Exceedingly Mundane

Some random and assorted thoughts and things going on:

It’s been chilly in the mornings when we walk! Sorta feels like fall. I know it will warm up, so I’m really enjoying the cooler temps while I can. One morning (just one!) was 51 degrees, so it was nice! I even broke down and splurged on a mug of hot tea Friday morning and coffee Saturday morning… they were both awesome!

Gail came Tuesday night and stayed with us while Don was out of town. I had to get my hair cut (and colored!) Wednesday morning, and after that, she ran errands with me. We went to TJ Maxx and Marshalls, and I picked up 2 more pieces of cookware.

I have been sort of wavering on Cuisinart vs Calphalon for some new stainless cookware. I had bought a couple in the Simply Calphalon line, but there seems to be a lot more sizes, shapes and even levels available from Cuisinart. I don’t really want to get a whole set, there are pieces I don’t want, and I really don’t have enough room for a large set (Tim found a 14 pc set at Sam’s he wanted to get me). Anyway, I found a couple more pieces Wednesday at TJ Maxx in the Simply Calphalon line, so I went ahead and got them. I need to pick up or order a couple more, but I think I’m going to go with that one. What I like about them is that they have a silicon grip on the handles and lid, instead of being all metal (I’m worried they’ll be hot). What I don’t like about them is that they have that black silicon grip, it doesn’t look as sleek as the all metal ones, LOL!

We also went to Kroger, the bank and post office. Gail left going home, and Tim went to play golf. He’s really enjoying the weather and his golf, his game is going well right now and he’s shooting lower scores than ever. He has one more tournament coming up at the end of the month. The days are getting shorter, so he can’t get as much golf in as he would like.

Survivor is back on and we watched the first episode Wednesday night! Hard to believe it’s the 25th season and we’ve watched every episode except the first one or two of season one. I tried the new Jeff Probst daytime talk show, and only gave it one day. I didn’t like the format. I much prefer The Chew and Rachael Ray for my daytime nonsense. I would give Katie Couric’s show a try, but no affiliate here is airing it.

Bought a jar of apple butter recently and tried it on toast, pretty good. I’m getting excited about fall and cooking more seasonal stuff with apples, pumpkins, soups, etc, and of course, Tim grilling out for football games and stuff. Love this time of year!

P.S. Saturday turned out to be a nice day together! Tim has been playing golf every Saturday for a while now, so when he said he wasn’t going to play, I got pretty excited! He’s been busy around the house and yard. We went to Lowe’s and got all new floodlights, and he’s put all of those up outside (the old ones were rusting and peeling). We also got pine straw, but haven’t gotten it out yet. We had to make a second trip to Lowe’s to get stuff to patch the roof, he found a hole in one of the shingles, yikes. Going to watch our college football game on the computer tonight, it’s not on regular tv, just ESPN3.com, so it’s hard for us to watch on the little bitty computer screen! 🙂

It rained, it was colder, all of which make for a nice weekend for me!

Not a whole lot going on here, but we had a nice weekend (or at least I did, Tim prefers 70 degrees, and hours spent on the golf course). It rained most of the day Saturday, so we stayed in and watched tv, and movies, and I read some. That’s a pretty perfect late winter day for me. Much better than the early spring we were having the last two weeks of February. Warm weather will be here plenty soon, so I don’t prefer to rush it.

Tim worked on our deck last week, and it looks really great. He used a new type cleaner on it, then put protectant on it, so it looks really good. So nice to have a useable space outside.

Sunday, we went to church, then to Fresh Market, then to the movie “The Grace Card.” It could have been a rental, but we like to support faith-based movies that come out, so we went to our theater to see it. It was a good movie, with a good message. Grace is easy for the people you know and love, it’s bestowing grace on the unloveable, the hate-filled, that is so very hard to do. We had also watched “Like Dandelion Dust” on Friday night (Netflix), another faith-based movie based on a Karen Kingsbury book. A really tough movie to watch, but a good topic and it ended well, so that is also a big thing with me, LOL!

The weekend ended on a bad note. Tim was outside hitting balls at dark, Sunday evening. When he and Beau came in, Beau was bleeding. Tim didn’t hear him get in a fight, so he probably got into some briars or something sharp. That dog loves to roam and wander. His ear is cut and it was bleeding profusely. It’s hard to put pressure on a dog’s ear to make it stop bleeding 🙁 It finally slowed up and we put some Vaseline on it. I hope he heals quickly 🙂 I keep finding little droplets of blood everywhere, poor baby. He obviously doesn’t feel good today, he’s been laying around and very subdued. My sweet Beau-baby.

Here’s to a good week ahead – I hope to get a few more things cleaned out around here, I’m hoping to try a new recipe or two (we bought brussel sprouts at Fresh Market, going to try roasting them), and I am looking forward to reading more on my Kindle. 😀 Have a great week, everyone out there in bloggity-ville!

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!

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!

Well, hooray for the little guy! We called out the big, ugly, corporate company that had come earlier in the week to service our air conditioning unit. The same one who said it was beyond repair, and wanted to sell us a big, expensive new unit. I had gotten the name of a local guy who has his own small business from a good friend of mine. He had replaced my friend’s upstairs unit last summer. He came out yesterday, after the big company’s guy had left, and after we told him what it was and wasn’t doing, immediately said “let me get my gauges and tools and see what we can do.”. He found the leak and fixed it. Something the big company didn’t offer and never brought up. It’s a temporary fix, but a very acceptable one to us. This guy was treating us like he would his own home, let’s get these people some air, and then we can look and see if they want to replace their unit. Let’s not make them suffer in this heat and make them think they have no options except to buy an expensive new unit from us. In fact, he gave us a ballpark estimate on a new unit, and he was more than a thousand dollars under the “big company” quote.

So, our air was fixed yesterday in about two hours, even though it took 9 hours to cool the house back down. We were able to sleep in cool comfort last night, and got a great night’s sleep compared to the night before. The man who helped us out said, let’s see how it goes, if it is cooling for the next couple of days. We’ll touch base on Monday, he said, and see what you guys would like to do. We’re probably still going to get a new unit, which will mean another long hot day with no AC, but after that, we’ll have a brand new unit. Right now, though, my A/C is running and blowing cool air. It certainly feels better in here than it did at this time yesterday!

Hoorah for small business owners with brains, heart and compassion!

Well, we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. Our air conditioning is out. The unit is old, and we’ve been having to add freon for the last couple of years. We had a technician out earlier in the week and they filled it up on freon and did a maintenance check. They told us again “it’s on its last leg”, which is the exact same thing they told us last year 🙄 However, air conditioning is very necessary in our part of the country. Today’s high is supposed to be 97 or 98, with heat indexes of 105-110. Not going to be fun here with the windows open and fans on 🙁

We have two people coming out this morning to look at our unit and give us an estimate. Keep your fingers crossed that we have cool air again soon. Last night was a really long, hot night. Not much sleep here!

I seem to have lost most of the month of April. My father-in-law went into the hospital on Wednesday, April 8 for surgery and was just released yesterday, Wed 4/22. We’re very grateful that he was able to go home and is doing good. After surgery (he had a hernia on his esophagus), he developed a blood clot that moved to his lungs, called a pulmonary embolism. He spent his birthday and Easter Sunday in ICU. After coming out of ICU, he spent over a week, trying to get his meds regulated. They could never get it all right, so they finally discharged him with shots and pills. He’s taking Lovenox shots twice a day (heparin shots) and is on Coumadin as an anti-coagulant to prevent more clots. Apparently, Coumadin is a “finicky” drug and is hard to regulate, as each person is different. Anyway, we’re just glad he’s doing well and is at home now.

It’s warmed up here in the last few weeks. It’s nice outside, the breeze is blowing and it smells so… fresh! After spending so many days in the hospital, breathing antiseptic laden recycled air, it’s so nice to smell fresh spring air! I’m also amazed at how things are growing. And how much I’m looking forward to getting some flowers to plant. And how many weeds have sprung up in my flower beds. I mean, really, why do those things have to pop up where they don’t belong?! 😀

Today it’s supposed to hit 88 degrees here. Which makes me sad, because I’ll have to break down and turn our A/C on in the house. I just hope it works!

How about you? Anything exciting going on in your neck of the woods? What’s the weather like where you are, and if you live in the South, do you have your A/C running yet?

Have a great day! 😀