Exceedingly Mundane

Well, I hate missing a Thursday Thirteen (I had a nice little streak going :roll:), but I just don’t have time to throw one together, much less visit anyone else. And I hate not being able to reciprocate, so I just decided to skip it this week. And next week as well, as we’ll be on vacation.

I have tons to do, lots of last minute vacation stuff. I have to make a list and start packing, as well as get all of our clothes washed today. We went last night and picked up a couple of new things (yeah!) for vacation. Mostly golf-related stuff for Tim, but I did get a new pair of jeans. Wishful thinking on my part, I think, that I will be able to wear jeans and not shorts!

We taped the results show of Dancing with the Stars and I was not surprised by the outcome. Totally forgot to tape Bones also, which is a good show. I’m looking forward to Survivor tonight! I hope our HD channel is going to broadcast it in HD, we love catching stuff on our new digital/HD line-up. I also have to get busy and make a list of shows to tape while we are gone. Lots of our favorites are going to be on while we’re off on vacation, and while we might get a chance to watch them, I don’t want to risk it! So, I want to try to tape as much as we can. On the list, the premiere of Amazing Race Sunday night, NCIS & The Unit next week, Dancing with the Stars, etc. We’ll also have to tape our football game on Sunday!

OK, since it went over well yesterday, we’ll try another Question of the Day:

Do you make an effort to clean up your house before you leave on vacation?

I do, it’s this weird obsessive thing I have. My husband always teases me that I’m cleaning up for the burglars. I think that mostly I just like everything to be as neat and orderly as possible when we get home. We’re usually tired from vacation, and have mountains of laundry to catch up on, as well as a bunch of other stuff that needs to be done when we get back. A dirty or messy house is not something I relish returning home to.

Leave me a comment and let me know if you share this pre-vacation cleaning syndrome! 🙂

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!

I finished another book from my “pile” last night – “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith. This is the first in a series of books about a lady detective in the country of Botswana. I knew McCall Smith was a Scottish writer, and I thought I was going to be starting a series about people in Scotland. I bought the wrong book though, as that is a different series. This book was good, not outstanding, but good and different. It was more like a series of short stories, as each chapter was devoted either to the main character, Precious Ramotswe, one of her friends or family members, or a case she was working on. Most of the chapters were short vignettes of cases in Botswana that she worked on. The books are filled with local color, words, places, and stories of life in that part of Africa (near South Africa and Namibia). It was different from the normal books I read, and therefore good for me to read, to break out of my norm. I think I will try to read some of the others in this series later, but I will try to get them from the library and not buy more of them. I also plan to start at least one or two of the other series by this author. In addition to all the other “series” type books I have either started or want to start by many other authors! 😀

For the record, that makes #55 for the year so far, with a total of 19,393 pages read. Up next is a book I picked up recently at a library sale, “Sullivan’s Island” by Dorothea Benton Frank. I read my first book by this Southern author recently (read the review here), and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a light, engrossing, very quick read, and I hope this one is very similar.

If you’re currently reading a book, or have one to recommend, be sure to leave me a comment! Not only do I love comments but I am always looking for good books or new authors to check out.

Happy Birthday to my sister-in-law Amanda! We hope she has a great day, and a wonderful upcoming year!

Amanda has a blog here at Hambones, but she hasn’t had much time to post lately, so I won’t ask anyone to go there and post birthday greetings to her. She checks in here sometimes, so hopefully she will see this 🙂 Happy Birthday Amanda – have a wonderful day!!!

I saw this at Stephanie‘s blog and liked it, so I thought I’d be pushy and invite myself to play along! 🙂

1. If you make sweet tea, do you use Luzianne, Lipton or _______ whatever your brand is? We’re a Lipton family here. I buy regular black tea bags and I recently bought a bag of green tea bags to try. For herbal teas, I either buy Lipton or Celestial Seasonings (have Red Zinger right now)

2. What brand of toilet paper do you buy, and is it the larger rolls or regular? I buy the big mega-pack at Sam’s of Quilted Northern. 🙂

3. Which brand of bath soap do you use? Is it body wash or bar style? For both of us, I buy Lever 2000 body wash. Then, I have some scented stuff I use from time to time, from Bath and Body Works. Right now, it’s Cherry Blossom and in the winter, it’s usually Warm Vanilla Sugar.

4. Which cereal do you buy for yourself? Wow. We’re definitely cereal people. I probably buy at least 6 boxes a month for the two of us. We both eat Raisin Bran Crunch, I eat several of the Cheerios (plain, yogurt burst, both vanilla and strawberry, and I just bought the fruit ones), and then we also usually have either Special K or Corn Flakes on hand. I also keep granola on hand too, for cereal, topping or munching. 😀

5. What brand of dishwasher detergent do you use and is it liquid or tablets? Again, I go with what I buy in large quantity at Sam’s. For years, that has been Cascade gel. My mother-in-law swears by the tablets, but I haven’t tried them yet.

6. What is your favorite fruit to eat? Toughie. I love fruit and Tim won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. I would probably pick strawberries or grapes for me, although there’s really no fruit I won’t eat. I love bananas, apples, kiwi, watermelon, grapefruit, cantaloupe, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, etc.

7. Which brand of clothes detergent do you use? All Free & Clear. We both have sensitive skin and this one works best for us.

8. Do you like chocolate? Good grief, do I! If you’ve read my blog any, you should know the answer to that. I’m a total and complete chocoholic.

9. Are you right-handed or left-handed? Right-handed, and very much so. I can’t do much of anything with my left hand.

10. Do you still write checks or use a debit card? Neither very often. Most everything goes on one credit card that we pay off every month, that earns us cash back. I only write about one or two checks a month and we rarely put anything on the debit card.

I wanted a new template for my blog for fall. I have been looking around and have not really found anything close to what I want in a premade design for the version of WordPress I use. Alas, I’m not really smart enough to change one up very much and I am nowhere near smart enough to design one from the ground up. So, for lack of anything better, I found one with some fallish colors that I sort of like. Let me know if you’re seeing this ok now, it’s browns and rusty orange colors. Please let me know if you have any trouble with any part of the blog now… I may go back to my blue and white soon, you never know! 🙄

Laura over at OrgJunkie sponsors this great meme each week. If you like cooking or planning your meals, go check it out! 🙂

This week, I’m going to try to use up some ingredients I have on hand, before we leave on vacation. Yippee!

Here we go:

Sunday – “Game Day” food – brats and sauerkraut to celebrate the first full day of NFL football

Monday – Tortilla Torta, and ??? — I’m at a loss as to what to fix with it, maybe just a green salad. The dish already has beans in it, which is my usual side dish for anything Mexican or Tex-Mex

Tuesday – new recipe for Feta Chicken, my Pan Roasted Potatoes, veggie or salad

Wednesday – our “light night” – either eggs, oatmeal and toast or else soup and a sandwich

Thursday – TBD (probably grill out fish for me & chicken for DH, veggie, box rice or potato mix)

Friday – Date Night

Saturday/Sunday/Next Week – On Vacation – Tons of eating out!!!!

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Good day to you! Again, questions right off the top of my head! Here goes…

1. How long have you been blogging? Since Feb 2005
2. How many times have you taken a break from blogging? None. I try to blog every day.
3. How long is the longest you’ve gone, so far, without posting on your blog? After Hurricane Katrina, we didn’t have power or Internet access for several days. That’s the longest I’ve gone. Only one other time I’ve missed posting, and that’s when we were out of town and didn’t have computer access from our hotel.
4. How many fellow bloggers do you keep in touch with, through your blogs, on a regular basis? Several, usually through emails
5. Have you ever met, in person, a blogger on your blogroll? None, unfortunately 🙁
6. How often do you update/change the ‘extra’ stuff on your blog? I constantly update the book info on my blog, as I read more books. I try to keep the “extra” stuff on my sidebar updated as needed (movies, TV shows, etc). I guess I need to be better at it, but honestly, some of it doesn’t change that much!
7. Do you think you’ll be blogging for years to come? I hope so!

Are you ready… for some football????

We definitely are. Football season is our favorite time of year. Tim has always been a huge fan and I’ve learned, through the years, to love football as well. We like to go to games, play fantasy football in our league at Hambones, but mostly, watch our teams on TV. Now that we have the new hi-def plasma TV, we are very ready for football season to begin in earnest. Granted, we had the opening game on Thursday night, but today really starts football. First up, there’s Tim’s beloved Saints at noon, then the Packers at 3 PM, then the battle of the Manning brothers tonight. We’ve got our fantasy teams ready to go and have purchased StatTracker so we can get up-to-the minute stats in real time to follow our teams. Plus, I got us some “game day” food at the grocery store on Friday afternoon, so we’re all set. It’s gonna be a great day!

Well, our garage sale was a success, at least to us! We worked hard all week to pull stuff out of the attic, closets, cabinets, and get it all ready to go for this morning. Click on the extended entry to see a couple of pictures I snapped last night, inside the garage, of the stuff all laid out. It was dark, so they are not the greatest of pictures! And there was more, off to the sides…

We got up at 5:45 and had people here by 6 AM. We sold a lot of it, I’d say probably 80%, and what was left, we took to the local Goodwill after it was all over. The only thing we didn’t sell was our old entertainment center, so we’ll run an ad in the paper soon or try Craigslist.com and see if we can find it a nice home. We made more money than I had anticipated, which is always really nice!!! I guess that old adage is true … “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” 🙂

We’re both fairly tired now, so I don’t expect to do more than some housework and vegging for the rest of the day. Hope everyone else is having a good weekend!

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I finished a really good book last night, that I had bought at Borders. It’s the first in a series of books about a group of friends and family in the fictitious town of Cedar Cove Washington. I had to buy the paperback at the bookstore because my county library system had lost their copy of the first book in the series, but they do have all the others. I’m a bit OCD though, and I always like to read the first book first.

“16 Lighthouse Road” was a really good book, if you like this type of women’s fiction, which I do. The first book set up the town and we are introduced to a group of family and friends as main characters. I believe the series will build on these, as well as probably add new characters along the way. The first book covers Olivia Lockhart, mother of 3, who is a local judge and lives at 16 Lighthouse Road. It also encompasses her mother Charlotte, and her daughter Justine and son James. There’s her best friend Grace, whose husband Dan mysteriously disappears in this book, and Grace’s two grown daughters Kelly and Mary Ellen. Grace lives at 204 Rosewood Lane, which happens to be the next book in this series, so maybe we’ll learn what happened to Dan in the next book. Then, there’s the young couple we meet at the beginning of the book. Cecelia and Ian Randall appear before the judge (Olivia) and want a divorce, but she does not grant it and wants the young couple to work things out. They had recently suffered the loss of their infant daughter and were having trouble communicating. All in all, several different plots going with some really good characters, and I look forward to reading more about them, and meeting more of the members of Cedar Cove in the next several books in the series.

For the record, that makes #54 so far this year, with a total of 19,158 pages read. Up next is my first book by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. He has several series of books as well. I bought “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” to start with, as it begins a series as well. I was thinking since he was Scottish, this series was set in Scotland. Apparently, I neglected to read the jacket cover (which I did just now), and I see that this book revolves around Precious Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in the country of Botswana. Apparently, the author lived for a while in Botswana and was a professor at the University there. So, this will be a bit different type of book for me. I’m looking forward to it! 🙂

Friday, September 08, 2006
Feast One Hundred & Ten

Appetizer
Name 3 things that you are wearing today. Jeans, t-shirt and tennis shoes!!!

Soup
Who was the last person you hugged? my husband, just a few minutes ago

Salad
What do you like to order from your favorite fast food place? Hmmm, from Sonic, either a regular hamburger, fries and Cherry Limeade or if I’m being good, a grilled chicken sandwich, tots and Diet Cherry Limeade!

Main Course
What time of day do you usually feel most energized? Late morning

Dessert
Using the letters in your first name, write a sentence. (Example: Sweet unusual spaniels are nice.) So Talk About Cats, Yes? {Boy, I really suck at these sentence things!}

P.S. I think the reason I came up with a sentence that contains a cat, is because when we woke up this morning – we had a cat trapped in our live animal trap outside! We’ve been using it to catch the coons and possums in our yard, eating our bird seed and squirrel food. Apparently, one of the neighborhood cats got curious about the corn, and went in the trap to check it out. Tim went to let her out this morning and you should have heard her crying and meowing! I know the whole neighborhood thought we were torturing a cat in our backyard!

No, not the three little words you are probably thinking of. Although, normally, those are my favorite words in the English language. I’m not talking about “I Love You” today.

Today, I’m talking about these three little words – “Do. Not. Report.” These are my most favorite three little words in the English language right now. I have a month-long jury summons for federal court, and I have to call in every evening to see if I have to report the next day. I’ve been doing it since August 31, and so far I have not had to report. So, these three little words “Do. Not. Report.” that the little automated voice says to me each evening are now music to my ears.

I don’t mind the thought of jury duty. I have no problem doing my civic duty. The thing I have a problem with is this not knowing. I don’t know until each evening if the next day I will be able to do whatever I have planned or scheduled, or if I will have to shuck it all and go to the federal court. This involves getting up about 2 1/2 hours before I normally would (YUCK – and yes, I know, I’m spoiled that I get to sleep in on a regular basis). Then, there’s the whole morning getting ready thing, and then the fighting commuter traffic thing that I have gotten really used to avoiding.

Anyway, I’m just really hoping to hear “Do. Not. Report.” again today. Wish me luck!

Oops, I stayed so busy over the long Labor Day holiday weekend, and didn’t get on the computer hardly at all. Come to find out, Claire over at Cooking is Medicine tagged me with a food meme. There is an ongoing “project” going on in the blogosphere called “5 Things to Eat Before You Die“, which you can read about here at the Traveler’s Lunchbox blogsite.

Hmmm, I’ve read skimmed through the posting info and I think I get the general gist of it. We’re to list “things you’ve eaten and think that everyone should eat at least once before they die“.

So, being decidedly Southern, mine will be along those lines! Here we go…

1. Good ole Southern sweet tea
2. Beignets from Cafe du Monde in New Orleans
3. Homemade chicken n dumplings, like my mother-in-law’s
4. Fried catfish, french fries, and hush puppies
5. Homemade banana pudding with meringue

Honorable Mention: crawfish cooked at a “real” crawfish boil, complete with potatoes, corn and mushrooms, and some French bread on the side. Yummy!

That was fun, thanks Claire!! I won’t tag anyone specifically, but if you’d like to play along, go right ahead! 🙂