-free instant butterscotch dry pudding mix
1/2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1/2 tsp. cinnamon 3 stevia, or to taste
crushed graham crackers as an optional topping 

Throw everything into your food processor or blender. Top with graham crackers if you're into that sort of thing.

Easy as (pumpkin) pie. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Things That Make Me Well Up: The Bobby Bones Show

I’ve wanted to start a series within my blog for a long time. Something original. Something that screams “Jonna.”

And one of the things that is so very “me” is my tendency toward crying. It isn’t crying as much as it is welling. Tears brim at my eyelids. I will them to stay in my tear ducts. It doesn’t usually work.

I don’t often cry big, huge crocodile tears, but I well up at varied list of things, including, but definitely not limited to: The Amazing Race, Phoebe’s wedding on Friends, that nurse commercial, this Buzzfeed article, and military homecoming videos.

Today’s welling, wasn’t actually a welling, but a full-on, have-to-close-my-office-door (#humblebrag) cry for …

The Bobby Bones Show.

I figured, if I’m going to cry like a B, I may as well be able to articulate why. So here goes nothing.

October 2008: R and I started seeing each other. We lived about 90 minutes from one another. Most Friday mornings to Tuesday mornings, I would spend that time with R. Then, I’d have to leave.  And the floodgates opened up. Which, in hindsight was kinda silly absolutely absurd. We would be reuniting again in literally 72 hours.

The point here isn’t my utter absurdity, but this:

On those drives back home, I would spend it with the Bobby Bones Show. And, after awhile, those drives weren’t tearful departures from someone I was starting to fall in love with, but drives full of laugh, Amy's horrible awesome jokes, and Name-That-Tune. So my tears started to subside.

June 2009: I moved in with R and commuted 50 miles to and from work. I started timing things so I’d get in the car just as the show started playing “What Year Was It?”

It made things easier. It made things better. It helped me get through these times in my life and other times where things were uncertain and scary and seemingly more than I could handle.

And now, more than four years later, they are still a part of my life.

I tried Glowing Green Smoothies because of Amy.

I ran a (half) marathon for the first time with one of my best friends because of Lunchbox.

I saved Bobby’s episode of “Live with Regis and Kelly” on my DVR for months.

The day before Maggie's wedding, we sat in on the show and met them all.

But, more than any of those things, I feel connected to these radio personalities. These radio personalities are my friends and I feel strangely, but undeniably, connected to them. My eyes welled up with happy tears when Amy called from Africa. My heart hurts for Bobby when he mentions his mom and his past. I can’t help but smile when Lunch wins a game, because I know what’s coming (“and they stay there, and they stay thereeee …”).

When I heard the news about the big move, I was speechless. I felt like my friends were moving away to do something amazing for themselves and their careers. I felt nervous for them because I know the change and the risk has to be nerve-wracking. I felt excited for them because it is an incredibly awesome opportunity that they 100% deserve. I am both anxious-excited and anxious-nervous to see how the show looks and feels from Nashville. I can already picture the country music beds and a Name-That-Tune game full of country music artists.

Friday morning, my eyes welled up hearing the last show from Austin because of all that. Bobby always says that there are a million other things that his listeners could do with their mornings.

But, this is the only thing I want to do with my morning. I want to listen to a bunch of best friends sit around and talk into microphones.

I am thankful for the realness, I am thankful for candor, and I am thankful for the laughs over the years.

Happy weekend, everyone!

The No-Niche Niche.

Over the past few months, I've turned into more of an introvert. I've learned to treasure the time I spend by myself and use that time to recharge, rethink, and reevaluate all things Jonna.

That's why I wanted to rebrand my blog. I wanted it to speak more truthfully and thoroughly about who I am and what I seek to do through this blog. I want it to tell my story. 

Here's the rub -- my story is all over the place. But, I don't want to limit that. I want to embrace it. 

I want to tell my readers about an amazing recipe they need to try AND tell them the funny thing that happened when I went to buy the ingredients. 

I want to talk about my relationship AND the new health regimen I'm starting to adopt. 

I want to discuss my cat food buying woes AND the Etsy prints I just ordered. 

So that's the new blog plan of action. 

Write a blog about my life as it comes. Simple? I hope so. 

One more thing. The name. The new blog name comes from Maroon 5's "She Will Be Loved" and this lyric: 

It's not always rainbows and butterflies
It's compromise that moves us along... 

This lyrics embodies what I aim to do here. I want to capture all the beauty and rough stuff that life hands me. The hope is that, if nothing else, it documents my triumphs and my struggles. And if I'm really lucky, people will take a break from their life and share in the hot mess that is mine.