Favorite Photos of 2011

January 4, 2012 2 Comments

For a number of reasons I’m rather fanatical about checking stats here, but other than noting new comments I don’t pay much attention to the activity on my Flickr stream. I’m hardly anything above a pure amateur so I guess I never really have cared, but I was poking around the other day and was pleasantly surprised to see that there’s been quite a lot of interest.

I don’t normally do posts recapping the year because (a.) it’s tedious and boring for me and (b.) I usually note the yearly partnership anniversary of me and my current guide dog so it seems redundant at best. But after digging through the 750+ photos from last year I thought I’d share some of my favorites. These aren’t all photos I took personally, though the majority are, just a smattering of the ones I’m particularly fond of.

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Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2011 Leave a Comment

Witch cupcakes

I had so many different ideas for Halloween cupcakes and I just couldn’t decide what to do. I think this ended up being a disservice because I kept getting ingredients and then when I settled on what I was making I didn’t actually have the right things to decorate with. But by then I’d already started, so I just improvised. The end result of this design isn’t quite what I expected, but I’m greatly amused by them. As you can see i didn’t use the cored out cupcake for all the hats. It was far too frustrating frying to cut them into the right shape, which is saying something given this is anything but a crumbly cake. So, most of the hats are Hershey Kisses. The cupcakes are the brownie recipe I made for the holidays last year and the frosting is peanut butter. (Not the one from the design link.) I’m not quite sure what happened with the cupcakes because they popped up as I remembered them doing, but then deflated like a sad soufflé.

Anyway, hope you all have a fun Halloween. It’s sure to be a yummy one here.

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Happy birthday, Uschi!

October 24, 2011 3 Comments

Me and Uschi sitting together in the rose garden at Central Park

Today, Uschi is three-years-old! I’m not entirely sure what our plans are for the day, but we’ve already celebrated with a pupcake. “Celebrate” here means I inadvertently traumatized her by trying to get a photo of her with the cupcake and thus she thought she shouldn’t eat it and when she finally would take it she tried to run off into another room to eat it and when I wouldn’t let her do that (because how would I get a photo?) she got mildly stressed and started to avoid the cupcake. So, um, I won’t be winning a “best dog handler in the world” awards any time soon . . . Anyway, she’s fine and she did eat the cupcake. See:

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C is for Cookie (Monster Cupcakes)

October 23, 2011 3 Comments

I made these today:

Cookie Monster cupcakes: German chocolate cupcakes topped with blue-tinted coconut, white candy melt eyes with black frosting pupils and a banana chocolate chip cookie stuffed in his mouth

Tinting things is my least favorite part of cupcake decorating since I’m completely colorblind and thus never know if I’m actually getting the color correct. These came out a bit darker than I would have liked, but I only had royal blue food coloring in the house. They were still incredibly simple to make, though time-consuming since I also baked the banana chocolate chip cookies on my new cookie sheets. Cookie Monster is a German chocolate cupcake, which I might be obsessed with since having one on the cupcake bus because the labs were also this flavor, and his eyes are made from candy melts with a dab of black frosting.

And with that, I am officially caught up on cupcakes, which is more than good enough for me!

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Stuff on a Sunday

October 23, 2011 Leave a Comment

1.) Submissions for the fifth Assistance Dog Blog Carnival are due by 11:59 PM EST tonight!!! Please let me know if you are planning to participate and can’t make the deadline.

2.) I should be finishing up cupcakes today and they will be shipping out first thing tomorrow.

3.) Uschi turns three tomorrow! The pupcakes I made for her seem to be a hit. We brought some with us to Jenn and Greg’s last night and they were happily gobbled up by both the dogs. (I realized after I got home that I never sent Tara home with any for Stu. Oops.)

4.) I have now seen Wasabi. We had to watch the dubbed version since I don’t know French and no one wanted to spend the entire movie reading the subtitles to me. Go figure. I think just the experience of watching a French film based in Japan dubbed in English was enough to amuse me, but the film itself was pretty good and I rather enjoyed it.

5.) I need to stop finding crazy awesome Firefly shirts on the Internet. Seriously. I’ve bought five in this last month alone and I wasn’t exactly lacking in Firefly shirts to begin with. But really, can you blame me? How am I supposed to pass up things like this awesome mash-up?

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Copyright © Cyndy Otty, 2000-2012. All rights reserved.

 
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