Isn’t that a great fire alarm pull?

This is what happens when you hand a Canon 5D to someone who has no idea what they’re doing even though they say they do…

The USO put on an AWESOME show today here in Rota. I volunteered to help and was a WalMart greeter-type person, smiling and pointing people in the direction of the bathrooms. However, bathroom directing has its perks…like getting to meet Robin Williams and Lewis Black, Kid Rock and Lance Armstrong, Ronan Tynan (one of the original Irish Tenors, with a voice that gives me goosebumps just thinking about it), and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen - and a coin to top it all off.

Check out my Flickr page for some more pictures that don’t suck quite as much.

I got a little overambitious, I think.

Tonight we’re having a holiday party at my coworker’s house. This is our first holiday party my command has had. We are a relatively small office - 10 of us, currently - so there aren’t that many to bring items for a potluck.

I am making two side dishes - creamy garlic mashed potatoes and fresh steamed veggies; an appetizer - jamón-wrapped asparagus; two desserts - crockpot chocolate mint cake and a flan; and 2 batches of snowball cookies.

I was hoping one of my Spanish coworkers would be bringing flan because for some reason, it’s really hard to find flan in a restaurant that isn’t store-made. Unfortunately, none of them offered to bring one (one said his wife only buys them from the store, never makes them from scratch), so I decided to be ambitious and make one myself.

I found a recipe that got good reviews and seems pretty authentic. It seemed easy enough.

Alas, the first time I forgot that you’re supposed to use wooden utensils when making these types of things so my sugar was lumpy and not thin enough and lumped in the middle of the bottom of my pan instead of coating evenly along the bottom and sides. So I had to start over, and cleaning caramelized sugar from a saucepan, a baking dish and 2 utensils is no easy task.

The second time, fortunately, the sugar turned out beautifully, but I knew that I needed to work very fast. It was HOT and the pan is glass which means it cools very quickly, so I was under pressure to coat the pan evenly and just as importantly, quickly. I managed to get the liquid in and coated evenly, but because I only had 2 hands instead of the required four, I set the pan down on the table next to me while I hurried to coat the pan.

What I forgot in the rush to get this done was that our table is one of those inexpensive tables where the “wood” is actually “wood patterned non-wood product that melts when you put a hot candy pan on it”.

I’m sure B will be thrilled when comes home and sees our kitchen in the state that it’s in, with candy-coated pans and a melted tabletop and flour all over the place from trying to beat the flour in the cookie dough and the bath of water that was once in the oven to promote even cooking but is now on the stove with about half my flan mixed into it.

This is going to be interesting…

* Oscar Wilde

-p.s., this story would not be complete without a nice fire to go along with it.