Exceedingly Mundane

My mom passed away 5 years ago today. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you and miss you, Dodie (that’s what we all called my mom).

My mom hated, hated to have her photo taken, so I have very few photos of her. I went through my scrapbook pages from several years ago and found this one from Thanksgiving 2000. My parents had come to our house to have dinner with us and Gail and her family.

I miss you Dodie. I’m glad you’re not suffering any more, but I still wish you were here for me to see and talk to. 🙂

Wow, someone thinks me or my blog rocks! I think it’s so cool, and many thanks to Trish and Annie for nominating me for the “Rockin Girl Blogger Awards”! It always warms my heart to find that someone, anyone, enjoys my blog and thinks it worthy of any type of mention. I think I must have the nicest, sweetest, most thoughtful set of blogging buddies a girl could have!

By the way, Trish’s post is here and Annie’s post is here. The reason I mention this is because both of them nominated some really other wonderful blogging ladies, many of whom I already read and enjoy. And who, I might add, I would have nominated myself, but they had already been tagged themselves.

OK, my turn to nominate. I think these ladies, and their blogs, totally rock, so go check them out!

Stacy aka Vader’s Mom – fellow booklover and fellow doggie mom, she rocks!

Karen, over at Write From Karen – great writer and fellow booklover, she always has something wonderful to say, and she rocks!

Dawn, at Thoughts from Along the Broken Road – fellow football fanatic, Disney lover and all around great blogger, she rocks!

Susie, at SusiePie.com – fellow booklover, awesome blogger, great Southern gal and we all know she does incredible blog design work – she rocks!

Judi, at Mommy to Two – fellow booklover, fellow food/recipe lover, she rocks!

Kim, at Kim’s Candor – fellow book lover and great Southern girl, she rocks!

Debi, at Nothing of Importance – fellow book lover, challenge joiner extraordinaire and amazing homeschooling mom, she rocks!

Sherry – at A Bibliomane Amidst Butterflies – fellow book lover, fellow recipe/food lover and amazing homeschooling mom, she rocks!

I could nominate many many more wonderful ladies, but I’ll stop here and hope they spread the love around 🙂 I really and truly think that all of the ladies whose blogs I visit and read are great, and you guys all rock! Thanks for visiting mine and making me feel like my blog is something more than “exceedingly mundane” 😀

Miss Southern Girl has tagged me with a Page 12 meme… and being a book-loving kind of gal, this one is a no-brainer!

You need to:

1. Pick up a book that is near to you
2. Go to page twelve in the book
3. Read the first two sentences and post it on your blog
4. Also post the book title and the name of the author
5. Tag 3 other people

OK, being that I have a bachelors in mathematics, I can do this one. Let’s see, page 12. Ok, here is page 12 of the current book I’m reading … “Murder on a Bad Hair Day” by Anne George:

Bonnie Blue shook her head. “No way you and Mary Alice could be sisters.”
“We were born at home, Bonnie Blue”.
“I look like Mama, blonde and little, and Sister looks like Daddy, big and brunette.”

OK, ok, maybe I can’t count. That was three sentences, but it helps put it into context. Patricia Anne and Mary Alice are the Southern Sisters, as in Southern Sisters mystery series. They live in Birmingham, AL and in this series of cozy mysteries, they find themselves in some odd and funny predicaments. Oddly enough, all involving murders!

Let’s see, I won’t tag anyone specifically, but feel free to play along. I’m such a rule breaker

Feast One Hundred & Forty Nine
June 22nd, 2007

Appetizer
Name a funny habit you have. Hmm, probably my habit of picking things up and putting them in their place. I don’t like things out of place for very long. I don’t like to sit down in the evenings to watch TV or a movie and know that I have dirty dishes in the kitchen or things that need to be done. Oooh! I also have this funny thing that I do with my bookmark. I was reading at my sister Gail’s one time and she commented that she does the same thing, so we’re odd together 🙂 When I’m reading a book, I take my bookmark and sort of lay it on my left shoulder. I have no idea why or why I started doing this.

Soup
If you could instantly know how to play a musical instrument, which one would you pick? Probably the piano

Salad
How long is your hair? Somewhere between my chin and my shoulders. I would like to grow it a little longer, about shoulder length, but it gets frizzy at a certain point and I usually end up chopping it.

Main Course
When was the last time you forgave someone, and who was it? Gosh, I have no idea. I am the one who needs forgiving most of the time. I have a temper and I get my feelings hurt too easily and get upset.

Dessert
What is your favorite kitchen appliance? Hmm, my favorite would be my red Kitchen-aid mixer. The one I use the most is either my crockpot or my toaster oven. Or lately, since we’re watching more movies, my microwave to pop popcorn 😀

I probably won’t do this very often, but I thought I’d throw out a couple of quick movie reviews. As I blogged about a couple of days ago (here), we just started our new Netflix trial membership. We’ve received our first three movies, and have watched two of them. One hit and one miss 🙂

The hit was “Deja Vu” with Denzel Washington. We both liked that one. It does have some violence and language to it, but we both really liked the plot. The miss was “Catch and Release“. My sister Gail was here when we watched it, and I don’t think she liked it much at all either. I wanted to like it, as I really like Jennifer Garner, but it just wasn’t a good movie for us. Too quirky and too immoral for our crew. Tim really and truly disliked it. When I asked him to rate these movies (on a scale of 1-10), he gave “Catch and Release” a 3 and “Deja Vu” an 8 or 9.

We also checked out the second Pirates movie. I had wanted to watch that one again to refresh my mind on the plot, before we go see Pirates 3 in the theater. We’ve been seeing a lot of sequels this summer. We’ve seen Spiderman 3, Oceans 13 and the 2nd Fantastic Four movie. This weekend or next, we’ll probably go see Pirates. We’re both really looking forward to the third Bourne movie coming out in August, also.

Up next for us from Netflix (remember, you can check my queue out on my sidebar, courtesy of the neat plug-in I installed) is one for Tim (“Flags of Our Fathers”) and one for me (“The Queen”). Lots of popcorn in my future 😀

School days, Golden Rule days…. June 21, 2007

Since school is out for the summer (in most places, at least), here’s a school-themed question for the week:

Do you have any old school books? Did you keep yours from college? Old textbooks from garage sales? Old workbooks from classes gone by?
How about your old notes, exams, papers? Do you save them? Or have they long since gone to the great Locker-in-the-sky?

Well, you know, I would honestly have to go up in the attic and look. I think we finally got around to throwing most of them away. At least mine; we might have some of Tim’s. I have absolutely no desire to hang on to my mathematics and extremely out-dated computer text books. I’m pretty sure that Tim has at least a couple still hanging around that he wants to keep as a reference. I would throw them away if I could, but alas, he might actually want to use them one day (*snort*). 🙄

As far as old notes and exams and papers go, I would say that it is all gone too. I might have a stray exam or report around here, but not much. I know I have one large Rubbermaid tote that has some things from my childhood, and I believe the last time I looked through it, I had some reports I did in elementary school and junior high. High level stuff, to be sure 😀

I finished a great book a day or so ago, “Thorn in My Heart” by Liz Curtis Higgs. I got this book via Stacy and Lauren, who very kindly passed it on to me to read. They had both enjoyed it, and now after reading it, I certainly understand why. This book is a retelling of the Biblical story of Jacob, Leah and Rachel, except it is set it in the Scottish Lowlands in the late 1700’s. There’s a ton of local Scottish dialect, culture and customs woven in with the more modernized version of the story. It’s a long book, but the story is fairly engrossing and the pages just flew by. I found myself not wanting the book to end, which is the sign of a wonderful book to me. There’s several more in this series, that I hope to read eventually. I’d recommend this book if you can “handle” the Scottish dialect that is interspersed in the book, as it’s a great story and a good read.

For the record, that makes 43 books read so far this year, for a total of 13, 494 pages read. Up next is the next book in the Anne George “Southern Sisters” mystery series, “Murder on a Bad Hair Day”. I won’t do a review for this one, as it is part of a nice little series. After that one, I will have to figure out what to read next. It might be “What a Girl Wants” by Kristin Billerbeck, but then again, it might be something else 🙂

Happy Reading!

Well, the much hoped-for rain was a near no-show at my house, although we did have a nice strong set of thunderstorms move through our area earlier today. We barely got enough rain to wet the pavement good (which means I’ll have to pull the sprinklers out tomorrow, boo-hoo). However, there was enough wind to knock down some large power lines somewhere. We were without power at our house for about 5 hours.

My sister Gail came this afternoon, right after the power went out, and we went shopping for a while. As she’s so fond of saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”. We all went out and had a lot of Mexican food for supper afterwards. It was so nice to come back to lights, air conditioning, and computers and TV’s with power. 🙂

We’re back now and hopefully all is well. I think we’re going to watch our first Netflix movie that came in (Yeah!) and I’ll try to blog some soon about a book I just finished, and the movie we watch.

Have a good one 😀

I was so excited when I won one of the Netflix complimentary subscriptions that Nan, over at her blog “Life is Like a Lunchbox” gave away last month. I’ve been burning a path to my mailbox every day since then, waiting for the information packet to come in. I had nearly given up hope, but a month after I won it, the package came! Yeah! I was literally jumping up and down and both Tim and Beau were eyeing me like I had lost my mind 🙄 I just love winning things, love having “fun” stuff come in the mail, and I love to get practical things that we really and truly will use. This is one of them.

I setup our free trial late Saturday night and immediately began adding movies to our queue. I’ve had a blast ever since then, trying to find movies for us to get, and reordering them in our queue. I was a bit bummed to learn that Netflix does not ship movies out on Saturdays or Sundays. For some reason, I think I was equating them in my mind to Amazon or someplace that worked around the clock, 7 days a week, to ship me my goodies 🙂 Anyway, the long weekend over, my first movies were mailed late yesterday (Monday) and we are hoping they come in the mail today. I’m so excited, I can’t wait 😀

I also downloaded and installed a plug-in for my blog, to show what we have at home from Netflix and also what is up next in our queue. Check it out on my sidebar, below and on the right. I think it’s so cool!

OK, so for my question – I have a bunch of movies in our queue, but I’m always looking for more suggestions! If you’ve seen a good movie, especially one that might have been a “sleeper” or not a blockbuster type movie that you’ve seen and enjoyed, let me know what it is! We see a lot of movies at the theater when they come out, and rent even more, so I’ve actually had a hard time trying to find movies. I’m finding some older ones, and some of the new releases that we haven’t seen yet to add to our queue. But I’d love to get more ideas 🙂 Leave me a comment and let me know some movies I should get!

Today’s Question of the Day is also tied in with my photo for today on my Project365 blog 🙂

The frugal side of me (aka, the cheap side) would prefer if we got out the soap and buckets and washed our vehicles on our driveway. We used to do that, way back when. It was always hot, but fun. Well, it was fun for me, because Tim did most of the work, LOL!!! These days, we seem to fall into the convenience category. When one of our vehicles needs a bath, we drive to the car wash place down the street and sit in the air conditioning while our car goes through the tunnel for a wash. It comes out nice and clean and we don’t even break a sweat. Of course, we pay dearly for it, but hey, Tim thinks it is worth it.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day – do you wash your own car? Does your spouse or kids wash the vehicles at your house? Do you run through a car wash at a gas station or local place, or even pay for someone to come out and wash your car at work or wherever?

Here’s my photos, at the car wash 🙂

Ok, time to see what we can do about planning a menu for the week. We did really good last week and stuck to our menu 100%. Hopefully more of the same this week! 🙂 We’re going to eat some light stuff and I hope it helps with our weight loss. Plus, I haven’t been in much of a cooking mood lately, so I’m taking it kind of easy. 😀

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

Sunday – leftover ribs and sides

Monday – Grilled Chicken Salad

Tuesday – Grilled Chicken (Tim) / Grilled Salmon (Stacy), veggies, smashed potatoes

Wednesday – Breakfast for dinner (eggs, oatmeal, toast)

Thursday – Crockpot Chicken Santa Fe

Friday – Date Night or Pizza

Saturday – TBD

Annie, from “My Life as Annie” emailed me a great idea for a “Question of the Day” – thanks Annie!

Annie said she was in the shower, and was wondering if she was the only one who did the “shampoo, rinse, repeat” cycle that is on so many shampoo bottles. She wondered if most of us just shampoo, rinse and condition and go on about our merry way, or if we do it twice. Great question, Annie!

I’m afraid I’m in the less is more category. I shampoo, rinse and then condition and rinse. I know, I know, I should be following the directions. Well, oops, I am! I just went and looked and my bottle says to shampoo, rinse and condition. It is probably because it’s a shampoo for color-treated hair, and maybe they don’t want you to overdo it and strip your color out. Plus, I think it’s a time issue for me – I already wash my face, shampoo, condition, wash my body and shave my girl stuff in there, so it takes me a while in the shower. I think if I did the double time on the shampoo, I’d be in there an awfully long time 🙂

OK, so Annie and I and all of the other inquiring minds out there want to know – do you shampoo, rinse and repeat or not? And while we’re on the subject, if you’d like to share what kind of shampoo you like and use, I’d love to hear that too 🙂

I finished another library book recently, “Dream When You’re Feeling Blue” by Elizabeth Berg. Oh my, I have really found an author I love! This was my third book by Berg and I enjoyed it immensely. It took me about 50 pages to “really” get into it, but after I did, it just flew by and I didn’t want it to end. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something about Berg’s writing style that I really love. I still think the first one I read by her, “The Year of Pleasures” is still my favorite, but this one was wonderful too. I was also able to strike a bit of a personal chord with this book.

The book is about an Irish family living in Chicago during World War II. There’s 6 children in all, 3 boys and 3 girls, and the book focuses mainly on the girls. We start off the book with the two oldest girls seeing their boyfriends off at the train station – one headed to Europe to fight the Germans and the other to the Pacific to fight the Japs. We follow their lives and loves, through letters, things happening on the home front, through the girls eyes, mostly. It was a really well written book, and much like “Year of Pleasures”, one that I could sort of relate to. You see, my mom and dad got married in 1946 and I could sort of picture this time period through their eyes. I asked my dad if my mom went to dances and danced with the soldiers (she did) and if she wrote him letters (she did, but not every night like the girls in the book). I just wish my mom were still here for me to ask her more things 🙂

I hated to see this book end, and it did sort of surprise me at the end. It didn’t turn out quite like I had thought it would. It didn’t end badly, but it ended differently than I would have thought. It had me thinking about the ending, and the characters, for quite a while afterwards. In fact, I’m still thinking about them – always the sign of a good book to me. I really wish the book had been longer, I wanted to know more about the characters and see what happened in their lives more. More, more, more… another good sign! I’m definitely going to have to look for other books by Elizabeth Berg at my library. She has not failed me yet 🙂

For the record, I’ve read 42 books so far this year, for a total of 13,019 pages read. I have also read the sixth book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series lately (“In the Company of Cheerful Ladies”), but I won’t review it. It is just part of a wonderful series that I have already reviewed. I look forward to catching up on it soon, as I have 2 more to be current with that particular series. Up next for me is a book that came to me via two wonderful ladies (thanks, Stacy and Lauren) – “Thorn in my Heart” by Liz Curtis Higgs. I’m really looking forward to it 🙂

Happy Reading!

Feast One Hundred & Forty Eight
June 15th, 2007

Appetizer
Fill in the blank: The best thing about where I live is _________________… Most all of our family is close by

Soup
Create a new name for a deodorant (like “Flower Freshâ€? or “Shower Scentâ€?). Gosh, I’m horrible at this kind of thing. How About Spring Rain or Summer Flowers?

Salad
What was the last piece of software you installed onto your computer? I installed updates to iTunes and Adobe recently. As far as the last full piece of software, it was probably the software that works with my Palm PDA

Main Course
If you were to receive a superlative award today beginning with the words â€?Most likely to…â€?, what would the rest of the phrase say? Most Likely to be Quiet for the Day 🙂

Dessert
What two colors do you like to wear together? I’m so incredibly boring with clothes. I wear black and khaki, A LOT!

I’ve seen this mentioned on several blogs, and thought I’d hop on the play-along bandwagon 🙂

Jill, over at “Who Could Ask for Anything More“, is having a fun new contest at her blog. She’s giving away a book each month, in a cute bag, to one lucky winner. This month, the book is “The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett. Sounds like a good book, and who wouldn’t love a cute bag to put your books in?! Count me in 🙂

Thanks Jill!