Exceedingly Mundane

Well, I haven’t really had (or taken) the time to blog about the last couple of days. We’ve been fairly busy, although most of it is pretty mundane and I imagine pretty boring to most people. However, if you like to live dangerously, then read on! WARNING: Extremely long post ahead! 😀

On Friday, I got out and ran some errands. I went to pick up Tim at work first, and we went out to eat lunch together. Something we had not really done in a long while. He’s scaled back his eating out at work to about 1 day a week, with his weight-loss group, and so we rarely go out to eat together at lunch on a weekday. So, this was a nice diversion. 🙂 We went to the Little Tokyo near his office and had some wonderful Japanese food (no sushi) – we each had an “obento” – a box style lunch. Tim had the fried gyoza and chicken teriyaki obento and I had the tempura and steamed gyoza obento. I had the miso soup with mine (with cubed tofu, which Tim detests!) and he had a salad. It was really very good. I love their food, it seems really light and healthy compared to a lot of the food we eat out. 😀

After I dropped Tim back at work, I headed out for an afternoon of shopping. I went to Marshalls to look for a new pepper grinder, and after pricing what they had, I went over to Bed, Bath and Beyond nearby to comparison shop. Well, the cheapest one in BB&B was 19.99 and I didn’t really like it. The one I liked in there was 34.99, but not enough to pay that, even with my 20% off coupon. 😀 So, I decided I would go back to Marshalls and get the pepper grinder I had found there that I liked. It’s a black wooden Trudeau one, similar to this one. I really like it! Anyway, I had that coupon from BB&B, so I decided to splurge and get another Yankee Candle in there with the rest of my Christmas money (thanks Dad!). I got a different kind this time, instead of the traditional jar candle, it’s called a housewarmer but is smaller. I usually either get the 22 or 14 oz jar candle (that has a big lid on it), but they had some smaller ones in glass jars without the lids, a 10 oz and a 17 oz side. I got a 10 oz buttercream one. I wanted one for the kitchen that smells like something baking, something warm and comforting. This one fit the bill. You can check it out here, except you’ll have to look at the bottom right one. (Well, that link may not work, darn these sessions that time out! Go to www.yankeecandle.com, search by fragrance for Buttercream, then scroll down). 😀

After I finished up getting the candle and pepper mill (and looking around both stores quite a bit), I headed out to Lakeland Drive to do some shopping. Stopped at Lowe’s to price air filters (we are going through those very frequently, the house or ductwork is so dusty, they are clogging up frequently, more on that later), then I went to Kohl’s. I had seen something in there last week that I wanted to get my Dad for Father’s Day, so I went back and got that. Then, I headed to Target to look around and see if I could find one more small thing for Dad. I ended up finding the EXACT same item I had bought him in Kohl’s, except it was almost $10 cheaper! So, needless to say, I bought the cheaper one at Target and made another trip back to Kohl’s on the way home to return the original.

OK, I’m taking a chance here that my dad doesn’t read my blog (which I’m almost certain of), and I’ll post what I got him. Dad, if you’re reading – STOP NOW! I got Dad one of these, and I also picked him up a t-shirt that says “World’s Greatest Dad”. I hope he likes them! He’s almost impossible to buy for. And by the time, I’m 82, I imagine I’ll be that way too! He already has anything and everything he wants. Very hard to find things he wants or is interested in.

Anyway, I didn’t get home from running errands till a little after 5 PM and Tim called shortly after I walked in, to tell me he was on his way home. I didn’t have anything out to cook, and he offered to take me out to eat AGAIN, so I took him up on that offer! Twice in one day, I can’t remember the last time we did that and weren’t on vacation! We tried a new place that opened recently in Madison called Captain’s Catch. They used to have a place out at the Reservoir (same family, same business), except they called it “Catch of the Day”. Tim had eaten there and liked it, but had failed to mention to me that they were a little on the pricey side. Oh well. Once we got in there and looked at the menu, it was a little too late to get up and walk out. They are a Cajun/seafood kind of place, and they have gumbo, jambalaya, fried and grilled seafood dishes, and also po-boys and burgers, things like that. We had po-boys (I had a small shrimp one and Tim had a combo of fried shrimp and catfish) and we shared some fries, and it was all really good. After supper, we walked to two more stores that had recently opened in this same area (a new strip shopping center next to our Super Walmart) – Dollar Tree and Cato. I might have to go back and do a little more shopping in Cato before we leave for our vacation to DC. 😀

We then went to Hollywood Video and rented “The Aviator” and went home to start watching it. That sucker is long – nearly 3 hours – and I got sleepy, so I had to get Tim to stop it and we finished it Saturday. I need to do a review on it soon on Hambones. Not sure what to say though, I wasn’t overly impressed with it (a bit too much bad language and those odd bits of pervsion really bothered us).

Saturday, we slept late and then did our exercises and stretching and took off on our walk. We both had tank tops on, and after stopping several times to chat to neighbors, we realized later on that we had gotten quite a sunburn! I also went out later in the same tank top to water all the flowers, and I got even more sun. We had just started back on The Aviator when the phone rang (the new Vonage phone, it’s all setup, transferred and working – YEAH!), and it was the Operations Center in Dallas, work call for Tim. Now, he’s not on call, so we didn’t expect it, but they couldn’t reach Mike on the on-call phone, so they called Tim at home. He ended up working 2-3 hours and fixed their problems. After he finished, we watched the rest of the Aviator and also some of the extras. Then, we headed out to return the movie, and we also went in search of an upgrade or newer version of SUSE, the linux software we use to run our website. We looked at Best Buy and CompUSA and also stopped by Tim’s office to see if we could find disks there. We ended up buying a new, full version at CompUSA. I thought we should have bought an upgrade, but we couldn’t find one locally. Anyway, on the way home (I thought to go home and grill the pork chops I had out to cook), Tim saw the sign on Hwy 51 for the new BBQ place that just opened Friday, called Pigskin, and he wanted to stop for BBQ. So, we did. More eating out. Argh. My clothes don’t fit as it is! I tried to be good and just had a pulled pork sandwich and small coleslaw. Tim had the BBQ chicken, baked beans and potato salad. We split a slice of caramel cake for dessert. Tim liked the place better than I did. They had just opened, and the AC was not working, so they were jumping through hoops to make people happy. One guy came out and saw that we had not ordered ribs, so he brought us a sample to taste. They were a lot better than what I had ordered, so if we go back, I will definitely get the ribs.

Anyway, we watched one of the movies we bought recently on the previously viewed rack at the video store, one we saw at the theatre and loved, I Robot with Will Smith. Yes, we’re very nerdy, we love these kinds of movies!

OK, that brings us to today, Sunday. Tim is working on Hambones, or rather, scouring the net to work on the SUSE upgrade. He’s having trouble finding the right ISO’s he wants, or something. I’ll leave that to him. He loves this stuff! I’ll just try to keep everyone up to date on when Hambones will be down, that kind of thing.

Not sure what we will do the rest of the afternoon. More later, maybe. If anyone cares! 😀