oh, the madness! i know that the messes i get myself into are mostly due to poor planning on my part in not seeking the help of others before i actually need it, but am i allowed to be bitter anyway?
this saturday will be (potentially the first annual) A Chocolate Affair, an event to redeem Valentine's Day with awareness of fair trade chocolate and thoughtfulness about the farmers on the other end of our dark indulgences. we'll be having a cookie-decorating and Valentine making for kids, free fair trade coffee and tea, a bake sale featuring fair trade baked goods, and a bake-off--oh, the bake-off! i nearly ended up on my knees begging people at church yesterday to please-please-please enter the bake-off (apparently the chance to win a $50 gift certificate to World Fare is not incentive enough). happily, i got two more entries and we're up to seven, though five of them are from our church and i was hoping to get more people from the community involved. it seems as though people here are more than willing to support community events only when they're a tried-and-true three years old (past bore-risk stage).
but enough complaining. perhaps what i'm most excited about is the fact that my sister, breanne, will be entering the bake-off. she and her husband will make the two-hour drive out on Friday night and by Saturday morning, she'll be hard at work perfecting her famous Chocolate Mousse Cake. this will be the second weekend they've come out in a month, due to his broken thumb that's keeping him from work for six weeks--a broken bone can be a blessing.
i've never really felt that close to breanne. odd timing maybe. i was quite a merciless selfish brat as a child and she, a second child searching desperately for her identity. i left for college while i was too absorbed in my personal problems and afraid of her often overt hatred of me to develop a real relationship with her. we're only three years apart, but due to cut-offs, never had the opportunity of driving to school together or being one another's anchor in the tumultuous halls of high school.
and so, unfortunately, here we are at 24 and 21 years old, and still partially a mystery to one another. her husband has been much easier to get to know, once she stopped shielding him from our family (or the other way around?) long enough for his own personality to emerge, rather than the one we manufactured in its absence (the smoker who doesn't want to have anything to do with us). and discovering how wonderful he is has been a window allowing me to see how wonderful she really is and realize how much i've been missing her.
i can't wait until Saturday.
