Exceedingly Mundane

I’ve been tagged recently by several bloggers for different memes, tags and such. I’m sorry to be so late posting these, but I have been in a bit of a blogging slump lately, as well as a non-tagging mood. I’ll try to get out of that here 🙂

The first was by mamichelle and KathyM, who both tagged me with this one:

If you had the opportunity to do a 1-year internship in a company or field completely unrelated to your current career or specialty, what would be your top 5 choices?

Well, I must admit, I think I have the dream job right now – no stressful job to slave away at all day, every day any more. Thanks to my hardworking husband, he provides for us and I’m allowed to stay home, relax, stay healthy, take care of us and the house, do the things I love and need to do, and spend my “spare” time with him. It’s not for the career-minded, driven, Type-A, people, but I love it. I call it early retirement 🙂 Thus, this “coming up with a job choice” is a difficult concept for me!

If I had to go back to work, I would like to think I’d try the following:

1. Paralegal (I like research)
2. Librarian (duh, I love books!)
3. Scenic photographer (I love to take photos of neat buildings, churches, cemeteries, flowers, trees, etc)
4. Food Taste Tester (duh!)
5. Book Editor/Reviewer (not that I can write good reviews, but I’d love to be able to have a legitimate excuse to read new books!)

I was also tagged by Amy, over at Laughing Through the Tears, for an eight random things about me tag. I’m going to wimp out on this one and refer you to a post I made a while back, about 9 weird things about me. Believe me, I could probably come up with a lot more of these. I’m really rather an odd person – just ask anyone who knows me (Gail and my husband would be MORE THAN HAPPY to tell you about all of the odd things I do, eat, watch, think and feel!) 😀

I won’t tag anyone specifically for either of these, but if you’d like to play along, please do so! Just leave me a comment to let me know, so I can come visit and check out your answers.

What color are you? Go take the test and see! I would say this one is right on for me 🙂

You Are A Gold Girl

You’re dependable and hard working. You never miss a deadline – and you’re never late. You have a clear sense of right and wrong. You’re very detail oriented. You get frustrated when your friends are sloppy – or when they don’t follow through. You’re on top of things, and you wish that everyone else was!

The Chef is away this week, so no new questions were posted. I surfed a bit through the archives and found one I don’t think I had done (but I didn’t look, and my memory is atrocious). Anyway, I’m going to answer these from way back in October 2005. Fun!

Feast Sixty Seven
October 21st, 2005

Appetizer
Do you button shirts top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top? Top to bottom, I’m pretty sure. I’m a very orderly person 🙂

Soup
What is your favorite sandwich? I’m not a big sandwich eater. I think that comes from growing up, brown bagging it to school every day. I got tired of sandwiches and didn’t eat them at all in college or afterwards. I like them better now, and I love a good french dip, layers of roast beef with a good au jus, on a big crispy bun. I even like grilled cheese, especially with tomato soup 🙂

Salad
What was a family project you helped work on as a child? I don’t think we had any family projects when I was a child! I used to love to work jigsaw puzzles at Christmas and New Years, with my sister. I like to do that still, and beg Tim every year to work them with me 😀

Main Course
When have you acted phony? Probably when I’m around people I don’t like or feel really uncomfortable around. I think I try to just stick a fake smile on my face and try not to open my mouth and insert my foot.

Dessert
Do you write letters or postcards? If so, to whom? Not much anymore. With the advent of computers and email, I do most of my personal and business correspondence electronically. I do still try to send postcards when we go somewhere fun on vacation. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and wrote someone a letter though. It’s been several years.

Have a great Friday!

If you’ve visited here much, you probably know by now that I love books, I love to read, and I LOVE my library! I ran to the library late Tuesday afternoon, right before they closed early for the July 4th holiday. They had a book I had put on reserve in, and of course, I had to do some browsing. I left with 3 other books and 2 movies. We had a gap in the week with Netflix, so I picked up a couple of free DVD’s to tide us over. And of course, I could have easily left with 8 or 10 books, but I try to limit myself to 3 or 4, something manageable.

I listed the books I got on my sidebar, but I’ll put them here too. I also picked up two DVD’s – “The Departed” for Tim to watch (which he did, and he liked), and “Last Holiday” for me to watch again. I saw that one at the theater and really liked it. Anyway, the books I got are:

1. Fame – by Karen Kingsbury (first in a series of 5 called the Firstborn series)
2. Blue Shoes and Happiness – by Alexander McCall Smith (book 7 in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Series; I’m trying to get current with this series and I’m close!)
3. The Tea House on Mulberry Street – by Sharon Owens (new author for me; saw this mentioned on someone’s blog, but I can’t for the life of me remember who!)
4. Mixed Signals – by Liz Curtis Higgs (I recently read Thorn in My Heart by her and really liked her; this is more modern day fiction from her)

OK, time for a Question of the Day: Do you have a library card? Do you use it? How often do you go, or when was the last time you visited your local library? About how many books a year do you get from the library? Does your spouse or kids go, do they have cards? Do your kids do the summer reading program? Or do you just prefer to buy your books and not mess with the library?

Leave me a comment and let me know!

Wow, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s already July! It’s certainly been hot enough here for a while. It has felt like summer here for several months. We grill nearly year round at our house, since our weather is almost always warm, and we don’t have a lot of cold weather in the winter. The summer is traditionally the time that most people grill, and I think the holidays of July 4th and Labor Day are big grilling times.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day – do you have a grill? Is it charcoal or gas? Who grills – you, your spouse, or someone else in your household? How often do you grill? Do you plan to grill out for July 4th? If so, what kind of food will you put on the grill? What’s your favorite thing to grill?

Here’s my answers: We have a gas grill and we use it a lot. Tim does all of the grilling at our house. We grill year round, but especially a lot in the fall during football season. We grill most everything from the norm (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages dogs, chicken, pork chops) to fish, veggies and even some fruit (we’ve tried pineapple). I love doing veggies on the grill, especially asparagus, zucchini and portobella mushrooms. We haven’t tried pizza yet, but maybe one day 🙂

How about you? Leave me a comment and let me know…

Have a great day and a wonderful 4th of July!

For those of you who visit my Project365 photoblog, you know that I went to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday with my sister Gail. One of the things I picked up was a pint of fresh locally grown blueberries. I asked Tim this morning what he wanted me to make him with the blueberries. As per usual, he said it didn’t matter, for me to pick. Not feeling very decisive, I persisted and gave him several choices – blueberry coffeecake, blueberry bread, blueberry cobbler, blueberry muffins, etc and he picked muffins.

I looked through several cookbooks I have here and also cruised my favorite recipe site, AllRecipes.com, before finally deciding to use this recipe, along with a lot of the comments that I read through. The recipe I ended up making was not all that much like the original, but the result was really good!

I used my red silicone muffin pan, and that was a mistake – the batter is heavy and the muffins spread, so with the flimsy silicone, they really oozed out all over the pan! (Photo here). They taste really good, though, and that’s all that matters. We each had one, hot out of the oven, with some butter melted on it, and they were delicious. I asked Tim to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 and he gave them (hot out of the oven), a 10. We’ll see how they taste tomorrow warmed back up!

The recipe is here, over at Hambones. I’ll also post it below. These are NOT low-fat, but I did make a few changes so they weren’t quite as bad as the original. I would have liked to have tried them with some whole wheat flour for half the white flour, some Splenda for the sugar, and other substitutions. But, when I had asked Tim if he wanted “low fat or full fat?” – he answered, “full fat”. Shhh, don’t tell him I used a couple of low-fat substitutions in this recipe 😀

The recipe is on the extended page, so click there if you’re so inclined!
Read the rest of this entry »

I used to do the “Monday Madness” meme a while ago and have just been focusing on posting my menu on Mondays lately, playing along to “Menu Plan Monday”. Today, I thought I’d be wild and crazy and do BOTH!

Monday, July 02, 2007

Good Monday to you all! This week’s questions are all about laundry; something we all have to do (or have done). Have a great week and thank you so much for playing! =)

1. Do you do your own laundry or do you send it out? Oh good gravy yes, I do all of our laundry!

2. Do you laundry at your home or a laundromat? At home, always have. I’ve been very blessed to have always had my own washer and dryer in my apartment or house. I’ve never actually even been to a laundromat 🙂 (I used the washers in the dorm in college and never had to go out of my dorm)

3. Are there certain articles of clothing that you need to have dry-cleaned on a regular basis? Not really, just Tim’s suits and a few of my dresses (most of which we don’t wear too often). I try not to buy a lot of clothes that have to be dry-cleaned

4. How often do you do laundry? Is there a certain day of the week that you consider “laundry day?” I do laundry almost every day, at least 1 or 2 loads. I do towels on Tuesdays, sheets on Wednesdays and usually on Mondays and either Thursdays or Fridays, I do dark clothes and whites. I probably only take 1 or maybe 2 days off during the week when I don’t wash something. I find it is easier that way for me, not to let it pile up. Thankfully, there’s only 2 of us plus the dog. If we were the Brady Bunch, I imagine I’d be doing 5 loads a day 🙂

5. Do you iron your clothes as you pull them out of the dryer or do you wait until just before you wear the clothing to iron? I pull the clothes out of the dryer and hang them up. Some of them while they are still damp, and the rest when they are dry. I iron before we wear them, if they need ironing.

6. Do you hang your clothes outside to dry or do you dry them in a dryer? I will hang a few things out to dry, some of the dogs stuff, and some of our clothes or Tim’s hunting clothes or bath mats, things like that. I don’t have a clothesline, so I use my deck railing 🙂

7. Do you own things that need to be hand-washed or do you try to avoid buying things that you can’t wash in the washing machine? I generally try to avoid it, but I do have a few things of mine that need to be hand-washed. Delicate little sweaters or blouses and I think one skirt. Missed that label in the store 🙁

Click on the banner above if you’d like to go over to the Monday Madness site and play along. And be sure to let me know so I can come check out your laundry situation at your house 😀

We did a little better last week at sticking to the menu. We did order in pizza one night, rather than having the meal I had planned to cook, but other than that, we stuck to it pretty well. This week will be up in the air as well. We’re not completely sure yet what we’ll be doing for the holiday on Wednesday and the weekend. Oh well. My husband loves to fly by the seat of his pants 🙂

As always, thanks to Laura, for hosting this every week!

Sunday – Spaghetti over whole wheat noodles, broccoli

Monday – Crockpot Mushroom Chicken, sauteed zucchini, smashed new potatoes

Tuesday – Chef Salad

Wednesday – TBD: out of town family get-together or stay home and grill out

Thursday – Fish Sandwiches, oven fries, cole slaw

Friday – Maple BBQ Chicken Sandwiches, more oven fries, more cole slaw

Saturday – Pizza or eat out

I finished another book recently, “Blessings” by Anna Quindlen. This is a book I actually purchased, for full price, in the bookstore. GASP! This was my first ever book by Anna Quindlen and I do like her writing style. It reminds me a little bit of Elizabeth Berg, but I don’t think I enjoyed it quite as much as the Berg books I have read. “Blessings” was good, not super-fantastic, but good.

Blessings is the name of the estate that has been in Lydia Blessing’s family for years. Lydia is in her 80’s and lives alone at Blessings with her housekeeper, Nadine, and her new caretaker/gardener Skip Cuddy. Skip discovers a box one morning on the stairs leading up to his garage apartment. A newborn baby girl is sleeping inside the box. Skip, recently in jail on a questionable participation in a robbery, wants to keep the baby and raise her. He hides her from everything and everyone, including Mrs. Blessing. This, of course, does not last and the story spins on from here.

I liked the plot and I did like the characters. We got a lot of backstory of Lydia’s childhood, her short marriage to Benny and glimpses into her daughter Meredith’s past. We meet some of the people that Skip used to associate with, and is trying to remove himself from as he builds a life for himself. This book also had a minor, ah, “undercurrent” of a subject I don’t prefer to read about, but it was not bad and it didn’t detract too much from the story. Quindlen could have pursued it more and she did not, and for that I was thankful. The book ended much as I expected. A quick read, weighing in at only 226 pages. I’d give it an average, slightly above average, rating. It was not one of my favorite books I’ve read thus far this year, but it was good.

For the record, that makes 46 books so far this year, for a total of 14,259 pages read. I think I’m going to switch gears and read a non women’s or Christian fiction book next. I think I’ll tackle one of the many Grisham books we have on our bookshelves that I have not read yet. I am going to give “The Brethren” a shot, but I reserve the right to drop it and pick up something else if it doesn’t grab my attention 😀

Happy Reading!

Feast One Hundred & Fifty
June 29th, 2007

Appetizer
How many pieces of jewelry do you wear most days? Most days, I only wear my wedding band. When I’m out and about, I will wear my engagement ring with it, my watch and a pair of earrings. Very rarely do I wear a necklace or bracelet, and never any other rings. I’m just not a jewelry kind of gal. And for that, my husband is truly grateful 😀

Soup
What is your favorite instrumental song? I think I need more coffee – I can barely think of any, much less my favorite. Let’s see, I like Kenny G, so I think his counts as instrumental. I also like some classical music and some movie soundtracks.

Salad
Who has a last name that you like? I love my last name! My husband’s name and that of his family is very important to me. In fact, back in April, I wrote a long post here on my father-in-law’s birthday, about our last name, and the things my FIL taught my husband by word and example.

Main Course
Name a popular movie you’ve never seen. Here we go again! The Wizard of Oz. I’ve never seen it and never will. Long story. I’ve also never seen Saving Private Ryan, The Passion of the Christ, and several others because I just didn’t think I could handle it.

Dessert
Fill in the blank: Nothing makes me ___________ like ____________. Nothing makes me happy like chocolate!

I finished a really cute, Christian chick-lit book last night, called “What a Girl Wants” by Kristin Billerbeck. This is the first in a series of books by this author (she has at least two different series that I know of), called the “Ashley Stockingdale novels”. I definitely want to read more of these and find out what happens next to Ashley. She also has a series called the “Spa Girls novels” and I may want to eventually read those too. Unfortunately, my library doesn’t have any books by this author, so I’m going to check sometime soon on their inter-library loan program and see if they can get them from a neighboring library system. If not, I might just have to break down and order them online 🙂

Anyway, this was a really cute book! Very light but very modern (think Jimmy Choo, Blackberrys and Lilly Pulitzer), about a patent attorney named Ashley Stockingdale, who lives in Silicon Valley and is an active member of her Christian singles group. She’s just turned 31 and she’s having trouble with where she is with her life, her job, her friends, her lack of chances to meet nice Christian men and a whole host of other things, including planning a wedding for her brother and his Chinese fiance, Mei Ling. This book was a really quick, very enjoyable read, and I can’t wait to get the next ones.

For the record, that makes 45 books read so far this year, for a total of 14,033 pages. Up next is a book by Anna Quindlen (I’ve never read her books) called “Blessings”. I hope it’s good!

Happy Reading!

Today’s question is suggested by Carrie.

What’s the most desperate thing you’ve read because it was the only available reading material?
If it was longer than a cereal box or an advertisement, did it turn out to be worth your while?

Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten desperate for something to read. I have a pretty good library branch not a mile from my house, so during their open hours, that is an option. The biggest factor is that I now keep a fairly decent TBR pile here at my house. I don’t like ending a book at 10:30 PM and not having another one lined up to read, you know?! Also, I subscribe to several magazines, and I have a pretty significant stack of those here at the ready, for me to read. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever run out of anything to read or not had something available.

Now, I have been known to read a cereal box or two in my time, though 🙂 Daily paper too, and most anything else I can get my hands on. But, these days, I try to always have a book with me, or something to read. Especially if I know I’m going to be somewhere that I might need to wait. I try to always be prepared 🙂

Happy Reading!

I’ve blogged here before, in various and sundry ways, about how I “collect” or “hoard” various household items. I blogged here recently about toilet paper and how I buy the really large packs at our warehouse club (Sam’s Club, no Costco here), because I really don’t want to run out. I see no need to run out of something I use on a daily basis. However, I can run down to Walmart and get toilet paper or paper towels if I need it. Unfortunately, this is not the case with everything that I use on a regular basis.

One thing I am really a packrat about is detergent:

That’s because I can’t just use any detergent in my new hE washer. I need and want to use the specially formatted hE detergent for front-loading washing machine. And get this – my Walmart and Kroger don’t carry the brand I like (in fact, Walmart only carries Tide, and I don’t like Tide detergent, at all). I can only find it at Target, and sometimes they don’t have it on the shelves. So, I tend to buy it when I find it and store it in my cabinet over the washing machine. I start to break out in hives and develop strange ticks if I am down to one or even two bottles. See, Tim has sensitive skin, and I’ve been using this All brand detergent, the Free and Clear one, for years. If I switch to anything else, his arms will break out into a mass of tiny red bumps. It’s the weirdest thing. He can tell if I use something else. So, I use the All Free and Clear – when I can find it. It’s hard to find here in the hE, and my big, huge, never-ending fear is that All is going to stop manufacturing it. They used to make it in a regular bottle, but now they only make it in their Small and Mighty bottle. I don’t know what I will do if they stop making it in the hE formula altogether. I can barely find it here, as it is. Sigh. So, when I do find it, I buy it. And hoard it.

So, we could go two ways with this, as in a Question of the Day. Your pick. We can ask the Question of the Day: What brand of detergent do you use and buy? Do you keep plenty on hand or do you just buy it as you need it. Or, we can go in a complete different direction and ask this Question of the Day – is there a product or item you really like and use, but you have a really hard time finding it where you live? So, when you do find it, you really stock up and hoard it like crazy?

Leave me a comment and let me know!

I know, I know, that’s a picture of a dog bone over there. But I already had that one and couldn’t find a cute picture of a human bone. I found some icky ones, but nothing cute, LOL!

Today’s “Question of the Day” is short and sweet – have you ever broken a bone?

My answer: I have never broken a bone, thankfully. I hope it stays that way. I am not really an adventurous sort, but I am klutzy. I have been very lucky to have not broken anything yet. My husband, on the other hand, is really, really lucky that he has never broken a bone. I’ve heard stories all of our married life of his exploits and escapades as a child, preteen, teenager and young man. I’m constantly amazed he never ended up in the hospital with a concussion or broken bone, or worse! It’s a miracle he survived his rough and rowdy upbringing. He grew up riding 4 wheelers and dirt bikes, out in the country, hunting and fishing and doing heaven only knows what else. He’s so lucky never to have broken anything.

So, how about you? Have you ever had a broken bone? If so, what got broken and how did it happen? Leave me a comment here, or if you’ve got a great story to tell, write about it at your own blog (but leave me a comment so I can come over and read it!).

Have a great day! 😀

Gosh, last week was not a good one for sticking to my menu. We ate out quite a bit and I didn’t make half the meals that I had planned. Oh well, there’s always this week to try and get back on track 🙂

As always, thanks to Laura, for hosting this every week!

Monday – Breakfast for Dinner: omelettes, al Fresco brand sausages (apple/maple flavor), hash browns

Tuesday – Chicken soft tacos (using meat made with this recipe), pinto beans

Wednesday – Light Night before Tim weighs in: either Grilled Chicken Salad or Tomato Soup & grilled cheese

Thursday – Chicken Quesadillas (use rest of tortillas left from Tuesday)

Friday – Date Night or Pizza

Saturday – TBD or spaghetti and meatballs