...and we're back

back to blogging, for now anyway! greetings and salutations to my apparently mostly indian followers. hello from the US where everyone walks upside down and eats hamburgers 3 times a day. in my absence from Blogger, something rather noteworthy (in my opinion) has occurred.



we made a baby! i'm 28 weeks along with 12 to go and i'm very much looking forward to meeting my little meat nugget.



as a result, i'm going to start being more careful about my food selections and i will also be trying to 'unfuck my habitat', as the tumblr author so delicately puts it. i made myself a weekly chore list. today was clean the downstairs bathroom and tidy up the living room. i did both things, admittedly somewhat halfheartedly. for breakfast today, i made some trader joe's multigrain hot cereal. i cooked it in light coconut milk and it came out pretty tasty. i topped it with half a banana, two chopped up prunes and some honey. i am satisfied with the overall result. no pictures today because the camera battery isn't charged and in order to charge it i'd have to like .. walk down the stairs and put the battery in the charger. *exhaustion*

no time for talky talky

how cute are these kitties*??



*photos courtesy of Jeremy Hancock.

some linen closet

well that's a mighty messy linen closet. how'd all those towels end up so disheveled and on the floor?



wait, is there something up there??



something ... sleepy, perhaps? something rather ... furry-bottomed and shameless?



ah yes. it's anya. enjoying a nice relaxing nap after wreaking havoc on the linens in a no-holds-barred effort to claw her way to the tippity-top of the closet.

cupcakes blacker than sin

my fabulous mother-in-law's birthday was this week.



this is me and mother-in-law at a sock hop, circa 2010.



this is mother-in-law using only the powers of her mind to levitate a bouncy ball on my first hancock christmas.



this is one of our earliest hancock+missy family portraits at a cross-dressing charity event back in the day. (wasn't jeremy just radiantly beautiful? btw in case you are wondering, brother-in-law there in the front was tammy fae baker, complete with real-weepy-action.)

i realize that some people might read that "fabulous mother-in-law" statement and assume that i say it sarcastically. but no, i pretty much won the in-laws lottery. totally love the hancocks. as a matter of fact, i am sending purposely annoying text messages to my brother-in-law [just for fun times] while writing this post! (where is your mom, ben? "i don't know" well did she tell you any of her plans for tonight? "no she did not" BUT I MADE CUPCAKES, BENJAMIN!!! CUPCAKES, DO YOU HEAR ME?! good thing he is a patient lad.) anyway, the point is, love my in-laws, i'm a lucky ducky.

so anyways, we did not celebrate my mother-in-law's b-day on wednesday due to her currently ridiculous work schedule ... but tonight, we acknowledge the date of her birth. so i did the only thing i know to do in these situations.

i baked something.

but i didn't just bake any old something. no, no. i baked cupcakes. dark chocolate cupcakes. flourless, deep dark chocolate cupcakes. yes i did.



super moist, super chocolatey, blacker than sin.

and so then i was like .. you can't just take unfrosted cupcakes to a woman that you respect for her birthday. it's just ridiculous. however, i really suck at making frosting. it consistently turns my kitchen into a disaster area, it's always heavy and gritty and gross and you can feel your teeth rotting from all the sugar ... blech. so instead, i made whipped cream. stabilized whipped cream for long-lasting-action.

and then i was like, what makes whipped cream better?



and then jeremy opened a cabinet where he had stashed my cake-testing toothpicks (the nerve .. can you even imagine?) and there was a bottle of jack daniels.



the finished product, topped with some bittersweet chocolate shavings.

i don't mean to toot my own horn here but ... *toot toot*.


**editor's note**

so then jeremy got confused and thought today was National Be Really Boring Day and he fell asleep on the couch with tillie mae (that little skank waffle)((pictured below))



and so i was bored and made a ganache with my leftover bittersweet chocolate. i thought i'd be real slick and dip the whipped cream-topped cupcakes in the ganache, but my first attempt resulted in catastrophic failure.



so i drizzled it on, instead. never let it be said that missy hancock was afraid to gild a lily.

have you humped anyone today? (don't look at me like that. it's hump day.)

breakfast. trader joe's reduced sugar triple nuts cereal (i love a mouthful of triple nuts first thing in the morning!...whatever, it's real tasty cereal. and there are a lot of nuts in it.) and peppermint tea.



lunch is a salad (with hummus instead of salad dressing) and string cheese because i feel like i haven't been eating too many vegetables lately and that's probably not great. i am also taking a snacktime apple and some saltines and ginger ale, because after lunch yesterday (after feeling normal all morning!) i felt pretty barfy for a while. it simmered down but i still felt weird the rest of the night. what is going on in my guts? [it is not the 'p' word so do not even begin to conjecture] i also had a nasty headache most of yesterday and woke up with it today. good times.



here is a demon cat. she and tillie mae hate each other super big time. she used to get along pretty ok with alfred but [as you saw yesterday] they have started brawling too. though i think their fights are for fun times because there's never any chunks of fur or blood or screaming like there is with tillie.

i went for my first outside morning time spring time walk today. it was very nice. the sky was pretty while the sun came up and there were like hundreds of birds singing. it reminded me of back in the day when i lived on west king street in boone and i went for early morning time spring time walks through the residential areas nearby. a lot of the sounds and smells are the same, but sadly the sights have pretty much nothing in common.



a busy day in boone.



a busy day in newport news. also, 5 people were shot during in the time it took to take this photograph.

speaking of not loving where we live, jeremy told me a bit about Obama's shipyard speech from yesterday. he ended up with, "...so anyway at least now we have a good reason to sell the house and move to Canada like we always wanted". womp womp.

tuesday bluesday

anya: hey alfred buddy, how's it goin' whatcha doin' i wanna do that too it looks fun is it fun hey alfred!



anya: hey, alfred!?!?!?!!



anya: hey alfred guess what.

anya: guess what.

anya: alfred, guess what.



alfred:WHAT?!?!?



anya: (totally freaks out and runs away until she forgets that she got her ass handed to her about 2 minutes later and comes back for more)



and then he looks at me all like, "woman, why have you brought that creature unto this place?"
...except for alfred is so not that eloquent, so really if he could talk it would come out like, "moms why u's brings dat kitties to here i's don't likes her moms!!!!"

and this whole time, tillie mae was downstairs dreaming about going to prom:



because she's a little princess. aren't you just a foofy woofy little pretty pretty princess, tillie mae? (she totally is).

ok anyway. so we're on day 2 of my pre-biggest loser diet. i lost 1 pound yesterday, but i'm thinking that could be because i had some kind of weird stomach bug and was too nauseated to eat very much of anything. i am better today. hooray!



there's breakfast, the same as yesterday.



and lunch .. again, the same as yesterday ..



and this weird cancerous cantaloupe that i was pretty afraid of.



it turned out to be neither the best (farmer's market) nor the worst (asian buffet) cantaloupe of my experience.

there was a good year or so where i refused to eat cantaloupe because of this listeria scare in north carolina. listeria sounds like it would be the name of some beautiful flower or something, right? wrong! it's a super evil bacteria that will kill the living eff out of you. so .... fingers crossed for no listeria on this badboy.

the first Biggest Loser (tm) weigh-in for 2013 at my office is on Thursday (originally I thought it was Friday. or Monday. or some day other than Thursday). In order to make it to my weight loss goal by the end of the contest, i'd have to lose about 25 pounds in 12 weeks. according to the mayo clinic (mayonaise clinic, har har) it's ok to lose 1-2 pounds per week. my goal in this case would be 2 pounds per week, which is pretty lofty, but not unrealistic. or as other people might say, realistic. [i am so negative!] anyways, let's see if we can make it happen.
because...

i whanna wheen

so every once in awhile, it comes to the attention of the people in my office (and to myself) that we have all become enormous, bloated, doughy blobs of insecurity. when this happens, we pull together and do a Biggest Loser (tm) contest. this time last year, i entered the contest and won the shit out of that shit. i looked and felt amazing! hot damn. but then the fourth quarter happened and i stress-ate my way back to only 4 pounds less than my pre-biggest loser weight. why can't i have a better way of handling stress? some people get so stressed that they can't be bothered to eat. other people find an outlet for their stress in jogging or lifting weights. or like, shopping. or cleaning. but missy? missy can't do something useful or beneficial with her stress. she just eats everything that isn't nailed down.

anyways, my point is that this year's Biggest Loser (tm) contest is looming on the horizon, with our first weigh-in slated for March 1. the thing is, i am actually in need of a little pre-game. so to get ready, i'm doing a little special-k (tm) type pre-contest run. the problem with special k (tm) is that it is like not super awesome for you. so i subbed it out for some dirty hippie cereals from trader joe's.



there's breakfast, minus the pear that i am taking to work with me.



and there's lunch.

the point of this little pre-game diet is to flip the eating switch back to 'off'. if my only choice for breakfast and lunch is cereal and fruit then i don't really have to think about anything. i just follow the rules and that is that. so hopefully i lose a couple pounds before the weigh in and i enter the contest in a more health-conscious state of mind. (which by the way, is a state of mind that i have not been in [....in which i have not been?....] last weekend i ate a doughnut the size of my face from the doughnut shop in the same plaza as the Hancock Family Tattoo Artist. and that doughnut followed a breakfast of challah french toast. mhm. bad things.

so anyway, biggest loser, special k, and nacho libre's battle cry.






it's kind of upsetting how much i have in common with nacho libre. spent childhood in group home, check. speaks with ridiculous accent for no apparent reason, check. likes to dress up in costumes, double check. weight problem, hello?! check. sometimes wear stretchy pants in my room for fun, check. great ... this movie is going to be playing in my head all day.

but it's ok because from now on, when i am tempted to indulge in a calorie-laden snack, i'll be like:



and if anyone tries to tell me that i can't get back into shape, i'll just be like: