Two blunders to kick things off right

For John the Vicar's New Year's Eve celebration I made my Guinness stout gingerbread.  Baking it starts out as a fun science adventure.  The baking soda will hugely react with the Guinness - or is it with the molasses?  Or both?  Either way, you gotta get it to react fully and completely in a pot before making the rest of the gingerbread.  Otherwise it will boil over while baking in the oven.

To do so, bring the Guinness and blackstrap molasses to a boil in a very large pot.  Then, while stirringstirringstirring, add in 1/2 tablespoon of baking soda.  It will froth up like you've never seen, and you gotta keep stirring to break the bubbles so it doesn't go over.  Hence using a very large pot. 

Now, I often eyeball ingredients and it usually is not a problem.  Rather than suffer the tedium of measuring three 1/2 teaspoons in order to achieve 1/2 tablespoon, I instead grabbed the full tablespoon and eye-balled what looked as half way.  And luckily I thought it would be fun to get the process on video....

Did you know I'm a genius?  Because I am.  My doctorate degree says so.  *Cough* *Clear throat* *Cough-loser-cough*  Luckily, as though more luck were possible in this situation, since the bulk of it was carbohydrate it cleaned up really easy with a little hot water and soap. 

Now for the more serious stuff.  I pulled up last year's similarly veined post to compare to 2011 stats and found, in true form, that last year's post describing 2011 data was instead labeled as 2012 in nice big bold print in the title. 

Awesome sauce.  Typo now fixed, one year later.

Anyways, things definitely bumped up a notch in the real 2012.  Many months my walking mileage was about the same or higher than my running mileage from '11. 

I like that my two week off season and the start of winter maintenance mileage is evident by the decrease in last year's November and December values. 

Blue = 2011 run.  Red = 2012 run.  Green = 2012 walk.

2011 running total: 1583 miles
2012 running total: 1770 miles

2011 walking total: 535 miles  *only recorded for 1/2 year
2012 walking total: 1605 miles

2012 grand total: 3375 miles

That's about the distance from Los Angeles to Maine.  I'll take that.  Better news with which to start the new year than a couple of blunders.