Exceedingly Mundane

I’ve seen this going around the blogosphere quite a bit, so I thought I’d hop on the bandwagon and play along. My sister Gail recently played, and she tagged me with the letter “T”.

Here’s the quick and dirty: It’s time for some alphabet fun. The goal of the game – List 10 things you love that begin with the letter you are assigned.

Sounds easy, huh? You know what, I came up with more things I didn’t like that start with T than I do like, hehehehe!

1. Tim – easy and should count for more than one. He’s my best friend and partner for life. {Hint: I think he may be why Gail picked the letter T for me!)

2. Towels – hot out of the dryer, especially in the winter. Nothing like an armful of warm, cozy, fluffy towels.

3. TV – it goes without saying that I’m a TV aholic. We watch a ton of TV and I have a long list of shows that I like. Surprisingly, none of them start with the letter T!

4. Tivo – or in our case, the DVR from our cable company (ok, I’m cheating a little here). However did we live without the ability to pause live tv, rewind live TV and record two shows at one time? I can’t remember and I never want to go back. 😀

5. Technology – Tim and I are gadget freaks. We love anything and everything technological. Our plasma TV, our DVR, DVD’s, the Wii, my PDA, our computers, my iPod, etc.

6. Thunderstorms – I actually like bad weather, at least to some degree. I used to go stand outside on our front porch with my dad growing up, and I like to go out now when it’s raining and thundering and lightening. I usually have to stay inside with the dog though, although Beau is not as scared of bad weather as our other dog Sally used to be.

7. Takeout – I love getting Chinese takeout and ordering Papa John’s pizza. We never get Dominos or Pizza Hut, always always Papa John’s. 😀

8. Tennessee – At least the Gatlinburg area. We got married in a little wedding chapel in Gatlinburg, spent our honeymoon there, and have gone back several times. I love that area and love going up there on vacation.

9. Tea – iced tea if it’s sweet or I have Splenda to add to unsweetened tea (I can’t drink it without something added). Sometimes, hot tea in the winter when it’s cold or if I have a sore throat. You know though, I actually like coffee more than tea now, but darn, I didn’t get the letter C! 🙂

10.T-shirts – I’m a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl. My favorite t-shirts are my Life is Good ones. Long sleeve or short sleeve, I love them all and can’t get enough of them!

Whew! If you want to play along, hop on over to Gail’s original post and leave a comment… I’m sure she’d be glad to pick you out a letter so you can play too!

Happiness is (at least for today), opening your front door and finding this:

I love a box full of brand new books, just for me!!!

I thought I would post a quick review of a really good Christian fiction book I completed late last night. I am also happy to report that this book finishes out the books I chose in January for the “What’s in a Name” challenge that I set out to read in 2008. You can see my original post and what books I read here (along with when I read each book). Thanks to Annie for hosting this challenge, I had a really good time choosing and reading these books 🙂

Here’s the quick review I wrote up at GoodReads about this book, Julia’s Hope:

Julias Hope by Leisha Kelly

rating: 5 of 5 stars
First in the Wortham Family series by new-to-me author Leisha Kelly. This is good old-fashioned Christian fiction at its best, at least for me. Sweet, charming, quaint, old-fashioned, simple, heart-warming. No action, just lots of details about life and faith.

The premise – the Wortham Family (father Samuel, mother Julia, children Robert and Sarah) have lost everything in the Great Depression, including their home in Harrisburg PA and their entire life savings. They leave with the barest of essentials in a bag, and try to reach a cousin in Illinois, with the promise of a job in a factory. They hitchhike, sleep in churches, eat in soup kitchens, and finally take refuge one stormy night in an old farmhouse that seems abandoned. Julia immediately is drawn to the farmhouse and land, and the hope of what they could build there. But without a dime to their name, how can they convince the owner to let them live there and work the land? Well, since this is wonderful old-fashioned fiction, the owner is, of course, an 80-something widow lady named Emma, who is having health problems and cannot remain on her beloved farm as she wants and hopes for. Easy solution, yes, but not everyone is happy to have strangers come in and start “taking advantage” of sweet Emma.

There’s 2 more in this series that I plan to read, and I really think I’ll enjoy them as much as this one. Great read, if you like this kind of story.

View all my reviews.

Nothing too exciting going on around here. Some days I don’t feel like I can come up with a single thing to blog about. Must be because I’ve been doing this about 3 1/2 years now 🙂 And face it, even when I do, it’s terrible boring. Hence, the name “Exceedingly Mundane”. 😀

Anyhoo, here’s what I have today:

1. I’ve been cooking a lot but haven’t made much new lately. What I have tried, we have liked though. A couple of weeks ago, I tried a different recipe for a Crockpot Cherry Cobbler. I made one a while back that used a cake mix for the cobbler portion. I found a recipe on RecipeZaar that used ingredients I had on hand like flour, butter, and sugar, and so I tried that one. This time I used my regular oval crockpot (which heats the entire ceramic crock) as opposed to my West Bend slow cooker (which seems to mostly heat the bottom). This doesn’t make a lot, but it’s a nice little treat for us to have a dessert for two at home. I entered this recipe here, on our website. You can also find it at RecipeZaar.

2. Last night, I made Tim something he’s been asking for. Greens. Ugh. To me, turnip or mustard greens look like stewed grass, but he loves them. He grew up on them and loves the stinky things. A few weeks ago, I asked him what vegetables he liked the most and darn if turnip greens wasn’t the first thing he mentioned. So, I bought a ham steak (well, a center slice, something I find at our Walmart Supercenter which works well for the two of us as opposed to a whole ham), some cabbage, some black-eyed peas and those greens. And no, they weren’t fresh, even though he would have rather had fresh than canned. I decided to look for a recipe for some kind of glaze or sauce for the ham steak, and found one to try on RecipeZaar (I’ve had good luck there lately, as opposed to AllRecipes, can you tell?!). It was good, and I’ll definitely do that again. Nothing fancy, but I love the taste of maple syrup and honey and it was good. The recipe is here on our website, and again you can search and find it easily at RecipeZaar.com.

3. I have tried to be better about blogging about the books I read. When last I posted about books (this post), I was about to start “8 Sandpiper Way” by Debbie Macomber. I read that one and enjoyed it. Nothing spectacular, but I do really like her Cedar Cove series and look forward to each new book. After that, I read a quick cozy mystery with a cooking theme. I’ve read the first in this series and now the second, entitled “Murder on the Menu“. Light and fluffy, right up my alley (my review at GoodReads is hopefully here, not sure if this link works for someone other than me though, LOL!. I’m now reading a new-to-me author, Stephen White, and his book “The Best Revenge“. So far, other than a bit of language, it’s a really good FBI/intrigue type of book. After that, you can check out my sidebar for what’s up next.

4. As a sidenote to #3, if you’re a member of GoodReads and friends with me, I apologize for bombarding you with new and updated books. I had an account at LibraryThing, and what I thought was a lifetime subscription I had gotten last year (it was gifted to me, I didn’t pay for it myself). Come to find out when I logged in Saturday morning, it said my subscription had expired and I could no longer enter new books. Being cheap, I mean frugal, I decided to enter all of our books over at GoodReads and just go from there. It was a tedious process, but I think I’m up to date.

5. At least, I’m up to date until my Amazon order arrives!!! I *heart* Amazon. I ordered several new books yesterday and most of them should be here early next week. I think they are all Christian fiction. One is for a sermon series we’re going to start soon at church and the rest are just light Christian fiction for me. I had saved up MyPoints a while back and cashed them in for a $50 gift certificate to Amazon. It didn’t take me long to spend that! 🙂

6. We’re back to total TV-junkie mode. Most of our new shows have started this week, and we’re watching and/or recording 2-4 shows a night. I won’t go into that long list, but I will say that I was not overly happy with Heroes on Monday night, we liked the new show The Mentalist on Tuesdays, and are looking forward to the new season of Survivor tonight. I’m watching Dancing with the Stars by myself (on a grainy old VCR tape, which makes it even worse. Boy, you can get attached to a DVR with High-Definition TV really fast!) and let me just say one thing – Cloris Leachman needs to go home. What a disastrous, horrific joke. I don’t find her funny or entertaining, just plain scary. I mean, I can’t believe people would vote to keep her on there. She could break a hip and be in the hospital, people. 😀

Today’s Question of the Day is an easy one. What’s your favorite dessert to order at a restaurant? As an added bonus, do you order dessert very often when you eat out, or just on special occasions like a birthday or anniversary? Do you like to try something new or something the restaurant is known for, or do you stick to your favorite?

My answer is fairly easy, although I can’t pick one thing. I love desserts and sweets to much! 🙂 I will almost always choose tiramisu if we’re at an Italian place. I usually choose something chocolate if we’re at any other kind of restaurant, although on rare occasions, I do like cheesecake. But I mostly go for the chocolate! I don’t usually have dessert unless it’s a special occasion or I am just starving and didn’t have a very big entree. Tim can usually talk me into ordering dessert though. It’ s not that hard to twist my arm!

Leave me a comment and let me know about you and dessert!

I stole this meme from Marianne, over at her blog, Lil Bits of Me. Thanks Marianne!

This is my guy, this past Father’s Day, with both his dad and my dad. 🙂

1. He’s sitting in front of the tv, what is on the screen? football, golf, funky mixed martial arts stuff, crime shows, discovery channel or national geographic stuff

2. You’re out to eat; what kind of dressing does he get on his salad? honey mustard

3. What’s one food he doesn’t like? English peas

4. You go out to the bar. what does he order? Diet Coke, we don’t drink

5. Where did he go to high school? Mississippi, Raleigh to be exact

6. What size shoe does he wear? usually 10 1/2, but depends on the shoe

7. If he was to collect anything, what would it be? golf balls. As he shoots lower scores, he keeps them with his score marked on it 🙂

8. What is his favorite type of sandwich? I’d guess a BLT but he orders multi-meat concoctions if we go to a sandwich shop. Ok, I just asked him and he said cheeseburger. I said, that’s not a sandwich. He says he’d still pick cheeseburger

9. What would this person eat every day if he could? cheeseburgers!

There’s more questions and answers on the extended page… Click here!
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Time for another Friday meme, to end the week. 🙂 You can go check it out here if you want to join in!

Food 4 Thought Friday

Breakfast
What is one thing you look forward to each day? Each week? Each day, spending time with Tim and Beau. Reading. Coffee. Chocolate. 🙂

Lunch
Are you a hoarder or a chucker? Beyond the shadow of any doubt, a hoarder!

Dinner
Do your dinner meals consist mostly of home cooked meals, convenience foods (i.e. boxed, frozen, heat & serve, etc.), or fast food? Who does most of the cooking in your home? Mostly home-cooked. We go out once a week or pick up food once or twice, usually on the weekends. I cook dinner most every night and since Tim starting working from home, we normally eat 3 meals a day here. I do the majority of the cooking, but he loves to grill out and will always help out if I ask him. 🙂

Midnight Snack
Has the rising cost of gasoline caused you to restrict, limit, or alter anything in your life? If so what? I have tried to cut down on my errands and combine them into one trip. No quick runs to one place here or one place there, on different days of the week. I try to save them all up, as much as I can, and knock them all out in one trip.

Recipe for this Week (instead of your recipe for life – what is it for just this week?) Hmmm…. how about, be kind to one another. 🙂

I’ve been meaning to post a few pictures of the smallest visitors we have in our backyard – hummingbirds. We’ve had quite a lot here the last few weeks. I need to refill my feeder, as they are busy eating and drinking every day. I took some pictures a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t had a chance to post them. 🙂

The first photos, I took from inside my breakfast room, with my telephoto lens. I was able to get really close! The second set of pictures, I took outside on the deck. Beau and I went out one afternoon to enjoy the nice weather. I was reading a book, but had a hard time concentrating, because we kept being dive-bombed and bzzzed by the hummingbirds (we were sitting under their feeder, oops!). I went and got my camera and waited patiently for them to fly up over our head.

Hope you have a wonderful day, and find something today that is beautiful, that brings you peace 😀

Busted!

No, I’m not going to blog about how to boil water. I am, however, going to blog about something equally mundane and probably a bit inane 😀

My very odd “Question of the Day” is this – how do you boil water? As in, do you boil it in your microwave, on the stovetop in a pan or in a kettle or maybe even an electric kettle? I’m not talking about for cooking pasta or veggies or anything. Say you’re going to make tea or hot cocoa, how do you heat up the water?

I’ve about decided that I’m the only person on the planet who does this in the microwave. Maybe it’s bad for us and I don’t realize it, with all of those microwaves zapping my water for hot tea or hot chocolate. I have debated off and on for years about whether to buy a kettle for my stovetop. While I’d like one, I could never justify the cost or mostly, the space to store it when I’m not using it. I don’t make a lot of hot tea or cocoa in the summer, but hopefully fall and then winter will be here soon, and I will be drinking more hot beverages.

So, even though this has to rank up there as the world’s dumbest question of the day ever, please leave me a comment and let me know – how do you boil water for tea or cocoa?

Have a wonderful day!

It’s time for another book-related post! I promised in a recent post to try and be better about blogging about the books I read. I’m going to cheat and take the easy way out, and post the quick blurbs I’ve been writing over at GoodReads about the last 3 books I read.

Two of the books (“Rematch” and “Match Point”, by Erynn Mangum) were part of a 3 book series, and I enjoyed this whole series immensely. If you like Christian chick-lit, then I’d recommend these books. The main character, Lauren Holbrook, is a committed Christian single girl who loves setting up her family and friends and playing matchmaker. She’s a fun character and the witty dialogue in these books really won me over 🙂

The other book is another Christian fiction one, albeit historical fiction, and I enjoyed it as well. I have read one other book by this author (I read “Courting Trouble” by Deeanne Gist earlier this year) and enjoyed it too. This one was called “A Bride Most Begrudging” and was about an earl’s daughter who ended up on a boat from England to the colonies in the 1600’s, as a “tobacco bride”. She is married off, thankfully, to a Godly Christian man and of course, they end up falling in love. I always love predictable books with happy endings 🙂 What I enjoyed most about this book was the description of life at this time, very harsh conditions, where the women had no say and the living incredibly primitive. I also had not heard of this concept of tobacco brides, so I enjoyed reading a little about that.

My reviews from GoodReads (although quite similar to what is above!) are on the extended page….

For the record, I’ve read 66 books so far this year, for a total of 21,880 pages. Up next, I’m trying to decide between a cozy mystery or the next Cedar Cove book by Debbie Macomber, 8 Sandpiper Way. I’ll probably read that one first, then a cozy, and then I might dive into another series of Christian fiction books. 🙂

Happy Reading!!!

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Still playing along to this meme on Fridays, as I guess the Friday Feast is not returning. This one has fun questions every week, so I’m glad I found it. You can go check it out here if you want to join in!

Food 4 Thought Friday

Breakfast
If you were to choose a new name for yourself what would it be and why? Were there any other names your parents almost gave you?
Gosh, I have no idea. I wasn’t particularly fond of my name growing up, but I am not sure any kid is. My problem stemmed from the fact that people couldn’t spell it correctly (always adding an e, or ending it with an ie instead of a y), plus my maiden name was always getting messed up too. Plus, apparently there are guys named Stacy. I got put in the boys gym class when I changed schools in the 7th grade. Not cool. I don’t remember any names I wanted to be, although I had names picked out for my kids at an early age. If my parents were going to name me anything else, I never heard it. We didn’t tell stories or tales of any kind in our family 🙂

Lunch
How do you usually spend your Sunday afternoons? This time of year, it’s easy to answer this question – football! Other times of year it varies. Tim doesn’t like to be “cooped up in the house” so we sometimes go out shopping or running errands. Sometimes he will go play golf. But right now, we watch football!

Dinner
What would be your last meal if you were about to walk the green mile? Good grief, I couldn’t pick one thing, I guess I’d have to have a smorgasbord of some of my favorites like shrimp, crab legs, chinese food, etc. And dessert, must have dessert – something chocolate or tiramisu or cheesecake 😀

Midnight Snack
Have you ever broken any bones? Nope. And I certainly hope it stays that way!

Recipe for this Week (instead of your recipe for life – what is it for just this week?)
Roll with the punches

Most of you who come here know that we have a furry child – Beau. I talk about him a lot and post a lot of pictures of him. What you might not know is that a) he’s our second furry child and b) I take a ridiculous amount of photos of him that I don’t post.

Our first furry child was a golden retriever and Irish setter mix named Sally. I didn’t have a blog when we had her, so she doesn’t get mentioned here much. Poor thing, she would have loved all of the attention 🙂 She was the sweetest, smartest dog ever. I promise! 😀

When she died, I was heartbroken for months, but wanted to get another dog about 2-3 months later. Tim made me wait 3 years and 2 weeks. Then, we got Beau.

I thought that Beau would be my baby. He was my birthday gift, and I got to name him and I thought by picking a male dog, he would love me more than he loved Tim. I could not have been more wrong. That dog lives for Tim. He allows me in his world because I feed him. 😀

Anyway, I digress. Sally had several habits that Beau has never had and vice versa. But lately, in the last couple of months, we have noticed that Beau has suddenly picked up a habit that Sally exhibited from the first day I brought her home. She loved to curl up in the corner behind the kitchen table, and she loved to hide behind the kitchen chairs and even under the table if she could crawl in. Tim always said it was because she was a scaredy-cat, and she was. But, Beau isn’t scared of anything, he’s a very brash and cocky male dog. So, why he is suddenly doing this is a mystery to me. Maybe it’s cooler back there, who knows?!

So, it was very surprising to both of us that Beau has started hiding out behind the chairs, just like our Sally girl used to:

I still miss Sally, but I love my Beau baby to death. Even if he does hide from us sometimes 🙂

We’ve got football back, so that means it is also time for new fall shows from some of our old favorites, as well as checking out a few new TV shows. It’s about time… Yeah for a new season of TV!!! 😀

Some of the shows we’ll be watching include:

Monday: MNF, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Chuck, Heroes, Dancing with the Stars (MAN, Mondays are so busy, we can’t even record everything on our DVR!)
Tuesday: NCIS, Fringe (new show by JJ Abrams, gotta give it a try). Tim might pick back up with Eli Stone and we might give the new show following NCIS a try, the Mentalist.
Wednesday: Knight Rider and Bones (and I might have to watch the recorded results of DWTS then)
Thursday: Survivor, that goes without saying!
Friday – it’s iffy if we’ll watch Numb3rs; Tim might watch Life. I’m wondering when Battlestar will come back on
Sunday: Sunday Night Football, maybe the Unit. I would like to watch Amazing Race, but Tim gave up on it 2 seasons ago and we haven’t watched it since.

I like to use this site (Laurel’s TV Picks) to see what comes on when and when the premiere date is.

Let me know what TV show you are looking forward to watching soon!

Are you ready for some football? We are!

Our college team plays today on TV and the first New Orleans Saints game is on tomorrow. Big weekend for us! Our fantasy football league is in action as well, so lots of football all around for us.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve played along to this meme for the last couple of weeks, and decided to do so again today. Fun questions! Go check it out here if you want to join in!

Food 4 Thought Friday

Breakfast
Do you use a day planner, calendar, notebook, computer program, lists on some random piece of paper, or just totally wing things to stay organized? I have a PDA that I use for lists and things. I have my calendar and contact info on my computer, and I use that regularly. I’m very organized until my laptop dies, and then I’m totally lost!

Lunch
What is something that you have too much of? Hmmm…probably scrapbook paper and supplies!

Dinner
What is one of the most important qualities you need in a friend? someone who is understanding and accepting

Midnight Snack
Describe yourself using only three adjectives. Well, how about 1) Organized 2) Nerdy 3) Quiet

Recipe for this Week (instead of your recipe for life – what is it for just this week?) Stacy should never run out of Chloraseptic, as she always gets sore throats. Darn, I wish my parents had had my tonsils out as a child. 🙂