Exceedingly Mundane

First, I thought I would do a couple of quick updates from last week’s menu. I didn’t make the new recipe for the Taco Pie, so I’ll have to move that to another time and week. We had the Golden Potato Soup on Thursday, while my sister Gail and her husband were here, and I think they enjoyed it. I usually add diced ham to that soup, but this time I didn’t have ham and just browned 1 lb of ground meat and added it. I think we both liked this better, so I may just do that from now on. We did have our Date Night on Friday, and I blogged about that here.

Now, for this week, I don’t have much of a plan, but thought I would post what I had. A lot up in the air this week, and not too much cooking on the horizon. You’ll probably get a lot of good ideas if you peruse the menus posted by other participants over at Laura’s blog, they should be a lot more inspiring than mine!

Monday – Chicken Squares, Tomato Soup

Tuesday & Wednesday – Free Days (Tim out of town)

Thursday – Spaghetti and Meatballs, garlic bread, steamed broccoli

Friday – Date Night

Saturday & Sunday – TBD

Needless to say, we’re still on a football infused high at our house. Tim’s beloved Saints won last night, and are going to the NFC Championship game for the first time EVER in their franchise history. We’re watching the other playoff games today, to see who we’ll play and who will play for the AFC title game. Pretty exciting stuff for us, considering the Saints are perpetually never in the post-season games. And… I’m still looking forward to the premiere of 24 tonight.

On a different note, I blogged yesterday that I had started a new book. I did, and then about 25 pages into it, realized I was reading the WRONG book. Duh. I feel like a total mo-ron. I picked up book 5 in the series I am reading, and not book 3. Argh. Now I have a glimpse of what is going to happen and I feel terrible for starting the wrong one. I plan to rectify that this afternoon, if I get a chance (in between football games and commentary!). I had thought we would get a fair amount of rain this weekend, but it all appears to be going north of us. It’s partly cloudy here and in the 70’s. Not really winter, I’m afraid. Good news on our heating bill but bad news on several other fronts. Oh well, no complaining here. It’s all good here at our house 😀

Hope everyone’s having a good day. Geaux Saints!!!

Not to much blog-worthy going on around here. I seem to be posting as much of what I’m doing during the day over on my Project 365 photo blog, since I’m taking a photo a day and blogging about what it is or how it relates to my day. Check it out if you haven’t already (yes, sorry, had to get that shameless plug in there :mrgreen:). Oh, and below, I just posted a book blurb for the book I finished last night. I’m going to start a new book this afternoon, hoorah!

Let’s see…. quick recap. I had a busy day yesterday, going grocery shopping and running errands. I had originally planned to cook last night, but decided to ask Tim for a date night instead, to which he very graciously obliged. We had dinner at our favorite Mexican place (we split fajitas – shrimp, chicken, beef and chorizo and it was really good!). Tim even splurged and ordered me some guacamole to go with our chips. I adore guacamole if it doesn’t have big chunks of tomato in it and this place does not. Yummy. After dinner, we were headed to Hollywood Video to get a movie to watch for the rest of our date night, when Tim suddenly declares “I want dessert”. Then he says… “I think I want a shake”. Normally, for a shake, we go to Sonic, but we were headed in the other direction and suspiciously near Cold Stone Creamery. So, we stopped there to see if they had shakes. They do and smoothies too. I should have stuck to my original plan, I declared in the truck that we could just split one. But, as soon as I got inside and started seeing all that ice cream and reading all the descriptions, I caved and got my own! Tim got a chocolate shake with brownie bits added (a large one, so I could sample it) and I got a small Cherry Cheesecake shake. Divine, absolutely divine. We rented “The Da Vinci Code” and watched it last night. I had read the book, but Tim had not. He said he enjoyed it and rated it an 8 out of 10. I think I would give it a 7, but only because I *had* read the book and I think my expectations are always higher. I want to try to watch some of the extras today, while Tim is out playing golf. (By the way, as another project I’m trying to tackle, I’m trying to keep track of the movies we watch this year. Check it out in my sidebar lists or click here. Just a listing, no ratings, but I think it will be fun to look back at the end of the year and see how many movies we watch!)

Tonight is the big playoff game, Tim’s beloved Saints versus the Philadelphia Eagles. Please consider rooting for the Saints unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Eagles fan. The Saints need all the help and good vibes they can get! They so rarely make the playoffs that this is a huge deal! We’re going to splurge again tonight and have brats with sauerkraut for the game.

Then, tomorrow night, I’m equally excited about planting myself in front of the TV. The first 2 hours of the new season of 24 start, and I absolutely cannot wait! It’s going to really rawk this time because of our new hi-def plasma TV and the fact that our sorry cable company *finally* got around to adding Fox to our HD lineup. It is going to look fantabulous, and we’re going to get 2 hours Sunday and two hours on Monday night. By Tuesday, I expect to be a driveling 24 junkie 😆

That’s about it for the excitement here – golf for Tim, reading for me, playoff games on TV and then 24. What are the highlights of your weekend? Pipe up and let me know what all I am missing out on! 😛

I finished another book last night, one that my dear friend Susie sent me to read because she read it and liked it. It’s called “All That Matters” by Jan Goldstein and I must admit that I didn’t realize until the very end that Jan is a man and not a woman. This is very much a woman’s book, and it seemed to be written by a woman, and not a Jewish Rabbi. It was a good book, a really quick read, and a very thoughtful one as well. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked the characters, Jennifer and her feisty grandmother Gabby, and the stories what wove throughout the book. I love the things that Gabby tries to teach Jennifer, about how each day is a gift and for her to find one good thing each day to write down in her journal. A wonderful lesson for us all. I thought briefly of trying to write a review, but I decided to cheat and copy one from Amazon.com instead. Click on the extended entry to read their published comments, verbatim, of this book.

This book left me with one overriding feeling – a sense of hope. In spite of the some of the main threads of the book (Jennifer, the granddaughter, attempts suicide, and Gabby, the grandmother, is a Holocaust survivor), this book was one of joy and hope. It was a very easy read, no hard words or difficult plot lines here, and it really ended all too quickly. 🙂

For the record, that makes #4 so far this new year, with a total of 1,014 pages read. Up next, I think I’ll read book 3 in the Abram’s Daughters series by Beverly Lewis, called “The Sacrifice”. My mother-in-law gave me the last 3 books in this series that I lacked, and I’m so looking forward to reading them. 🙂 After that, I think I’ll read something light from my ever-growing “to-be-read” stash. Books, glorious books!

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Friday, January 12, 2007
Feast One Hundred & Twenty Six

Appetizer
What comes to mind when you see the color orange? Sorry, boring answer. Halloween, pumpkins, etc, if it’s the regular, bright orange. There’s a shade of orange I love, like a burnt orange, that I see in a lot of home furnishings and I love it. Unfortunately, Tim doesn’t like orange so I haven’t been able to use it to decorate much.

Soup
Did you ever get in trouble while you were in school? If so, what was it for? Not that I can remember. I was a MODEL child 🙂

Salad
Which topping(s) make up your perfect pizza? My perfect pizza is a Hawaiian one, with pineapple and Canadian bacon. I also love white pizzas, with spinach and Alfredo. Yummy!

Main Course
Do you believe in UFOs/aliens/etc.? Why or why not? I don’t rule out the possibility. If God created us here, I see no reason why he couldn’t have made life elsewhere and we’re just not ready to find them yet. The universe is a tremendous place, but God is ever larger and I haven’t ruled it out.

Dessert
What color is your bedspread/comforter/quilt? Burgundy and dark green with some beige thrown in.

The book that I just finished (“A Year of Pleasures” by Elizabeth Berg) contained quite a few words that I have never run across. I always like to think of myself as a person with a pretty good vocabulary, but this is one of those books that makes me rethink that statement. It seems I found quite a few words that I have no idea what they mean. I’m one of these readers who likes to know all of the words in a sentence, so I tend to stop and look them up. If I run across a word that I’m pretty sure I know what it means but I am not completely sure how it’s pronounced, I will often just “make up” a pronunciation in my head and keep going. But a definition, that one always stops me in my tracks. I have to stop and look it up if I can’t figure it out.

Anyway, here’s some of the ones I ran across:

somnambulate– it means to sleep walk
exophthalmic – condition marked by protruding eyeballs
aphorism – an adage
sybaritic – marked by pleasure and luxury

(P.S. You can click on the link above and not only see the definition, but hear the pronunciation. If you’re silly like me and like to hear how things are pronounced. 🙂 )

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: If you’re reading a book or article and run across a word you do not know the meaning of, do you stop and look it up or do you just try to make up a definition and keep going? Leave me a comment and let me know 🙂

I finished a most enjoyable book last night, “The Year of Pleasures” by Elizabeth Berg. I’m not quite sure what it is that first attracted me to this book; I know the cover grabbed me right away. The title also piqued my interest, and both of those, along with the blurb on the back made me buy it, even though I have a fairly hard and fast rule about buying books by authors I have never read. I rarely branch out and buy (aka pay my own money!) a book that I have not heard of or have previously read other books by that author. I usually prefer to take my chances and get a book from the library for my first time reading a new author. But, I had heard good things about Elizabeth Berg’s work and this book really sucked me in at the bookstore 🙂

I think one thing that I so enjoyed about this book was that I could totally relate to the character. Betta Nolan is a 55 year old woman, who has been married to the love of her life for most of her adult life. After he dies of cancer, she fulfills a dream they shared, and he insisted that she pursue, of moving from Boston to the Midwest. She buys the first home she sees and likes, and moves to town. She makes old friends and rekindles her friendship with her three college roommates. She meets a younger handyman and an older gentleman named Tom. She debates on opening up her own store for women, another dream she has had and one that her husband John always encouraged her to do. And, she grieves and tries to learn to live her life without her soulmate.

The book wanes a little in spots, but it’s the writing and the plot that appealed to me. First, I see myself in the character of Betta, a woman who was unable to conceive and spends her life devoted to one man and her marriage, forsaking most everyone and everything else in her life. Second, the book is really about learning to enjoy the simple things in life, small pleasures, and about how all of those strung together can make for a peaceful, happy existence. This is my philosophy on life, to be sure. I live a simple, abundant life full of small things that make me happy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am so glad I read it! I hated to see it end and would have liked for it to have gone on a bit further and seen more of what would happen to Betta in the coming months and years.

For the record, that makes #3 on the year, with a total of 816 pages read. Up next is a book that my dear friend Susie sent me, that she read and really enjoyed – “All That Matters” by Jan Goldstein. I can’t wait to get started on it, thanks Susie!!!

P.S. I decided to follow Dianne’s advice and post a “bit from something you’re reading”. Thanks Dianne! 🙂 Click on the extended entry if you’d like to read a few of the passages that I really enjoyed or that moved me in some way. Or I just really liked how they were written!

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I have some bookshelves that need cleaning out (and a myriad of other cleaning out, purging and organizing projects that I *want* to do but never seem to get started). One of the bookshelves contains a bunch of old annuals or yearbooks from when Tim and I were in school.

I don’t ever look at them, but I can’t seem to throw them out. I really need this shelf space though, for books I have bought over the last year and books I received for birthday and Christmas last year.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you have annuals or yearbooks from your school years? If so, do you still have them “out” somewhere, or are they packed up? Or were you stronger than me and have you gotten rid of them? Inquiring minds want to know!

I bought a Daily Devotional book the other day at Sam’s, by the Guideposts people. My grandmother used to read Guideposts and I have fond memories of reading these with her when I would go stay at her house when I was young.

Anyway, one of the thoughts on yesterday’s devotional was a quote by Rick Hamlin, who is a Christian author. Simple, but to the point:

I rejoice, Lord, in all the blessings of life.

So, that’s the thought for today. Be sure to go over and check out my photos I am posting daily as part of the Project 365. They’re just as mundane as this regular blog! 🙂

I blogged the other day about how one of the first things I do every day is to make the bed, and asked everyone to comment about whether or not they make their bed every day. To my surprise, I got a lot of feedback! It was wonderful!!! So, this time we’re going to talk about towels. I think this one will definitely have me in the minority!

I wash towels on Tuesday (get the alliteration?!). Once a week. When we take a bath or a shower, we hang the towel back up and let it dry, to use it again the next day. I know a bunch of people don’t do that, they like to throw the towel out and get a fresh one. My husband was like that. It took him a while to “come around” to my way of thinking. We came from completely different backgrounds and totally different ways of looking at this. I came from a family of girls. We didn’t get that dirty and sweaty and nasty, and my mom’s philosophy was, you take a bath or shower, so you’re CLEAN when you towel off. You use the towel just to dry off your clean body. My husband, on the other hand, came from a family of all boys. And outside boys, they grew up on a farm and would often come in dirty or nasty after working, being in the chicken house, hunting, fishing or whatever. They used a towel and threw it in the dirty clothes to be washed. So, I explained my way to Tim and he agreed to try it that way. He understood the logic behind “you are supposed to come out of the shower clean, so the towel is just to dry you off”. Now, in the summer, when it’s really hot here, I do wash the towels more often. We’re not too gross. Well, maybe we are. That’s the point of this post 🙂

That’s today’s Question of the Day: When you use a bath towel, do you throw it in the dirty clothes or do you hang it up to dry and use it again? Do you want or need a new towel every time you get out of the shower? And, along the same lines, how often do you wash towels in your house? Leave me a comment and let me know!

I finished this book a couple of nights ago and have been meaning to write a blurb about it. Not really a book review. I’ve decided after reading many “book reviews” at other people’s blogs that I cannot write a good review. I don’t think I write well enough to compare with most of you, LOL! So, I’m going to call them book blurbs and stick to that 😆

This is a book that I borrowed from my mother-in-law over the Christmas holidays. She had several of these, and I borrowed three, I think. They all say “Love Inspired” at the top, and the tagline “heartwarming inspirational romance”. So, I guess you could call them a Christian romance, but I didn’t really consider this book a romance book. It was a love story yes, but it’s not a romance in the sense of the Harlequin romance type of book.

I really liked it, and am glad I read it. It was light and predictable, but a good read. This particular one is about Elizabeth, a woman living with a “spoiled heiress” reputation, when in reality, she’s neither spoiled nor an heiress, but is hiding behind a mask of hurt and pain from a traumatic event that happened to her as a teenager. She was raped and has never been able to get close to a man since it happened. She has friends, family that she doesn’t like or respect, and a job she enjoys. Then, she meets Jackson, a man who moves to the horse ranch next door to become their foreman. He has his own reasons for being there, having just found out that he was adopted. He’s looking for his family and doesn’t realize at first that he will now find the woman of his dreams. It was predictable, it was light, it was easy to read, and it had a Christian slant to it. My kind of book. 🙂

For the record, that makes #2 for the year (I had previously finished “The Betrayal”, book 2 in the Beverly Lewis series I am reading), with a total of 610 pages read. Up next is a book I just started and I know already that I’m going to love, “The Year of Pleasures” by Elizabeth Berg. Berg is a new author for me, but one I have been wanting to read for a while. I think this one is going to be wonderful – so far, I am totally entranced and in love with her style of writing. Check back soon for the review of that one 🙂

Planning this week’s menu was a little bit of a struggle for me. This week, I have several ingredients that I am trying to use up and I have a lot of them! I bought a huge bag of potatoes at Kroger last week, on sale, and we’re having potatoes almost every day! I also bought a big thing of portebellini mushrooms (baby portobellos) and those are going to appear in the first couple of meals. It turned out to be an odd menu, but I’m sure we’ll survive!

Be sure to stop by Laura‘s blog and see what everyone else is planning for the week!

Monday – Tortellini with Portobello mushrooms (I don’t have a jar of alfredo sauce, so unless I run back to the grocery, I may try it using this alfredo sauce recipe), Salad, bread

Tuesday – Baked Potatoes with Creamy Mushroom Sauce, Salad

Wednesday – Grilled Chicken Salad with homemade zesty Italian dressing

Thursday – Golden Potato Soup, homemade bread

Friday – new recipe for Taco Pie

Saturday – Frito Pie or Wings – it’s Playoff Time, baby! Saints play at 7 PM, Woo-Hoo!

Sunday – TBD or Breakfast Food

The Creamy Mushroom sauce for the baked potatoes and the zesty Italian dressing recipes are older ones I have on recipe cards, and are not entered in our recipe system. They’re pretty simple recipes, but if anyone is interested in them, just email me or leave a comment if you want to see them, and I’ll be glad to type them up. 🙂

Have a great week!

One of the nicest and sweetest bloggers on the block (Susie of SusiePie fame) has tagged me with this meme. If she knew me better, she’d probably not want to know what I think, LOL. Just kidding! This one is pretty mild, and pretty fun to boot! Thanks Susie 🙂

1. As a child, what did you always say you wanted to be when you grew up? For the longest time, I wanted to be a pilot. Fly airplanes, fly into space, be an astronaut. I don’t remember ever wanting to be things like a doctor or a nurse or anything like that. I think I knew, even at a young age, that medical stuff, needles, sickness, pain, etc were not areas that I would be any good at!

2. If you had to choose one thing that you’ve always dreamed of doing, what would it be? What is stopping you? To go into space. See question #1 about wanting to be an astronaut. Maybe now, Tim will strike it rich one day and we can be space tourists, LOL. What is stopping me – myself, earlier in life for not pursuing this type of dream. Not enough discipline on my part, I’d say. As for the tourist part, obviously money is a huge impediment!

3. Who is your biggest fan? I hope it’s Tim, but I honestly have no idea. I don’t think I would have any fans.

4. What bible study or book (besides the obvious-the Bible) has most impacted your life to date? I must admit that I can’t really think of a proper answer for this one. I don’t read much non-fiction or study books of any kind. I’ve got a couple that I want to read, but I haven’t read them yet. Maybe I can answer this one better in a year or two. As for Christian fiction, most every book I have read by authors such as Karen Kingsbury and Lori Wick have left me with a sense of peace and renewed faith. I really enjoy this genre and read a lot of it, because of the positive aspects I feel when I read this type of book.

5. When are you the happiest? One of the happiest times I’ve had in recent years was when Tim took me to the mountains to celebrate my birthday. We had a wonderful time! It was my birthday and I got some nice presents, we went out to eat for breakfast for my birthday, he cooked me a juicy steak that night, we had a great cabin with a big hot tub on the deck, we went hiking and sightseeing and I got to take tons of great photos of fall foliage, etc. As for the day to day kind of happiness, I’m happiest being at home. When things are quiet, I have a good book, some down time and maybe a cup of yummy coffee or cocoa.

OK, I’ll tag Stacy, Cam, Dianne and my sister Gail for this one. If anyone else would like to play along, I’d love to come visit yours, so just leave me a note that you’d like to play. Thanks again to Susie for tagging me!

I saw over at Dawn‘s blog that she had tagged me and also my sister Gail with a book tag. Fun, here we go!

Here are the rules/requirements:
1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fourth sentence.
3. Post the text of the following 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Name of the author and book.
5. Tag three people of your own.

OK, the closest book is “The Betrayal” by Beverly Lewis, a book I just recently finished. I’ve flipped to page 123, and gone down to the fourth sentence. Here’s the next three sentences of text:

“Well, I daresay none of them has ever had such a defiant streak.” Mamma had frowned and shook her head. Clearly aggravated, she groaned a bit as she bent down to hoist the wicker hamper filled with damp clothing.

Hmmm, not very exciting, that passage. It’s a good book though, book 2 in a series of 5 books about the Amish as told by Christian author Beverly Lewis.

I won’t tag anyone specifically, but please feel free to play along. Leave me a comment if you play, and I’ll be sure to come and visit and leave you a comment! 🙂