Exceedingly Mundane

Or any meme for that matter! They used to be all the rage out in BlogLand, but they appear to be very few left. And of the ones I have found for Monday or any other day, there are always questions that don’t apply to me, or else I would be answering the same thing every.single.time. So I guess I’ll stick with regular blogging and see how that pans out 🙂

Speaking of blogging, I’m coming up on my TEN YEAR anniversary of my blog. Hard to believe, but when I go back in my archives, I started in February of 2005. Good golly Miss Molly, where did the time go? I’ve taken a lot of breaks, but find it’s a great way to keep up with what is going on with us, so I keep coming back.

Ok, back to the original topic, today is Monday. We are zipping through January, hard to believe it’s already almost half way through the month. Today is a grey, bleak day. It rained some yesterday and quite a bit last night, but had mostly ended this morning. Tim had to work last night, for about 3 or so hours until the wee hours of the morning. He started a new fitness challenge at work, to log steps walked with a pedometer, so he wanted to go walking at lunch. Yippee! First time he’s walked with me in at least a year, maybe two. I showed him the route I had mapped out in the new subdivision, and we had a nice long walk during his lunch hour today. That makes me all kinds of happy 🙂

I’ve got some ham and bean soup in the crockpot today. I tasted the beans a while ago and they were still hard as a rock. I guess I’ve added too much salt, got old beans from the bin at Whole Foods or something, because I soaked them all night long and threw them in the crockpot this morning. I guess we’ll eat leftovers if the soup doesn’t turn out.

We had a busy weekend. We went to Greenwood for the funeral for Don’s mom Margaret on Saturday. It was nice to see Trent, Grayson and Henry though, since we missed seeing them at New Years. Just a really sad occasion though 🙁 We stayed to eat and visit, but the church ladies ran out of food, so we stopped at Sonic and picked up fast food on the way home. After we got home, I made a loaf of cranberry bread to take to Sunday School. Sunday was busy with Sunday School, church and going to Kroger afterwards. After that, I cooked lunch (pepperoni crescents, really easy and so not healthy) and then Tim took a long nap and watched the NFL playoff games. I cooked supper, thereby breaking my rule that I don’t like cooking on Sundays 🙁

Currently weather: as stated, grey and bleak

Currently reading: Rachel by Jill Eileen Smith

Currently watching on TV: the new Agent Carter … I need to watch Downtown, I’m already two weeks behind, but don’t seem to have much time lately for catching up on the DVR

Currently Cooking: ham and bean soup today, potato soup later in the week, winging a couple of days

Week Ahead: have to take Suzanne to the airport, get my hair cut, make a run to Sam’s for food for the family get-together we are hosting this Saturday, take Tim’s suit to the dry cleaners and a few more errands. I’d much rather stay home, but these things have to get done!

And a photo from the weekend, I made a new recipe Friday night for a skillet chocolate chip cookie cooked in a cast iron skillet. It was DELICIOUS!

More next time, hope everyone is having a great day!

Six years ago today, I wrote my first post on my little blog. It was just an experiment, something I thought wouldn’t last long. For the longest time, it was just my sisters that came by and visited. Then, slowly, I had other lovely people stop by to visit. Now, six years later, I’m still blogging, which is a bit of a surprise to me! I’ve taken several breaks, some quite long, but I’m still sticking with it. I think it’s a wonderful way to chronicle our lives, share ideas and thoughts, ask fun questions about the things we all have in common and that we’re different about, etc.

Happy Anniversary to my little blog, Exceedingly Mundane 😀

But not recipes for Spam!

A couple of random thoughts this morning:

1. I don’t understand people who leave spam on my little blog. I mean, it’s not a high traffic blog, nor does it have anything controversial or even overtly interesting on it. I’m SO grateful for Akismet though – the spam filter I installed a while back to catch all of this nasty spam. I’m constantly amazed and disgusted at the kinds of spam that Akismet catches. Ugh. At least it doesn’t get out there, but I hate seeing it all on my moderation page.

2. I’ve been trying to get back into a cooking groove. For a while now, I’ve just been making things that are easy, or things that I’ve made many times before. I’m making a concerted effort to try new things. Most of them have been winners, although some have been better than others. All of these are new to me, and all are from places online. I have tried to give credit from the website where I found the recipe, but sometimes I don’t always write it down or print it out. I have just entered several recipes on our family website, in the Recipes section. Here’s a sampling of them:

Sausage Calzones, with homemade dough – here

Pizza Pot Pie – here

Butter Honey Wheat Bread – here

Homemade Taco Sauce (here), which I used in this Skillet Taco recipe

I am going to try a new recipe today for a homemade spaghetti sauce. I’m on a kick lately to reduce sodium and cut down on the processed food I buy and use. So many additives in the canned stuff, packet mixes, etc, as well as that nasty high fructose corn syrup. I hope it turns out ok, because I sure do like using jarred spaghetti sauce, it’s so easy!

Where does one begin a blog post, when you have gone so long without posting? New territory for me. I’ve taken short breaks before, and longer breaks when we’ve had computer or Internet issues, but never a break this long.

For starters, I wasn’t sure I was going to post again. I’m still on the fence but willing to keep trying. Mostly, I don’t like to be a quitter 🙂 I have four years of blogging going on here that a part of me hates to just… abandon.

I haven’t felt the need to blog lately. One reason is that for the last 9 or 10 days, I’ve been sick. I haven’t been this sick in a while. I lost two days from running a fever, sleeping most of the time, and laying in a dark and quiet room for nearly 48 hours. Sinus migraine type headaches are no fun. When my head feels like the size of Jupiter and it’s trying to all fit inside my small cranium, then stuff hurts.

I didn’t turn my computer on at all for a week. That’s another first for me. You know what – I didn’t miss it at all! Not only was I not blogging, I wasn’t checking email, I wasn’t reading blogs, I wasn’t checking Facebook, I wasn’t reading tweets on Twitter, I wasn’t surfing online to read about stuff, look stuff up or even play games. I haven’t really wanted to get back to it, but I feel like I have to. Isn’t that sad?!

Anyway, I’ll try to think of something to blog about. I’ll have to go back to extremely mundane thoughts. A book, a song, a reality tv show, a picture of my puppy. Something inane, I guess. 🙂

How about this for starters – I actually watched Dancing with the Stars this week. I used to love that show. I don’t get to watch it much any more because, we also DVR Chuck, Heroes, and 24 on Mondays. The DVR can only handle so much, unfortunately. However, I was impressed with a couple of dancers, including whoever the Melissa girl is from the Bachelor (never watched that one). I also called and lodged my first votes for American Idol this year. I was a Danny/Anoop fan, and still am, but my new favorite contestant, hands down, is Kris Allen. I think he’s awesome, and I’m going to vote for him as long as he continues to impress me every week 😀

Hope all is well out there in blogland!

P.S. I’m trying out a new template for spring and summer. I’ve had another one on here that I liked better (red), but in IE, the comments are HUGE. I hope this one is alright in whatever browser you use. Please let me know if you have any problems or complaints about it 🙂 I like the ocean side of it, the “earth” side is a little dark for me, but still nice. The “ocean” part of it looks like summer to me 😀

I’ve changed the look on my blog to one not quite as fall-looking…. I really liked the other one with the trees and leaves, but it didn’t display properly in IE. Thanks to Dawn for letting me know! I will have to remember that not everyone uses Firefox or Safari, and some people actually do still use Internet Explorer 🙂

I’ll post a book review very soon, maybe in a few hours 🙂

You know…. I’ve been blogging for 3 1/2 years, and I think we’d only updated my blogging software (WordPress) once or twice. Tim decided that while I was taking a break, that would be a good time to update my software. Because, you know, I was only about 15 versions behind! Anyway, I’ve been having fun getting it updated and looking for a new, free theme for my blog. I found a couple, and have loaded one for fall, until I can find something for Christmas.

What do you think of the new look around here?

I don’t have a whole lot to say, as before, but I have been busy on my bloggy break. I’ve been reading, and trying to go through a pile of magazines. I’m trying to work out more and walk on the treadmill more. Not that it’s doing any good. You know, two weeks of walking and not a single pound disappearing from the scales is quite discouraging. But I’ll keep on trying 🙂

I’ll be back soon with a quick book review and a Question of the Day… stay tuned!