I can count the number on my hands

This past Friday was a different day in my world here in Texas. First, I met with a great counselor who works out of a suburb about 40 minutes from us. She is connected with a nonprofit organization that provides counseling services for victims of violence. I am going to be able to do some counseling for this organization and get supervision from her. And I cannot express how excited I am!!!! One of my goals is to get licensed and this will help that happen. Plus, I'm excited to get back to work. The organization is very flexible and works essentially as a private practice - I will be assigned clients for the first meeting and then after that I do my own scheduling. I could not ask for a better experience right now!

So in meeting with this woman Friday, I explained how I just moved here and she asked me how many people I know. I said four and she quickly replied - "oh goodness, well now you know five and if you stay I can introduce you to some more people!" She was very happy to help me meet more people and at the end of the time with her, I had met an additional four people.

We went out Friday for a birthday celebration and met a few others, so alas, now I can no longer count the number of people I know here on two hands. :)  Friday was a big day for me!

Weekend Update:

• Ran errands to multiple places including Home Depot where we bought the plywood for the headboard project
• Baked yummy homemade cinnamon bread
• Made homemade bbq sauce
• Cleaned
• Caulked trim so we can finally paint it this coming weekend
• Made homemade curried coleslaw
• Sunday grilled a roadside chicken from Rick Bayless and made enchilada sauce for dinner tonight
• Grilled some amazing ribs for dinner last night - husband did a great job with them

We were actually busy although not really accomplishing anything big, except making yummy food. And just so you know - the husband did a lot of the cooking - he's pretty darn good at it!

Happy Monday!

More great cookbooks

I regularly shift between cookbooks to keep our meals more interesting. This past week I decided to go through a few cookbooks that haven't seen any action lately. And it so reminded me of how much I love them. Which ones am I talking about? Well I have a small collection (4 to be exact) of Donna Hay cookbooks. The husbands' family turned us onto these and they have been fabulous go-to cookbooks over the years. Who is Donna Hay you ask? She is an Australian food stylist, author, and magazine editor according to wikipedia. But seriously, her cookbooks are great. The recipes are simple - although occasionally she has an ingredient that isn't a regular around here. For example the chicken curry I made last week from her Flavors cookbook called for Kaffir lime leaves. I didn't have time to drive the almost hour to the nearest Asian market so I did without. Anyways, she fits 4 recipes to a page so you can imagine the compact ingredient lists. And everything turns out well - she knows her stuff.

We have these 4 of her cookbooks:

• Off the Shelf: Cooking from the pantry - recipes that attempt to use items you might normally stock in your kitchen and includes a list of items you should keep in your pantry
  
• Flavors - chapters are based on flavor profiles like vanilla, garlic + onion, basil + mint and our favorite chili
• The New Cook - goes over basics but its nice to have basic recipes for pastas, etc
• Modern Classics Book 2 - yummy sweets - one of my favorites!

Tonight we will be having sweet potato cakes with peppered beef over arugula, from Flavors - can't wait!

Mornings and such

While we were taking care of Kona I was getting up between 4:45 and 5:15 to take her out for her morning potty break. It didn't seem terrible to be up that early but each day I decided to go back to sleep, making it so much harder to get up before 8. I actually liked getting up and an even better perk was getting to exchange a few sentences with the husband before he left for work. I also don't really like starting my day so late and to be honest I'm most productive in the am and least productive in the early afternoon. After trying to nail down a dissertation timeline (eek) this weekend, I decided I should just bite the bullet. Getting up early would help me get more work done and I would be on a more similar time schedule as the husband. So today is day 2 of getting up at 5:30 and I'm liking it pretty well (except right at 5:30 when I'm trying to get my butt out of bed). Hopefully it lasts! :)

Weekend in Review

• Packed up the car with Gracie in tow and headed down to Galveston Saturday for some fun in the sun - it was nice and as usual Gracie loved it.
• Cleaned lots and lots - fun I know
• Drew out a template for a headboard and hung it on the bedroom wall to make sure we loved it - we did
• Grilled out with the husband - one of our go-to meals is Roadside Chicken from Rick Bayless - great flavors and awesome leftovers for whatever we feel like eating (homemade pizzas, enchiladas, salad, etc) over the next couple of days

Roadside Chicken

• Read the newspaper with the help of Gracie

 Oh and the fabric I ordered a few weeks ago arrived this weekend. Hopefully I'll get a ton of work done on the dissertation this week so I can spend some time over the weekend working on a few projects around here. Exciting!

Ah painting

All the blogs - you know, the fancy well-known ones, say that painting is the easiest thing to change when you're getting your house all home-like. So I decided to take that advice to heart. To give you a back story - we love our house but it came with TERRIBLE paint colors in EVERY room. Of priority after moving in was to quickly cover up the family room color.

See why?

But making quick decisions about paint colors isn't easy especially when, as you can see, we had nothing in the room and really no design concept/theme/idea. And the husband swore off shades of white or lighter colors. So we chose this (please ignore mess).

I really like the color and it really doesn't work in the room for multiple reasons. The first - the room gets almost no natural light and the lighting in it isn't great so its super dark with this wall color.

Taken without flash, at sunniest part of the day for this room.

The second - the room, the very large room can be seen from 6 different rooms or areas in our home thus the color was dictating way too much about the house design and colors and I didn't like that.

So after thinking on it for awhile, painting 8 different color samples on poster pieces and leaving them in two places in the room for about two weeks, we took the plunge. The husband chose a darker shade of tan that I wasn't sure would work. I pondered over it and eventually vetoed him. I'm glad I did b/c the color is great - neutral and light like I wanted. Now we (really me) can add color in other fun ways and it won't feel like we're in a cave! We haven't put anything back in its place yet and I'm going to paint the trim (hopefully this weekend) so we'll post pictures once we get these things done!