Exceedingly Mundane

Not a whole lot “blog-worthy” going on. The sun is actually out today and it’s rather pretty outside. I just finished watering some of the flowers and deadheading my moss rose and petunias. I took some pictures of some of the flowers blooming in the yard and might post some later (yeah, I know, don’t everyone get all excited at once 🙂 ). It didn’t really rain much yesterday either, so Tim decided to mow and do all the yard work when he got in. It all looks really good. The grass is really green from all the rain we’ve had recently.

I finished my latest book last night. I give it an enthusiastic two-thumbs up, my highest rating, etc. I loved it. No other words to describe it. I do believe it’s one of the best books I have read in a long time. Maybe not everyone would like it, but I thoroughly and completely enjoyed it. I read it in two nights flat – I believe that’s a new record for me on a book like this. You can read more in the review I just typed up at Hambones.

More good news on the Vonage front. I got an email from Vonage today that BellSouth had accepted our letter of transfer and they should be transferring our phone line soon; in fact, it’s scheduled for tomorrow. Which will be wonderful – we’ll have unlimited nationwide long distance, caller id, call waiting, call forwarding, Internet voice mail, and lots of other features. All for $24.99 a month. You can’t beat that. I mostly wanted it for the caller id. I have wanted it for a while but just didn’t want to pay what BellSouth wanted for it every month. Now, it’s “free”, or so I think, gotta look at it that way! We’ll have to do some work tonight with the VOIP box, the new phones, and other various hardware issues (read: Tim will be busy doing this stuff tonight!), but hopefully it will all go smooth. Let us know if you can’t get us at the house though! 😀

Well, so far today has been really good. We got up early and went walking. It always makes us feel better to get up and go, even though it’s sometimes difficult to drag ourselves out of bed so much earlier than we would like. I’m definitely not a morning person!

Tim worked quite a bit on Hambones last night, and I read my new book I got at the library. All I can say is “Wow”, I’m loving this book so much. I do believe it’s one of the best I have read so far this year. I’d definitely put it up there with “The Testament” and “The Wedding”. I’m reading “Three Weeks with My Brother” by Nicholas and Micah Sparks. I want Tim to read it after I finish with it, but I see a losing battle on the horizon with that proposition! I’m already nearly half way through it. I absolutely could not put it down last night. I read till my eyes were bleary and nearly popped out of their sockets!

Wendy called at lunch today, from the hospital! They had her scheduled for a c-section today, but as often happens, the baby decided to come on his own terms, and they actually came over Monday morning and Nathan made his appearance! Wendy said she and Nathan were doing fine, so that is wonderful news. Nothing else really matters except a healthy baby and a healthy mom. Wendy said they would go home tomorrow, which is great news.

Well, not much going on today to blog about. We had a nice long weekend, and now it’s time to get back into some kind of normal routine. We got up this morning and went walking at 6. Come to find out, Tim had stayed up till about 2:30 or so, working on Hambones, so needless to say, he’s probably pretty tired right about now. I went to bed at about 11:30 and I’m tired, but I’m a wimp, so… 🙂

It’s still very cloudy and grey here and it looks like it could rain at any minute. I’m sure it will wait until I head out to run errands. I’m going to run to the library and grocery shopping here in a bit, so I imagine it will come a flood about the time I wheel my cart out to the car, full of groceries. Murhpy’s Law and all. After that, it’s just a lot of picking up and cleaning. Back to the grind

Well, it looks like the remainder of our holiday weekend will be a rain-out. Or so they are saying. We drove most of the way back from New Orleans yesterday in the rain, and pulled up at home to find everything soaked, so we knew we had gotten a good rain.

Dad stopped by on his way home from Indianola to Hattiesburg yesterday afternoon after we got in, and visited with us for a few minutes. Then, after he left, we ran out to Blockbuster to rent a movie (I had one more free rental coupon good for the month of May), and then stopped by Kroger to pick up hotdogs and buns to grill out today. It rained again shortly after we got back home, and then I think it might have rained more during the night. It’s looking like more rain later today, as they are predicting 80% chance of rain for today, tonight and tomorrow. Tim had wanted to get out and work in the yard, cut the grass, and work on my back flower bed. But everything looks like a mud slide out there, so I think that is definitely out.

So far, we’re just hanging out inside, which is ok-fine by me. 🙂 I did the trivia on Hambones.org this morning, and am trying to catch up on some emails and blog surfing. Maybe we’ll watch more movies this afternoon. Tim watched “Blade Trinity” last night, but I finished reading another book and watched “Titanic” on TV, instead of watching the vampire stuff with him. I have several book and movie reviews that I need to add to Hambones later on, hopefully today or tomorrow.

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day!

We got back from New Orleans today. Nice long weekend, and it was fun. We did basically what I blogged about before we left (you can read all about it here). Except we didn’t make it on the streetcar to tour the Garden District. We ate at Landry’s (stuffed shrimp for me, shrimp fettucine for Tim), and also at House of Blues (shrimp po-boy for me, ribs, sweet potatoes and turnip greens for Tim, then we split the chocolate walnut brownie with ice cream for dessert!). We walked down to the original Cafe Du Monde on Saturday morning and found the line to get in was about a block long, so we went to the Riverwalk and ate at the Cafe du Monde there. Inside a shopping mall, so we didn’t have the ambience, but had the same food/drink and air conditioning and a view of the river to boot! I discovered that even though I can drink our coffee at home, I can still barely get down Cafe du Monde’s original cafe au lait, unless it has a LOT of sugar added to it! Tim drank their regular black coffee, in spite of the guy warning him “our coffee is VERY strong sir”, he got a large and downed every last drop of it. It looked like tar!

We spent all day Saturday at the D-Day museum (well, between 5 and 6 hours), and finished what we had not seen a couple of summers ago. We walked along the Riverwalk towards dusk and watched a bunch of boats coming up the river. All in all, a really nice trip. We had thought we might stick around and do something today (Sunday), but it had rained early that morning and was very grey and overcast, and we were ready to get home. After checking out, we proceeded to wait nearly 1 1/2 hours for our car to be brought around from the valet service. Well, technically, we called ahead from the room about 20-30 minutes before we went down. Then, we sat in the lobby for 55 minutes, waiting on our car. Long story. Otherwise, we really liked the hotel. Great ambience and a terrific room. No view. We were on the first floor and our window view was an alley with cars and lots of dumpsters. But it was right in the middle of things, and still very quiet and peaceful at night and we really enjoyed it.

Hope everyone else had a great weekend too!

Well, I have a lot to blog about and not much time to sit down and blog about it. I would like to blab about the TV shows last night – the American Idol finale, the Lost 2 hour season finale and the Alias finale. Maybe later.

We got up early and went walking this morning. Tim is going to take off Friday and wants to go to New Orleans this weekend. So, we spent most of the morning looking online for hotels. We’re going to try a new one this time – the St James down in the Quarter. We’ve not stayed here before, so it will be a learning experience. We’ve stayed at the Wyndham and Hyatt before and had great stays, so hopefully this one will be as nice.

We’re going to go back to the D-Day Museum and finish going through it. We went two summers ago and didn’t see it all, but enjoyed the museum immensely. We’ll probably take in a movie at the IMAX, there is a new African safari one starting this weekend. Also, I’ve been wanting to take the St Charles streetcar down through the Garden District and we’ve not done that yet, so hopefully this trip. I know Tim wants to go back to House of Blues and eat, he loved it there when we went last time (we won’t go for the bands or music, probably go for lunch). I know that eating out in New Orleans won’t be a problem. Plenty of good places to eat. 🙂

Oh, and we’ll definitely hit Cafe du Monde at least one time, maybe more. I have only learned to “tolerate” coffee in the last year or so, since we went on vacation last summer to San Antonio. The last time we went to New Orleans, I didn’t drink coffee, couldn’t stand the taste of it, and although we went to Cafe du Monde, I ended up getting milk or water with my beignet. Not this time! 😀

We are leaving Friday morning and coming back Sunday night. I have to head out this afternoon and run some errands, then get back and do laundry before we go.

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend. I will try to check in Sunday night when we get back. 😀

Let’s see… catching up from Monday late. Tim got home and we went walking and got our two miles in. We had supper and then watched the season finale of ’24’. I couldn’t believe it – now they have Jack in hiding, and we have to wait to see if they figure out a way to bring him back. And we don’t have to wait till September, darn, the preview says we have to wait till January. What’s up with that? We taped the season finale of 7th Heaven, but didn’t watch it. We worked on the PC and phones for a couple of hours after ’24’ went off.

Tim had stopped at CompUSA on the way home and got us a Vonage phone adaptor. We installed it last night and got our new service activated. We did the transfer paperwork to have our phone number transferred from BellSouth, but that’s going to take a while. Their website says a “minimum of 20 working days”, but I think it will be more like a month or two. We’ll see. We realized we didn’t have a free port on the router for the vonage adaptor, so Tim had to “rig” it temporarily, and will have to daisy chain our old router together with the current one, or else we’ll have to buy a bigger router. It’s always something! 🙂

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Another one of those weekends where we are so busy working hard and having fun, that I didn’t ever stop to take a minute and blog about it. Saturday was work day, and Sunday afternoon we went to see Star Wars and run a bunch of errands. Click the -More- link if you want to read all the gory details! 🙂

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Well, our weekend was busy, busy, busy. But good, as always. I’ll post a recap tomorrow when I have more time! 🙂

Yesterday was Tim’s parents 38th anniversary, and they all came over to celebrate it with us! Terry and the kids came too, and we all went to Harbor Freight, then to Ryan’s to eat out. After we left Ryan’s, we headed towards Old Navy on Lakeland and proceeded to drive into a torrential thunderstorm. There were times that Zack and I couldn’t see the road, but Tim didn’t drive off into a ditch, so apparently he could see! Terry got the kids some new swimsuits, as he and Zack were headed to Philadelphia to Geyser Falls today. Brittany has a cheerleading clinic all day today! Anyway, we hope that Mitchell and Linda enjoyed their anniversary, since we really enjoyed spending it with them! 😀

I’ve had a quiet morning, catching up with stuff on the computer, and I have plans to get out and run errands for a while this afternoon. Then, Tim and I are going to take his parents out to eat for their anniversary tonight. I think this year is number 38! He called them this morning and invited them, and I think they are going to come over, but I’m not sure yet where we might go. We’ll let them pick, since it’s their anniversary!! Check back for more details later tonight or tomorrow! 😆

Tim surprised me yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon when he IM’d me about 3:30 PM and said he was going to come home early, and didn’t I want to go out to eat or to a movie or just go do something fun together? 🙂 He knew that Star Wars was coming out, and thought I might want to go to the midnight showing. (Isn’t he sweet?!!!) But, I didn’t really want to go that late, plus I figured the tickets were probably mostly sold out. So, we picked another thing to do.

I spent most of yesterday online, researching the Grand Canyon. We’ve been talking about where to go on vacation this year, and Tim really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon. I had some books in my cart at Amazon, and I wanted to go and see if I could find them locally, so I talked Tim into going to Books a Million with me. We got a whole pile of books, then went to the Joe Muggs cafe up front to sit down and read them. Tim got a vanilla cream frappe and I got a decaf white chocolate caramel latte. We each went through a book or two, comparing things we were reading about which Rim to visit, when to go, what to do when you’re there, other things in the area, etc. Then, we talked about other places to go, including Washington DC, which has been on our list for the last 3 years. We decided a good old-fashioned game of rock-paper-scissors would solve our dilemma. So, we sat in Books a Million and played rock-paper-scissors and dueled down through our choices of San Francisco, Alaska, Grand Canyon, Boston and Washington DC. DC emerged as the winner, so we put up all the books from the Southwest and Grand Canyon! I decided not to buy a book today on DC, since we have one at home from 2002, when we first thought we were going. I might need to update it, though, but I will go through it first and see.

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Tim had to work late last night at the office, to get stuff ready for their weekly Tuesday night conference call. I took the opportunity to read more on my book while the house was quiet. When Tim got home, we watched American Idol and then House, and then he started back on his laptop and worked till about 1:30 AM. I sat up till about 11:15 PM and finished my book! It was pretty good. It took me a while to get into it, as her style is a bit different. But once it started clicking, it went very fast and was hard to put down. I really enjoyed it! I have to go do a review on Hambones sometimes soon. In the mean time, I am going to start on “A Year in Provence” by Peter Mayle soon, maybe today or tomorrow. It is an older book and has been on my list for years. I’m not sure if I will like the style of it, but since I got it at the library, it’s worth a try!

I have been hard at it this afternoon, working at removing more dust and dirt from inside the house, and as a result, I think I stirred up quite a bit! As I tried to expain to Tim in my best Blues Brothers voice “I’m on a mission”, but I don’t think he got my humor! 🙂 I did stir up a lot of dust, but I think I removed quite a bit too, as I had to dump out the bagless canister on our vacuum 3 separate times today. The dust got my nose a bit stopped up, so I took a break and went outside on the deck in the early afternoon, and read my book for a few minutes. I’m really starting to get into it now!

Here’s what I had a view of, I think they are so pretty:

I also took a picture of the birds nest I spotted yesterday, out back in my Bradford Pear Tree:

Busy today… went and ran errands this afternoon. The libary called and the book I put a hold on last Friday came in early, so they called me to let me know. I went ahead and got it, and now I have 3 books checked out. A bit over my limit. But the lady at the desk was very sweet when I asked about not being able to finish them all in time, she said “just call us and we can renew them over the phone!”. So I might just do that. Ran to Walmart and did a bunch of shopping after that.

Tim stopped by the house after work and picked me up. We went to Walmar to get more allergen filters for the A/C unit. We also found some filters for the vent covers that are in each room, not sure how those are going to work, but at this point, I’m willing to try anything! We also got some replacement parts, filter and bag, for the Shop-Vac.

Came home, changed and did our 2 mile walk. Then we finished up the last of the crawfish that our neighbor had brought us late Saturday night. A little mushier, still really cold, and overall pretty good. I’m accustomed to eating crawfish warm, but these were really good, even cold.

We just finished watching ’24’ and it sure looks like they are going to kill off Tony next week on the 2 hour season finale. As soon as he told Michelle he still loved her, both Tim and I sputtered out “oh no, they’re going to kill him off now!”.