The Procrastinating Blogger

Well, the holidays are here and as always; food and entertaining magazines publish their editions of the best recipes and what traditions are in or out for the current season. I can only imagine that for a magazine publisher this is the Superbowl of printed media in the US, Thanksgiving being the opening for the continuous flurry of cheer and food indulgence that follows right up until Easter week.

That being said, at least the Superbowl advertising has become entertaining, and there are even shows after the actual day to show you what ads made the cut as far as entertainment value and which simply sucked arse; with a magazine this really doesn't quite translate, there are many many ads and articles most in which you see the same exact product with different names over and over, and the articles well, that's the reason for the title of this post.

I've collected a number of food magazines during the past years and never actually bothered to look inside a Food and Wine magazine, until today. Maybe their covers aren't as flashy as Martha, or Gourmet but there has to be something special about it anyway since in the Bravo show Top Chef, the winner gets a full spread on this publication. Also they have Gail Simmons in there as an expert judge and she works both as a food critic and as a manager of something, so I thought, maybe it's one of those magazines that is less flashy on the outside but with better content (hello America's Test Kitchen).
I had some time so I started browsing the magazine, I got a little excited since they had their best holiday recipes and hosting tips on the cover; I mean why would I not want to learn where to place the forks and the spons? Sad to say, I wish someone had thrown a fork at me right then, when I started to flip the pages it was a mayor disappointment, not only their writing is very uptight and pretentious but they display an enormous number of advertisement and their recipes where pretty mediocre; like they had Rachel Ray fabricate them mediocre.
I was to a point, upset. Not because the magazine sucks, but mostly because I know this Gail woman who is a supposed food critic (from Canada lols) has a role in the desition making for the winner of Top Chef! The travesty I tell you, if she is there representing the magazine and the magazine is poop, then she is also poop.

I only hope that Toby "I hate life" Young gets to cover for her on the last two episodes, at least he doesn't seem that pretentions, and he is funny.

Point to the story is: please don't buy this crap, it's not worth it, not even if you drink a lot of wine before reading it.

Two more down, one more to go!

One thing is for sure, next year I won't have to do so many things (big things that is) and do some work outside on our deck. After many many months, our bathrooms are stripped from that horrid and moldy wallpaper and a coat of fresh paint finished the job beautifully.

I didn't take photos of the very first project in Julian's bathroom, I tried to do venetian plaster only to have my dear husband think that it was some kind of joke because to him it just looked unfinished, I agreed after giving it a second look, VP paint is tough to work with and it takes to much time to make it look like the real thing (which is only left for crazy Italians). Also for some odd reason the paint wouldn't stop showing these hairline cracks that annoyed me.

Julian's bathroom was going to be of a boring greyish blue until I went to Lowes to return the cracking Venetian Plaster, I gave Julian a bunch of paint cards to see which he liked, it was around 10 or so all very different colors from brown to green, he picked the very bright blue you see in the photo.

For our bathroom (which had the most damage from the stupid wallpaper and humidity) we had Jesus fix some things in the drywall first, then for the color I had picked out this tan that reminded me of Cafe con Leche *yum* which I was lucky enough to found in some Ace hardware by a friend's house already mixed and was only $5!