It's a happy day!

Why?

Because its my mom's birthday!!

Happy birthday Mom! :)

You are truly an amazing woman and I'm so grateful for you - your wisdom, your patience, your laugh, your spirit, and your love!

A visit

The husband's parents came for a visit two weekends ago and I'm just now getting around to posting the small number of pictures we took. It was a nice, relaxing visit that involved a trip down to Galveston and one into downtown, and lots of good food.

I thought it would be fun to make pasta for (with) the husband's parents so the first night they were here we decided to have fresh Cannelloni with Chicken, Mushrooms, Spinach, Walnuts, and Ricotta from the blog What Katie Ate. This is one of my all time favorite food blogs - Katie is a food stylist and her pictures of food are AMAZING. And so far her recipes are all quite tasty. The first time we made this recipe we used fresh pasta sheets from the grocery store but this time we made our own! (Sorry no pictures)

The next day we took a trip down to Galveston Island. We had a nice light lunch at The Lunchbox Cafe, stopped by a few antique stores and finished our visit with some ice cream from La King's Confectionery.

On the way out of Galveston, we stopped by a seafood market to pick up fish for dinner. That night we made a few Mexican dishes from Rick Bayless' Authentic Mexican cookbook in honor of Cinco de Mayo. We had red snapper in a cream and poblano sauce, roasted poblano and corn rice, and a simple salad. The salad was the only thing pretty enough to take a picture of!

We spent the last day relaxing a bit and then headed downtown for dinner at Feast, which was, as always, quite delicious.

The last morning, the husband made what might become his signature breakfast, lemon ricotta pancakes with berries. They are quite tasty!

What can you say

It's been another busy week. I'm behind on everything and in the midst of that, I got a migraine that knocked me out for a day. Nice. Oh well. All of that is to say that I don't have any interesting post today (or this week). But here are some random ramblings from my brain.

I got teary-eyed thinking about the nonsense in NC this week. I know, I'm one of THOSE bleeding heart liberals. (I will spare you any further discussion on this topic)

I've had two people ask me for help/advice this week. That seems strange to me, mainly because I wonder if I'm adult enough yet to give advice. As a counselor, I don't much believe in advice giving but here's a part of what I said to one of those people:

"I believe that we get to a point in our lives where we realize, sometimes regretfully, that we have made all the decisions that have gotten us where we are now and we have to live with that. Realizing and coming to terms with our decisions is I think one of the biggest challenges we each face in life. For me, I currently feel a bit hopeless with job stuff – I’ve worked very hard (but often not hard enough) to get done with a PhD that I’ve not finished still. I often don’t want to think about all the decisions I made to get me to this point but that’s the reality of the situation. So I say to myself, there are two ways to approach this but it is my decision: 1) I can choose to be unhappy and stay immobile in this current space, or 2) I can choose to work hard to get where I want to be. And this is what I try to do everyday. But it is an everyday, almost every minute, decision to move forward and to give myself credit when its due. This is where I find I need support and help. I seek counseling; and I work to be very honest, with myself and others, because if people don’t love me for my true self, then they do not belong in my life. Goodness knows I dislike being honest with myself sometimes but it is that clarity in your life which will help you move forward. 

And so here is the part where I guess I try to give you advice, although I still don’t feel wise enough to do so. Know yourself and love yourself. We ALL make mistakes, you may not recognize them in others b/c you’re used to beating yourself up which brings me to the next point. Learn to recognize your strengths and learn to fall back on those when you face tough times. When I start to feel hopeless about work, I say, I am good at teaching – my students over four semesters told me each time – I KNOW I can do this. When you begin to truly believe in yourself, other things will fall into place. Seek a counselor who you are comfortable with – I cannot express to you how helpful it has been for me to be surrounded by counselors over the years and to have been in counseling myself.

Last but not least, learning to trust yourself and making changes in your life takes great patience. I know because I struggle with this daily and I see so many of my friends struggle with this as well. Write down your goals, and make realistic plans with dates to achieve them. Then, be patient – with yourself and with others - while you work to attain these goals. Nothing comes fast enough but know that if you do a little each day, one day those goals will be in the past and you will be on to bigger and better things."

Gardening update

Apparently we learned a little about gardening last year, because our garden is doing much better so far this year. I attribute this almost entirely to the husband. He is pretty much the point man on all gardening stuff, unless we have a concern or possible problem, and then I utilize my mad skills to research the solution. I will also kill a ('bad') bug that gets near my garden so I occasionally help by using those skills!

So lets talk specifics. First, our two zucchini plants are seriously ginormous this year - I mean, look at those things. They've produced a lot more but we're having a problem with end rot which we hope to deal with this week.

Our three cucumber plants are really taking off too - especially the one we grew from seed (the other two from seed died). The two we bought to replace the dead ones are not doing nearly as well. That is most definitely a theme in our garden - all of our plants from seed are doing much better than the store bought ones.

As tall as the fence.

Our pepper plants, (1 jalapeno, 2 red bell, 2 orange bell, and 2 poblano), are doing much better also. We actually have normal size peppers on several of them and lots of babies.

Though you can't tell - these are a pretty good size!

Last but not least, our tomatoes are really taking off. Almost all of the plants are 5ft tall and have at least a handful of baby tomatoes.

So far, we have more tomatoes on our heirlooms than we had total last year from heirlooms and our 4 big boy (regular tomato) plants have more than 40 tomatoes on them right now.

Baby heirlooms

Our first color

 Here's hoping the good gardening luck continues!

Home improving update

Sometimes owning a home feels like a never-ending list of to-do's. I'm sure part of that feeling for us has to do with our home being a bit older and in need of some updates. And I'm aware that some of that process involves personalizing our home. Although I love our home, I feel like all I ever think about is the next thing to needs to be updated. Sometimes I need to remind myself of how far we've come. The truth is, we've accomplished quite a bit in our home in the last 2 years.

Thankfully, except for the master bath remodel, the remaining items on our to-do list are pretty manageable. The main difficulty of accomplishing these tasks lies in finding the time!