Potatoes in the BBQ beef ...

... and other random crises. I'm so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open, but for some reason, I'm sitting here posting, not sure why. A few ransom stories before I forget them. Today while I was at work Dave was making BBQ beef. All by himself. You know, the kind you eat on buns... the stuff we had at our wedding actually, for those of you who were there. Anyway, he was feeling ambitious and wanting to do it all himself, and he was also going to chop vegetables for chamichingas and I was going to finish them later. Anyway, the beef was in the oven smelling fabulous when I got home. Then, pretty soon, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" What?? says I, wondering how big the tragedy is. He says, "The potatoes were supposed to go in the chimichangas! They're in the beef!" Not a huge tragedy. struck me pretty funny actually. The beef turned out fabulous, and there's potato chunks in it which is, um... interesting.

If you're wondering about all the food overtaking the house, well, we have company coming this weekend. Dave's wondering what the big deal is, and well, how can I explain... you can take the girl out of the Mennonite, but you can't take the Mennonite out of the girl. Honey, if there's people in my house, it's my God-given duty to see that they go home with a few more pounds than they came with. I can just hear Carolyn - SIT! EAT! What can I get you? What do you NEED? Are you okay??

This isn't even news anymore and I should stop admitting it on here, but today I locked myself out of my car AGAIN. But I was on a home visit a half hour away from home. ARG! I called the police and they said the only way they will do it is if there's a child locked in the car. It took Dave awhile to leave and then he took a little detour getting there, so I sat for almost an extra hour at this house. good times. The time has time. I'm getting one of those things you put under your car with an extra key.

I think I mentioned my flashdrive that had all my pics on it from the last 3 years or so. It got a virus and we couldn't access the pictures. Dave's really smart computer friend at the school was able to get all or most of the pictures off it but the flashdrive was toasted. The funny thing - okay, not funny - anyway, I'm SO happy to have them! (I think I have backups on my old computer as well that I thought had been deleted) However, I had them all organized in folders. I know now have a CD with almost 3000 pictures, all mixed up and no folders! Okay, it is sort of amusing. Hey look, Madagascar, oooo, trying on my wedding dress... hey, I'm 10, oh look, my 3 year old nephew is a baby... all in one happy little viewing session. It will probably take hours to get them all sorted out... a fun little project for a later date.

Tonight I went over to my sweet friend's house and used her awesome front loading washer and dryer - those things are AMAZING!! And compared to what we usually use, oh my. It was such a delightful experience. Okay, that's all. Night night.

Oh yeah, a title...

Okay, blogger is officially driving me nuts! It will NOT let me write over the first picture, so I added an extra picture at the top and will hopefully be able to delete it after typing. How dumb is that? Anyway, just wanted to say hi and share some pics from the last week or so. This has been a long, crazy, and difficult week, but thankfully it's over and life is looking up I think. Ahhh, Saturdays... this is the first day in weeks that I don't have to leave the house. I'm not sure if I will or not. Dave just went to get groceries which means I'm also alone in the house which never happens these days either. Last Saturday we spent a long time sorting through our room, getting rid of stuff, and getting it organized. Today I hope to attack our guest room. Last Saturday Dave also drug me out to see Star Trek. He was beside himself with excitement about it. I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. = P Actually, I didn't mind it at all, which is about as much as we can hope for when it comes to movies with the 2 of us. Okay, here's some pics...
Me thinks strawberries are in season - $1.50 for these!



This is from last Saturday - happy 9 monthiversary to us. = ) This is one of our current favorite places to hang out.

And these are from last Sunday. We had the privilege of going out on the boat with some friends and their terribly cute kids. It was so much fun.
Really! it WAS fun! gracious.
I only post this unflattering picture of me (above) to point out that I think if I grabbed him and ran for the hills, no one would ever question if he was really mine or not. (which I am tempted to do every time I'm around them, but resist, since I had a solid upbringing that taught me right from wrong and such)




Aw, such handsome guys... shucks...

Absent minded professor...

You know how people who are really smart and like to stare off into space thinking about numbers and things like that, how they tend to not have the brain space for menial, every day boring stuff.... I just have to share a couple cute little stories. The other night we were doing piles of laundry. We moved everything from the washers to 2 dryers and brought the rest in to hang up. Well, I went to bed while Dave finished since I had to be up early in the morning and he's officially done school. In the morning I went to get something and one basket (the one that he had but in the dryer) was completely soaking wet. Often our stuff doesn't dry all the way which is annoying, but this seemed like it hadn't been dried at all. Before I left for work I mentioned it and said he probably forgot to push the button to start to dryer. So he went out to check and came back and said, "Not only did I not push the button to start it, but all 5 of the quarters were just sitting in the slots not even pushed in. Oh I laughed. Okay, it's not that funny, but just the thought of taking all the clothes from the washer and putting them in the dryer, putting all the coins in the dryer, leaving, and then coming back in a couple hours and taking all the wet clothes out... it just hit me funny.

I try not to tease Dave too much about his tendency to park, um, shall we say, not straight. The other day he said, "You'd think with all the geometry I've had, I'd be able to park a car!" I just laughed. This morning as I walked out to my car to go to work, I stared at both of our cars parked right beside each other and thought, gracious day in the mornin, I never park that crooked! I'm even parked worse than Dave who is parked slightly crooked. Then I remembered a story from last night and had to laugh. Dave was going to be nice and fill up my car with gas (because I have to get up early and bla bla bla). So he comes home after filling it up and says that he took the car to get gas and it only cost 10 bucks and he thought, that's odd, her car was on empty, so he looks and realizes he's driving his car and not mine. So he comes home and gets mine and fils that one up as well - thus both cars are now full and parked very crookedly. But dang he's good at math! His students liked him so much this semester they baked him cookies! How sweet is that?

Okay, I'm back again. More boring ramblings - I just made the most disgusting supper ever. Yes, I'm on a health kick again and never do anything half way. So I bought this new flour at the health food store - buckwheat and millet. And I wanted to make a pizza. I've never used buckwheat before and had no idea it tasted like horse dung. No wonder the average person doesn't have it in their house. I made up my dough using those 2 things and it's dry, crumby, sawdust like and tastes gross. arg. Just wanted you all to know. If any of you have suggested for using the stuff, I'd be open to that.

Pictures! (how original)

All the way back to Valentines Day! I guess it was only 2.5 months ago, but it seems like forever ago. If you remember my post way back then... well, here's one thing that worked - I was happy with my glass decoration that I came up with all in my head. And below is our little chimichanga feast.
Mardi Gras weekend, the end of February. We went to a parade in Baton Rouge, one of the tame, family ones. = P
What do they kneaux about sneaux, anyway?


The above was Friday night. Then we decided spur of the moment to go to Madisonville on Sunday afternoon for the boat parade. It was pretty funny. Not really worth the drive, but we had fun anyway.




Back at our little condo - you thought YOU had misquotes! These things are so obnoxious! They aren't nearly as bad now that it's hot here. They were terrible in the spring. I guess most of you are still having spring.
Our little romantic getaway... Easter long weekend we spent one night in a little town and the next day we took the ferry across the river to to St. Francisville, which is a really pretty town. The reason we didn't stay there is because it's more expensive. We found a really cheap place in a close by town, which was sorta a scary little town, but the ferry ride was fun and it all worked out. This is where we stayed - the outside of our luxury suite.
... and the INSIDE of our luxury suite. The room was SO small. This pic shows most of the space between the bathroom door and the shower curtain.

But it was a pretty place on the outside.
This is the outside of the restaurant we ate at, right by our room. Looks pretty scary, eh? It was actually really nice on the inside. From the outside it looked like it might float away any moment.
The next day we took the ferry to St. Francisville. We thought it was funny that Lucy knew exactly what to do. Even though she called the ferry a fry.

Mississippi River from the ferry.
We went to a plantation that was so pretty. I could not stop taking pictures here.
Inside of the mansion.


Original columns.



This concludes our show. Hopefully I'll post pictures more regularly now that we have a non-infected computer. Congratulations if you're still reading this!

tidbits

Hello all. I've been meaning to blog for so long. Life just feels so busy and crazy, even though I can't really say with what. I guess working full time and trying to hold things together around here. I haven't been doing such a great job at the latter, but did make some progress this week. I'm finding that Dave and I are both pack rats (duh, I've known that for a long time) but I also hate clutter and it stresses me out. I've been very stressed lately over how fast things can be clean, at least on the surface, and then disintegrate into complete chaos in no time flat. So I've been pondering the book that Sabrina gave us as a wedding gift and that she posted about awhile back - "Simplify Your Life: Get organized and stay that way!" I read the chapter on cleaning and clutter this week and it was just what I needed. Consider this quote (with somewhat flaky modifiers), "A good 50% of housework is not just cleany-clean, scrubby-scrubbing, but shuffling clutter, litter, and junk from place to place. Getting rid of junk is the easiest way to free yourself from household imprisonment." HOW TRUE! I think I'm finding that a part of the reason I can never really get a handle on things is because there's just too much stuff and clutter around and lack of organization beneath the surface mess. So this week I tackled the kitchen. The fridge is cleaned out and spotless, the food cupboard (yep, that's singular, I've only really got one, to speak of) is finally organized and user friendly, and all the unnecessary clutter from the very limited counter tops is gone. Beautiful feeling! And now I'm finding it's much easier to just maintain it like that. Plus it's a great motivation for wanting to keep it that way. Next project is our room, including our bathroom. I want to thoroughly go through the closet, drawers, cupboards, piles of junk, and just get everything de-cluttered. Anyway, this is probably boring all of you to tears. It's just so hard for me to let my junk go and hard to know what to keep for sentimental reasons. Our guest room has a rather ample dresser FULL of all my junk. The sad thing is, probably 99% of the stuff in there, I will never have out, never use, or never read through. I'll just continue to move it from place to place unless I work up the nerve to get rid of a bunch of it. Do I really need my sticker collection from when I was 7, my eraser collection from when I was 10, some pretty rocks, an old antique lunch pail... ahhhh... I could go on and on.

Our living room has been pretty good in the clutter department, but now some things need to go because.... drum roll please... we just got a "new" love seat from someone on Craigslist. So now things are looking a bit crowded. I'm started to really like Craigslist. Last week I got a bunch of Mary Kay for half price because someone was going out of business. Then we found the couch about 15 minutes after it was posted and happened to be the first one to respond. The guy got so many requests for it but he held it for us. It's leather and reclining and so insanely comfortable. It does have a few holes and issues that we're hoping to repair with a leather repair kit. I'll let you know how it works out. For the price, I think it was worth it. It's like disappearing into clouds of leathery softness when you sit on it.

My job continues to provide many opportunities to grow in upright character. I'm not sure I succeed at many of them... sigh... anyhoo... today I was at a "Grandparents Raising Grandchildren" conference all day. I'm not really a grandparent, nor do I work with any who are raising children, so I'm not really sure why I was there, but oh well. The thing was SO SO SO long and boring. None of it was really helpful information for this stage in life. And in regards to all the above rambling on clutter, I go to so many conferences for work and every time I come home with a bag full of junk. Every time. arg! If anyone is in need of cheap tote bags, just let me know and I can fix you up. Anyhoo... the day had some interesting moments including a woman in the crowd who, um, well something was not right there. But it was sorta nice to have a distraction. She was very loud, strange, and very socially inappropriate. And then there were people there doing this big survey of grandparents raising grandchildren. So lots of people in blue t-shirts doing surveys with grandparents all over the place. Wouldn't you know, a lady in a blue t-shirt came up to me and said, "Have you taken your survey yet?" EX ca USE ME???!!!!??? I just started at her and blurted out, "Lady, that's a really quick way to get a black eye!" Okay, so I didn't say that, but I felt like it. I politely snarled something about NOT being a grandparent, not even being a parent, and how the hairy old to I look????? She felt sort of bad, but in her defense, she was a grandmother at 36. And if I would have had a baby at the age of the girls I work with, I suppose I easily could be a grandma right now. oh my! moving right along....

Well, I guess I don't have a lot of interesting news. I have to work part of the day tomorrow which I'm thrilled about. I guess we're putting on a brunch-like doo hickie. so long for now. Enjoy the pics of the last few months.