Exceedingly Mundane

2013 was a record-setting year for me, book wise. I not only read the Bible through (which I now plan to do yearly), but I also read more books than I ever have in the past (110 total !!!) I’m leaving my GoodReads widget up for a couple of weeks longer, just so I can see it and be motivated to get back into a good reading groove.

I didn’t read many books at all from about Thanksgiving till New Years Eve. We got busy with Thanksgiving, Tim’s birthday (the day after), decorating and shopping for Christmas, wrapping, etc. Then about the time we got all of that done and I felt like I could relax, snuggle up with a good book, watch a Christmas movie, then Tim took off vacation! And while I loved every minute he was off and we could spend together, we were spending it all together 🙂 And one thing Tim is not into is a) reading a book and b) watching a girlie Christmas movie! So, I only read a couple of books and got to watch zero of my favorite Christmas movies. I had even added a couple to the Amazon Prime queue to stream (more on that in another post to come soon). But, I need to go delete them now, since I didn’t get to watch them. Oh well, there’s always next year.

I’m on to a new year of reading, with new goals. I tend to set a low goal at GoodReads, then adjust it throughout the year. I started out with a book I got from the Kindle Prime program, one of their “First” books. Apparently, they pick out a few books each month from new authors and offer them to read for free. I picked the one that sounded the best to me, “Soy Sauce for Beginners” by Kirstin Chen. I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed it! I normally read almost exclusively Christian fiction, because I don’t like the language and explicit stuff in most mainstream books these days. But this one was surprisingly clean, and had nothing “bad” in it, at least according to my standards. The story was good, and I liked the characters, so it was a nice, fun, quick read to start off the year. Now, book #2 is the last in a trilogy I am reading by Lisa T. Bergren. I got the first two in the “Grand Tour” series free for Kindle, and purchased the last one “Glittering Promises” for 2.99, to finish up the trilogy. So far, I’m liking the first two that I got free more, but I hope this one gets better 🙂

We watched a new TV show last night, one we both really liked. “Intelligence” with Josh Holloway, who played Sawyer on Lost. He’s a super soldier who has had a computer chip implanted in his brain, which gives him instant access to anything cyber related. It had an interesting concept, we like all the characters/actors, and I hope this one makes it. We picked up a new show last fall that we both love, “The Blacklist” and it’s a big hit, so hopefully this one will make it too.

Lastly, our Saints won their first EVER road playoff game! They went to Philadelphia last weekend in this cold “polar vortex” we’ve been having and WON! We were so excited. Now, onto an even harder road game in Seattle this weekend. They might not make it, but we’re going to hope they keep going through the playoffs 😀

Have a good day, everyone!

I’ve been a TV-aholic most of my life. Lately is no exception. We keep our DVR humming most all year long, recording shows and movies. We’re still watching old favorites like Survivor and NCIS, and we’ve picked up new shows along the way, like Person of Interest and Elementary.

There are actually a fair amount of shows we watch in the summer now, since USA, TNT and other networks are coming out with off-season type shows. Some of the ones we are watching this summer include:

Falling Skies (icky aliens)
Major Crimes (I LOVE Mary McDonnell)
Continuum (a new favorite on SyFy)
Under the Dome (trying it out, not sure at this point)
Rizzoli & Isles (I like both of the lead characters and actresses)
Burn Notice (final season, thank goodness)
Motive (still not sure of this one either)
Crossing Lines (Tim likes this more than me)
Covert Affairs (when it comes back in a couple of weeks)
and our new favorite, King and Maxwell

Tim has some he watches (Suits, Graceland, etc) and I have some I watch (Masterchef, which I love! and other cooking and daytime shows).

We’ve seen 3 movies in the theater so far this summer: Ironman 3, Star Trek into Darkness and Man of Steel. I’ve liked all 3, but of course, my favorite by far was Trek into Darkness. There’s a few more coming out that I’d be ok with seeing, but I’m more likely to want to wait and get them on DVD or a pay channel. We’ve got a lot of premium channels right now, since Tim changed our bundle with the cable company. I’m recording a lot on the DVR for us to watch the rest of the summer. Which is a good thing, since…

Our receiver went out and Tim had to mail it in to be repaired. Boo. Hiss. It’s the new fancy Internet Onkyo receiver Tim bought a couple of years ago. It’s at the end of the warranty, but the good news is that a) it was still under warranty and b) even if it wasn’t, Tim had bought an extended warranty! We FedEx’d it last weekend and it’s been received at the repair place in Minnesota or somewhere up north. Not sure how long it will take to be repaired or replaced. In the mean time, we can’t watch DVD’s or Blu-Rays without him rewiring everything, so we’re just not going to pop in discs for the time being. The only downside to that – all of my Harry Potter movies are on Blu-Ray. So sad 🙁

Luckily, we have plenty of TV watching to keep us busy. And with Tim playing golf most every day until nearly 9 PM, we don’t have a lot of time in the evenings to catch up on the DVR. So, it’s pretty full these days 🙂

I’m getting excited for the Olympics! Opening ceremony is tonight, then the competitions begin. It helps that I watch The Today Show most every morning, and their crew has been there this week, getting ready and reporting on the venues, the athletes, etc. I know a lot more names to root for now in several sports 🙂

I looked back through my blog and realize that this is my fourth Olympics to blog about: 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Wow, I’ve been blogging a long time 😀

I think I like the Olympics a lot more than Tim (Saints training camp started this week, and I think he’s a lot more excited about that, LOL!) He doesn’t really get into them, although he is VERY patriotic and does root for Team USA if I have it on. I always hope that I can get him interested, and I think my enthusiasm for the games slowly fizzles, as I realize he just doesn’t want to watch as much of it as I do. Thank goodness we have 2 DVR’s this time around, I think I’ll get to watch a lot more than I have in the past!

So, are you watching the Olympics? Do you have a favorite sport you watch, or favorite athlete you are rooting for?

We’re huge TV junkies. I always have been and Tim has become one (not much choice when you live with me!). Of course, football is on now, and that is our most favorite thing in the whole wide world. 😀 We’ve just finished up with several “summer” shows that we like, including Leverage, White Collar, Covert Affairs, Psych, Royal Pains, etc. I believe most of those will come back in January (when we’ll be missing 24, I imagine).

We have a ton of shows that start back in the fall, that we like to watch. Many nights, our DVR is nearly smoking from the exertion 🙂 There are even a couple of new shows that I would like to check out, but we already have 2 things in that time period, and that’s all the silly DVR can handle. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it record more than two at one time, LOL!

Some of the returning shows that we like and look forward to are:

Survivor
NCIS
NCIS: Los Angeles
The Mentalist
V
Chuck
Fringe
Human Target

Some of the new shows that we are wanting to check out are:

Hawaii 5-0
The Event
Undercovers

I miss watching Dancing with the Stars and Amazing Race, but those never work out for me. I love DWTS and would love to see Kurt Warner this season. But alas, those shows are on Sundays and Mondays, and we have football on those nights. And we have a lot of shows on Tuesdays, when I think the DWTS results are on. Sometimes I might record them and watch later, but it doesn’t happen often. I just keep up with them online and watch some clips.

How about you? Is there a returning or new show that you are looking forward to seeing this fall?

We watch a LOT of TV around here. I used to list all the shows we watch in my sidebar, but I took it off a while ago — the list just got too long!

We have a lot of shows that we are excited about, that are returning. To mention a few: Chuck, NCIS and NCIS: LA, Leverage, The Mentalist, Fringe, V (not sure when it’s coming back on, but we really liked it), Bones, etc. We’re also pretty pumped about the new Survivor: Heroes vs Villains. I hope it’s a good one! We also like a lot of the USA shows like Psych, Burn Notice, White Collar and In Plain Sight. I’m on the fence about a few, most notably Heroes.

Being Jack Bauer addicts, we’re really excited about 24! We’re also going to try the new show that comes on this Sunday with 24, Human Target. I hope it’s good 🙂 Also coming back is the final season of Lost. I’m a bit conflicted about it, wondering how they are going to finish it and how satisfied or dissatisfied we will be. Sigh. I would give it up, but I like to complete things, so I feel compelled to finish out the series.

Another spring show that we used to watch is American Idol — but we’re going to give that one up. We weren’t huge Paula fans, but we hated that they let her go. I always liked the dynamic of Randy, Paula and Simon. Last year, I was just not thrilled with Kara, and I do NOT like Ellen DeGeneres. So, we had already decided to just skip Idol this time, and now this week, they’ve come out and announced that Simon will leave after this year. I’m a little confused about the new show that he will come out with in 2011, the X-Factor. It sounds just like Idol to me!

OK, just some rambling… if you are excited about any show coming on, leave me a comment and let me know. I know most people are not tv junkies like we are 😀

I think our days of watching American Idol are now over. We didn’t watch in the beginning, but picked up around season 4 or 5. Last year, when they added Kara, it was okay, but we weren’t thrilled. It helped that they had a lot of talent. I personally really liked both Kris Allen and Danny Gokey, and am looking forward to their albums later this year. But, now with them getting rid of Paula and adding Ellen DeGeneres, I think we’ll probably skip this one from now on.

Here’s a link to the story, if you’d like to read more… click here.

How about you, did you ever watch and will you continue to watch if you did before?

Nothing too exciting going on around here. Some days I don’t feel like I can come up with a single thing to blog about. Must be because I’ve been doing this about 3 1/2 years now 🙂 And face it, even when I do, it’s terrible boring. Hence, the name “Exceedingly Mundane”. 😀

Anyhoo, here’s what I have today:

1. I’ve been cooking a lot but haven’t made much new lately. What I have tried, we have liked though. A couple of weeks ago, I tried a different recipe for a Crockpot Cherry Cobbler. I made one a while back that used a cake mix for the cobbler portion. I found a recipe on RecipeZaar that used ingredients I had on hand like flour, butter, and sugar, and so I tried that one. This time I used my regular oval crockpot (which heats the entire ceramic crock) as opposed to my West Bend slow cooker (which seems to mostly heat the bottom). This doesn’t make a lot, but it’s a nice little treat for us to have a dessert for two at home. I entered this recipe here, on our website. You can also find it at RecipeZaar.

2. Last night, I made Tim something he’s been asking for. Greens. Ugh. To me, turnip or mustard greens look like stewed grass, but he loves them. He grew up on them and loves the stinky things. A few weeks ago, I asked him what vegetables he liked the most and darn if turnip greens wasn’t the first thing he mentioned. So, I bought a ham steak (well, a center slice, something I find at our Walmart Supercenter which works well for the two of us as opposed to a whole ham), some cabbage, some black-eyed peas and those greens. And no, they weren’t fresh, even though he would have rather had fresh than canned. I decided to look for a recipe for some kind of glaze or sauce for the ham steak, and found one to try on RecipeZaar (I’ve had good luck there lately, as opposed to AllRecipes, can you tell?!). It was good, and I’ll definitely do that again. Nothing fancy, but I love the taste of maple syrup and honey and it was good. The recipe is here on our website, and again you can search and find it easily at RecipeZaar.com.

3. I have tried to be better about blogging about the books I read. When last I posted about books (this post), I was about to start “8 Sandpiper Way” by Debbie Macomber. I read that one and enjoyed it. Nothing spectacular, but I do really like her Cedar Cove series and look forward to each new book. After that, I read a quick cozy mystery with a cooking theme. I’ve read the first in this series and now the second, entitled “Murder on the Menu“. Light and fluffy, right up my alley (my review at GoodReads is hopefully here, not sure if this link works for someone other than me though, LOL!. I’m now reading a new-to-me author, Stephen White, and his book “The Best Revenge“. So far, other than a bit of language, it’s a really good FBI/intrigue type of book. After that, you can check out my sidebar for what’s up next.

4. As a sidenote to #3, if you’re a member of GoodReads and friends with me, I apologize for bombarding you with new and updated books. I had an account at LibraryThing, and what I thought was a lifetime subscription I had gotten last year (it was gifted to me, I didn’t pay for it myself). Come to find out when I logged in Saturday morning, it said my subscription had expired and I could no longer enter new books. Being cheap, I mean frugal, I decided to enter all of our books over at GoodReads and just go from there. It was a tedious process, but I think I’m up to date.

5. At least, I’m up to date until my Amazon order arrives!!! I *heart* Amazon. I ordered several new books yesterday and most of them should be here early next week. I think they are all Christian fiction. One is for a sermon series we’re going to start soon at church and the rest are just light Christian fiction for me. I had saved up MyPoints a while back and cashed them in for a $50 gift certificate to Amazon. It didn’t take me long to spend that! 🙂

6. We’re back to total TV-junkie mode. Most of our new shows have started this week, and we’re watching and/or recording 2-4 shows a night. I won’t go into that long list, but I will say that I was not overly happy with Heroes on Monday night, we liked the new show The Mentalist on Tuesdays, and are looking forward to the new season of Survivor tonight. I’m watching Dancing with the Stars by myself (on a grainy old VCR tape, which makes it even worse. Boy, you can get attached to a DVR with High-Definition TV really fast!) and let me just say one thing – Cloris Leachman needs to go home. What a disastrous, horrific joke. I don’t find her funny or entertaining, just plain scary. I mean, I can’t believe people would vote to keep her on there. She could break a hip and be in the hospital, people. 😀

We’ve got football back, so that means it is also time for new fall shows from some of our old favorites, as well as checking out a few new TV shows. It’s about time… Yeah for a new season of TV!!! 😀

Some of the shows we’ll be watching include:

Monday: MNF, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Chuck, Heroes, Dancing with the Stars (MAN, Mondays are so busy, we can’t even record everything on our DVR!)
Tuesday: NCIS, Fringe (new show by JJ Abrams, gotta give it a try). Tim might pick back up with Eli Stone and we might give the new show following NCIS a try, the Mentalist.
Wednesday: Knight Rider and Bones (and I might have to watch the recorded results of DWTS then)
Thursday: Survivor, that goes without saying!
Friday – it’s iffy if we’ll watch Numb3rs; Tim might watch Life. I’m wondering when Battlestar will come back on
Sunday: Sunday Night Football, maybe the Unit. I would like to watch Amazing Race, but Tim gave up on it 2 seasons ago and we haven’t watched it since.

I like to use this site (Laurel’s TV Picks) to see what comes on when and when the premiere date is.

Let me know what TV show you are looking forward to watching soon!

Today is all about my DVR. I’m so excited! I have a bunch of Jon and Kate plus 8 episodes that taped during TLC’s mini-marathon last night. I just recently discovered this show, and am enjoying catching up on older episodes. I never could have taped all of these shows like this, when we were using a VCR. We often tape two shows at one time, too, since we got the DVR. I love that thing 🙂

I am going to take a break from blogging today, and from reading your blogs. Jon and Kate are calling, as well as the Idol Gives Back show from last night. Try to hold off on posting anything new today, will ya?! 😀

Have a great day!

If you’ve visited here much, you probably already know that I’m a self-proclaimed TV addict. Not so much in the summer, when there’s not much on that we like to watch. But when all of the new shows crank up in the fall, I revert right back into TV Junkie mode. I’m so glad that time has come!

Survivor: China started last Thursday and I loved it. Dancing with the Stars started last night, but I had to tape it since we watched Monday Night football. Tonight, we have Bones, NCIS and The Unit. There’s a couple of new shows that we want to check out and see if we like, including Chuck, Bionic Woman, and The Women’s Murder Club (which doesn’t premiere until mid-October). There’s a few returning shows that we’re on the fence about whether we’ll watch or not. Some of those are Prison Break, Heroes (Tim watched, but not regularly), CSI, Without a Trace, Shark and Numb3rs. We still have a lot of football through the end of the year, so that will limit some of what we watch during the week.

How about you – are there any returning shows or new shows you want to watch or are excited about?

Have a great day!

I had “Good Morning America” on this morning. Today is the 2 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting our state and devastating our Gulf Coast. So, I’ve been watching some of the morning shows (Today and GMA, I rarely watch the Early Show on CBS) and checking out some of the coverage. I was glad to see the announcement of the dancers – they have more this time, 12 couples and the show starts in late September (9/24). I can’t wait, I love this show 🙂

Marie Osmond – singer, actress
Floyd Mayweather – boxer
Melanie Brown – “Scary” Spice
Helio Castroneves – Racecar Champ
Jenny Garth – Beverly Hills 90210 actress
Cameron Mathison – from daytime soap All My Children (yeah, I LOVE him!)
Jane Seymour – actress
Albert Reed – Model
Sabrina Bryant – actress, singer (part of the group The Cheetah Girls)
Mark Cuban – Basketball Owner (Dallas Mavericks), billionaire
Josie Maran – Model (SI swimsuit, among other things)
Wayne Newton – Las Vegas entertainer

I’m really excited about several of these contestants! Do you watch this show and if so, who would you root for out of these (obviously, if they are decent dancers!)? 🙂

We woke up this morning to find that our new cable provider, Comcast, has shuffled our channel line-up. And I’m not talking about a couple of random changes, or removing one channel to add another. I’m talking about a whole change up in our channel listing.

Let me tell you, for a TV-aholic like myself, this is not a good thing. We had upgraded to digital cable last year when we got our new hi-def plasma television, and it’s taken me a while to learn a lot of the new channels. There’s so many channels on here, that I don’t like just scrolling up and down through them — it takes too long. I like to memorize the channels that I watch often, and just punch in the number and flip right to them. WELL. Today, they are all different. They’ve totally moved such channels as our hi-def ABC, NBC, Fox, as well as channels like Discovery, TLC, History Channel, all of the sports channels, all of the news channels, Spike, Family Channel, Hallmark Channel, etc. It’s enough to make me not a happy camper for today.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, and I know the worst is coming. We also get our Internet service through our cable company. Soon, I’ll have to change over my email address and go through all of those hoops to get it all changed. I have SO many things tied to my email address, and its going to be a pain in the patoot to get it all switched over. I just hope that we don’t lose our Internet access for any length of time. I hate being without my Internet!

So, that’s my gripe for today. And it’s also a segue into today’s Question of the Day: Do you have cable or satellite TV? Do you have memorized the channel numbers of your favorite channels, or do you just surf through the channels? Also, do you get your internet service through your cable company, your phone company, or another way? We are going to look at changing to satellite later this year, so inquiring minds want to know!

Even though I’m a huge TV addict and watch a lot of TV, I don’t normally blog a whole lot about it. But, they just announced the new contestants for Dancing with the Stars, and we watched Idol last night, so I feel the need to blabber a little bit about TV. Bullet-style:

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had a lot of time. First off, I’m still on my month-long federal jury summons, but so far I have not had to go in. I keep hearing those three little words I love – “Do. Not. Report.” and they make me so happy. 😆

Da Blog – I worked the other day on a new look for the blog. I know a lot of you don’t like it, either it’s too dark or too hard to read. I’m still looking for something else that will work, but in the mean time, I’m going to leave this one up. I just don’t have time to work on another one. Sorry, hope everyone understands!

Menu ramblings – I post my weekly menu every week, as part of a meme sponsored by Laura. I love doing this, but we don’t always stick to the plan! This has been one of those weeks (starting tonight, the rest of the menu probably won’t go according to plan!) I did make the Tortilla Torta on Monday, and it’s really just an easy layered enchilada pie. Very gooey, pretty good, and meatless too (shhh, don’t tell Tim!). I also made a quick dressing to go on a side salad. I surfed around and couldn’t find a Mexican type salad dressing, but I saw an idea and used it, and I really liked it. I took some low-fat Ranch salad dressing, mixed it with some plain non-fat yogurt, a squirt of lime juice and a bunch of cumin. Whisked it all together to taste and had it over a green salad. I really liked it and will do that again. Last night, I tried a new way to do chicken, with feta cheese. It was good, but next time I will use more feta. Basically, it’s just a baked chicken with feta inside. I pounded my chicken breasts flat, dipped them in beaten egg whites, then rolled in bread crumbs. On the inside, I put some feta then sort of rolled them up. Next time, I’ll definitely put more feta. You couldn’t taste it in half the chicken, but it was still good. I also sprayed the top of the bread crumbs with fat-free spray butter, so that made it crispier. Tim loves fried chicken, but I never fry things, so this is as close as he gets!

TV – I watched the season premiere of “Dancing with the Stars” last night, and loved it. I didn’t see the first few dancers (long story, we had a lady knock on the door who bought something at our garage sale and wanted HELP with it. Argh. To me, if you buy something at a garage sale, it’s “As Is”. I would NEVER drive back to someones house and ring their doorbell at dinnertime and ask for help.) Anyway, I didn’t see Tucker Carlson except in the recap at the end, but he looked very wooden. So did Harry Hamlin and Jerry Springer, so I’m not sure who will be the first to go. It sure looks like Mario Lopez will be the one to beat this time. He looked really good out there. I also checked out the show after it, “Men in Trees” and it was ok. I’m looking forward to Survivor starting tomorrow night. We always watch that show. 🙂

Vacation – I’ve been doing a bunch of vacation planning and printing out maps and itineraries. We leave in a couple of days on vacation, so the blogging will be sporadic from here on out until we get back. We will have internet access from some of our hotel spots, so I will try to check in and post if I have time. No guarantees, though! Since we’re driving, we will take the laptop and maybe I’ll be able to post some.

OK, I have to go run errands and maybe do a little shopping. Normally, when we go on vacation, I always get some new clothes. I haven’t bought a single thing for this trip so far, and I am thinking I need to!

So, that brings up a question of the day – when you go on vacation, do you usually get any new clothes for the trip? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Tim and I went out for a “date night” on Friday night – we went to the local pizza buffet and stuffed ourselves silly. Do you hear that – glup, glup, glup – that’s the sound of my arteries clogging up and all of those calories going straight to my thighs! LOL, it was fun and it was really good, but I ate altogether too much, then I have that sort of guilty feeling afterwards for overindulging on food that’s not really that healthy. Oh well 🙂

After we got home, we called and wished Tim’s brother Mark a happy birthday. We hope you have a good birthday Mark, he’s going to get to celebrate again today. Enjoy the movie!

We turned on the TV at 9 PM so we could catch the new show, Psych. We used to be big Monk fans, and although I still really like the show, Tim is a bit aggravated with it. He doesn’t really like TV shows that don’t stick to a normal scheduling routine. Monk tends to appear at odd times, like January, and run through March, and Tim hates that. I still love the show and would watch it, but sometimes the “King of the Remote” overrules me! But, he had seen a few minutes of the pilot episode of Psych last week and thought it looked good. And I must give Jane at Cozy Reader a shout out for blogging about the show last week. Thanks Jane, you were right – Psych is funny and we really enjoyed it! It’s sort of along the same lines as Monk, but rather than him being OCD and solving crimes, the main character (Sean) is just a really observant guy who is good at figuring things out, but he has led the police to believe he’s a psychic who is figuring out cases by his psychic visions. He was really funny when he tried to do his “psychic ability” routines. Good show and we enjoyed it! 🙂

Today, we’re going to get to hang out with Tim’s parents. His mom and dad are coming over to eat, go shopping and hang out with us! Should be fun, we love spending time with them and just wish we got to see them more often.

Have a great day everyone!