Hello again and welcome to my second ever post!
As you don’t really know me too well yet, and it’s so soon after NYE I thought that you may be interested to hear how I spent my New Years Eve. Well, first you should know that ever since 2008 or so my family has had a tradition of a holding a game night to ring in the new year. In the years before that, we spent them at my Grandparents house, my parents and grandparents playing 500 while my brother and I played with Legos or something of the sort. Some years, we played video games, especially drawn to active (often Wii) games, sometimes we’ve turned our small family celebration into a party, and invited our whole Church to come, and some years we’ve stuck mainly to card and board games. This year was one of the card and board variety, with a splash of video gaming thrown in. I should also note here that I am hardly a lone zebra in my house, as my mother, father, AND brother also have EDS, so sometimes the more active games get set aside due to being too tired, or sore to play them.
As the most pressing arrangement that anyone had that day was baking a few treats, we started our evening at about 6:00, despite knowing that we were in for a quiet evening, my mom and I decided, company or no, we wanted to go into 2019 looking our best, so we dusted off our dresses and pulled our hair out of our eyes. My dad and brother had decided ahead of time that there was no point to dressing up if no one would be there to see them, but when they saw us all dressed up, and glittery, they both headed to their closets saying “Well I don’t wanna look bad next to you!” As my mother and I snickered at their sudden change of heart. When they no longer felt like our “Poor country cousins” we began the task of deciding what to play, with a cupboard FULL of games, this can take a LONG time, but we worked through them fairly quickly, deciding on about five board/card games, with two (less active,) video games set aside in case we decided to play them as well, not that we were too sore to play them, we just couldn’t play them so well in our “finery”. After a LONG game of Trivial pursuit (Doctor Who addition:) ), it was decided that we should consider eating dinner, so we threw a tray of fries into the oven, and soon enjoyed a “fry bar” loaded down with guacamole, shredded cheese, barbecue sauce, vegan bacon bits, vegan chili, melted cheese, sour cream and onion dip, and chopped peppers.
(Here are SOME of our games, we do have even MORE!)
Needless to say, we were spoilt for choice, but with each of our plates piled high with our personal favorites, we sat down to several rounds of 31 (a card game we recently discovered.) For dessert and general snacking, we had an apple crisp, and a couple dozen peanut butter oatmeal cookies, (a personal favorite.) although only the boys had any room left for those goodies. After I suggested that we play a different game, (instead of reshuffling the deck another time,) we pulled up a Tetris game which we played until we came to another activity change (my brother or I having won every round) now only a few minutes to midnight, we poured some sparkling grape juice into fancy glasses, with cherries and lemon slices for garnish, and turned on a short tv show, which we all love. Ironically as we do celebrate NYE, we have a bad habit of missing midnight by a few minutes, which we continued this year. My brother, snickering badly attracted my attention to the clock, and I announced loudly, “Well we blew it” my dad tried to recover it announcing “Happy New Year!” While the rest of us unceremoniously sipped away at our juice. I watched everyone fall away, starting with my brother, who waited no longer then it took to finish his juice to beat a hasty retreat to his bed, and ending with me, the last man standing, going to bed at only about 1:30 or so, tired due to insomnia.
So there you go, despite our strong beginning we managed to miss the hour, but the truth is, we still had fun, and as I see it that’s the point of celebrating New Years isn’t it? Not champagne, or a large foil ball dropping in New York, not even kissing your crush and claiming that traditional made you do it, but rather celebrating another new start, another year survived, silently hoping for secret wishes and prayers to be answered this year, and really just having fun with family and friends, in the hopes of doing so much more in the coming year. Or maybe this zebra is getting too philosophical, and dreamy either way I hope this is a good year for you, and that God blesses you in it in a thousand ways you can’t even imagine yet.
Kat
For breakfast, we had Cornmeal mush, with an orange omelet, and a cup of tea, (Irish breakfast, with a little bit of evaporated milk, a personal favorite). So, um, I’m gonna be honest here, I hadn't personally read through the recipes in their entirety, so I ran into a few surprises right away. First I was instructed to mix the cornmeal mush for A HALF AN HOUR! Without any sort of indication of how hot the stove ought to be, don’t get me wrong here, I didn’t expect any sort of exact temperature, but, having read a few Victorian cookbooks before, I assumed that I would AT LEAST be instructed in whether it was a “high flame” or something of the sort. So I winged it… unsuccessfully, I ran the stove too hot, and cooked it too fast, after only ten minutes I didn’t dare cook it any longer, as it already looked like stiff wallpaper paste. Then I began the omelet… oh that cursed omelet. I had NO IDEA that I would have to pre-beat the whites and with no indication of how much? I was also instructed to “fold” them, so I knew that I would need at least some peaks forming, but soft peaks? Stiff peaks? No clue and I’m still not certain whether or not it turned out correctly. 
Nerves somewhat shaken, and not having finished making BREAKFAST until after noon, (there were plenty of snacks and pre-prepared foods, so don’t worry, no one went hungry), I finally began making “lunch” which ended up being dinner, with as long as it took to cook, and with how long I had stalled in dread. :) Our “lunch” was composed of onion soup with fresh bread and baked apples with hand-whipped cream and nutmeg. Not as much happened that wasn't to be expected, except that it took a full HALF HOUR to whip the cream, I don’t mean in a jar either, I mean in a mason jar churn. (I shortened the process for you in this video,) My big brother, who works a physically demanding job lasted only FIVE of those minutes, while I, the smaller one managed the other twenty five-minutes! 
Due to the time which it had taken to make my first two meals, I decided (with some prompting from my mom and brother,) to put off dinner and desert until the next day. Our dinner was composed of cream of corn soup, and tomatoes (pepper for my tomato-hating brother) stuffed with egg. The soup (unsurprisingly,) went exactly to plan, with no real problems. The tomatoes however, would NOT COOK! We put them a “moderate oven” which a quick Google search told us was about 360 degrees, after 30 minutes, (when it was supposed to be cook for 10) the egg was just BARELY beginning to cook, so we upped the temp to 400 and cooked it for 15 minutes more!
With the end of my experiment finally, in sight, I faced my biggest obstacle yet: a vanilla souffle. My mom is by far the best cook and baker in my house, and yet she has yet to personally attempt a souffle, and no one in my house has even TASTED a proper souffle either! So I was rather dreading this task, but if I was going to finish on a bang, this was certainly a way to do it. If you have ever made a souffle, or know much about how to do so, then you know that you need your egg whites beaten to STIFF PEAKS, a process which usually takes about 20 exhausting minutes to do by hand. I knew this to start with and still wanted to do it anyways. (Yeah I’m crazy, and proud of it.) We’re pretty sure it was undercooked, by just a few minutes, as well as being downright salty, the texture I admit freely was probably my fault, the salt? Definitely the recipe, but my mom is eager to try again (with the aid of 21st-century tech of course.)
