Plans

We had one of my husband's friends visit this past weekend - it was nice to see a friendly face from NC.

On a slightly random side note: I'm not sure how my husband knows so many good men. I mean truly good men. I am constantly amazed at how lucky I am that my husband has these friends in his life and thus, by association, I have them in my life. Such amazing men with such wonderful hearts.

Ok, back to the post. My husband's friend asked me if I planned to do any more to the house. I laughed - yes, of course! When I'm not burdened by school I plan to do A LOT to the house and I have a lot of ideas that are just waiting on the sideline ready to go!

One of the things I so desperately want to do is overhaul the laundry room. And I keep seeing wonderful laundry room pictures that make me want to start this project NOW. Oh well - not until the dreaded D (stands for dissertation) is done.

A laundry room like any of these would be fabulous!

Country Living

Centsational Girl

BHG

Tater Tots & Jello

House of Smiths

Natural Interiors

 

 

 

DesignSponge

 

 

 

 

The Mango Archives

Thundafunda

Donna Griffith Photography - DecorPad

A bit of reality

I've recently been drawn more to bloggers who write about the truth of life, not just pretty things. And several have posted about how blogging can make things seem great b/c most people only blog about the great-kind-of-things. But reality is, life isn't great and pretty all the time but it can be fun, even more so in those not-so-perfect moments.

So, just to remind you that things aren't nearly as wonderful and pretty as they may seem in this little blogger's world, I'm gonna hit you with a fun list of reality.

I had some super sweet and kind comments on my hair at the wedding we attended in NC a few weeks back - yes, its long and that's great, why? Because I don't do it up all nice every day. Actually, that's a lie, I don't do it up all nice EVER. Yep, side ponytails, buns, regular ponytails - that's my hair everyday. And I'm good with that.

I'm kind of a clean freak (several wonderful women who happened to live with me post-graduation unfortunately know this about me - most of them still talk to me). But I've lost some of that somewhere in life and now I'm ok with:

• The dog hair/dust balls that fly about the house
• The husband's shoes (oh, and sometimes mine) that I about killed myself tripping over yesterday, this weekend, last week...
• The dishes that sit in or beside the sink for three days or more (I do rinse them out)
• The random food bits left on the island so long that I have to scrape them off with some kind of tool
• The magazine pictures and fabric samples I've collected for decorating that now lie under our bed, in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet, in a basket next to my desk, etc.
• Our office - a four drawer file cabinet and two full-size cabinets from Ikea that could all be termed "junk" cabinets - you know, they are the places you throw things to get them out of the way
• And as the last example (b/c goodness knows I could go on), the entire third bedroom which is currently a storage room for Christmas decorations, a bunch of the husband's old stuff, and everything else that lacks a home in our home - you can't even walk in there any more.

I do like cooking a lot and it may seem like we do a great job of it all the time or that we eat well all the time. NOT TRUE. I saw a post recently about meal-planning for a month. It sounded nice. And then I realized our meal planning would look something like this:

Oh yeah, we eat leftovers for lunch and dinner almost every day. And those meals that we make on Sundays are usually normal low key meals like lasagna, or a casserole, or an easy crockpot recipe, or some kind of rice dish that I quadrupled and loaded with a bunch of extra veggies to get us through the week in a somewhat healthy way.

For example - this week, I'm eating pinto beans and cornbread most days, with some added in leftover hummus, enchiladas, etc. I like it but its definitely not gourmet cooking!

Oh, and I like cooking because its challenging - the husband I screw it up, sometimes pretty badly, but its fun to do things that are challenging and to occasionally come out on the winning side. And when we don't, it usually provides a good laugh!

Now you know some more about my life behind the blog - a little of the honest-to-goodness messiness of our lives! Messiness that I wouldn't trade for anything (except maybe a shorter commute to work).

Hope you have a terrific, mess of a day! :)

Traditions

One of the things that stands out for me about our first year of marriage has been our traditions. Because of traveling at the holidays, we really had no chance to start our own traditions - definitely a bummer. So this week we decided to work on some traditions, not as big as holidays, but things we make priorities in our lives that last over time. I came up with one and the husband came up with one. And they were both based on things we've done before that slowly fell away because of work, commuting, etc. Mine was a game night with no tv. This is one of the things that I take both from my family and from early in our relationship. The husband's was cooking dinner together, sitting at the table to eat it (you know how good that couch looks after working all day), and no tv. (See a theme? I do so get tired of tv).

Cooking dinner together once a week, eating, and talking away the night at the kitchen table or the patio table was one of those things that we did a lot before I started working and before it got colder. And I do love it. So we started this past Friday night by making a cioppino. It was fun because it allowed us to customize the ingredients based on what we like. It was definitely yummy and fun to make together. We used a combination of three recipes from Epicurious: Lobster and Shrimp Cioppino, Grandfather's Cioppino, and Cioppino.

Cioppino with some of our parsley that has managed to stay alive all winter!

Cooking for one

Weekend before last I did some me kind of cooking - meaning, I made food with beans. It really kills me that the husband doesn't eat beans because I do love them. We had a shared lunch with some of the ladies at work on Tuesday of that week and I contributed the black bean veggie chili and cornbread. Quite yummy. The chili recipe was modified from this one: vegetarian black bean chili. I added all kinds of things to this recipe including corn, garbanzo beans, and hatch chilis (frozen from the fall). The cornbread recipe is a seriously modified version of this one: southern corn bread. One of my coworkers is a vegetarian so I omitted the bacon fat, subbing in butter but two tablespoons only. I used high quality stone ground cornmeal, no onions, about 1/3 cup cheese, a can of hatch chilis, no corn, and about two pinches of garlic powder. Plus one cup flour and 1/2 cup sugar. Ok, so really, it wasn't even close to the same recipe. Oh well!

Chili cooking away

I made a lot!

Things that make me happy

Happy Valentines Day - I'm not a big Vday person but it is an excuse to show my husband how much I love him and really, any excuse will do! :)

Other than the husband, these things make me happy today!

1. Our weekly weather forecast - I cannot wait to get outside!!

2. Gracie times 2 - first, when she wants to sit somewhere, she will, regardless of what or who is in her way.

3. And, second, when she's sleepy, she'll use you as a bed (sound asleep 5 minutes after the picture above)

4. Shadow makes me happy too but, much like her momma, she would prefer being outside in the sun than inside - so while Gracie was sitting and napping she was laying outside!

On our list

We have a list - a really long, and a bit idealistic, list of things we (sometimes just me) want to do to the house.

But I saw a great idea for one of our list items just the other day!

The problem space:

Awful picture right after we moved in but you can see the open awkward space.

A possible solution:

From RAENOVATE

When I saw this, I thought it was the perfect solution for that space. I like the idea - we wouldn't have the granite or a sink but it would work perfectly!!

Cars and such

We're going on almost 2 months of owning just one car. I never posted about this in December but the husband's car was hit by a hurried shopper and totaled. At that time we really only drove his car (a manual) on the weekends, essentially to just drive it every once in awhile. We drive my car to work because its an automatic and traffic is easier to deal with in an automatic.

Anywho, the one car thing is going well for the most part. I do forget every once in awhile that he can't run an errand for me when he works from home and I'm at work with the car. But other than that, its good. We're looking to buy a car maybe in May (just in time for us to drive it to NC) or we might wait longer, who knows.

Are you wondering what kind of car? We need a car with more room because we have two dogs that take up a lot of space and we need to consider that we may add more members to our family in the future. Then remember that I have a bit of my dad's hippie side and the result is that I have a strong desire to 1. not pay a lot for a car, 2. buy a car that gets good gas mileage, and 3. buy a car that will be reliable and last a long time. So that pretty much leaves us with station wagons!  And I'm a fan (I know, I'm strange). We're considering these guys but we'll see what happens over the next few months!

Hyundai Elantra Touring

Subaru Outback

Impetus

Can a desk be an impetus to get the dreadful "D" done?  Probably not, but it sure could help matters along. That, along with a need to improve the general functioning of our office space, has led us (or really the husband) to begin building a corner desk. And he's doing a great job.

Building in action

One finished base

We found the plans on AnaWhite.com, changing them a bit to fit our needs. We're hoping to have the thing built by the end of the weekend. Then it only needs painting and it will be done!  I'm pretty excited for a lot of reasons, including having my very own fancy workspace.

My current workspace is, well, interesting. See?

I'm using a piece of an ikea coffee table as a desk - it works but I definitely could use an upgrade with a lot more space!

So naturally I'm excited about the desk. But it also helps us move forward on my big goal for the year for the inside of the house - get to organizing those areas in the house which we use frequently - the office, the laundry room, and the closet. Super!

Little chickens

In an effort to clean out the freezer and pantry, we're on a plan where we are not buying meat or really much of anything else until we make some headway in those two areas. First on our list were our 4 Cornish hens that have been freezing their little bottoms off for a month or so. We decided to cook them for dinner Sunday and tried a new recipe of butternut squash risotto as a side.

The husband found the recipe on Epicurious - it was a bit of a change as it involved a traditional Jewish stuffing. The recipe was Spice-Rubbed Cornish Hens with apricot, date, and pistachio Haroseth stuffing. The butternut squash risotto was from Simply Recipes. It all turned out quite well. I'm looking forward to making more risotto in the future - I could eat that everyday!

Stuffing - the husband put it in this ugly tupperware before I could take a picture!

 

 

 

 

 

Before cooking

Done!

Cornish hen and risotto

My chillins

Well, they're not actually mine but close enough! :)  I love these kids more than life. Their momma and daddy and I went to middle school together and I've been bff's with their momma ever since. I was there for the chillins' births and when they were little itty bitty. I was there for almost all their birthdays too and other fun times. I miss them tons and tons. But while we were home in NC we got to play for a few hours with them Sunday afternoon and here are some of the 150 pictures we took. (I told you I love them - and to be fair, the husband took most of these - he loves them too even if he acts like he doesn't like kids)

 

 

Poor poor dog.

He wanted me to play under a tree.

Wardrobe malfunction 1 - duck tape fixed it right up.

Whoops, wardrobe malfunction 2.

Snowball fight - I admit, I started it!

He's kinda scary - especially when he wields large sticks and runs toward you laughing maniacally.

The chillins' dad and my husband thought this would be funny - they told him to make a "sad" face and this is what happened.

Loves her.

Loves her too - she's happy by herself thinking up new creative ways to play with leaves or sticks or whatever.