Exceedingly Mundane

Right around Christmas, I had a few days where I was not feeling very well. I wasn’t near-death kind of sick, just sort of run down, with a bad sore throat, a headache and I sort of ached all over. I was afraid it might have been the flu, but after I got some rest, took some Tylenol and sucked back a few Chloraseptic lozenges, I started to feel better.

I don’t get “near-death” sick very often. I don’t run fever much, and I have only thrown up 2 or 3 times in the last 10-11 years. But, if I do ever get really sick, we have a problem in our house. Tim and I treat sickness and feeling bad completely different. Completely.

When I’m sick, I like to have a little bit of attention paid to me. I know, I am probably asking a lot, but that’s what I like and it’s what I had growing up. If I didn’t feel good, my mom would mother me and make me chicken noodle soup (Campbells, from a can!), get me some Sprite or give me some crackers every few hours. She’d check on me and see how I was feeling. Personally, I don’t think that’s a lot to ask, but if you were to ask my husband that, you would not get that kind of answer. Tim, when he doesn’t feel good, wants to be left completely, totally and utterly alone. Don’t talk to him, don’t offer to bring him food or get him something to drink, don’t try to get him a Tylenol, just leave him alone. For hours or days on end. He doesn’t like to be touched, talked to, or basically even share the same room with me or anyone else. Me, I’m the polar opposite. I like those things. I don’t like to be in a dark room, all alone and left to die.

A couple of years ago, I was pretty sick. I was running fever and I was pretty weak. I laid down in bed (something I rarely do, so you’d think that would have tipped Tim off) and turned off the lights, tv, radio, etc. I had the door open, and apparently he looked in on me once, closed the door, and then proceeded to not come in for nearly 10 hours. TEN HOURS. After I woke up a few hours later, I lay there miserable, wondering, is he going to offer to bring me something to drink since I’m too weak to get up and get it myself? Will he offer me some soup or crackers since I’m too sick to open a can of Campbells chicken noodle and feed myself? Nope, nothing. I could have died and he wouldn’t have noticed.

I know, I’m going to get a lot of snide comments here. I have come to learn from Tim that apparently I’m asking for way too much. Apparently, I can learn to leave him alone and try not to talk to him, but he can’t learn to check on me (tsk, tsk, there I go again, being snarky) and get me a Sprite. 🙄 Now, before you pipe up and say what a bad wife I am, please let me state for the record, I really don’t think I am that bad. I am not asking to be petted and baby’d to death, just a cursory check and an offer of medicine or food every now and then would be nice. I love Tim to death and I know he loves me and I know he wouldn’t knowingly let me lay there and die. At least, I don’t think he would 😀

Ok, here’s today’s Question of the Day: How do you act when you’re sick? Do you want to be left alone or do you like a little attention? Does your spouse or family share the same way of thinking, or are there a lot of polar opposites in your home on this matter? Leave me a comment and let me know 🙂

Friday, January 05, 2007
Feast One Hundred & Twenty-Five

Appetizer
Which celebrity (or celebrities) do you think will make headlines this year? Probably the same ones who annoy me already. Like Brad and Angelina (although I think they will adopt another baby this year), Paris Hilton, poor dumb Britney Spears, etc. I just hope Tom Cruise stays in the background and doesn’t come out and jump on any more couches and drive me batty.

Soup
They say that good things come in small packages? What is something little that you think is great? A Godiva truffle!

Salad
Name a song that makes you want to dance. Black Horse and a Cherry Tree by KT Tunstall

Main Course
What is your favorite font? Hmmm, haven’t thought about fonts much since I haven’t been scrapbooking. I used to like using Tabitha or Comic Sans for journaling though.

Dessert
If you were to write a do-it-yourself article, what would it be about? How to waste time on the computer every day??? 🙄

I have an odd request, and it’s going to come off like I’m asking for something or begging, because, let’s face it, I am! It’s not a big thing, so if it doesn’t work out, I won’t break down and cry or anything. 🙁

I noticed on a box of Nabisco brand crackers I bought before Christmas that Rachael Ray’s picture was on the box. When I read the side of the box, I noticed an offer for one of her cookbooks, Express Lane Meals, if you collect a certain number of box tops and mail them in with a check for 4.99. Unfortunately, it calls for 6 box tops and I only have 2 of these boxes. We don’t eat a lot of crackers, but I did buy some for a cheeseball and some dips I made at the holidays. I might buy one or maybe two more boxes at most, around the time of the Super Bowl. But I seriously doubt that I will buy 6 boxes of crackers in the next few months.

So, here’s my shameless begging – if you have a box of these crackers that has this special “cookbook point” on it and you are NOT going to use it for yourself, would you mind mailing it to me? Like I said, I won’t break down and sob if I don’t get it, but on the other hand, I didn’t think it would be too awful to ask. Or is it? Am I just a shameless horrible good-for-nothing blogger??!

Here’s what they look like:

Thanks!

Tim worked quite a bit last night on getting me setup with a new photoblog for the Project365 photo project. Thank you sweetheart!!! It’s on my sidebar, or you can click here to reference it. I just updated it with today’s photo 😆 I have also started a listing of others who are participating in this project… so if you are and you’re not on my list, leave me a comment and let me know so I can add you!

Oh, and I’m still trying to decide on a look for this new photoblog. Right now I have the mountain one, just because it reminds me of winter, without being holiday oriented. That may change sooner or later!

Well, I’ve been thinking, mulling, pondering, and deliberating on whether or not to join the Project 365 photo project. It’s an awfully big commitment and I’m not sure one that I will be able to complete. The idea of taking and posting a photo a day for 365 consecutive days is rather daunting to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I take a ton of photos already. I would guess that I take, on average, 1000 photos a year, maybe more. Of nothing, of everything; of food, animals, people, events, holidays, flowers, things around the house, etc. Taking the photos is not that big of a deal to me, it’s something I am already doing. It’s just the general idea that I commit to a project this demanding and see it through to the end. It’s the “forced” nature of the project. I rather enjoy taking my photos and don’t want it to become a chore or something I feel that I *have* to do. Nor do I want it to be something I tried and failed. I’m a bit competitive, ya know, I don’t like to fail. 🙄

Having said that, I am going to at least attempt it. But, with the caveat that I might not complete it, that I might not post a picture every day (yup, my blog, my rules, my way, nanananana!). I will quit if I feel like it’s become something I don’t enjoy doing any more.

In the mean time, I’ve set up a separate area of the blog for this immense project. It’s called Project365 and is on my sidebar. I will also be posting a lot of the pictures here, as I’m doing today. I hope to incorporate the pictures I use for this photo project into my regular blogging. Some days I will and some I won’t. I often post photos anyway (yes, of Beau the wonder dog and food I cook, I know, but remember this blog ain’t named ‘Exceedingly Mundane’ for nothing!), so hopefully it won’t be too burdensome to post extra ones as a part of this project.

Drumroll please… click here to see the first two days entries, and my entry for today is below:

I found Beau staring out the window this morning into our backyard which was filled with birds. I think we have more birds in the wintertime because I put out suet, bird seed and also corn for the squirrels. We get a lot more activity, I think, when they have trouble finding other food. This morning, I was able to see both a cardinal and a dove in one section of a tree… I took multiple pictures and was able to get the camera to focus on either the dove or the cardinal but not both. This was the best of the lot 🙂

P.S. I just read over at Susie‘s blog that she is participating too. Yeah! I like how she’s setup a separate photo blog for this. I wanted to do this, but will require help from my geeky husband to get it going. Something to strive for in the future 🙂

Our fantasy football league has sadly come to an end. I hated to see it finish — we have such a good time playing every week. Congratulations go out to our friend Chris (code name: Jurisprudence What?) for coming in first, and to our friend Michael (code name: Skull Crushers) for being the runner-up. They both had a really great season! Both of their teams were pretty awesome, and they were both really hard to beat! Tim (code name: WhoDat) and our nephew Zack (code name: Bone Crushers), battled it out for third place, with Tim coming in third. I didn’t do too bad; I was pretty pleased with my results, although of course I would have rather won! I came in 5th (out of 16 teams in our league) and was the highest scoring female. My blog buddy Dawn also made it into the playoffs with me, and we were the only women who did. The men really dominated this year!

Anyway, we hated to see it come to an end, and can’t wait for next year. Next year will be the third annual Hambones fantasy football league, cool huh?! In the mean time, we’re really excited about the playoffs around here. Tim, my devoted Saints fan, is on cloud 9 that his team has made it into the playoffs, and we can’t believe they have a first round bye! We’ll be rooting for them and then looking forward to the Super Bowl!

P.S. Tim wants me to say “Geaux Saints!!!”

I have several topics rolling around in my head that I want to blog about. However, I can’t seem to decide which one to start with. I probably need to jot them down somewhere or start some draft blog posts, because a lot of the time I can’t think of a single thing to blog about. Nothing, nada.

Anyway, I thought I’d start at the beginning of my day. One of the first things I do every morning is make the bed. It’s something I was raised with. I can’t ever remember a time when my mom let me slide and not make the bed. I’m sure when I was very little, she did it for me, but I don’t remember those days. I can remember being older and living at home, and she always wanted the bed made. Since I’ve been grown and living on my own, it’s something that I have always, always done. And I mean 365 days a year always. Even when I’m sick. I make the bed every day. It must be some kind of weird gene I have!

So that’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you make your bed every day? Or does it just not matter to you? If you do, is it something your mom or someone else insisted on or taught you?

Have a great day everyone! I hope to get busy today with cleaning and getting things back to normal. I’ve made stabs over the last couple of weeks at keeping things picked up and semi-presentable looking, but I haven’t really done much cleaning, and my house shows it. We need some serious cleaning around here 🙄

I am so ready to get back to normal, back into a routine, and also trying to eat healthier. You know, my days are so messed up with the holidays that I just now realized this is Monday. I guess I’ll be off track all week! Thankfully, Laura over at OrgJunkie is back with this fun menu meme. Pop on over and check out some of the other participants menus for ideas and inspiration!

Without further ado, here’s my menu for the week:

Monday – traditional NY Day food (ham, greens for Tim, cabbage and cornbread. Due to a scheduling snafu the terribly traditional black-eyed peas did not get made). For supper, we’re having Tim’s world famous Rumien 🙂

Tuesday – Easy Baked Fish, coleslaw, mashed potatoes

Wednesday – Grilled Chicken Salad (Lite Night before Tim weighs in at work)

Thursday – new recipe for a Sausage and Potato chowder, homemade sourdough bread

Friday – Spaghetti or Date Night

Saturday – TBD

Sunday – game day food; our alma mater plays in a bowl game that night and I hope to order pizza delivery 🙂

OK, so we just finished our jigsaw puzzle! That sucker was 1000 pieces and so many of the same colors. Lots of white, greens and brown shades. We’ve been working very diligently on it since Saturday afternoon late. Here it is – Ta da!

Now, we’ll have to find something else to do for the rest of the holiday today. Tomorrow, I hope to get back into some kind of normal routine 🙄

Happy New Year to all of you out there! Hope you are all having a good New Years Eve and will have a good New Years Day.

Here’s to a wonderful, healthy, happy and blessed 2007 for us all!

P.S. I hope to return to “normal” blogging on Tuesday. That, and menu planning, and cleaning and getting things back to normal 😀

P.S.S. The jigsaw puzzle pictured below is coming along really well… will try to post a picture when we’re through 😛

It’s a total wash-out here at our house today. It’s been raining since before we got up and really hasn’t stopped all day. The rain effectively ruled out Tim playing golf or hitting golf balls (his preferred thing to do with any spare time). He watched a golf DVD for a while and then read a golf book for a while… finally, we decided to turn on college bowl games and pulled this out:

So, yeah, we’re going to work on a jigsaw puzzle this weekend after all! 🙂 Or at least, I am! It’s a whopping 1000 pieces, so send some good jigsaw puzzle vibes our way!

I tried a new soup recipe yesterday, for a “Hambone Soup”. It’s really just a vegetable soup, but it does use a hambone to flavor it, hence the name. Since I still had the bone left from our Christmas Eve ham, I went looking for recipes to use with the bone. (The ham was delicious, by the way, and only the second ham I’ve ever made in my life. It was spiral sliced and I did a honey glaze on it and it was deee-licious!)

I looked online, and found a recipe on AllRecipes.com (one of my favorite places to search for new recipes, since I love reading all of the feedback and reviews that people leave). I made a ton of changes to the original recipe, so it is quite different from what is posted.

For those of you who don’t “get it” – I love, love, love that the soup is technically named “Hambone Soup”. It’s really just a flavorful vegetable soup, but I knew I had to make this because of the name. Get it, Hambone. Our main site is called Hambones.org and we’re sometimes called the Hambones. Get it??!! Funny, huh?! 🙄

Anyway, I’ll post the recipe, along with my numerous changes, in the extended section. Be sure to read all of my notes at the bottom. Here’s a couple of pictures of the soup, and also the bone cooling on the counter. Guess who eyeballed the bone for a long time, before he started barking at it?!! He’s going to get the bone later today… we saved it for a rainy day. It’s been raining here since before we got up this morning, and I’m afraid it may rain off and on all day. Beau won’t be able to go outside and play, so we thought the bone would make him happy! 😆

Click on the extended link for the recipe itself…
Read the rest of this entry »

Friday, December 29, 2006
Feast One Hundred & Twenty Four

Appetizer
How do you usually celebrate on New Year’s Eve? Well, we’re now officially “old married folks”, I guess after you pass 10 years, you get to call yourselves that, LOL! I’m not one for partying, and I really don’t like being out when half of the drivers are intoxicated, so I prefer to stay home. We stay in and watch TV or a movie and sometimes, if I’m lucky, I”ll get Tim to work on a jigsaw puzzle with me (something I used to do years ago with my sister at the holidays, that I still love to do!) The last couple of years, I am not sure we’ve even stayed up until midnight!

Soup
Name one thing unexpected that happened to you in 2006. Finally, after 3 years of waiting and begging, we got another dog. Beau the wonder dog is now part of our little family!

Salad
Where was your favorite place that you visited in 2006? We only went on one vacation, so I can only pick from that trip. I’d say Savannah and Tybee Island Georgia. It was beautiful there!

Main Course
What resolution is your top priority for 2007? I don’t make resolutions, but I am going to continue to do as much reading as I can. I love to read and love getting lost in a good book 🙂

Dessert
Using just three words, describe 2006. Another Year in Paradise 😆

Go here and enjoy the feast yourself!!!

Ok, part of my post Christmas decluttering is also to remove my cute little snowman look here. I’m going back to a theme I used last year, a red one I really liked. Please let me know if you see it, and mostly, if you have any trouble seeing or accessing anything. I really like this one and hope to keep it a while! 🙂

Thanks, and have a wonderful day!!!

Just a quick blurb… not a lot going on around here. We’re in the post-Christmas downward spiral … does anyone else experience that? I guess after all the weeks of shopping, decorating, wrapping, cooking and planning, it’s always a bit of a letdown after the “Big Day” is over. I usually really enjoy that time, but this week, not so much. Tim is off work all week, and looking forward to doing the things he loves – going to play golf and going to hunt. Me, I usually use this time to get the house back to normal, un-decorated, and everything put up and back in its place. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do much of that so far. I haven’t felt well, and so I haven’t had a lot of energy to do much yet. (That brings up the title of the post – if you work at home and you’re sick, are you on vacation or do you ask for sick leave or what?!!) I’m behind on my cleaning, since we’ve been gone so much and we’ve been so busy, but the dirt and dust are starting to get to me. 🙄 At least I’m about to catch up on the laundry – after the break with no workable washer and dryer, I’m glad to have a set in the house that works!

Anyway, I haven’t even made a menu for this week (blah!) and have no concrete plans of what we are going to do and what we are going to eat on any given day. I don’t operate well without some kind of plan; I’m not a “fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants” kind of girl! Anyway, at this point, I don’t much feel like cooking and don’t much care. Isn’t that terrible? Guess that’s what happens when you get half sick and don’t feel like doing much besides laying on the couch and reading or watching TV!

Hope everyone is having a good day… and maybe starting to get back to normal. Looks like we’re going to have to postpone the “back to normal routine” here at our house until next week!