Exceedingly Mundane

I’m still playing catch-up. Just posted two entries trying to catch up somewhat from everything going on in July. I’ll attempt to do that here for the first nine days of August!

Well, July 31st was a blue moon – second full moon of the month. I decided I wanted to play with my camera, so I got out the tripod (after a half hour of searching, Tim finally found it for me… something we had not had occasion to use since we moved and even though I knew where we kept it in the old house, I had no idea what closet or space it got shoved into here at the new house, LOL!). I won’t post any pictures here, as I posted a couple on Facebook. I was pleased with how they came out 🙂

I worked on my china cabinet in early August. I ordered some plastic display stands and some felt dividers for the china I wanted to display in a big ole stack (I know, you’re not supposed to do that, but I wanted to get it all in there and not have to store half of it again). It took me a while to unpack it all, but thankfully, several years back, I had unpacked it all, washed it and rewrapped it in tissue paper and bubble wrap (when my dad originally packed it up for me in big barrels, he just used newspaper and it all needed washing). Here’s my cabinet now:

I also have been working on a spot on my granite. I discovered the Saturday that Mark and Amanda came that I had a large discolored spot on my granite by the stove, where I store my olive oil dispenser and salt cellar. Tim said the oil had leaked and discolored the stone, so I did some research online. Tried a few home remedies, but nothing worked, so I ordered some stone oil stain remover from Amazon (a duPont product). Here’s a test area, that I tried first:

It came out looking a bit better, so now I have much larger area covered in the paste, where it must sit for at least 72 hours. The picture doesn’t show how bad the stain looks in real life, because the flash lit up the discolored spot. Trust me, I’m not happy that I’ve already ruined my granite 🙁

Tim is back to playing more golf, although it’s as hot as blue blazes. Today, the forecast high is 104 degrees, with a heat index of 115 predicted. Yikes. He stayed home one night and we watched the second Hobbit movie, the Desolation of Smaug. We also started re-watching all of the Star Wars movies. This girl is more than ready for The Force Awakens to come out in December! We watched the original ones first, the ones I know so well that I can quote most every line of dialogue. 🙂 We are nearly through; we finished Attack of the Clones last night and started Revenge of the Sith, although it may take the rest of the week to finish it 🙂 We also watched the last Hobbit movie, Battle of the Five Armies, this past weekend and I was a little sad to see those movies end. I love me some Lord of the Rings!

Our new Sam’s Club opened in Madison last week! We went on Free Preview night, along with nearly everyone else in town! I had some items on my list, and we got those, and were able to use the self-checkout area, which is really nice. I’m not a normal Sam’s shopper, in that I don’t fill up a flat bed cart or big shopping cart. Most of the time, I get 10-15 items and it’s nice to be able to grab the scanner wand in the self checkout, scan my items and skee-daddle!

I got a haircut last week, then ran errands to Kroger and Walmart one afternoon. I got a bunch of food to fix to take to a couple at church. The wife had tonsil surgery and I wanted to take her some juice (she’s on clear liquids for 10-14 days) and take her husband and son something to eat. I thought a lot of people would do dinner stuff like lasagna, chicken spaghetti or pulled pork, so I decided to take Gail’s idea and do a breakfast casserole and some refrigerator fruit. I made all of that one afternoon late, and got up and took over to their house before 7 AM, so they could have breakfast.

We went to dinner at one of our neighbor’s house last weekend and had fish tacos, black beans, and rice. I made a chocolate skillet cookie and Tim had made salsa earlier in the day, so we took both of those. After eating and visiting a while, we walked down to the cul-de-sac and went to the block party that the younger crowd with small kids were having. They had all grilled out burgers and hot dogs for the kids, and they had a big blow-up slide and all the kids were in their swim suits having a blast! We visited a long time, till nearly 10 PM and got to meet a few more new neighbors. We still have so many people we have not yet met. We just don’t see a lot of them out, some of them work a lot of crazy hours, we assume, and some of them have yard crews to do their yard work so we never see them outside. I’m still hoping we can meet more people soon.

Here’s Tim making his salsa earlier in the day before the parties:

After church yesterday, we met Suzanne for a long lunch at Broad Street Bakery. Suzanne and I had a turkey and brie panini and Tim had the Reuben. Good food, and we got to catch up with Suzanne. She closes on her new house at the end of this month and is very excited!

This week looks to be equally busy – especially at the end. More dinners and a birthday party. Hopefully I won’t fall too far behind again on my blog (famous last words!) 😀

And tada- all caught up! 🙂

I posted in early July about the Keurig I got for free using my Viggle points. Well, my enjoyment of my new toy was short-lived! I’m already having trouble with it, and have had to call Keurig to get a replacement unit. After less than 25 cups of coffee, I was having one problem when trying to brew the individual K-cup (the unit never showed finished, just kept saying wait, Hot Brew, do not lift). And the Keurig only ever successfully brewed one K-carafe cup into the 4 cup carafe. On the second try, it spit out about 6 oz of liquid, less than one cup. We had to cycle the carafe pod through four times to get enough coffee for Tim. I emailed Keurig, to which they replied with a canned email that I should try cleaning and descaling the unit. After less than a month of usage?! I was indignant, to say the least. They did say “call Customer Service at this number”, so after I calmed down and found time, I did. We went through a lot of trouble shooting, including the paper clip technique I had already Google’d for and watched the YouTube video on how to take a paper clip and dislodge any coffee grounds around the needle. Anyway, after a while on the phone, they agreed to send me a replacement unit. Let’s hope this one works better than the first one!

OK, the rest of July was equally busy. Our furniture was delivered from Ross Furniture! We got two leather recliners for us in the keeping room, and I finally, FINALLY, after waiting my whole adult life, got dining room furniture! It’s been a discussion our entire married life. We used to look at houses and I’d eye the dining room with reverence and talk about how I wanted dining room furniture, and a china cabinet so I could finally unpack the china and crystal I got 30 years ago from my grandmother. Tim would look at a dining room in a house and say “Wow, I can’t wait to put a pool table in here and play pool all the time!”. Sigh. I agree, in principle, that’s he right when he insists that it’s not practical – it’s not something we will use all that often and it’s mostly just for show. The space could be better utilized for other things (although as much as I enjoy a game of pool, I don’t want to own a pool table and have it dominate my dining room). Thankfully, when we picked out this floor plan from another house in this subdivision and started building, we both realized the dining room wasn’t large enough to hold a pool table. I’ve been hoping my dreams would come true, and Tim finally made it a reality 🙂

Here’s the empty dining room before:

China cabinet delivered:

And the full dining room after:

And the two leather recliners in the keeping room – note: that end table will eventually be replaced with something that fits better between those two chairs. New lamp too. Those are still on the list!

I have since ordered display stands for my china cabinet and unpacked my grandmother’s china and crystal. Picture in next post!

OK, more fun stuff in July…. Sam and Katelyn came to stay for a couple of days. We went to the library for movies, we watched tv, they played on their parents iPads, we went to Walmart for new toys and then played with those, we had pizza, we took them for ice cream, we played Parcheesi, I took them to the pool, we had a picnic (although it ended up being indoors, nobody wanted to go out in the heat!), we had the required reading time of 30 minutes per day, according to their mom (poor Sam, this was his most miserable time of day!). I hope they had fun, we sure did!

Oh, and before I went and got the kids, I found this in the side yard one morning while watering flowers:

Thankfully it is just the skin and not an actual snake, but you know, like I told Tim, there WAS an actual snake in it, and it felt the need to shed its skin in MY yard. ARGH! He said “it’s probably a good snake!”. Double ARGH!

The weekend after the new furniture was delivered, Mark, Amanda and the kids drove up from Hattiesburg, pulling a U-Haul trailer. When we moved last September, we offered Mark our old entertainment center. He said he wanted it, but would have to get a trailer to come get it. So, in late July, they finally had time to get a trailer and come get it 😀 Lucky for us, we had just moved out the old chairs from the keeping room, and they were able to take those too. Tim is very happy to have lots of room in his third bay in the garage!

Mark, Amanda, Ethan and Abby spent Saturday afternoon and evening hanging out with us. We grilled out, hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken, grilled veggies, chips and dip and fruit. Good food and good times hanging out! 🙂

And one other item of note, although the picture doesn’t do it justice! I went and got the last Little Meal Deal of the month on July 23 at Fresh Market. All month long, they had a burger meal deal. Four large flavored beef burgers, brioche buns from the deli, cole slaw, corn on the cob, chips, cheese, and cookies for $20. I like a lot of their meal deals (although I’m not going to do the thai noodle bowl one in August). I realize after I uploaded my photos, that I didn’t take a good picture showing the contents of the meal deal, or especially, the burgers, corn on the cob, cole slaw and chips on our overflowing plate after we cooked it. It was delicious!

Since my last blog post about what we have been doing was way back on July 16, I felt like I had a bit of catching up to do! I’ll try to break it up into a couple of posts. Not that anyone but me reads these, but I like having them down to remember. You know, for in a few years when I develop dementia or Alzheimers or whatever, all I know is my memory is bad and getting worse by the day! Haha! 🙂

July was a long, hot month of no rain. It looks like August is going to be the same way. We’re having problems with the new sod (as in, Tim sprayed some weed killer on a large portion of the front yard and some in the back, and it not only killed weeds, but has killed the grass too). We’ve lost 2 more azaleas, they will have to be replaced. We are running the sprinklers 3-4 times a week, and still things look terrible and are dying.

In mid-July, we took care of our neighbors dogs for a week while they were at the beach. I learned how to scoop kitty litter (they have a cat too!) and fed the dogs twice a day, checked on them a lot because it was so hot, and went over to read on their back porch and hang out with the dogs. It was blissful, it was like having two puppies all of my own for a week! Some days, I really miss having a dog.

We tried another couple of new restaurants in late July. One is a local place in Gluckstadt, Angelo’s. We went on a Friday night for date night. They have a strange menu – Italian, pizzas and barbecue! What an odd combination! We didn’t know what to try first, but Tim picked pizza. He picked an all meats one and it was pretty big, so we had leftovers to take home. Good thing, since Tim only ate one piece at the restaurant and I looked like a total pig, eating a whopping 2 slices! It was good, but pricey. I much prefer making my own pizza or order pizza hut than going to pay 23 bucks for a pizza! Next time, we’ll have to try the italian or barbecue.

Saturday July 18th was a fun day! Tim didn’t go play golf, so we hung out at home for a while, then headed out to Dogwood to shop all afternoon. We stopped at Panda Express for a late lunch, since I have been terribly hungry for Chinese food. It was ok, not great, but the first time I had been to one. I didn’t realize they had opened one out that way, we don’t have one near us. We shopped for rugs and art for the walls and came home with several pieces. No rug yet, we can’t agree on what we want to put on the floor in the keeping room.

Here’s some of my new wall art, I’m very happy with what we got, most of it came from Hobby Lobby:

Sunday July 19th was a tough day for Tim. We didn’t make it to church, since we knew he had to work all night. He did go play golf all afternoon, then started work around 8:30 PM. He came to bed around 5:30 AM, and I woke up and asked him, “did it all go okay?” To which he answered, “No, we had to roll it all back out”. He slept about 3 hours and got up and worked all day, trying to find the problems that had caused them to back out the code and put things back the way they were. He played golf that evening, Monday, and then was pretty exhausted the rest of the week! He has been searching for the problems and solutions ever since, and we know he has another long work weekend coming up, but we just don’t know when it will be.