Exceedingly Mundane

I just love, love, love to see one of these:

Sitting on my doorstep, like it was today 🙂 I had a bunch of credit stored up at Amazon (gift cards, plus a certificate cashed in from points at MyPoints, and gift cards accumulated by searching at Swagbucks). So, I decided to splurge and order some books from my wish list. They’re all Christian fiction books but one, and the other is a cozy, so they are definitely not everyone’s favorite kind of books. But they are mine, and I’m so excited to get a big box of new books. Here’s my stash:

Happy Reading!

I’m actually one of the weird people in the world. I’ve never been personally affected by bad weather or storms, so I don’t have a healthy fear of them. Quite the contrary, I normally like bad weather and am oddly fascinated by it.

A week or so ago, when we had all of our rainy weather, we had a weather system move through during the middle of the night. It started thundering and lightning, and a particularly loud clap of thunder (or so I thought), woke me up. And I mean, I sat up straight in the bed and must have gasped or yelled. Because then Beau jumped up and started barking (Tim says I scared him, but I think the weather scared him too!). I told Tim it sounded a lot louder than a regular clap of thunder, but he said it was fine, go back to sleep.

Come to find out the next day, our neighbor told him that lightning struck the tree behind their house. Woke our neighbors up and scared them to death too! It wasn’t as bad as I though it would be, but still sort of fascinating. I’ve never seen lightning just strip bark and not cause a burn or anything. It doesn’t look like much in these pictures, but it was all over the tree, all the way around, which I also thought was really weird. The other thing that was strange is that all of the dirt was pushed away from the base of the tree. Like the lightning had gone from the top to the bottom and then blown out, pushing all of the dirt away from the base of the trunk. It was really weird, but hard to photograph, so I didn’t get a good picture. Here’s what the stripped bark looked like, but again, this was all the way around the entire tree, so it may not look like much here, but believe me, it was pretty weird!

I blogged a couple of weeks ago, here, about having to drive my cardboard and magazines to a recycling bin a mile or two from my house. Well! I’m happy to report that I won’t have to do that any longer!

My city/county apparently changed contractors for their recycling pickup. Which, I failed to note in my previous post, we pay for, whether we use it or not. Of course, I’ve always been a recycle/reuse/save the planet kind of girl, so I’ve recycled stuff as long as I can remember. Anyway… last week, we all got dropped off on our driveway a brand new recycling bin! In a pretty green color 🙂 Inside was a list of what all they will and will not accept.

The main thing we lost is glass recycling. I’ve been recycling glass bottles for over 16 years, and now they will no longer accept them. Which is not bad, it’s probably one of the least recycled things in my bin. I used to have more kitchen things that were glass, but a lot of those have been converted to either plastic or paper containers. But, here’s the good news… they added paper of all kinds! The handout says you can recycle flattened cardboard, magazines, phone books, junk mail, office paper, etc. So, that’s going to be a huge boost for me! Not only do I no longer have to drive this stuff to the drop-off center, maybe I will get better about not throwing junk mail and stuff in the trash! Also, this is even more motivation for me to go through the piles of magazines I have around here. Shhh, don’t tell Tim where all I have them hiding!

All in all, I think it’s a good trade-off, giving up glass but gaining paper, cardboard and magazine recycling. I seem to have paper coming out of my ears 😀

Hooray for recycling!

Couldn’t think of a snazzy title… I tend to use misc, random and odd and things like that a little too much 🙂 “Stuff” will have to do, since it is just a bunch of silly stuff!

* Things are busy here, yet not in some ways. Tim is working most every weekend, in the middle of the night, which really messes up his sleep patterns. He was up all last weekend, and I got up at 4 AM to put a roast in the crockpot. I discovered that a) 4 AM is not a natural time for me to be awake and b) once I’m up, cooking in the kitchen with all the lights on, it is very difficult to fall back asleep!

* I’m so glad football season is back, as well as fantasy football. Once again, I tried to draft my own players and ended up botching up my team. Oh well, at least it’s all for fun. It will NOT be fun around my house this weekend, as Tim and I go up against each other in our fantasy football league this time 🙂 On a happier note, both of our teams are doing well. Our college alma mater (USM) and Tim’s beloved Saints. Oh, the hope for our Saints springs eternal every fall!

* Beau has been very worked up lately. We’ve had a lot of grey days and rain and “looks like rain”, so he has not been outside as much. He has a lot of pent-up energy and some days he is hard to deal with. Of course, I should be a good doggie parent and walk him regularly, but I tend to open the gate and let him run wild in the area behind our house 😀

* I’ve been cooking a lot, and finally trying some new recipes. I have been motivated because we’ve installed a new recipe system on our website (more on that in a future post, I have one brewing in my drafts). Of the new recipes, most have been hits but there’s been a couple of misses. One was last night, I tried a crockpot orange chicken. I should have known better, and I did, but I wanted to try it anyway 😀 Tim doesn’t do citrus in any way, shape or form. I liked it though, so I’m debating on whether to post it on our site.

* I haven’t been reading as much as normal. I haven’t been watching many movies. It’s hard to pin down just what I have been spending my time doing, LOL! But we are picking back up all of our fall tv shows. So far, we’re back into Heroes, NCIS, the new NCIS: Los Angeles, Survivor, Bones, Fringe, and Mentalist. I think we have a few more to go. I wanted to try Flash Forward, but we already have two shows recording in that time slot, hehehe!

* I had a bunch of credit built up at Amazon, including some gift cards I have won at Swagbucks (check it out, and use me as a referral if you’re interested!). I ordered a bunch of books and I’m eagerly awaiting their arrival. Of course, I just went to the library, so I have a stack of books to read, but still. I love to get a box full of books on my doorstep in that brown Amazon box! I’ll post a picture when they get here (I always use free shipping, so it takes a lot longer!)

Ok, I’m sure there’s more… I have an update to my recycling post that I made a couple of weeks ago. And then there’s the wildly interesting post I have in my drafts folder about cleaning out and reorganizing my pantry, riveting stuff, I tell ya! Anyway, I’m still trying to blog, but I think a lot of people have given up blogging, as well as reading blogs. I still do Facebook and Twitter though, so maybe that is where I’m spending most of my time!

Have a wonderful, blessed day!

Tim called me outside a day or so ago, and said “You have to see this!”. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was just glad it was not a snake! We’ve had some rain here lately, although not as much as some areas around us. It’s been grey and overcast though, and it hasn’t dried out much, without the sun out. Apparently, it’s great weather for growing mushrooms!

Here’s what he wanted me to see:

And he put his golf club up next to it, to show how big it is in comparison 🙂

It’s such a little thing, but it makes me so very happy! I love, love, love the seasonal drink from the Sierra Mist people, Cranberry Splash. My memory is really bad, but it seems like it normally shows up in stores around Halloween, or at least before Thanksgiving. Yesterday, yesterday, the first day of fall, I found it in my local super Walmart!

Tim was joking, but he said “you should start stocking up now, you love that stuff so much!”. And you know, he’s right. I do!! I remember distinctly going to the grocery a week or two before Christmas last year, to stock up and buy some before it was gone out of the stores, and it was already gone. I need to start stockpiling the stuff NOW! 🙂

Hope you’re having a great day too, and some little insignificant something makes you really happy 😀

Even though I took a long hiatus from blogging over the summer, that does NOT mean that I have not been taking photos of Beau! Tim is always picking at me, saying, gee, don’t you have enough photos of that dog already? But, you know, I can never have enough pictures of my Beau Baby! 🙂

Beau, being a cool dog:

Beau, being a sad dog:

P.S. It goes without saying that the less time I spent blogging, meant the more time I had to spend with Beau! Beau and I play together a lot, and we hunt squirrels and lizards constantly! We’re both looking forward to fall and cooler weather (well, lately, it’s cooler, but there’s soooo many mosquitoes, so really we’re looking for fewer mosquitoes to bite us!), so that we can hang outside together in the afternoons and evenings 🙂 Beau is a wonderful companion, you know!

I was reading an article in our paper yesterday about Blockbuster closing nearly 1,000 of their brick and mortar stores. I believe the same article is here. Anyway, it made me wax nostalgic on two things:

1) We haven’t wanted to drive to a video store in several years. We were already tired of slogging to the local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, looking for the movie we wanted to be in stock, when we wanted it. We tried Netflix a couple of years ago and have been happy with them ever since. I don’t particularly like to get out and drive to get a movie, when I can have it delivered to me through the mail. And a plus for Netflix – we can watch a lot of things online.

Which brings me to my second point…

2) Just where the whole movie/tv watching thing is going. Waxing nostalgic – I’m old and apparently getting older all the time 😀 I remember the days when we had two rotary dial, plug in the wall phones in our house. There was no such thing as an answering machine, no phone you carry around with you. These days, my phone is always with me, I can text, surf the Internet, play games, keep my shopping lists on it, and a myriad of other things. We’ve sure come a long way. Same with TV and movies. Growing up, we had one tv and three channels. There was no such things as the remote control. Or more precisely, *I* was the remote control. If my dad wanted to change the channel, he just asked me to do it 🙂 My, how things have changed. Not only do we have the channels and programs we have now (not all good, in my mind, some of the stuff on TV is bordering on trash), and the chances to watch them. DVR’s, On Demand and soon, streaming video and movies will be the way to go. We already hook up my laptop occasionally to our big screen TV, and watch things from Netflix like that. I foresee us getting a device to stream tv, movies, etc one day in the not too distant future.

Anyway, it constantly amazes me about how far things have come in my lifetime. Yet, I get stuck in my ruts. I don’t like driving to a store to get a video, so we use the mail order one. So, we have not tried Redbox yet – have you? I understand the appeal, it’s cheaper and fairly easy, I’m assuming. I was not all that surprised to read in the article that RedBox is owned by Coinstar, the brilliant people who started putting coin counter machines in stores and stuff. I think it’s smart, as is Redbox. But, I just don’t want to have to get out and go to a store to get a movie. How about you?

Vote in the poll, if you want, and let me know!

[poll id=”16″]

For years, Tim and I have called family members on their birthday, and we sing a birthday song to them. Believe me, it’s not great, but it’s just something fun that we do. Most of the time, it’s the traditional “Happy Birthday to you” version, but every once in a while, we get a crazy hair and sing the Beatles’ version of “They Say It’s Your Birthday” (or whatever it’s called!).

This past weekend, we called our sister-in-law Amanda on the phone and *tried* to sing to her (sorry, Amanda, hope you had a great birthday!). We finally gave up, because Beau immediately started singing along! It cracks us up and we have a hard time finishing, because we are laughing so hard! He’s been doing this for about a year now. We like to think that he just likes to sing along with us. Family members and friends like to tell us that he’s howling because we sound so horribly awfully bad!

We had to stage this one, but I got out the camcorder and we proceeded to sing the beginning of the Happy Birthday song 3 times. All 3 times, Beau sang along (as he was standing at the back door, looking for squirrels, which is his normal daytime job!).

Here’s proof, finally!

Are you ready for some football? We are! It only lasts for a few months, but football season is definitely my favorite time of the year 🙂 I barely watched football before I met Tim, but I love it now, and I love how much he loves football. I love that he explains it to me, and seems to enjoy going to games and watching football at home on our pretty awesome tv. He’s a lifelong Saints fan, and he’s converted me too. Oh, and I like that we both play fantasy football in our family league 😀

So, I’m busy planning “game day food” for our upcoming football games and getting out my Saints t-shirts and Drew Brees jersey. I’m ready to root for our favorite team. 😀

The Saints are Coming, The Saints are Coming!

U2: The Saints are Coming

I’ve blogged before that I’m really fortunate to live in a city that has curbside recycling, and has for over 15 years. They take newspaper, plastic, glass bottles and aluminum/tin cans. They do NOT take paper other than newspaper, so for years and years, I kept just throwing it in the garbage. And hating myself for doing it, but I didn’t have a choice.

Then, I found out that the next little town over (only a mile or so from my house really, since I live on the edge of town!), had drop-off recycling bins at their city fire stations. And that they took not only what my curbside picked up, but they also accepted paper and cardboard.

So, I’ve been breaking down cardboard boxes and going through old magazines and tossing catalogs that come in the mail. I had a big pile in the garage, that I finally loaded up in the SUV and drove to the bin a week or so ago. It felt really good to put all of this stuff in the overflowing recycling bin!

More photos of Beau, being, well… Beau!

We keep an old bath towel by the back door, so we can wipe Beau’s feet off. Lately, it’s been fairly dry, but sometimes in the morning, there is a lot of dew on the grass and he comes back to the door with wet feet. And of course, when it rains, he is messy. Beau is a mud puppy – he loves the rain and mud! He likes to go out and play in it and comes back looking like he went to the spa and had a mud bath 😀

Anyway, every once in a while, he likes to play with his towel. Hence, my towel boy!

I think our days of watching American Idol are now over. We didn’t watch in the beginning, but picked up around season 4 or 5. Last year, when they added Kara, it was okay, but we weren’t thrilled. It helped that they had a lot of talent. I personally really liked both Kris Allen and Danny Gokey, and am looking forward to their albums later this year. But, now with them getting rid of Paula and adding Ellen DeGeneres, I think we’ll probably skip this one from now on.

Here’s a link to the story, if you’d like to read more… click here.

How about you, did you ever watch and will you continue to watch if you did before?

Another Labor Day has come and gone, and another Labor Day party at our house is in the books! Tim and I have been having an annual Labor Day party since we first got married. We picked Labor Day because it was about the only holiday that wasn’t spoken for on either side of the family. We started having a party every year on this holiday, so we could invite our immediate family on both sides. When Tim and I first got married, our families didn’t know each other much at all, so we started this tradition to give everyone a chance to meet, and spend time together. It’s gone on through the years, as kids have grown older, others have had children, and new members of the family have been introduced.

I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the food on the grill, which I love to do! It’s always a meat fest around here, since Tim and his brothers (and the rest of us too!) LOVES them some meat! I always take a picture, so I can remember what we have from year to year 🙂 Last year, we had ribs and sausage, but this year, we had a few more little kids than normal, so we went back to hot dogs and hamburgers. We also grilled some chicken breasts and sausage, so we had four sets of meat, people! I made potato salad and my sister Gail brought her crunchy asian slaw (recipe here!). I made some dips, and we had cheese and crackers (again, no pictures!). I also made my brownies, which I love (recipe here). Just wanted to remember what we had, for future party planning 🙂 We also had our live draft for our family fantasy football league, after all of the eating was done. Tim really enjoys doing it with everyone here, but it’s hard for me to concentrate 😀 There was some Wii playing, as well as the kids playing outside in the dirt for a while. Hopefully, fun was had by all!

I did take a few photos, almost all people pictures. Click on the extended link to see a few cute ones! Hope everyone had a great Labor Day 🙂

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From earlier in the summer, when I was on my blogging hiatus:

Beau was napping, and actually being a very good boy. The blanket and his bed are the dividing line for where he is supposed to be. He’s not supposed to come on the carpet side, into the den (but he cheats all the time and comes a body length over!). He seems to prefer the carpet and rug though, to the hard tile floor of the kitchen 🙂

I caught Beau napping and was able to sneak and run go get my camera and take a couple of shots. Caught napping:

And after he heard the shutter click of the camera:

You can’t sneak anything by MY watch dog!

P.S. I love when he uses his bed for a big pillow! I think it’s just so cute 🙂