Exceedingly Mundane

Well, I feel like I should blog about something other than my weekly menu, a book or movie review, or a meme or tag. I do try to post my “question of the day” fairly often, because I feel like it’s a fun and kind of interesting way of talking about myself, as well as learning more about the wonderful people who take time out of their busy day to visit my blog. I love seeing the ways that we are all alike, yet all different. It reminds me that I live in a very small corner of our incredible world, and there are lots of other ways that people think, act and live.

However, that doesn’t really fill in for what most people expect to find in a blog. I feel like most people blog about interesting things, fun times out of their day, their kids and the cute things they say, family times, and a whole myriad of other entertaining topics. I don’t feel like my blog has been anywhere in that realm lately. Maybe its just me and the blahs, or maybe its just because I lead a very boring, an exceedingly mundane kind of life. I live a simple life and that’s totally by choice and by plan. But it doesn’t make for a very interesting blog.

Plus, I seem to be putting more of my daily type ramblings over on my Project365 blog. Swing by and check it if you haven’t. Nothing interesting, but at least it’s a photo and a blurb about something that happened during the day. Usually, it’s a picture of food, a flower or my dog. Riveting stuff!

So, here’s a few minor things in my head… buckle your seatbelts 🙂

Ok, I guess that’s enough boring randomness for today. Hope everyone else is having a great day, and a great week

I’ve been known to go overboard on lots of things. It’s the “hoarding” or packrat mentality that I possess. Tim often jokes that if there is an empty space, I will fill it. I have enough toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste and the like stashed around here for us for months on end. He got really worried when we got the new refrigerator, thinking I would go hog wild and go out and buy tons of food — just to fill it up 🙂 Silly boy. And oh, he says we should never move into a house with a walk-in pantry. He says I will be at Sam’s Club every week, buying stuff we can’t possibly eat in a lifetime.

Anyway, this mentality reared its ugly head, just a little, yesterday when I was grocery shopping. I stopped by the milk (ack, it’s up to 3.57 for a gallon of store brand skim milk, and going up every week, it seems), and I also needed to grab a creamer. Here’s what is residing in my refrigerator now:

I had blogged about seeing this Blueberry Cobbler flavor earlier and swore up and down I wouldn’t want to try it. It’s the thought of it being blue, I think. But then Sparky Duck emailed me and told me he had tried it and he really liked it, so I thought I would give it a try. I also spied another “limited edition” flavor in the International Delights brand, White Chocolate Raspberry. So, I couldn’t, you know, just let it sit there! There was only one there, so I had to get it 🙂

Yes, the first step is admitting you have a problem…

We’ve been really busy the last couple of days. Too busy to blog, I’m afraid, and this one is going to be short and sweet 🙂

We had a date night last night. Dinner at our favorite Chinese place, and then we went to the new Starbucks that recently opened in our little burg. After that, we rented “The Guardian” with Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. Tim’s pick, but we both liked the movie. He really liked it and said he’d give it a 8.5 to a 9.0. I’d probably rate it a 7 or 8, but only because of the ending. It was like Top Gun except with Coast Guard and rescue swimmers instead of pilots. Good movie.

Quick Pic – this is what was on Tim’s Starbucks cup… loved it!

Hope everyone is having a great weekend 😀

I’m not quite sure why, but several of you asked to see what my new fridge looked like, once I had moved all of the food into it. I thought I’d go ahead and do this while it’s all nice and shiny and clean, and most of all – organized!

Remember my new fridge on Sunday, totally empty, waiting to cool off for the required amount of time:

Here’s what it looked like late Monday night after I had moved everything from old small refrigerator into the new side by side:

And this is a built in slot area on the door, that I’m not quite sure what it’s meant for. We don’t buy canned drinks, so I don’t even have a can to test to see if they fit in the slots. Tim thinks it’s too small for cans and I think he’s right. Irregardless, it seems like a perfect place to put my yogurt, so that’s what it is for NOW!

What I really like about this refrigerator is that it’s so adjustable. Almost all of the shelves on both sides are adjustable, I can move them up and down and rearrange them. All of the drawers on the door are movable, and I’ve moved them up and down several times trying to get stuff to fit. Same thing on the freezer side. The freezer has two pull out drawers, but the shelves are able to be moved up and down. And the openings on the door side of the freezer tilt out, which is really nice. All in all, very customizable, which is one reason we picked this one.

OK, I’m going grocery shopping later today, so I’ll have to see what I can do about filling it up more! 😀 I wanted to go ahead and post a picture, because it will probably never look this good again, LOL!

I blogged back in late December, when we had to buy a new washer and dryer, that I thought that 2007 was going to be the “Year of the Appliance“.

Boy, is that turning out to be true! My clothes washer went out in December, and we got a new hE washer and dryer. I said then that my dishwasher was going out soon, and I was right. It has broken twice this week, and the first three times, Tim used a parts kit we had bought to fix it. After it broke for a fourth time on Saturday, we decided to go get a new one. We were just going to get a dishwasher, mind you.

You guys don’t know my husband.

Here’s what we came home with:

I honestly think Tim would have bought me a new stove/oven if I had let him. After all of this, I was near coronary stage, seeing all of those dollar signs. I thought I was going to hyperventilate after we got the grill today (we ordered the dishwasher and refrigerator on Saturday afternoon and they were delivered Sunday). We had to run back to Lowe’s to get a fitting for the dishwasher, and Tim said “let’s get a grill too”. 🙂

To be fair, the dishwasher was broken, our old fridge was small (17 cu ft) and old (14 years) and our old grill had rapidly deteriorating grates that had already been replaced two times. We grill a lot, year round, and Tim absolutely loves to grill. I call him the “Grillmaster”. Now, the only things left (knock on wood) are the stove, water heater, AC unit for the house and the roof. I hope those hold out a lot longer, so they don’t need upgrading or replacing.

In the mean time, I’m running my first load in the new dishwasher right now, and trying so hard to be patient and let the fridge and freezer cool off before moving all of the food from the old one to the new one. We’ve moved the old refrigerator into the garage for a day, till the new one cools off. After that, we’re going to donate it to a church. We had the delivery guys haul the old dishwasher off, since it was dead as a doornail.

All in all, a really exciting weekend. If you like to spend money and buy shiny new appliances, that is!

P.S. I have to figure out where to put all of my food in the new refrigerator. We had a small one before, and not a side by side. This one is completely different, and so much bigger. I’ve never had a humidity controlled drawer for my fruits and vegetables. 🙄 I have to figure out where to put everything. Maybe in the next couple of days, if I’m really bored, I’ll show you guys a before and after picture. 😆 Right now, it looks like this:

I haven’t been posting a lot here lately about my flowers and things growing in the yard. Nor have I been posting all of the cute pictures I take of our dog Beau. I’ve been posting those over at my Project365 photo blog for a while now. In fact, that blog is often more of a chronicle of what’s going on with our daily lives and the things growing in our yard, and where we go and what we do, more than this blog.

I thought it was time to post some pictures of Beau over here though. Of course, he’s had quite a few posted on the other blog (you can click here, here or a ton of them here to check some of them out).

You see – we had a very important event occur in the Exceedingly Mundane world yesterday. We took Beau to the lake in our subdivision for his first swim. When we rescued Beau last October, we felt it was getting a little chilly to let him go play in the lake in our subdivision. And even though it’s been warm here for a bit, we wanted to make sure the water had warmed up enough. Plus, we had an extra reason yesterday. Tim was out back hitting golf balls and then he heard “whoosh” and realized Beau had gone and jumped in the ditch behind our house. He’s starting to do that a lot, unfortunately. Which means we have to give him a bath afterwards, since he comes back in at dark and snuggles up on his bed. Anyway, he was already wet and dirty, so we took him to the lake.

Tim is not sure that he had ever been swimming before. He was very hesitant at first, and Tim said he “had to get his confidence up”. But, he is a dog after all, and swimming is fairly inborn. He took to it in no time! Tim threw his ball out and he swam out to get it over and over, and he just looked the happiest we’ve seen him look in a long time! Maybe ever – Tim and I think this might be his most favorite thing he’s done since we’ve had him 🙂 Beau had a blast, so we’re going to try to take him more often. He had to get another bath, at dark, of course, but he was so happy, he didn’t even mind!

I took a couple of MPEG movies, but I haven’t figured out how to edit them down and post them here. So, I’m going to post a boatload of pictures instead Click on the extended link to see them all.

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I know I haven’t done a lot of “real” blogging lately. It seems I’m mostly doing memes, posting my menu, some book or movie reviews every now and then, and my favorite, posting a “Question of the Day”. The main reason being twofold – 1) I don’t have anything all that interesting going on to blog about and 2) I haven’t been feeling really motivated lately with my blog. Either this one or my Project365 blog. I hope my mojo comes back soon! 🙂

In the mean time, here’s a few random, and incredibly mundane, thoughts:

Books, glorious books, I wish I could spend all my time reading. I have so many books I want to read, and after cruising so many blogs who are doing the Spring Reading Challenge, I’ve found tons more books I want to read. I am also loving that my library finally, at long last, got an online reservation system. I go put my name on the list for a bestseller and poof – when it’s my turn, they call me up and say “your book is ready!”. It’s enough to make a bookworm like me squeal with joy!

So, if you also read my Project365 photoblog, you already know that we did the whole big “eat bad food, watch several movies” thing over the weekend. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. We’re really behind on seeing a lot of movies that have been out on DVD for the last few months. Plus, I’ve been really craving pizza. So, Saturday we ordered Papa John’s pizza (the Works, and we tried their little dessert cinna-pizza) and then on Sunday, we ordered take out Chinese from the place a few blocks from our house. Yummy! Tim always gets chicken with garlic sauce (spicy) and I always get shrimp with broccoli. We ordered some steamed dumplings, which is my most favorite thing that this particular place makes.

Anyway, here’s the movies we rented:

I thought I would do some quick movie reviews, then I got to thinking – I basically always like the movies we watch and the books I read! I am not a very good person to give a thoughtful, insightful kind of review. I just like to escape and I like to be entertained. I don’t like to really analyze the movies and dissect them. I just like to watch them and enjoy them 🙂

We liked all 3 movies, but we did enjoy “The Illusionist” the best. Very good movie, with a good plot, good characters and actors, and it was actually fairly clean. We both give it an 8 out of 10. The other two movies, we liked for different reasons. “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” is so lite and cheesy and campy, and even though it has a bit of off-color humor and crassness to it (and a bit of bad language), it is just so easy to laugh along to all of its silliness. We give it a 7 out of 10. The last movie was one I rented purely for myself, “A Good Year“. I had read the book “A Year in Provence” by Peter Mayle a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I had thought this movie was loosely based on this book, but from what I remember about the book, the two don’t have anything remotely in common! I enjoyed it, nonetheless, and Tim said he did too, although I’m sure he would say this was his least favorite movie of the ones we got. The pace of this movie is slower, and it wants you to stop and think about your life and your job and your choices, and I really liked it. I thought it had a certain charm and a certain quality to it, that I really enjoyed. But, that’s just me, I love movies about appreciating the simple things in life.

So, there you go. We at least knocked 3 movies off our ever-growing list. We haven’t rented hardly any movies this year, and we’ve only been to the theater once. This is way behind schedule for us. I know it will pick up a lot more in the summer. Once our shows like 24, Idol, Lost, Survivor, etc go off for the summer sometime in May, we’ll start renting a lot more movies. I say every year that we want to try Netflix, but somehow, we never seem to get around to it. One reason could be the 100+ DVD’s we already own, and the massive amount of channels we get on our digital cable. Anyway, if you have any movies you’ve seen lately and would recommend, leave me a comment and let me know 🙂 We still have a lot left to rent, and I’m always looking for more good ones to add to that list!

Yippee! Look what just came in the mail!!!!

For those of you who don’t remember, back in early January of this year, I shamelessly begged asked if anyone had any “cookbook points” from Nabisco brand boxes of crackers or cookies. So many of you were so sweet and so very generous, and you guys all pitched in and mailed me enough points to not only get a cookbook for myself, but to share with my sister Gail, so she could get one. And even though we had a bit of a scare back in March (when this little notify card came in, saying it would be a couple more months before it was shipped), I’m happy to say that the cookbook arrived today! Yeah! I can’t wait to start going through it 🙂

Oh yes, and add it to my much beloved cookbook collection, which, as fate would have it, I just blogged about a couple of days ago, LOL! Believe it or not, this is my very first Rachael Ray cookbook.

So, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, to all of you who helped out — I really appreciate it! 🙂

WARNING: Long, sappy, rambling, personal post ahead.

Today is my father-in-law’s birthday. I had originally thought I would post about this topic on a day associated with my husband, Tim. His birthday, Valentines Day, our anniversary, or some other day where I could blog about Tim, and about how wonderful it is that we found each other, that he shared not only his last name with me, but made me a part of his family. But, it seems I blogged about something else on all of those days. So, since this has as much to do with my FIL as my husband, I’m going to blab on about it today.

This post stems from the song “My Last Name” by Dierks Bentley.

[audio:http://www.hambones.org/blogs/stacy/mp3/My Last Name.mp3] Click (on the left, twice) to play the song and hear it in its entirety.

The lyrics that really get me all choked up are:

Daddy always told me, far back as I recall, Son, you’re part of something. You represent us all. So, keep it how you got it. As solid as it came. It’s my last name.

Darling if you’re wondering, why I’ve got you here tonight. I want to be your husband; I want you to be my wife. I ain’t got much to give you, but what I’ve got means everything – it’s my last name”

This song gets me every time, because it reminds me so much of my husband and his father. When Tim proposed to me (he got down on both knees, by the way), he said he didn’t have the world to give me, but he would if he could. He said he could just promise to love and cherish me all of the days of our lives. And he does. And I’ve come to realize what other wonderful gift he gave me – his last name and being accepted into his family as a daughter and sister.

You see, I had my own wonderful family before I ever met Tim and his family. I had a mom I loved (who is no longer with us), a Daddy I adore and two pretty awesome sisters. But when I married Tim, I got a whole extra family as part of the package deal. 🙂 And the head of that family is my father-in-law, Mitchell. Mitchell is one of my favorite men on the planet. He is right up there with my dad and my husband. I love and respect them all, immensely. Mitchell taught his three sons by example as much as the words, how to be a good man, how to be honorable, how to be respectful of yourself and others, how to love your family, love and honor God and be the man that God expects you to be. Mitchell has walked this walk all of his life, and his sons are the same way. They are honorable, hard-working, kind, very decent kind of men. Tim had the added benefit, as Mitchell did, of serving in the military, where he learned even more about honor, discipline and respect. I love the man my husband is, and I have his parents to thank for that. And I do, as often as I can. They did a tremendous job raising their sons, and I think my in-laws are so proud of all of their sons. I know I love them both to pieces (Tim’s mom and dad) and I am proud to call Tim’s brothers my very own brothers. It’s really great to have such wonderful family on both sides! 😀

So, today, Happy Birthday to my father-in-law Mitchell. Thank you for being the man and father you are.

Ahh, cookbooks. I love cookbooks! Cookbooks are another serious obsession for me. I love to look at them, read them like books, look at the pretty pictures, dream about all of the recipes I want to try, etc. I use those little post-it flags sometimes to mark the pages of the recipes I want to make. I always have the best of intentions. And yet, I rarely cook out of them. I do try a few things, but for the most part, I just like to have them to look at and maybe use “one day”.

I also daydream about the day when I get a bigger kitchen and I can put my cookbooks on some shelves in the kitchen, or nearby. Right now, the majority of my cookbooks are in an old bookcase in the hall, nowhere near my kitchen. One day, I hope to have a built-in set of shelves on the side of an island or cabinet, or maybe a built-in desk area with shelves above it, so I can display my favorite cookbooks. I do have a few in the kitchen, in a wooden cookbook stand on top of my refrigerator. But, I have so many that storing them is an issue. Some of them are here:

That’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you like cookbooks? Do you buy many cookbooks? Do you cook out of them much, if you do? And equally important, where do you store yours? If you really want to get all involved with your answer, give me a ballpark estimate on how many cookbooks you have. You can also tell me which one is your favorite, if you can pick just one. I can’t! 🙂

P.S. I’m cheating again, and using this for today’s photo over at my Project 365 blog. Blogger privilege

I hope everyone is having a very joyful, very blessed Easter today. We’ve been busy all weekend, and I just haven’t stopped to look at the computer, much less blog. I just now got my photos for yesterday and today loaded on my Project365 blog. In fact, I even “cheated” on my photo for today

We had a surprise birthday party for my father-in-law yesterday. We think it all went well and we sure had a great time, seeing everyone and celebrating his birthday. He’s such a wonderful man, and he raised 3 fine sons, one of which I am very blessed to call my husband. I think I might have to get all sappy later in the week and blog about him again, on his actual birthday. 🙂

The weather certainly doesn’t feel like Easter or spring. Hard to believe it’s so chilly here for this time of year. I’m really glad I had not planted any flowers or shrubs yet, back when we were in the upper 80’s.

Hope you are all having a lovely Easter. Rejoice, He is Risen!

I have a feeling that I’m going to be popping several Tylenol today. It’s going to be a long day…

I blogged yesterday that I was fretting about our neighbor’s fence. The fence contractor he hired showed up bright and early this morning (and it’s in the 40’s here, hard to believe, since it was 86 on Monday!), and started tearing down his fence. We share one side of our yard with him and so now, I have a gaping hole where there used to be a fence. Which means Beau can’t go out on his own to take care of business, hang out or whatever. He is NOT a happy dog. We’re only a couple of hours into the project and already he’s really upset. He hears them banging and drilling and making noise and he is about to tear down the back door to go out and investigate. He’s a territorial kind of dog and rather protective of me, and our house and yard. So, needless to say, I already have a headache and I will probably have to go get some Tylenol soon.

So, I thought I would do a quick Question of the Day: Can you swallow pills without any kind of liquid? I absolutely cannot, but Tim can. He always amazes me. He doesn’t take Tylenol or Advil very often, but when he does, he takes two in his hand, pops them in his mouth and just swallows them. I absolutely cannot do this. I have to have liquid of some kind and then sometimes I have trouble getting the larger pills down. When I was younger, I couldn’t swallow pills at all, but I did finally learn. How about you – do you have any trouble swallowing pills? Have you always been able to, or did you struggle to learn? Can you swallow them dry, without liquid?

Not that it’s anything important, but here’s a few things that are bouncing around in my head. Mostly, just a good excuse to use bullets. I luvs me some bullets in my blog posts, LOL!

I am going this morning to the salon to get my hair cut. And colored, but shhhh, we’re not going to talk about that very much. Suffice it to say that I had grey hair in high school. They had to airbrush it out of my senior portrait. By the time I got married, I had huge streaks of grey all through my hair. Not long after we were married, Tim told me that he thought I should color it, since he thought I looked a lot older than I really was. Needless to say, I’ve been coloring my hair ever since. I am calmly and patiently waiting for the day when Tim has a head full of grey hair. Then, I’ll stop coloring mine and we’ll be grey together. 🙄

Anyway, I go regularly to get my hair cut. Every 5-6 weeks. I have horrible hair and I have trouble styling it. I wish I had great hair. I wish I had “wash and go” kind of hair, but I don’t. It won’t do what I want it to. It’s incredibly frizzy. It flips one way and then another, never the same thing twice or the same way on that part of my head. It’s a struggle every day between me and my hair. A common phrase in my house is that I’m having a “bad hair day”. 😀

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day – Do you go to the salon to get your hair cut? How often? Do you get your hair highlighted or colored? Would you say you have more “good hair days” or “bad hair days”. 😀 Inquiring minds want to know!