Exceedingly Mundane

My buddy Desert Songbird tagged me with this fun photo meme that I’ve seen going around. I have been in a decidedly untagging mood lately, but I also have had trouble coming up with something to blog about! I’m still really on the fence about continuing to blog. I just can’t think of anything interesting to yack about any more 🙂 Anyway, I thought I’d play along with this one. It’s always fun to look back at old photos.

Here’s the rules:
1. Go to your Picture Folder on your computer or wherever you store your pictures.
2. Go to the 6th Folder and then pick the 6th Picture.
3. Post it on your blog and tell the story that goes with the picture.
4. Tag 5 other glorious peoples to do the same thing and leave a comment on their blog tellin’ them ’bout it.

I’ve only had my laptop a couple of years, so these pictures are fairly recent. This was taken back in late summer 2007. I was really pleased to see that the sixth photo in my sixth folder was one of my favorite subject – Beau! Tim would say that is because I take more photos of our dog than anything else!

I’m supposed to tag 5 others, but as I mentioned, I’ve been in a real un-tagging mood lately. So, I’ll just leave this one open, and if you’d like to play along, please do!

Have a great day 🙂

I read online over the weekend, that in addition to Saturday being Valentine’s Day, that it was also National Donor’s Day. Apparently, this was started in 1998, but I think it might have been the first time I’ve heard of this holiday. I imagine it’s hard to get more press than Valentine’s Day, with its flowers and candy 🙂

Anyway, I thought this would be a good Question of the Day. I’m not a blood donor (I have a serious needle aversion), but I am an organ donor. And I have been for many years. I don’t know when I’m going to die or how, but when I do go, I hope that I have something or some part that would help someone else live a better life. I’ve told my family that they can have any and every part of me that they can use. If there’s not enough left to bury, they can just cremate me. After all, I’ll already be home in heaven, so it won’t matter much to me.

So, how about you? Are you a blood donor or an organ donor? Vote in the poll or leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Hope you have a great day!

[poll id=”9″]

P.S. Today is my sister Gail’s birthday! Not a very cheery post today from me on her birthday, so hop on over to her blog and wish her a Happy Birthday 😀

You gotta love this time of year! It can sometimes be about flowers and chocolate. 😀

Tim surprised me on Thursday, and said he wanted to take me out for an early Valentine’s dinner at Biaggi’s, which is one of our favorite places. We don’t go out for Valentines Day any more. We did when we were dating and the first few years we were married. Then, one year on Valentines Day, we waited two hours for a table, then had mediocre food and service at a place that normally has wonderful food and excellent service. That did it for us – we decided we’d just as soon stay at home and grill a steak and not feel compelled to go out for a nice dinner on that day, just because someone else says we should. We certainly go out to eat plenty of other times during the year.

It was a nice surprise though, and we had a good dinner. Then, we went to Fresh Market afterwards, another place I love. I told Tim, if we were rich, I’d shop in there every week! But, it’s nice to save it for splurges or special things. I love food and love to shop for food, so that place is heaven for me.

Here’s a few pictures, always more fun than my long boring posts!

Red tulips for me, and a box of truffles Tim bought me at Fresh Market:

And the tulips up close:

You can’t tell what’s in here, but this is our leftovers from Biaggi’s. That’s either today’s lunch or tonight’s supper! Tim had shrimp and crab cannelloni and I had penne sardi. Both delicious!

We picked up some gourmet brownies from the bakery in Fresh Market which will be our Valentines dessert (we’re grilling out ribeyes and will have salad, sweet potatoes and grilled asparagus for dinner):

Lastly, we got a new happy to fill our crystal candy dish in the den… at Christmas, we got soft peppermint sticks from Fresh Market, then after that, we got some organic truffles. Now, we got a big thing of chocolate covered peanuts, one of their “Items of the Month” up front:

Can you tell that I’ve been craving chocolate lately?!

Anyway, we’ve already had one Valentines celebration here, with dinner out and all these goodies. We’ll have another Saturday night. How about you? Do you have plans for Valentines Day? Eating in or out or something special with your spouse and/or kids? Hope you have a wonderful weekend, whatever you do 😀

Or at least, washing dishes is fun for a few days, LOL!

The sprayer on my kitchen sink broke in early December, and I told Tim we should just wait till after Christmas to replace it. That led to early February, but it all worked out really well for me. We looked at Lowe’s and didn’t see just a replacement sprayer (although Tim told me later he did find one), so we decided to get a whole new faucet set. My sink and faucet are original to the house, so they are over 15 years old. One of us said something to the effect of “it sure would be a shame to put a nice, shiny new faucet on that old, scratched up, rusted sink”. I can’t remember who said that at the moment 😀 Anyway, I picked out a new sink too. I really like being able to pick out fixtures and lighting and stuff to replace what we have here. Everything put in by the builder was the lowest level possible, so now I have a nicer sink, two inches deeper, and a nicer faucet that doesn’t leak, with a sprayer that works. Ah, washing dishes is fun again!

Here’s the old one:

And the nice shiny new one:

So, that leads to an unusual Question of the Day: Do you have a good cleaner for stainless steel? Or any tricks to keeping my new sink as clean and shiny and protected for as long as possible? I have always used BarKeeper’s Friend (a powder, sort of like Comet) or SoftScrub on my sink, but I’m wondering if I should be using something else. Something for stainless or something special for sinks. It sure has a lot of water spots all the time!

Leave me a comment and let me know if you have any tips or suggestions on keeping a stainless steel sink clean. And have a great day!

Since our website was down (and therefore my blog), I haven’t been able to post any updates on the books I’ve been reading so far in 2009. I have, however, been keeping up at GoodReads, so hopefully most of those who might be interested in what I’ve read or my thoughts on those books are following me over there. In case there are any who aren’t, I thought I’d do a quick rundown on some of the books I’ve been reading lately.

So far this year, I’ve completed 9 books, including 4 for the two reading challenges I am participating in. I’ve read:

1. Through the Grinder by Cleo Coyle (cozy mystery, part of a series about murders revolving around the owner of a coffeehouse in New York City)

2. Happily Ever After by Susan May Warren (cute Christian chick-lit/romance book, my first by this author but it won’t be the last, counts toward my Chick-Lit Challenge)

3. Life Support by Tess Gerritsen (medical mystery, second book by this author that I’ve read and liked, counts towards the What’s in a Name challenge, category of medical condition)

4. The Way We Were by Judy Baer (part of the Guidepost series, Tales from the Grace Chapel Inn, easy and enjoyable Christian fiction)

5. Nights of Rain and Stars by Maeve Binchy (one of hers I had not read, not my favorite of hers, but not bad, counts towards the What’s in a Name Challenge, category of time of day)

6. Booked to Die by John Dunning (first in the Cliff Janeway series, I’m on the fence about continuing with these)

7. Rorey’s Secret by Leisha Kelly (continuing story of the Wortham and Hammond families, wonderful Christian fiction books I’m reading)

8. Whispers of the Bayou by Mindy Starns Clark (Christian mystery, not part of the Million Dollar or Smart Chick mysteries but still a good read)

9. The Broker by John Grisham (one of the many Grisham books we own I have not read, not my favorite but still enjoyable, counts toward the What’s in a Name Challenge, category of profession)

I’m going to include a few of the blurbs I wrote over at GoodReads about a few of these on the extended page, please click on the “Please read more” if you’re interested and want to read them.

For the record, I’ve read 9 books so far in 2009, for a total of 2,884 pages. Up next is the first in the Spa Girls series by Kristin Billerbeck (“She’s All That”). I’ll count all three of these towards my 10 required for the Chick-Lit Challenge.

Happy Reading!

Read the rest of this entry »

Our website, and therefore my blog, was down during Super Bowl weekend, but I wanted to go back and post a little about it. We had a really good time, as always, and a house full this year. All of Tim’s family and my dad came, which was great. My dad will turn 86 in April, so it’s really good that he’s still able to get out and about, and come visit us a bunch. We also had some friends and extended family here. All in all, I think we had about 20 people or so.

Tim and I went on Saturday to Sam’s Club and bought food for the party. Note to self – if you take Tim, expect to load up on meat. It was definitely a male-oriented, cholesterol laden, meat festival at our house on Sunday. 😀 We had hamburgers, hot dogs, smoked sausage, 3 flavors of wings (thanks Terry!), a sausage stuffed/bacon wrapped concoction (thanks Mark!) that I dubbed the Bacon-ator. We had Lil’ Smokies, a meat and cheese platter, a vegetable tray, several kinds of dips and chips, Chex Mix, potato salad, fruit, and a double decker cookie cake for dessert. I had three things that I had planned for later in the day (game time or half time), but everyone filled up at lunchtime on the food we had, then nibbled throughout the afternoon and early evening. So, I put those into the freezer and we’ll have to plan another party so we can eat that food up 🙂 As it is, Tim and I have been eating leftovers all week, which has been wonderful. I got out of cooking for many days! Since we purchased everything and Tim did the grilling, I was home free for this year’s party. I think that’s definitely the way to go, at least for me! Isn’t that terrible. You’d think I’d want to cook for 20 or more people, huh?! 😀

I took a few videos of the guys playing Madden 09 on the Wii, but I’m not going to post those. They’re funny though 🙂 Here’s a couple of still photos that I took. We had enough 3-D glasses for everyone, and big kids and little kids alike had a good time playing with them and waiting for the 3D commercial 🙂

Here’s the first round of meat on the grill…. 22 burgers, some of the sausage and hot dogs. Tim filled it up a second time!

Lots of Electronic toys here: Wii playing, iPod Touch, iPhones, Nintendo DS’s…

Having fun with 3D glasses:

I’ve lost count on what consecutive party this is that we’ve had. Tim and I have been married almost 13 years, so I’d say we have had a party at least 10 of those 12 years, and maybe 11 of those. We plan to have one next year. Unless the Saints go to the Super Bowl. If Tim’s beloved Saints ever make it, we have already told everyone we will not be having a party. We’ll lock every door in the house and tell people to go away, so we won’t miss a second of the game! As it is, I don’t get to watch a lot of the pregame or game (I did finally sit down and watch some of the second half this year though, it was a really good game). I didn’t get to see Faith Hill or Jennifer Hudson sing beforehand, and I missed the halftime show, which was fine because I’m not a Springsteen fan. I did watch the 3D commercial though. Gotta have your priorities straight. Anyway, we’re already missing football season around here. Training camp can’t come soon enough!

Well, hello to all my fellow bloggers! We’ve been offline for about 2 1/2 weeks here. We went out of town one weekend, only to return and find that our website (hambones.org) was down and we were having hardware issues. We have a couple of computers that run our website, but the primary one (which is 4 1/2 years old, btw) was not booting up. We tried buying various parts locally, then had to order stuff online. Several times. One thing turned into another, and before you know it, we basically had to start over from scratch, on both hardware and software. I say “we”, but really I mean Tim. He’s worked night and day for weeks to get things back online. We still have a long way to go, there’s still a lot of problems and things that don’t work, things that used to work before. We were several versions behind on different components, things I don’t really even understand, but Tim does. Thank goodness! Our blogs are now back up, but we aren’t able to load pictures and images for a while, nor is the email working. And a few other things that hopefully are behind the scenes and no one will notice! LOL 🙂

So — you’d think with all that time while our website and my blog was down that I would have been uber-productive, huh? Well, you’d be wrong! I enjoyed the break immensely and had considered more than once not even blogging when we did get things back up. I’m still on the fence about that. However, yesterday, Feb 3, was the four year anniversary of my blog, and I sort of hate to just “give up”. So, we’ll see. I still have a few things to say, but not nearly as many these days 🙂 In the beginning, I blogged every day. About anything and everything. I talked about my day, all the little things going on, I did every meme that came along, etc. Those days are gone. Tim doesn’t like me to blog about where we go or what we do, at least for the most part, for security reasons. I’ve lost my mojo where memes and tags are concerned. And the days of blogging daily are long gone. We’ll see how long I do keep going though.

Back to the break – I should have gotten a lot of stuff done. But, I didn’t do hardly any of the “projects” that I should have done. I haven’t worked on the piles of paper and receipts and magazines that are overflowing around here. I watched a lot of TV, played a lot of Wii, read a fair amount (7 for the year, so far), and generally enjoyed the break. I did have my computer, so I was able to keep up with other blogs and Facebook. But I didn’t miss blogging here, so that leads me to believe that it may be time…

Ok, so, we’re back, but hobbling and limping along. If you have an error or notice something that is not working, please let me know. We still have a long way to go, but right now, Tim needs a break. He’s worked nonstop on this thing, night and day, and until the wee hours of the morning, for too long now. He’s a keeper though, don’t you think?! 🙂

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