Exceedingly Mundane

I just posted a couple of photos over on my Project365 blog (here) of the fall decorations I got today. Nothing elaborate. Since we don’t have kids, we don’t really go all out for Halloween. We hand out candy, and we’ve dressed up in the past, but not in the last several years. Last year on Halloween, I was all alone, as Tim had to be out of town on business. We had just gotten Beau less than 2 weeks before, and believe me, all of the excitement, the kids voices, the doorbell ringing, was hard on my new puppy dog. I think he’ll be a lot better this year!

The weather has been so nice the last couple of days. I’ve turned the AC off temporarily and just had the windows open. I think that will come to an end on either Sunday or Monday, as our temperatures will be headed back into the mid to upper 80’s. It’s been nice, and I’m certainly ready for more cool weather.

I picked up some fall decorations today for the front (hay bale, pumpkin, mums, etc), and we drug out our “plastic” decorations. I opened up the big bags of Halloween candy from Sam’s Club (Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Nestle Crunch, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, etc) and put it in my big Halloween candy bowl. I bought a few pansies and planted them in some planters. I still have to get a lot more pansies and plant in the front yard, but otherwise, I think I’m ready for fall!

Here’s my weathered, battered, quite old scarecrow out front. Be sure to check out my Project365 blog for a couple of cute photos of Beau out front. 🙂

Happy Fall, Ya’ll!

Feast One Hundred & Sixty Four
October 12, 2007

Appetizer
When was the last time you were surprised? Probably the last time Tim came in from work with something from Sonic for me. I think it was a caramel mocha Java Chiller 🙂

Soup
Fill in the blanks: My eyes are ________, but I wish they were __________. My eyes are green but I wish they were brown. Or not, I sorta like them green 😀

Salad
If you were a Beanie Baby, what would you look like and what would your name be? You know, I’ve never paid any attention to Beanie Babies. I know nothing about them. However, I was going to answer Sweet Pea (since I thought maybe I might be considered sweet). Tim said that I should say “Booger” and leave it at that. 😛

Main Course
Name two things you consistently do that you consider to be healthy habits. I try to walk fairly often, I try to drink water every day, and I stay away from most red meat and almost all fried foods.

Dessert
What brand of toothpaste are you using these days? Do you like it? Why or why not? We’ve always used Crest. Right now, we have some regular paste and some of the Cinnamon Rush gel. Yummy! 🙂

Today’s Question of the Day is all about the dishes you use at your home.

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, yet terribly conflicting for me! I love dishes and dinnerware; I have no idea why. If I had the room, I think I would have at least 2 sets to use everyday, and some seasonal ones as well. As it is, I barely have room for the everyday dishes I do have and use. My “good china” is a set of fine china that I inherited from my grandmother, and I have never even used it. (It’s probably 75 or 80 years old, or more, and definitely not microwave safe!) It’s been packed up and stored in the attic as long as I’ve had it. For everyday use, I have had Mikasa French Countryside since before we were married, although I just had a few place settings before I got registered for our wedding. We now have a set of 12 dinner and salad plates, and both sizes of bowls (soup bowls, which are larger, and salad bowls which are smaller). Oddly enough, I use all of the bowls and cups, the small plates, but I rarely use the large dinner plates. They have a large “rim” or “lip” on them, and they just don’t fit in my dishwasher well. So, a couple of years ago, I picked up 4 red dinner plates that are “flatter” at Target and we use those for two nights meals. They’re cheaper though, than my Mikasa, and they are scratched up and getting really chipped after all of the use they’ve seen. I need to replace them, and hope to do that soon.

As I said, I’d LOVE to have room for another set of dishes, but I just don’t have the space. Part of me would like to pack up the 12 place settings of plain white dishes I have and go with a set of colored dishes, or a mix and match of two or three colors. I’d love to get some Fiestaware, in a couple of coordinating colors, or some other mix and match dinnerware. I realize that the white is much more practical, and that’s why I have been using it for the last 12 years or so 🙂

I also love seasonal dinnerware, especially at this time of year. I’d love to have something fallish, but more than that, I LOVE Christmas dinnerware. I actually have some Christmas dishes. Years ago, I started getting a few pieces of Pfaltzgraff Winterberry, and had slowly built up enough for us for a few days (not enough to host Christmas dinner, but then again, no one ever comes to our house for Christmas, we always have to travel everywhere). I don’t have room to keep it in my cabinets year round, so it is packed up in a Rubbermaid tote and is stored in the attic. Last year, for the first time in several years, I had Tim bring it down from the attic, and I packed up some of our everyday dishes, and pulled out the Christmas ones to use. It felt so good to have new dishes!

So, finally, I’ll stop blabbing about my love of dishes and what I have and mostly what I WISH I had! Today’s Question of the Day is for you – what dishes do you have and use? How many sets do you have? Do you have “nice” china as well as everyday dishes? Do you have any seasonal dinnerware? Are you happy with what you have or are you wanting something new? Do you understand my obsession with dishes and do you share it?! 😀

Have a wonderful day everyone!

I finally finished the five books in the “Firstborn” series by Karen Kingsbury. I had read the Redemption series a year or two ago, and I loved those books. I think they are still my favorite of all of these Baxter family related books that I have read, but I really did enjoy the Firstborn ones. I had a hard time getting them all at the library. I think I kept running into several other people reading them at the same time I was, as I had to get on the wait list for most of them.

What can I say about these books? They’re really well-written, contemporary Christian fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed them! I like reading series books because I like to see characters developed, I like to see storylines extended and played out. When you combine these books with the Redemption series, you’ve already got a series of 10 books. Now, once she finishes writing all four (or is it five?) of the upcoming Sunrise series, the next books following these same people and families, I will have to read those. I love having storylines that just keep growing and evolving and extending.

I didn’t do individual reviews on each of these books, and this isn’t really meant to be a post on my review of these books. Mostly what I wanted to do was write down one thing that really got me in this last book, “Forever”. In Forever, the author presents (by way of the matriarch of these books, who has since passed away) a list of “Ten Secrets of a Happy Marriage”. Maybe these came from another book. I don’t read much non-fiction so these might be borrowed or paraphrased. In this book and this list, there’s also mention of the “love languages” and I have yet to read that book, although I have a copy (“The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman). Anyway, irregardless of the source or author, these are wonderful guidelines, and something I need to remember. Every single day. Tim and I both try to work hard, every day, to make our marriage stronger, happier, and more fulfilling. Some days he does better and some days I do better, which I guess is normal. Anyway, I thought if I put them here, I’d have them to refer to easily. Especially since this is a library book and I don’t have a copy on my bookshelves. 🙂

As listed in the book… “Ten Secrets to a Happy Marriage“, by Elizabeth Baxter:

1. God has you here to serve one another. Love acted out is serving.

2. Women need respect and nurturing. Love your wife so she knows you’d lay your life down for her. Continue to date her and admire her. Share a hobby – find something you can do to have fun together.

3. Laugh often.

4. Be patient. Love crumbles quickly under the weight of unmet expectations.

5. Spend more time trying to fix yourself than your spouse.

6. Keep short accounts. The Bible says “Do not let the sun go down while you are angry.” Make it a habit to forgive.

7. Determine up front that divorce is not an option.

8. Learn about love languages. Not all people show love or receive it the same way. You want a back rub and your spouse wants a clean kitchen. The love languages are fairly simple: acts of service, time, physical touch, gifts and words of affirmation. Learn them. Love is better received when it’s in the language that a person speaks.

9. Words of affirmation are a love language for all men.

10. Men are born to be leaders. He cannot lead unless she gives him the confidence to do so. If you love your husband, build him up. Confident men do not seek love outside the home.

Happy Reading, everyone!

Is there any chance that I could convince all of you out there to slow down and stop posting to your blogs? Please, pretty please?! I’m so far behind reading my favorite blogs. It used to be that I couldn’t keep up and my feed reader usually said I had over 100 new posts to check out. Now, for the last 5 or 6 days, that number has increased to over 200 new posts. Yikes. Talk about feeling overwhelmed!

Life is just a little busier lately and I am spending less time on the computer. So, I’m really far behind. I’m going to try to get around to reading all of my favorite blogs later in the week. I have so many! So many family and friends blogs, so many great blog friends, a lot of book and foodie blogs that I enjoy reading. I just can’t keep up 🙁

That brings me to a “Question of the Day” – how do you keep up with the blogs that you like to read? Do you use Bloglines or Google Reader or another feed reader? Do you just have a list of blogs you liked bookmarked on your computer? Or maybe a listing on the side of your own blog that you use to check on your favorites? And about how many blogs do you read on average? Just a ballpark figure, you don’t have to count or go check… would you guesstimate that you read 10, 50, 100 or 300 blogs regularly?

As for me, I used to just keep a bookmarked list on my computer or blog, but I outgrew that rather quickly. Then I switched to Blogrolling, but later tried Google Reader, which I like a lot. I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now to check on all of my favorite blogs. I have over 150 in my list, so I get lots of new posts all the time! How about you – leave me a comment and let me know! 🙂

Hope everyone has a super-duper Tuesday!!!

Last week went according to plan. We ate at a new pizza place last Friday on “date night” and it was really good pizza. We’ll have to find another new place to try this weekend. I’m not feeling very motivated on planning or cooking this week. Not sure if I’ll stick to this or not, but it’s a plan to work from.

Thanks to Laura at OrgJunkie for organizing and hosting this each week! Go check out her blog and you’ll find tons more recipes and menu plans.

Sunday – we had Potstickers and Fried Rice (potstickers from the freezer, I made the rice)

Monday – Spaghetti, broccoli

Tuesday – Grilled Chicken Sandwiches, sweet potato fries, veggie or fruit

Wednesday – Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese (carryover meal from last week)

Thursday – Waffles and Turkey Bacon

Friday – Date Night

Saturday – TBD

Sunday – Football food (either wings and cheese sticks or Frito Pie, haven’t had that yet)

I was going through an old magazine the other day (still a work in progress, this “going through and throwing out my huge mountain of magazines” project), and I ran across a quick poll they posted. I thought it was a good question, so I thought I’d ask here.

What would you do?

If you found a $100 bill on the sidewalk, what would you do?

1. Put it in my wallet (hello, new shoes!)
2. Pass it by. Gross. Germs!
3. Give the money to charity
4. Add it to my savings

Cast your vote now 🙂

Feast One Hundred & Sixty Three
October 5, 2007

Appetizer
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how much do you look forward to your birthday? Oooh, what a timely question, since mine is coming up later this month! Let’s see, before I met Tim, I didn’t care much about my birthday. But, now that I have him to drop hints to, I have a big time and always look forward to it 😀 I’d say about a 7 or 8 now.

Soup
What is one word you don’t like the sound, spelling, or meaning of? Gosh, I’m sure there’s a lot of these and much better choices, but for whatever reason, the only word I can think of right now is abominable. I have trouble pronouncing and spelling that word. I’m sure there’s more 🙂 There’s lots of words I do like though (like lagniappe, conundrum, queue and others) 😀

Salad
Do you wear sunglasses when you’re outside? If so, what does your current pair look like? Always. My eyes are very sensitive to the light and sun. I get a headache if I go outside for very long and it’s bright or glary. It even bothers me if its cloudy outside. I have to have sunglasses.

Main Course
If you were to write a book, to whom would you dedicate it? Tim of course!

Dessert
Name a beverage that you enjoy Cherry Coke Zero

This week’s topic: Decorum

Do you have “issues� with too much profanity or overly explicit (ahem) “romantic� scenes in books? Or do you take them in stride? Have issues like these ever caused you to close a book? Or do you go looking for more exactly like them? (grin)

Well, I imagine that I’m going to be the fuddy duddy of the group today, with this meme. I do have issues with both books and movies that have too much profanity in them. Or explicit “romantic” scenes. Or graphic violence. I don’t choose to watch movies like that. In the last several years, I have really almost refused to go to the theater to see movies like that, and if we rent them, I really prefer that Tim watch them without me. That’s not how I choose to spend those two hours of my life. I’m the same way with books. I don’t like a lot of profanity or explicit stuff, either romantic or violent. I don’t choose to fill with my life with things like that. So, I tend to read cleaner books, “women’s fiction” that is not too descriptive, or Christian fiction. It just fits me a lot better. 🙂

Happy Reading!

I post about our dog Beau constantly over at my Project365 blog, but I haven’t posted much about him here. I just couldn’t resist today, though.

Beau loves to hunt for squirrels and lizards in our back yard. He stands or lays by the back door for hours at a time. We certainly haven’t discouraged it over the last (almost) year that we’ve had him. We’ve probably even fostered it and encouraged this behavior in him. He’s been known to stalk a squirrel for a while, but he never catches those. The lizards, on the other hand, are fair game. I’ve personally witnessed him maiming and even killing the poor things.

Beau must have spotted a lizard on the deck today. They often run along our deck railing, and if you open the back door, they will either scurry off, hide between the deck planks, or jump over to the tree that is right off the deck. Apparently one jumped into the tree, or Beau thought he did, because he spent 15 or 20 minutes jumping up and down on the ground, trying to get to a certain branch.

He jumped up from the deck a few times:

Then, he got smart and remembered he could jump up on the glider. I didn’t get a photo of that, because I stopped to GASP when I saw what he did a split second after jumping up in the glider. Something he’s never ever done before, and really scared me a little! But, my big Lab boy WANTED his lizard!

No, he didn’t get the lizard, and no, he thankfully did NOT break a leg getting down. I threw my camera down right after taking the last photo. I could see his legs starting to quiver and he looked a little worried about jumping down. I was afraid he was going to be a big dummy and jump down to the ground. About the time I opened the back door, he realized he could jump back down the same way he came up, via the glider, so he was fine. He still wanted to hunt for that lizard for a long time after that though 🙂

P.S. I had already posted a photo for today over at my Project365 blog, but I just can’t resist posting the last one over there too 🙂

Today’s Question of the Day is all about your watch. 🙂

Do you wear a watch every day? Do you wear it on your left wrist or your right? Do you have more than one watch? Do they bother you, or do you feel naked without yours on?

My answers: I wear a watch most of the time. I always wear one when I leave the house. I have two watches – a nice one and a sports one. I wear the sports one if I am going walking, going somewhere really casual, etc. Otherwise, I wear my nicer watch. I always wear mine on my left wrist. I have always heard that you do that if you are right-handed. Not sure. 🙂 I sometimes wear one around the house. It all depends. I am wearing one more now because we’ve taken down our clock in our living room. We’re looking for another one, a bigger one, and right now, there is not a clock hanging in the spot where there has been one for over 14 years. I find myself glancing at that spot all day long, trying to find the clock. So, I’ve taken to wearing my watch instead. Make sense?

How about you? Do you wear a watch regularly, and if so, which wrist? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Have a great day

I updated my Project365 blog last night, and it seems that I’m doing more blogging over there than here. Go figure. I assume that once this project is over, I’ll go back to more “normal” blogging here, whatever that means. I’ll go back to posting photos here, and talking about what we are doing or did. I just don’t seem to have an interesting enough life to maintain entries on two blogs 🙄

Let’s see… I blogged here and here about what all we did over the weekend. This past weekend had a lot of golf! I went with Tim on Friday afternoon to the golf course, to hang out with him. It’s Tim’s most ardent desire in life that I learn to love golf, want to play, and that we can go together to play golf 5 or 6 days a week. Sadly, this is not my goal in life! I really don’t like golf that much. The idea of taking that piece of metal and swinging at that little ball holds absolutely no appeal to me at the moment 🙂 Saturday was also a day of golf – for Tim. He went to the PGA tournament that took place near our house. Sunday, my dad drove up and we all went to the German Fest near our house.

We’re back into a decent slate of watching TV most every night. We’re trying a couple of new shows – Chuck on Mondays, Bionic Woman on Wednesdays and Tim started watching and liked “Life” on NBC on Wednesday night (right after Bionic Woman). We’ve cut way down on our movie watching from Netflix, now that all of the fall shows have started. We have, however, picked up a new TV show, via Netflix. Tim watched several episodes of “Heroes” last year and was always trying to get me to watch. This year, as last year, I felt like I had enough shows that I watched and hated to start anymore, so I resisted. Now, we are renting Season 1 of Heroes via Netflix and I’m already hooked. He was right – this is my kind of show. Sigh. We’re also still watching, slowly, the Gilmore Girls on DVD. We’ve made it through 3 seasons and have ordered the next two on DVD. And, of course, there’s LOTS of football on TV! 😀

I’ve still been reading a fair amount. I’ve recently finished “1st to Die” by James Patterson – the first in the Women’s Murder Club series books. I had wanted to read one of these to see how gory or descriptive of violence they were. Nothing I can’t handle, so I’ve got another new series to read. I wanted to read one of these before the new TV show started, based on these books. I think it starts in mid-October and stars Angie Harmon. I hope it will be a good show! Let’s see, I’ve read another couple of books that were just so-so for me. I read “The Tavern on Maple Street” by Sharon Owens. I’ve read one other by Owens before, she’s very similar to Maeve Binchy, a good Irish writer. It was good, just so-so for me. As was “Underdog” by Laurien Berenson. She apparently writes cozy type mysteries with dog titles, so I had hoped I would love these. This one I read was just okay for me too. The dog is a Standard Poodle and there was a lot in this book about dog shows, and grooming dogs for showing, which doesn’t interest me at all. I might give one more of her books a chance, someday. I also finished “The Redemption of Sarah Cain” by Beverly Lewis, another good Amish book. Up next, I have another cozy mystery by Laura Levine. I read one by her recently entitled “This Pen for Hire” and enjoyed it. Hopefully I will like this new one “The PMS Murder” also. Then, after that, I have the last book in the Firstborn series by Karen Kingsbury (“Forever“) and the most recent one by Janet Evanovich “Lean Mean Thirteen“. I have been on the wait list for a long time for the latest Stephanie Plum book. I started out as number 16 on the wait list at the library, and now my time has come! 🙂 Oh, and for the record, I’ve completed 87 books so far this year, with a total of 25,855 pages read. 🙂

I have also checked out a couple of cookbooks from the library, and have been busy going through those. I’ve gone through one completely – Taste of Home Everyday Light Meals. I’ve copied out over 20 recipes that interested me. It looks like a good cookbook, but since I’ve gone through and “got what I wanted”, I won’t be buying this one for my shelves. I’ll post a listing on the extended page of the recipes I copied out. If anyone would like to see a copy of the recipe, I can email it to you. I haven’t made any of these recipes yet, so I can’t vouch for how they taste!

I’ve still be in a bit of a fall cleaning mode around here. Heaven help me, but I’ve even started cleaning windows! Gasp. That doesn’t happen very often. I wonder if the earth stopped rotating on its axis for a bit 😀

Hope everyone has a great day!

Click for recipe listing… Read the rest of this entry »

Last week went pretty much according to plan. I made everything on my menu that I had planned, except for the beef stew (which was a stand-by meal, anyway. I want it to cool off a little more before I make some stew). We stayed really busy all week with football and golf, and then the German festival yesterday. I hope we can stick to plan this week too!

Thanks to Laura at OrgJunkie for organizing and hosting this each week! Go check out her blog and you’ll find tons more recipes and menu plans.

Monday – Maple BBQ Chicken Sandwiches, fries or chips, broccoli for Stacy

Tuesday – Grilled Chicken (Tim) / Grilled Fish (Stacy), sweet potatoes, veggie

Wednesday – Tomato Soup & Grilled Cheese

Thursday – Sausage Skillet Dinner, green beans or other veggie

Friday – Date Night or Pizza

Saturday – TBD

Sunday – Game Day Food – probably either Frito Pie or wings and fries