Amped Up

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a terrible driver. I’d like to argue that this is mostly the result of bad luck.

Example 1: In high school, I hit two deer in one month. Or, should I say, THEY hit ME. Jerks.

Example 2: Two years ago, while minding my own business and walking across the crosswalk with a lovely apple pie, a taxi plowed into me. The cops were left scraping pie innards off of 34th street (at least they weren’t my innards).

As you might expect,  such mishaps combined with a 3 year driving hiatus (when I was working in NYC), have given me some anxiety about driving. This is ironic considering I live in the NASCAR capital.

Tonight my friend and I were driving home from an outdoor concert (25 minutes away) in a RIDICULOUSLY TERRIBLE STORM.  According to weather.com, there were 75-90 mph winds. My Jetta could definitely feel it and was clinging to the road for dear life. Not the ideal situation for someone who drives like an 85 year old granny and has only moderately functioning windshield wipers.

I had the bright idea to pull off onto a smaller highway where I knew there was a 24-hour Wal-Mart we could hide. (In retrospect, I’m chagrined that I turned to Wally for sanctuary. But really, would we have survived seeking shelter in a farmer’s market? Probably not.).

This was a terrible plan, as all of the stoplights on the roads were down, causing mass confusion in the pouring rain.  Also, the road was blockaded a mile up due to an accident, so we had to turn around and go right back on the interstate.  Twigs and leaves were flying all over the joint (no cows or mobile homes though, thank goodness). Ay yi yi. Eventually we got on the highway and crept home until the storm let up a little bit. 

The point of bringing up this totally irrelevant anecdote is that I’M JACKED UP from the adrenaline and thought I’d treat everyone with a late night post. Ha.

Part of the advanced breads curriculum is making a sculpture. My teacher is famous for making these awesome sculptures and has won international competitions ($$$!).  I thought ours turned out pretty well for a first try:

As you can see, it is wine-themed. Let’s ignore the fact that grapes do not grow on trees.

Admittedly, I’m not the most artistic person in the world, so I mostly made the grapes while my group members did the tricky braiding stuff. My piece de resistance, though, was the barrel:

    

Close up of barrel. Aw yeah. I wasn’t sure how convincing it was, so we put a super-obvious label on… just in case.

I thought the corks were pretty cute, too. We picked a bunch of wineries that we liked from California.

So there’s my bread sculpture, with much ado.  If you need to find me, I will be sleeping in my bathtub… just in case my apartment building blows over.