Cupcake failure but anticipated joy

My friend Kate makes these really yummy self-filled cupcakes and I, being a very lucky friend, was given the recipe and have been making these cupcakes for many years now.  Kate has said that the cupcakes have failed her once in a while, but I hadn’t had it happen before.  Granted, I don’t make these as often as Kate, but I have made them often enough to know that the filling has not done it’s whole “self-fill” job:

bad cell phone picture

As you can see, these cupcakes have filling fail.  As Kate put it, these are “self-frost” cupcakes instead of self-fill.  Alas.  I’m sure they still taste good, though.

Why was I making cupcakes, by the way?  I was (well, am) scheduled to be in a meeting at 2pm tomorrow.  This means I could not take a day off tomorrow to stay home and watch the inauguration.  Today I received an email stating that the inauguration will be playing all day in the room next to where I sit and that we’re all getting lunch ordered in for us.  Hurrah!  To illustrate my joy, I decided to bake and bring in self-filled self-frosted cupcakes.

I am overjoyed for the inauguration tomorrow.  Watching yesterday’s concert on HBO, I felt like there was this spirit of uprising – like a population had revolted and overthrown the king.  It really IS the end of an era (or “error” like one of my favorite bumper stickers says).  Time will tell how this administration is judged, but if I had to guess… I’m guessing that many historians will check the box stating “worst ever”.

It’s relatively small potatoes compared to the wars in the Middle East, the current economic situation, the job losses, the credit crunch, the probably permanent damage done to the environment and wildlife, and so on – but I am SO very happy to have a president (as of tomorrow) who loves to read and values the role of literature and poetry in one’s life.  Bush apparently read quite a lot (in competition with Karl Rove) but he didn’t make it part of his job to encourage his (HIS!!) country to read.  Laura Bush’s cause was going to be literacy, I believe, and I know she works very quietly and wouldn’t have made a big show of anything she did, but I wish more was done.  Reading levels have gone up over the past five years or so, but most articles attribute that to kids who grew up reading Harry Potter (yay Harry Potter!) and then went on to be reading adults.  I hope that’s true, but I hope even more is done in the coming years.

I signed up online for a library card today (so I spend less money on books but can still read current ones) but I did the application online and so I need to go to the library with a picture ID to pick up the actual card.  Then that’ll be one more item done on the 101 in 1001, yay!  I have a whole box of books of my own to read, but sometimes I want to read something I don’t own before I read something I do and our town library is really great about having new releases.

Library card: success

Cupcakes: (semi) failure

Inauguration viewing: expected success

Anticipated mood tomorrow: total joy – like how I would feel if it had just been cloudy for years and the sun has finally come out.  This land is your land, this land is my land… once again.