Exceedingly Mundane

We went to another family get-together yesterday at Tim’s aunt’s house. We got to see some of his dad’s side of the family (although I didn’t get pictures of everyone) and visit with everyone. We had lots of good food and a good time 🙂

It started raining while we were there, and we drove home in a lot of rain. It continued to rain at our house off and on for a couple of hours and was dreary and gray outside. I was really glad to get home and stay in – days like that are some of my favorites. Tim, unfortunately, got called with a work problem and had to work on that quite a bit after we got home. After he finished, we watched some TV, I read a little, we caught up on the shows we had taped Friday night (Monk and Psych) and Tim did quite a bit of putting on his indoor putting green I got him for Christmas. 🙂

Click on the extended entry to see a few pictures from yesterday’s family get-together…

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I was doing some blog-surfing on Friday, and stopped by to visit Paperback Writer’s blog, Publish or Perish. Great site, by the way, you should check it out! As I was reading through some posts, I found a reference to a blog by Ken Jennings. You remember him, the biggest champ ever on Jeopardy!. This guy is very smart and won tons of money, and apparently is even coming out with a book this fall, entitled “Brainiac”. Love that title!

Anyway, his blog is here if you’d like to check it out. I signed up for his weekly trivia emails, and am considering restarting trivia on the main Hambones website. Once I get these in my email, I might post them and see if anyone can get them! I bet his are pretty tough, being the world’s biggest trivia buff.

{FYI: For those who don’t frequent our main site, www.hambones.org, we used to play trivia in the forums on a regular basis. Everyone got busy or lost interest though, and we suspended trivia a couple of months ago. Possibly forever, or maybe just for a long break. I’ve been thinking about trying it again, even though I realize everyone stays pretty busy.}

So —- check out Ken Jennings blog if you’d like, and Paperback Writer’s as well. Also, please leave me a comment and let me know if you’re interested in restarting trivia at Hambones, or joining in for anyone new who might be interested.

Happy Birthday to David, our nephew! Hope you have a great birthday David, and a great year.

David will be entering his final year of college next month, and we hope his last year will be his best yet. I seriously doubt that David has ever looked at my blog (and probably never will), but I thought I would wish him happy birthday here anyway!! Have a great day, David

Friday night is traditionally “date night” in our house, or at least, we’ve been observing it fairly regularly in recent weeks. Last night was no exception 🙂 I went to Walmart for most of Friday afternoon, to grocery shop and get a bunch of household items. After I got back, I started making cookies. We have a family lunch today at Tim’s aunt’s house (this is his dad’s side of the family, which is different from the one we just went to at July 4th, which was his mom’s side of the family – confused yet?!), and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies to bring.

Tim very kindly agreed to help with the clean-up after I had made the cookies:

That’s his idea of helping – licking the beaters. He didn’t actually wash dishes or even put anything in the sink for me. He also “helped out” by testing the cookies when they came out of the oven! Such a great guy, hehehe. Here’s the platter of cookies:

After I made the cookies and cleaned up the kitchen, we got ready and went to eat. We went to Logan’s out on Lakeland and had a really good dinner. Logan’s is one of the chain restaurants we like best – we’ve always had good food and good service there. Last night was no exception. When we got there, there were tons of people waiting, so we put our names on the list and the hostess said it was about a 20-25 minute wait. We grabbed a bucket of peanuts to nibble on, and less than 10 minutes later, we were seated. Tim got a prime rib and I got a combo of grilled salmon with 2 shrimp skewers. Mine was delicious, but I got one bite of Tim’s steak, and of course, it was much better! But, I was trying to eat healthy and my grilled salmon, grilled shrimp, grilled zucchini and red onion were delicious. After dinner, I talked Tim into taking me back to Borders. Since I had gotten my Borders Rewards card last weekend, I have been wanting to go back and buy some books. Tim read football magazines and let me browse to my heart’s content. I had a coupon that Borders had emailed me (smart marketing!) and I ended up buying 4 more books. I will try to load them on my sidebar later this weekend.

We’re headed out for the family lunch in a bit. Tim is going to play golf tomorrow afternoon with a buddy from work, so maybe I’ll have time to blog more then!

I don’t know about anyone else, but normally I actually usually love to cook and bake. But, this summer, I’ve really been avoiding it like the plague! Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the so-called summer doldrums, maybe I’m just reacting to our busy lives and the fact that we’re eating out more and eating much later at night, which I really hate. Whatever it is, I really haven’t been cooking much lately. And when I do cook, I make something easy, like taco salad or spaghetti or fish with veggies. Nothing fancy and certainly nothing new lately. I haven’t made a new recipe in ages – until last night.

I made a new recipe for banana-blueberry muffins and they were really good! We decided to just have breakfast food last night for supper, and we cooked some of Tim’s deer sausage. We’re nearly out of most of the meat from hunting season last year, but we do have a little bit of sausage left. So we had eggs and sausage, and instead of biscuits or toast, I made muffins instead. They are fairly healthy, as far as muffins go, and they were pretty tasty too.

Here’s the batter:

And the muffins after they came out of the oven:

And the recipe is entered here on Hambones. And OOPS!, I must apologize – I just realized when I went to enter the recipe that I have made these once before, last summer. I didn’t remember making them, so technically they are not a new recipe for me. Oh well! They were still really good!:mrgreen:

I finished another book last night, one I had actually purchased rather than checking out of the library! LOL, what an oddity for moi. 😀 I finished “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden. I had been wanting to read it for a while, before I rented the movie, so now I’m done and I’m ready to rent the DVD. It was a good book, not super-fantastic, but I did enjoy it and am glad I read it. It was very rich in detail and it is obvious that the author researched that period in Japan and the way of the geisha extensively for this book. I’m sure the movie is going to be breathtakingly beautiful in its own way.

For the record, that makes #41 for me so far this year, with a total of 14,568 pages read. Up next for me is the first book (“Moonlight on the Mill Pond”) in the Tucker Mills trilogy, a set of books by Christian author Lori Wick. My mother-in-law kindly brought me the first two last weekend, and I want to read them and return them to her in a timely fashion. I hope they are good; I’m looking forward to reading them! Check back in a few days to see 🙂

Friday, July 21, 2006
Feast One Hundred and Three

Appetizer
Fill in the blanks: I ____________ when I _____________. I perspire along my upper lip when I cry! OK – explanation. I went to get coffee and asked my husband if he could help me come up with an answer to this one and this was what he immediately responded with. I know it’s weird. I’m probably the only person on the planet that does this, and it’s only when I really gear up and cry a lot, when I’m really upset. I don’t know why I do it, and frankly, I’m not sure why I posted this! 🙄

Soup
Name something you use to make your home smell good. Well, I love all of my Yankee Candles, and often burn them just for me to smell, or especially if we’re going to have company over

Salad
If you could receive a coupon in the mail for 50% off any product, what would you want it to be for? Well, these days, I really want new kitchen appliances, so 50% off would be reallly nice!

Main Course
Besides sleeping, what do you spend the majority of the hours of your typical day doing? Hmm, how about cooking, cleaning, running the house, along with some mindless TV/computer/internet thrown in for good measure?!

Dessert
What can you hear right now while answering these questions? morning TV, flipping between Good Morning America and the Today Show – Taylor Hicks is going to be on GMA, gotta hear him!

My kitchen window faces my next door neighbor’s kitchen window. Our houses are fairly close together, and we know our neighbors pretty well around here; we live in a nice little neighborhood. Anyway, for years, my neighbor and I have been putting flowers in our kitchen window sill. That way, I get to enjoy not only the flowers I plant, but the ones she plants as well. I usually plant moss rose or petunias in the summer, and pansies or johnny jump-up’s (violas) in the winter. My petunias this year are a bit scraggly, but at least they haven’t died in this window. My neighbor’s flowers, on the other hand, are doing great and are just gorgeous! She’s growing Gerber daisies in there this summer – a flower I have never been able to get to grow. Every time I plant them, they die. But hers look great. I get to enjoy them every day, out the view from my kitchen window.

Here’s the view from inside my kitchen:

And here’s her flowers up close (taken from inside my house, on full zoom):

Funny story – I took a couple of pictures from inside my kitchen to post, and then realized that they didn’t show up that well, because of the screen on the window. I thought to myself, I should call her and ask if it’s ok if I take a quick picture of her flowers to post on my blog. Then I thought, nah, I’ll just sneak over there really quick and snap a couple. So, I did, and I got caught! 😀 She was going to close her blind and saw me out her window taking pictures of her flowers! She came outside and I told her what I was doing, and thankfully – I think she was ok with it! We talked for a while (she’s the sweetest person) and caught up on all the things going on with us. Anyway, Sharon, if you’re reading this, your flowers look great and I so enjoy looking at them every day. I hope you don’t mind that I posted these here on my blog!

Here’s her flowers, up close and personal, when she saw me outside taking pictures!!

Wow, it’s so hot and dry here. My air conditioner is running night and day, trying to keep up. And — I’m doing my best to stay inside when the mean temperatures are hitting 99 and 100, and the heat index is 105-107. I have to go out every day though and water all my flowers, plants and grass. Everything is withering and dying here. I’ve lost several flowers in the last week or so.

OK, on to the main topic – moisturizer. I am almost out of the moisturizer I use at night on my face. It’s different from the regular one I use during the day, and I’m wanting to know – do you use a different moisturizer on your face at night? Or do you use the regular one you use for daytime, or before you put on your make-up? What brand and kind is it, and do you like it? Would you recommend it? Post a comment and let me know, I’m going to need to buy some new nighttime stuff soon 😀

Our niece Elizabeth has been staying with us some for the last couple of weeks, before she leaves for graduate school in the fall. We’ve really been glad to see her, and Chris too, before she has to leave. Last night, they came over for pizza and to hang out. We all had a lot of fun, and as it turns out, they turned into first-time geocachers!

We were telling them about geocaching, and trying to explain it, then Tim suggested that we all go do one close by, so we could let them try their hand at it. They’re good sports, so they agreed to give it a try 🙂 We went to a “micro” cache very close to our house that Tim and I had found before, and let Elizabeth and Chris practice with the GPS and information. They found it pretty quickly and seemed to enjoy it, so we all went back to the house and printed out 3 more caches close by, and downloaded the info into our GPS. Off we go, but it was getting close to dark and we were not able to find them all. Chris and Elizabeth did really good though, and found 3 out of 4. Of the two new ones that Tim and I had not tried to locate before, we found 1 of 2. Not too shabby for a couple of hours of fun and hanging out!

Check out the extended page for a couple of pictures of Elizabeth and Chris on their very first geocache 🙂

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Well, I blogged a bit more this weekend than I normally do, but there was a lot on my mind, and we were fairly busy 🙂 Thought I would jot the rest of it down… Saturday, I already blogged about (twice), and then Sunday afternoon, Tim went to play golf. He had gone to the driving range late Friday, but he just couldn’t stand not playing on the weekend. He wanted me to go with him, but it was just too hot for me in the middle of the day. So, he had to go by himself, poor thing. After he got home, we decided to go see “The Devil Wears Prada” at the theater. It was good, not excellent, but good. I probably could have waited and rented it, but it was nice that Tim offered to go see a girl movie with me. I have not read the book yet, so I didn’t know the whole plot and I must admit it was more drama than comedy, which surprised me a little. I enjoyed it though, and was glad that Tim agreed to go.

For a splurge, I made us some homemade ice cream Sunday night in my little Cuisinart ice cream maker that I got two summers ago and just love. It makes just the right amount for the two of us. We still have a big one that is up in the attic somewhere, for when we have a big group over. You know, the old kind where you have to add ice and rock salt. I love this one because I can just freeze the container, pop it out and have ice cream in under 30 minutes. Believe it or not, I’ve only ever made one kind of ice cream – plain jane vanilla. That would be because of Tim, when it comes to homemade ice cream, he’s a total purist and only EVER wants vanilla. I added crushed Butterfingers and chocolate coating to mine, so it was much better. Click on the extended page for a couple of ice cream pictures, if you want 🙂

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What comes to mind when you think of the following colors?

RED: Valentines, red roses
BLUE: blue skies
GREEN: green grass
YELLOW: marigolds in my front flower bed
PURPLE: verbena in my back flower bed
PINK: little girls
ORANGE: pumpkins
BLACK: black and gold, our football teams colors
WHITE: puffy clouds in a blue sky

I grew up in a family where my parents sat at the kitchen table every morning, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. Well, and my mother smoked her cigarettes, but that’s not something I want to talk about. Nasty things, they will kill you. Anyway, it was a natural for me to subscribe to the daily newspaper once I graduated from college, and I have every day of my adult life. These days, I tend to read the paper at odd times of the day, sometimes in the mornings, sometimes afternoons, and sometimes I just skip it and will pile them up for days, before I finally sit down for one long massive newspaper reading session.

Sunday papers are different though. I love to read them in the mornings and look at all the ads and coupons. That’s my favorite part of the paper, and my favorite paper of the week is the Sunday version. I love me some retail. Target ads are always my favorite, but I love all the electronics stores ones, the craft and chain department store ones, and various and sundry other ad supplements. Now that I’ve learned to drink coffee, I love to get a big mug of coffee and work my way through all the ads and coupons on Sunday morning.

What I do not get, though, are the drug store ads. Every Sunday, my paper comes with an ad for CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens. Every.Single.Week. We have a joke around here that if a new building is going up on a corner, it’s got to either be a drugstore or a bank. They are very prolific where I live, these drugstores. Many of them are open 24×7 and I realize that a lot of people frequent them. Mostly, people who have kids, who are constantly needing medicine, band-aids, benadryl, cough syrup, etc. We’re not “those” kind of people though, and I can honestly say that I rarely, if ever, walk in a chain drugstore. I buy all my drugs, household supplies, etc at either Walmart, Target or the grocery store. I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve walked into a CVS, Walgreen’s or Rite Aid of my own need in the last 10 years. So, every Sunday, I toss those circulars right out. Never even glance at them.

Just wondering if others are like that, or am I in the small minority?

P.S. I know my sister Suzanne will enjoy this post, her job is newspaper advertising. Blah! Go for it Suzie, comment away!

We had a good time today, getting to see Tim’s parents and hanging out with them all afternoon. We ran some errands, had lunch, went shopping, went to Borders for coffee, then made a big run to Sam’s. We had a great time and were so glad they got to “come to town” 🙂

Tim’s mom brought me two books to read, the first two books in Lori Wick’s “Tucker Mills Trilogy”. She knows how much I love to read and had bought these and read them recently. I mentioned I might like to read them, so she was sweet and loaned them to me. I am going to try to finish “Memoirs of a Geisha” first, and then read them.

When we stopped at Borders for coffee, I caved and got a Borders Rewards card. Sigh, at least it was free. Bookstores are like crack to me. I don’t need incentives to go spend money in bookstores. And I definitely didn’t need a Borders card – Borders is the furthest bookstore from my house (B&N is closest, Books a Million is next and Borders is the longest drive). But, I got it anyway, and now I’m signed up and have a coupon for my first book. Hmmm, gotta find time to go back out there and spend some money.