Exceedingly Mundane

Note to self: Be sure to keep the garage door closed. All of those birds you’ve seen flying in and out of the garage the last couple of days have been up to something:

I felt really really bad to get rid of the nest they had started. I know they need to have one somewhere, this time of year. But, my opened box of kitchen garbage bags that I had stored on top of my shelf in the garage is not the best place to do it. I just know I’m going to need more garbage bags from behind the nest before too long

Poor birdies, no babies in my garage!

If you’re the only dog in a house where there are no children, no cats and no other pets, it stands to reason that you will be a little spoiled.

If you’re a dog who happens to live in OUR house, you will be very spoiled!

Beau doesn’t think so, but he is. I know he is, because I’m the one who spoils him. I particularly love to buy him new beds, new collars and treats (lots of treats!). He is set with toys. He has a toy basket full and he only plays with them sporadically. He has 3 beds and I would have 5 more if I had room for them, LOL!

This winter has been particularly cold, so I thought it was time for Beau to have a newer, bigger, softer, better blanket. I mean, a dog gets cold in a climate controlled house, you know?!

So, here’s Beau with his new blankie:

Sometimes, we wrap him up so tight, you can barely find him in his new blankie:

On chilly days, when Beau wants to go outside and enjoy the sunshine, his mama thinks he gets cold, so she wraps him up (on his glider), in his new blankie:

Do you think Beau is spoiled? Do you think Beau is loved and well-cared for? I think somebody loves Beau the wonder dog

I haven’t been blogging for the last week or so. I’d like to convince you it’s because I’m so busy watching the Olympics (which we are, sort of!), but mostly it’s because I haven’t been able to think of a whole lot to blog about. It definitely comes and goes, ideas for blog posts

So, have you been watching the Olympics? If so, which sport or athlete has been your favorite?

We’ve really been enjoying the speed skating, a lot of the skiing, and the snowboarding (love the snowboard cross).

Every week, I empty the kitchen and breakfast room of all the chairs around the table, and sweep and mop the floors really well. Beau, for some unknown reason, loves, loves, loves to lay up under the table when all of the chairs are gone. He actually grumps and growls at me when I start to move them back and he has to move out I have never actually seen him do this before, though, and he laid like that for a long time, propped up against the leg of the table. I’m really surprised he did, that table leg is pretty hard and probably not very comfy!

P.S. Tim said this looked like a yin and yang photo of him, with the sun and shadow on his face. I love photos of him like that! Aw heck, who am I kidding, I love all photos of my Beau-Beau

My apologies to all who have already seen and heard about this on Facebook, but this is just too good to not post at my blog too! After all, I always look back here to reminisce and look things up, and just generally remember all the little and big things.

So….

Today, it snowed! About 4 or 4 1/2 inches, depending on which area of the yard we measured in! They had been forecasting snow all week, but I was very skeptical. I kept saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. They forecast our area to get 1-3″, and I really thought we would just get a dusting of snow, or an inch or less. When I woke up this morning, I was shocked! Happy, but quite surprised

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Just for the record, the largest container of Shout laundry detergent from Sam’s lasts me approximately 2 1/2 years, LOL!

I posted this entry on my Project 365 blog way back in July 2007.

I got a couple of comments back then about how big the container was. And it was, but I always figure that things like toilet paper, dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent, Shout and things like that don’t go bad or are ever going to stop being used in our house. So those are the kinds of things I buy in large quantities at Sam’s Club. So, for the record, that 128 oz container worked for us for about 2 1/2 years. And today, I threw out that container of Shout and opened a new one (also from Sam’s, but not quite as large).

I thought you might like to know, hardy har har!

P.S. You know, sometimes it is really nice to be able to look back at the REALLY important things in life, like when you bought a giant container of laundry cleaner. You know, the special moments

P.S.S. This blog ain’t named Exceedingly Mundane for nothing!

I gave Tim a really good list for Christmas this year (well, 2009, still hard to believe it’s 2010), and he did a wonderful job of getting me both things I wanted from my list and surprising me. One of the practical things I asked for was an electric kettle. I have never owned a traditional kettle that you use on the stovetop to boil water. I have always used my microwave to boil water, I don’t know why. But when people are over and it’s cold and everyone wants hot chocolate, it’s hard to boil a lot of water fast for 4 or 5 cups of cocoa.

Enter my new baby! She’s a keeper. She boils water really fast (although she sounds like a freight train after a minute or two), and the water is really hot. Almost too hot. But I can boil enough for a cup of hot cocoa or cider or tea for me, or for a crowd. I know it’s not something I’ll use year round, but it is wonderful to have for the winter. And after all, we’re having a really cold winter around here, so she’s getting a good workout lately. Yep, she’s a keeper

I’m just a little goofy, because I got excited when I found out a few days ago that this year, Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day are on the same day

If you’ve visited here before, you might remember me blogging about the fact that Tim doesn’t really buy into the “greeting card holidays” as he calls them. Valentines is his biggest pet peeve. And even though I love to get flowers or chocolates or even a card, I really do see his point.

In the beginning, when we were dating and first married, he pushed through his cynicism and did what I wanted - sent me expensive flowers, took me out to nice restaurants, etc for Valentines Day. One year, we waited at a local Italian place (Amerigo) for over two hours then had less than stellar food and service. We had been married a few years and I was starting to see his point, but that ill-fated date night out on Valentines Day sealed it for me. These days, we do little to observe Valentines. Tim is wonderful about getting me flowers or cards or happies any of the other 360+ days out of the year (anniversary and birthday don’t count!), so Valentines really is not a big deal for us. We normally grill out a steak and watch tv, no biggie.

This year though, I saw that the Chinese New Year is on February 14. So, I’m really excited! You see, Chinese food is one of my most favorite things in the whole world. And Tim loves to get take-out more than eat it in restaurants, so it’s a win-win thing for us. I’m hoping we can get some Chinese food this weekend; in fact, I’m already planning for it and looking forward to it We do have some steaks in the freezer, so maybe the other night (Saturday), we can grill out a steak and just celebrate both with our favorite foods

BTW, I’m a Dragon and Tim’s a Rooster on the Chinese zodiac… we always have fun reading about those on the paper place-mats at one of the local Chinese places we visit. Have you ever checked to see what you are? You can read about the Chinese New Year here at Wikipedia, or find out your sign here.

Do you have plans for either holiday this weekend?

Who Dat! Who Dat say de gonna beat MY Saints?! Who Dat? Nobody!

Yep, we’re excited and euphoric and dazed and thrilled beyond words! I know most of you guys out in blog-ville don’t care a hoot about football, but obviously we do. Tim is already talking about what kind of Super Bowl memorabilia he wants to get

Just for the record, this is a long time coming. For those of you who aren’t Saints fans, let me tell you this - in 43 years, the Saints had never even made it to the Super Bowl. Heck, for the first 21 years of the franchise’s existence, they didn’t even have a winning season. In the 12 years that Archie Manning was the quarterback for the Saints (yes, Peyton and Eli’s dad), he only had 35 wins. In twelve total years. So, this is long overdue and we’re really really really ecstatic!

Who Dat!

Sometimes I love that my puppy dog is so vocal, and sometimes, it drives me nuts! When we rescued Beau, the foster home he was living in told us, “He NEVER barks!”. Well, even though he lived there six months, they were dead wrong. The dog barks all the time. He sings, he cries, he whines, he wails, he howls, he moans in his sleep. I guess all dogs do, to a certain extent. But, we happen to think that Beau is extra vocal and expressive.

This is just a short snippet, but this is very commonplace in our house. Beau thinks it is his job to be on guard duty all day long, so he stands at the back door, looking for predators in the back yard (most notably squirrels, but also lizards, bugs, birds and most any critter that moves). It’s his job to protect us. And apparently to alert us to anything moving outside.

P.S. Donna, you asked for it, so here’s yet another Beau post and video, LOL!

I was surfing around a day or so ago (or maybe checking Twitter, I honestly can’t remember!), and I saw a link to this article, about washing bagged lettuce.

I normally watch The Today Show, so I didn’t see this segment on The Early Show. But, I must admit, I don’t always rewash those bags of pre-washed lettuce. I might think twice now! I try to buy heads of lettuce, or heads of romaine more precisely, and then wash them myself, run them through the salad spinner, and store in a gallon ziploc bag in my produce drawer. I have been buying some of those big plastic tubs of organic lettuce at either my grocery or at Fresh Market (our favorite spot to stop after church on Sunday and pick up food for lunch). I tend to not wash those either, but just pick out the lettuce and make a salad or whatever.

So, how about you… do you wash those pre-washed bags or tubs of lettuce again? Or do you not buy those and just buy heads of lettuce that you do wash yourself? Vote in the poll and let me know!

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Today marks the five year anniversary of my little blog, Exceedingly Mundane. I made several really boring posts on February 3, 2005, and have been making mundane ramblings ever since I still enjoy it, but there are days when I can’t think of a thing to say, LOL! It’s really awesome to be able to look back though, and see things that I posted about, big and small. It’s a great way to remember things in life and see pictures that I posted to remind me of places we went, people we saw, etc. I love that aspect of it.

I’m not sure how much longer I will blog, but then again, I didn’t plan on blogging this long either!!!

Boy, you get old, you blink and a month goes by in a flash!

It seems like we wait all year for football season, and when it FINALLY gets here, we’re so happy. Then, before you know it, BAM! It’s the end of January and it’s almost over. Although for us this year, for the first time EVAH, our team is going to the big game. Can’t wait! We’ve never really experienced a true Super Bowl experience. We have a party every year (not this year though!), so we always watch the game, but we never get to root for our team. Not so this year!

Ok, I actually meant to post about what little was going on around here in January.

* The month started out cold, then our water heater went out. It was an ordeal to get it replaced, but it all turned out fine in the end. It definitely gave me a whole new appreciation for HOT water, as well as for all of the little things in life that I can so easily take for granted.

* We went to our great-niece’s 4th birthday party, which was fun. We weren’t able to make it to our niece’s 5th birthday party, as it was out of town, on the same afternoon as the NFC Championship game and we had invited some people over to watch the game.

* We had the whole Saints in the playoffs, going to the Super Bowl thing that I just blogged about (and yes, I know I blog ad nauseum about football and the Saints!).

* I didn’t cook a whole lot in the month, we ate a lot of sandwiches and soups and easy stuff, plus we picked up food on the weekend. We’ve been going to Fresh Market every Sunday after church, and usually get stuff that we can “eat on” for a few days. Or we have leftovers from the football food that I fix (or pizza that we order!) from the weekend. I do have one or two new recipes that I have tried, that I need to post on our family website (but I haven’t gotten around to that yet)

* I didn’t read a lot of books in January. I finished three books and I’m about 20 pages away from finishing another book, here on Feb 1. I completed “Home for the Holidays” (part of the Grace Chapel Inn series), “Leaving Yesterday” by Kathryn Cushman and “Latte Trouble” by Cleo Coyle (part of the Coffeehouse mystery series). I enjoyed all the books, even though I didn’t blog about any of them. I am also working on the five books in the Chronicles of the Kings series by Lynn Austin and thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying them. I have so many books I want to read!

* We spent one very productive Saturday in January, when it wasn’t so cold, doing a lot of outside work. Tim got all the bushes and trees cut back, and raked leaves. He also cleaned up a lot in the garage and stuff. I spent a lot of that day working inside, getting the office cleaned up (and a bunch of stuff thrown out), gathering up some stuff for Goodwill. And, the biggie, I got all of the yearly “paperwork” done from last year - shredding things we won’t keep, getting papers organized for the taxes, and going thru receipts. The shredder got a workout that day!

* I spent a lot of time on Facebook. Mostly on Farmville and Cafe World. I continue to be addicted.

* I got back into walking with my walking buddy Julie. She wanted to start the C25K (couch to 5K) training program, so we did that. We’re into week 2, but I think we’re repeating week 1 on the program. It’s going to take us longer than the 9 weeks that the program thinks

* We played some of our new Wii games, in between football, tv and Netflix movies. I’m really enjoying Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort

Ok, February, bring it on! I have a dentist appointment and haircut to start the month off right, then there’s that all important “greeting-card” holiday that Tim loves to avoid. Mostly, we’re excited about the Super Bowl! February is a short month, so I expect it to fly by with equal speed, if not faster, than January did.

And to think, I wrote 2009 on a check the other day! I’d better get used to 2010 and a whole new decade, because it’s here with a vengeance!

I know not everyone has an iPhone, but I do, and I LOVE mine! Tim and I got ours over a year ago, for each of our birthdays, so we’ve had them about a year and a half now.

I download free apps all the time, but only a very few pay ones. I go through phases of my favorite apps on the iPhone, but here’s what I am really liking lately:

Grocery IQ - my new grocery shopping app. I downloaded Splash Shopper when I first got my iPhone, because I had used it for several years on my Palm Pilot. And I really liked it on the Palm. On the iPhone, I don’t like it so much. It’s slow, its cumbersome, and you can really tell that it wasn’t designed from the ground up to use the iPhones many features, as Grocery IQ is. Grocery IQ is now one of my most used apps, and at 99 cents, was a steal

Bejeweled for the iPhone - I have loved this game for years! I played it on my desktop for years, then when I joined Facebook, I found it on there and played. I must say though, that the iPhone version for me is the most fun! It has 3 modes, and I like being able to play in timed or untimed mode, as well as being able to save my game and come back to it later. Plus, they have it connected to Facebook now, the Blitz version, so I can play there and have it post my score at Facebook (of course, it seems harder to score big on the phone version!) It was a little pricey, 2.99 when I bought it, but hey, I had credit in the iTunes store so it was a great buy for me!

One of the first apps I downloaded is still my most used - the Facebook app and the iTV app. Both have recently had big upgrades, and they are much improved. I really enjoy both, and love what they allow me to do from my phone. The iTV app not only shows me tv listings, movie listings, let us watch clips and even full length shows (although I haven’t done that), but most important to me - it lets me handle my Netflix queue from within iTV. I had another Netflix app, to manage my queue, but I don’t need it since iTV lets me do that, and more. The Facebook app is really nice, and much improved. I like that you can take photos from your phone and easily upload them.

There’s more, but those are a few of my favorites. I like the Weather Channel app too, especially to see the radar for my area. I twitter from my phone alot, and I personally like Tweetdeck, although I have 2 other free apps loaded on my phone. I go through phases with games, but have recently liked both Toobz (like the old game Pipe I used to play on my desktop computer) and Boxed In. I like playing Scramble on my phone too, because it interfaces with my Scramble on Facebook. However, my scores are really low from the phone.. for some reason, it’s harder to type in words quickly with your fingertip as opposed to using a keyboard on the computer, hahaha!
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My walking buddy and I are attempting to transition to jogging. She wants to do the C25K program, which takes you from the couch to running a 5K in 9 weeks (or in our case, probably a lot longer, LOL!) She has an iPhone too, so we both downloaded the C25K app, which tells us when to walk, when to jog, warm up, cool down, etc. I like using the app (2.99) versus the free podcasts, because the app lets you play your own music on your phone, rather than using the canned music that comes with the podcast. I have a walking playlist, of music that I like, so that makes it a lot nicer.

OK, I will end with a picture that proves that we are not the only ones who are addicted to our iPhones! Chris and Liz come over to hang out sometimes, and Chris has an iPhone. Usually one of them is playing on his, and sometimes, one of them will borrow one of ours, and it looks like this in the living room:

If you have a smartphone, whether its an iPhone, Blackberry or other, what apps or programs do you use the most? Some for fun, some for productivity? Leave me a comment and let me know! Oh, and …Have a great day!

P.S. I’ve had this post in my drafts for a while, but had never gotten around to posting it! With Apple’s announcement yesterday about the new iPad, it made me think about it. I think I want one of the new iPads, but we’ll have to give it some thought and see how it does. And try to justify the cost.
How about you, are you interested in getting an iPad?

I’ve gotten into a habit of asking a “Question of the Day” here at my blog. How I got into the habit of doing it, I will never know. But I really enjoy hearing what other people think about things, big or small, or what items you use in your daily life or how you feel about certain products, or current events or lots of other things. I think it’s a great way to learn about my blog friends, share a little something about myself, as well as see how many things we share in common vs things we are different about. That’s one thing I’ve definitely learned as I’ve aged - we all have a lot more in common than we think, and we all have differences. God made us unique, in big ways and small, and I like exploring that.

So, in keeping with the title of my blog, today’s Question of the Day is just about as mundane as you can get What kind of toothpaste do you use? I have always really liked it that when Tim and I got married, we never had issues with the toothpaste. The toilet seat going up and down, yes, that’s a big one in our house, but the toothpaste has never been an issue. We both use Crest and tend to like the same type flavors and textures. We’ve transitioned to gel over the last few years, but both grew up with plain old paste. We’re both kind of funny about the toothpaste tube. Tim is just as likely as his OCD-wife to squeeze from the middle, but then be diligent about squeezing it up and keeping it near the top.

OK, so how about you? Do you use one kind in your house and everyone is happy, or do you buy multiple brands, multiple flavors, multiple kinds? Have you ever changed because someone else was using a different kind and it was just easier to switch? Do you even care?! LOL! Leave me a comment and let me know!