Exceedingly Mundane

Today’s Question of the Day is a bit different from the others I have asked in the past. Today, I’d like to give you a hypothetical situation and see what you would do.

Let’s say that someone you’re close to, a family member or friend, gives you a gift of a scented toiletry item. For example, a bottle of perfume, some scented body wash or body lotion. You’re thrilled because you love this type of stuff! But, after you use it a couple of times, you realize you don’t like the scent. What do you do?

Do you keep it and use it anyway? Do you use it and then once you realize you don’t like it, do you … throw it away? Put it away in a cabinet or drawer and forget about it? Do you give it to another friend for her to try? What would you do?

Leave me a comment and let me know!

Hope everyone has a great weekend! We’re going to be busy. It’s beautiful outside and we have some stuff to do – pruning, weeding, cleaning up, etc. I also have a really long list of things that need to be worked on and fixed on my new laptop. Then, there’s housework. Who knows how much of which will get done! 🙂

Well, today has been a day of good and bad things happening. Thankfully, the good totally outweighs the bad. 😀 Here’s a quick rundown:

The Bad:

1. Tim woke up with a bad headache and has had it all day. Tim NEVER gets headaches. Headaches make Tim a grouchy man.
2. My laptop that we got last weekend is driving me batty. I installed some programs I was using on my Windows XP desktop. Something went horribly wrong and the PC would blue screen every time it restarted. The problem got progressively worse, and last night, Tim declared that we had to totally wipe the hard drive and start over. Even wipe out what was already pre-installed on the laptop when we opened the box. The laptop that came with ZERO disks to reinstall stuff. Argh. He was a huge help and got all of that back on. Now, I’m slowly, one piece at a time, trying to rebuild what I had loaded over the last 5 days. At least 12-15 hours of work, maybe more, that was all lost. And we’re still not sure which program caused the problems. Argh. I am not happy with Windows Vista right now.
3. CBS did not show Survivor here last night, because of the SEC basketball tournament. I was not happy. Luckily, it came on at like 2 AM and we were able to tape it. Now, we have to watch the tape, and I’m avoiding all blogs that might mention Survivor.

The Good:

1. The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful day here. Tim is working from home and helping me with my laptop.
2. My library FINALLY got upgraded to a new online system. I went into the library to get setup for it. I can now renew books online, place a hold on a book online, and see what books I have checked out and when they are due. All online! This may not seem like much to anyone else, but this is a vast improvement over what I had before. This makes Stacy a very happy girl!!!
3. While in the library to get setup, I checked out 3 books. They are: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Morality for Beautiful Girls (part of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series) and 44 Cranberry Point (part of the Cedar Cove series by Debbie Macomber). Yeah for new library books!
4. While out running errands, I found a new Life is Good t-shirt and Tim bought it for me. These are my favorite products on the planet. Can’t get enough of them. YIPPEE!
5. While out running errands, I found two books I was lacking to complete a series of books by Wanda Brunstetter. I can’t stand to read series books out of order. I have this weird idiosyncrasy about it, and prefer to get the whole series in my grubby little hands before I even start it. Go figure.
6. Tim got his anniversary present today. He is like a kid at Christmas. Read a little about it, and see the pictures, here.
7. Tim took me out to eat for date night. We went to a local rib place and got some wonderfully delicious ribs for two. Baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad and Texas toast on the side. With enough left over for lunch on Saturday. And best of all, we saved all of the bones for Beau. Beau is a happy dog 😀

Anything exciting going on out there in your world? I am probably going to spend an inordinate amount of time this weekend, trying to reload programs and data on this new laptop. Which will put me even further behind on reading all of your blogs and catching up with what’s going on. I hope to come by and visit soon 😛

Friday, March 09, 2007
Feast One Hundred and Thirty Four

Appetizer
What is your usual bedtime? Do you like that, or would you rather it be different? Well, now that I’m not rushing out early in the AM to fight traffic, I sit up later than I used to. Bedtime now is usually around 10:30 to 11 PM.

Soup
When it comes to advice, do you give more or receive more? I think I receive more, but I might have family or friends who disagree with that.:roll:

Salad
Describe a memorable meal you’ve had. My birthday meals are always great – Tim takes me to my favorite Italian place and I eat to my heart’s content. Then, I order tiramisu for dessert and have to share it with my darling husband. 😀 Another memorable meal for me was one we had years ago at Big Cedar Lodge and Resort. I had a meal with cabbage. I didn’t think I liked cabbage, but I tasted it and it was good. Of course, they cooked it with a ton of bacon, so it was really tasty!

Main Course
Name a work of fiction that affected the way you think about something. Well, not for how you think, but probably The Da Vinci Code. Not because I believe it at all, but because it opened my eyes to the fact that people believe what I do not. The world is very big and very different and it was eye-opening for me to see how many people might not believe all of the things that I believe so strongly in.

Dessert
What is your favorite type of fruit juice? Oooh, TOUGH question! I can’t pick just one. I love juice. I love orange juice, but it can’t have pulp. I love apple juice, grape juice, cranberry juice, fruit blends, all of it. Yummy!

My blog buddy Heidi, over at God’s Grace in Practice, asked if I had asked a “Question of the Day” about pillows – and I have not. Great idea, thanks Heidi!

How many pillows do you sleep with on your bed? What kind of pillows are they? We’re sort of particular about our pillows. Tim has a problem with feathers and down, so I never buy down pillows and we can’t sleep under a down comforter. I buy synthetic pillows or down alternative. I always try to get some that say “hypoallergenic”, because those seem to do better for us. I don’t have a problem with feathers or down, but if Tim is sneezing all night and miserable, then I do have trouble sleeping! Anyway, we just sleep with two plain, regular sized pillows. No extra pillows, no body pillows. I do wash them fairly often, at least every few months, and more often in the summer when it’s hotter. I probably wash them every month or so in the hot part of the year. I replace them when they are looking bad. Which, for Tim, is sooner than me. He scrunches his pillow up when he sleeps, and his gets broken down and lumpy a lot faster than mine. I don’t keep track, but I probably buy new pillows every 12-16 months.

Oh, and for the record, since I was blogging about this, I just went and put our pillows into the washer. Hehehehe! 😀

So, thanks to Heidi, that’s today’s Question of the Day: How many pillows do you sleep with, and what kind? Anything out of the ordinary? Do you wash them regularly or replace them often?

Lending Library

Do you lend your books to other people? If so, any restrictions? Well, I don’t make a habit of it. I got burned years ago by loaning a cherished book to a friend to read, and I never got it back. It was a first edition hard back too, and I would love to have gotten it back. So, needless to say, these days I am really particular about who I loan my books to. It’s usually just family. I loan a bunch to my sister Gail, but she treats them as well as I do and always, always returns them, so that’s never a problem. My one restriction is that I get it back. Bad, I know, but just me.

Do you borrow books from other people? (Friends or family–I’m not talking about the public library) Basically the same answer as above. I will occasionally borrow, but it’s not my favorite thing to do. I’d much rather get them from the library or buy my own books. But, I will borrow from friends and family, and I treat them very well and try to return them as soon as I can.

And, most importantly–do the books you lend/borrow get returned to their rightful owners?? Always, unless someone sends me or gives me the book with the caveat that they don’t want it back. Then, I read it and pass it on to someone else.

Great questions! If you’d like to play along, check out the meme’s home page here. And leave me a note if you play, so I can come check out your answers!

I saw this fun set of questions over at Lynne’s blog today. I love these things, and most of these were great questions I thought, so I just had to play along! Thanks, Lynne, for letting me swipe them from you! 😀

1. If you could build a house anywhere, where would it be? In the mountains with a great view and lots of open area around me. But, it would have to have fairly easy access in and out when the weather was bad. Think big lodge style house, lots of windows, big stone fireplaces.

2.What is your favorite article of clothing? Jeans and one of my Life is Good t-shirts

3. Last C.D. you bought? Long Trip Alone by Dierks Bentley

4. Where is your favorite place to be? At home, with Tim and Beau. If not at home, then in a cabin in the mountains.

5. Least favorite place to be?I’m with Lynne, I don’t like huge crowds or really large places packed with people.

6. Are you strongest in mind or body? Gosh, I hope mind. Because my body is pretty weak and it might be dangerous if my mind was weaker 🙄

7. What time do you wake up? about 7 AM or so

8. Favorite kitchen appliance? I don’t use it every single day, but my favorite would have to be my Kitchen-aid mixer

9. What instrument would you like to play? Toss-up between a guitar and the piano

10. Favorite color? Another toss-up. Some days red and some days green.

11. Sports car of SUV? SUV, definitely

12. Favorite children’s book? I don’t remember any from my own childhood, but I have fond memories of reading Goodnight Moon to lots of my nieces and nephews

13. Favorite season? Fall

14. Least favorite chore? Dusting

15. Favorite day? Friday

16. Favorite food? Ooh, I can’t pick one! Seafood, Italian, Chinese

17. Favorite drink? Lately, Cherry Coke Zero

18. Favorite word? Hmm, I guess “Beau”!

19. Favorite inspirational book?I don’t read much non-fiction, but I loved the Redemption series by Karen Kingsbury. Very comforting and inspiring books

20. Who would you like to play you in the movie of you life? Good grief. No one would ever make a movie out of my boring little ole life. But, I’ll play, how about… Sandra Bullock?

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. Life seems to get in the way sometimes, huh? But, today, I wanted to ask a question of the day. I always love reading everyone’s answers! Today’s question is all about how you start your day. Do you eat breakfast in the morning? I know a lot of people don’t, and that’s ok too, but it’s just not us.

We’re breakfast people in our house. We were both raised by moms who thought we should start the day off right. Tim’s mom used to get up every single morning and fix them a big breakfast before they got on the bus. Breakfast was big in my house too, and to this day, it’s one of my favorite kinds of food. I have fond memories of my dad fixing pancakes on an old Presto electric griddle we used to have. We eat breakfast every morning here, and we often have breakfast foods for dinner. At least once a week, sometimes more. In fact, I love breakfast food so much, that one year for my birthday, I asked Tim to take me out to eat breakfast rather than dinner. 😀

On an average weekday, we have coffee, juice and a bowl of cereal. We keep two kinds of cereal in the house lately. Tim is on a Raisin Bran Crunch kick, and I’m on a Yogurt Cheerios kick, although I love the Raisin Bran crunch too. On the weekends, we either have cereal or maybe eggs, sausage and grits or even pancakes or waffles.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you eat breakfast? Does everyone in your house eat something different? Do you eat at home, in the car, at your desk at work, or not at all? Do you eat the same thing every day or something different every day? Do you eat a big breakfast on the weekends? Do you just skip breakfast all together and wait for lunch?! Inquiring minds want to know 😀

It’s that time of the week again! Thanks to Laura for hosting this every week. You can check out her site for a list of everyone playing and go find some more yummy sounding menus 🙂

Here’s the basic plan for the week… nothing too exciting here. I’m planning on being really busy setting up my new laptop and not much time for cooking, LOL!

Monday – Annie’s Organic Cheeseburger Macaroni, green beans

Tuesday – grilled Teriyaki pork chops, sauteed zucchini, smashed potatoes

Wednesday – Light Night – eggs, oatmeal, toast

Thursday – new recipe – Gail’s Creamy Salmon chowder, homemade sourdough bread

Friday – new recipe – Chicken Olive Calzones

Saturday – Date Night or Pizza

Sunday – Our Anniversary – ribeyes, potatoes, salad

In case you haven’t checked my Project365 blog in the last day or so, you might want to check out today’s photo here.

Then you can see a pitiful picture of my awesome new laptop! We are getting our anniversary presents a little early this year. Tim is getting a new set of irons (golf clubs) and I just got this incredible new laptop. I’m in the very beginning phase of trying to move all of my data and programs over from my old desktop to the new laptop. I don’t think anyone ever realizes how much they have on their computer that they use until it’s time to restore or move it over! 🙂 The only problem I’m having is that some of my programs don’t work quite right under Windows Vista, and I’ve learned that moving iTunes and the music from your iPod is quite an involved task 🙄

On the bright side, it’s a really cool computer. It’s got a great 17″ screen and tons of extra geeky things that we are going to have a blast playing with. Like a webcam, which is new for us, and a TV tuner too. It even came with 2 different remote controls that we can use on all of the media options. Tim is really looking forward to playing with the tuner, once I get most everything else setup.

In the mean time, I’ll be spending every spare minute trying to get my “stuff” moved over and setup. Maybe in a week or two, huh?! I’m going to get further behind in all of my blogging and visiting my favorite blogs.

Hope everyone has a great week!

I just finished the three books in the Yukon Quest series by Tracie Peterson, and thoroughly enjoyed them! I don’t normally read series books back to back to back, but prefer to split them up with other books in between. However, on my last library trip, I was looking for books in the middle of other series I am currently reading, and I was disappointed to not have the ones I wanted available. I saw that my library had all 3 of these books in this trilogy, so I went ahead and got them.

If you like Christian fiction, then I think you will enjoy these books. I certainly did. I liked the characters and the setting was a new one for me – the gold rush to the Yukon in the late 1800’s. The faith of these characters were certainly put to the test enduring the conditions of the time and place, like the forty degrees below zero winters they were subjected to. There was a bit of mystery and intrigue to these books, enough to be interesting, but not too much to take away from the joy and enjoyment of these books.

I plan to read more by Tracie Peterson (she was a new author for me before I started these books), including the next set of books called the “Alaskan Quest”. From the little bit of reading I’ve done at Amazon, she follows on with some of the characters from these books (most notably, Leah and Jacob). I always like reading more books about characters I like, and seeing where the author goes with their lives and loves. I have a lot of other books on my to-read list though, so it may be a while before I get to these!

For the record, I’ve read a total of 15 books so far this year, with a total of 5,054 pages read. Up next is my first ever “cozy” mystery book, “On What Grounds” by Cleo Coyle. I can’t wait to get started!! 🙂

Friday, March 02, 2007
Feast One Hundred & Thirty Three

Appetizer
What does the color pink make you think of? Sweet baby girls

Soup
Name something you thought you had lost, but later found. Five pounds, LOL!

Salad
In 3 words, describe this past week. Hard Drive Failure.

Main Course
What are you obsessed with? Exceedingly Mundane things. Like blogging, watching my favorite TV shows, reading, playing with Beau. 😀

Dessert
What kind of perfume or cologne do you like to wear? Clinique Happy

I mentioned in a previous post that Tim and I ended up eating out on Tuesday night, while we were out shopping for replacement parts for our website’s servers. We tossed around several suggestions of places we both like to eat, that we had been to before. Believe me, we don’t have any trouble finding places to eat out! We both love to eat, we both love food and we both like to eat out. And we do, quite often.

Anyway, a new place opened near our house, a chain restaurant that is new to our area. Neither of us had eaten at one of these restaurants before, and since it’s a sports/family themed type place, we thought it would be perfect. There’s a local sports bar and grill near our house that we love, and we wanted to check this place out.

Well, let’s just say that I didn’t think it was that great. My food was mediocre at best, although Tim says his was good. We realize the place is new, and so when the service was slow, we were very understanding. We assumed the servers and kitchen staff were still learning, but we do get exasperated when we don’t see our waitress for the entire meal and we run out of our drinks (water/ Diet Coke). We’re not particularly fussy about restaurants in general – I worked in the restaurant industry some in high school and college and I know first hand just how hard it is to wait tables and dish up food. We’re really good tippers because of that, if the food and service are good.

I won’t name the place by name, because believe it or not, this post is not a rant and rave about this particular restaurant. Instead, it’s a in-general thing – in general, how do you decide about going back to a restaurant you weren’t overly thrilled with? Tim liked it better than I did, even though I told him I’d be glad to try it again and get something else on the menu. But – I do draw the line somewhere. I will give this place one or two more times and then if the food and service don’t get any better, I’d rather cross it off my list. There’s just too many good places here to eat, for me to keep going back to a place I really don’t enjoy.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: If you and your spouse/family go to a new restaurant and someone is not happy with the food/service/environment, how many times will you go back to try them again? Will you not go back? Will you give it one more shot and then that’s it? Three strikes and you’re out? Or will you keep going back because someone else in your family likes it and wants to go there? Leave me a comment and let me know!

But, Who’s Counting?

Booking Through Thursday

How many books would you say you read in an average month? An average month, I would like to read 3-5 books. I always shoot for about one a week. Sometimes I read more and more often than not, it takes me more than a week to read a book. It definitely will depend on the week and what else is going on. 🙂
In a year? My goal is usually 52 books, which averages out to one a week. This year, though, I think my goal is going to be 70 or 75
Over the last five years? Well, I had to go back and look. I’ve kept a detailed list of the books I’ve read for the last 3 years, but not for any longer. I don’t think I was reading much before 2005, so I guess I don’t have a count for 03 or 04. But, for 2005 through today, I’ve read 119 books. 😀
The last 10? See above!

Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response in the comments–or if you prefer, leave your answers in the comments themselves!

There I go again, using a song title, like my sister Gail does at her blog, called “More than a Song”. Sorry Gail, I just couldn’t resist! I always loved that Kelly Clarkson song 😀

Let’s see, there’s been a few things going on around here, but the computers and our website being down was obviously the big story. Here’s a few other tidbits:

Yep, that’s me, doing the happy dance! I think everything is all fixed now, thanks to Tim’s hard work and staying up until the wee hours of the morning. He’s really put in a ton of extra hours to get the new hard drives installed on our server and get everything loaded back, installed, configured and the data restored. I’m so grateful to him, and so happy that he was able to do it so quickly. I truly thought it was going to take several days. I’m so glad that it all appears to be back and working in good order. Here’s to hoping this new hard drive lasts a lot longer than the old one. Otherwise, in another year or so, we’ll be doing this again!

UPDATE: Tim wanted me to be sure and note that if anyone has any trouble accessing anything here or on our main website (hambones.org), to be sure to let us know. If you get an error or can’t access a page now, we would love to know. We think everything is fixed though, so hopefully that won’t happen 🙂