Exceedingly Mundane

I’m SO glad that fall is here, even though we’ll still have plenty of hot days. At least maybe the nights will start cooling off a bit, and my early morning walks will be less sweaty and stinky 🙂

We got one or two new tv shows last week, but this week, it really starts cranking up. Some new favorites are returning and we’re going to try a few new shows.

Here’s some of the new ones we are going to give a test drive too and see how we like them…

* Sleepy Hollow – this one started on Fox last week and we both liked it! It reminds me a lot of Grimm, which Tim loves and watches by himself. I’ll give this one a try for a while, until the creatures and monsters and stuff start to get to me 🙂

* Hostages (CBS) and The Blacklist (NBC) – both start Monday night at 9 PM here. Not sure about either one, but they have some decent actors and a decent sounding plot. We’ll give them a try.

* Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – Tuesday night on ABC, and I cannot wait! I love all the Marvel movies and loved the Avengers movie. I hope this one is great, and it’s even better because although Colson died in the last movie, he lives in this tv show! 😀

* Ironside starts in early October, I think on NBC. I remember Blair Underwood from a show a LONG time ago, I think it was LA Law. Boy, I’m getting old 🙂

And then we’ve got a lot of favorites coming back, including both NCIS shows, Person of Interest, Elementary, Blue Bloods and several others. I have a new season of Top Chef to look forward to, and a new Dancing (which started last week). I’m really on the fence about The Voice. I loved,loved,loved it last season with Shakira and Usher, and now they are gone and the two I dislike intensely (CeeLo and Christina) are back. Bleh. I will give it a limited shot, mostly because I enjoy Adam and Blake.

As far as fall goes, I’m ready for more. Cooler temps, more comfort foods, holidays, birthdays and of course, the football that I’m already enjoying. Our college team is not doing well (again, hard after a streak of 17 winning seasons), but the Saints… oh, my Saints! They are 3-0 and we have such high hopes and happy expectations every Sunday. I love this time of year! Bring on some cool temps, let me pull out jeans and my favorite long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts, light a good smelling candle, and I’m a happy camper 😀

You know what they say about the best of intentions? Yes, that was me a couple of months ago when I thought I was back into blogging. Oh well, I really have been meaning to update the old blog! I actually don’t know where to start 🙂

Since I blogged last, we’ve been busy! We have:

gone to our great-nephew Sam’s 3rd birthday party
Tim hurt his back and was out of commission for a short while
I’ve had a birthday (and got a Kindle!)
my sister Gail ran her second 5K
Had Halloween at our house and went trick or treating with small kids for the first time
my sister Suzanne came to visit from Florida
I went to my yearly doctor visit and found out my cholesterol is high (ugh)
I’ve been trying to cook and eat better (haha!)

and now… we’re about to have Thanksgiving and Tim’s birthday. A lot going on, and I’d like to record some of it to remember, but a lot of it is “old news” by now!

Let’s start here – I wrote this post a couple months ago about a prize I won online. I watch the Rachael Ray show pretty regularly, and try to enter most of the contests they offer online. I won a nice prize, a Shark Pocket Steam Mop, and it came in a couple of weeks after they notified me that I had won. It was very cool, because it was delivered the morning that I clean our floors in the kitchen and breakfast room. I already had the room empty, swept and ready to mop when the doorbell rang!

So, I gave it a good test and I have to say, I really like using an electric steam mop as opposed to a wet mop. It uses just water, so I no longer use chemicals on my floor. The pads are interchangeable (it has 3 sizes of “heads”, one regular, one extra large, and one triangular which is great in the bathrooms) and you can wash the microfiber covers. They’re white, so you can REALLY see what dirt is coming up off your floors. The best thing, hands down, about using this steam mop is how quickly the floor dries. It’s dry just a couple of minutes after I mop over it. I love it 🙂

I’ll try to update soon with a picture of my Kindle and the cute case I ordered for it, and blog about that soon. I might update with some photos of family events, but then again, I may just put them on Flickr.

Hope everyone is having a great day, week, and great fall! 😀

Once again, I don’t have anything earth-shattering to blog about. Just some random tidbits floating around in my head!

* The weather here is gorgeous! It finally feels like fall and not so much like summer. I’ve joked most of my life that we have two seasons here in the Deep South – really really hot and not quite as hot! Last week, it started cooling off some and was in the 80’s during the day and 50’s and 60’s at night. The last couple of days have been even better – 70’s during the day and 40’s at night. Awesome! I’ve had the windows open and been enjoying not only the cooler air, but hearing my birds at my bird feeder, the insects chirping and even occasionally my wind chimes singing 🙂

* Once the weather starts feeling better, I start thinking about needing a few new pieces of clothing for fall and winter. I have mentioned before that I really don’t like to shop (not for clothes anyway, food and electronics shopping make me happy though!). I particularly dislike shopping for shoes. And purses. And underwear. Ugh. But, part of me wants some new boots this year. I have never owned a pair of cowboy boots and some part of me wants a pair. Maybe even a pair of short ones, I saw some in a store when I was at the beach with my sister and her family. So – if you buy boots this year, will they be tall or short ones and what style? Is there anything that’s really “in”, not that I’m much of an in-style kind of girl!

* We got our replacement coffee maker in the mail, finally. Our Cuisinart On-Demand coffee maker started having problems after about a year. It’s under warranty for 3 years, so we called them and set things up. We had to cut the cord from the old one and mail to them, and then they told us that our unit was on back-order. So we waited, and waited. It finally came in last week! Tim is happy and I’m pretty happy too. I had bought a cheap Mr Coffee at Walmart to use while we waited on the new one to come in. Now, I drag that one out every day from the garage to use for my decaf coffee. So, I’m back to drinking coffee some days 🙂 If you remember, I gave up caffeine to help with my tinnitus, but I do miss sweet tea in the summer and coffee in the winter. I am now enjoying the Decaf Moose Munch flavored coffee I bought at Harry & David last month!

* I’m still on the fence about getting a Kindle. My birthday is coming up, and I actually have enough credit at Amazon to get one (from doing the Swagbucks and MyPoints programs). I’ve been going back and forth between thinking I want an iPad to thinking I want a Kindle, to most days thinking, I love paper books, why on earth would I waste money on an e-Reader. Tim encouraged me to download something to my Mac and read it on there. Luckily, Amazon gives away a lot of really good free books and I’ve downloaded quite a few. I read one, “The Pawn” by Steven James on my Kindle for Mac app. I really enjoyed it, good book and it was easier to read on the laptop than I had anticipated. So now I’m swinging more that way than before!

* I’ve been doing better on the cooking front. I’m making menu plans more often and sticking to them, and I’ve also made a concerted effort to try some new recipes. I’ve got a few that have been deemed keepers, so I’ll try to post a link to those soon – in case anyone is interested! 🙂

Hope you’re all having a great day and week out there in blog-land!

We’re huge TV junkies. I always have been and Tim has become one (not much choice when you live with me!). Of course, football is on now, and that is our most favorite thing in the whole wide world. 😀 We’ve just finished up with several “summer” shows that we like, including Leverage, White Collar, Covert Affairs, Psych, Royal Pains, etc. I believe most of those will come back in January (when we’ll be missing 24, I imagine).

We have a ton of shows that start back in the fall, that we like to watch. Many nights, our DVR is nearly smoking from the exertion 🙂 There are even a couple of new shows that I would like to check out, but we already have 2 things in that time period, and that’s all the silly DVR can handle. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it record more than two at one time, LOL!

Some of the returning shows that we like and look forward to are:

Survivor
NCIS
NCIS: Los Angeles
The Mentalist
V
Chuck
Fringe
Human Target

Some of the new shows that we are wanting to check out are:

Hawaii 5-0
The Event
Undercovers

I miss watching Dancing with the Stars and Amazing Race, but those never work out for me. I love DWTS and would love to see Kurt Warner this season. But alas, those shows are on Sundays and Mondays, and we have football on those nights. And we have a lot of shows on Tuesdays, when I think the DWTS results are on. Sometimes I might record them and watch later, but it doesn’t happen often. I just keep up with them online and watch some clips.

How about you? Is there a returning or new show that you are looking forward to seeing this fall?

Living in the Deep South, we don’t have much fall and winter. I’ve lived here all my life, so I’m accustomed to it. As odd as it sounds, I’m very cold-natured, but I love the colder times of the year! Tonight, the weathermen are predicting a low temperature of 39. I’m ready for it to be 32 or below, but I’ll take what I can get 🙂

If the prognosticators are correct (and that trusty farmer’s almanac), they are saying we are going to have a colder than normal winter. Fine by me! As long as I don’t have to be out in it, LOL! For one thing, I think we need more cold weather here to kill the fleas and ticks, and mostly the mosquitoes.

For another thing, there’s so many things I love about this time of year. Enough for a bulleted blog post! Here’s some of the things iLike 😀 about fall and winter:

* wearing sweatshirts, sweatpants, jeans, boots
* wrapping up in my soft, cozy blanket
* smelling and feeling hot towels and sheets right out of the dryer
* watching some of the leaves finally change color a bit here
* once the leaves are off the trees, I can see all of my pretty birds in the backyard
* baking!
* football season 🙂
* burning candles and having them make our home seem that much more cozy
* if it gets REALLY cold, we might actually turn on the gas logs and have a fire
* washing dishes in hot soapy water, just to warm my hands up
* hot apple cider with red hots
* or hot cocoa with marshmallows
* making soup, stew, chili and homemade bread

Ok, I’m sure there are plenty more, but those are the first ones that come to mind. How about you, do you have a favorite thing about this time of the year?

At least down here in the South, it finally looks and feels like fall. Friday’s high was around 47 degrees, and Friday night was 25. That’s pretty chilly for us, more like winter! The trees in our yard are finally starting to shed a few of their leaves. Not all, mind you. We’ll have leaves falling for the next couple of months around here. And one of our trees in the front yard has this habit of hanging on to her leaves all winter. Next March or April, when it gets windy, they will all finally blow off. I sort of like it that way 🙂

Anyway, Friday around lunchtime, Tim and I raked some of the leaves up in the front and back yard. Beau, the wonder dog, had a blast! He’s still got some puppy in him. We have no idea how old he is, but I’d guess around four. We’ve had him two years now, but we have no idea how old he was when we adopted him. He had a blast playing in the leaves though! See…