No, I’m not tokin’ it up today at all, but I always just giggle a little when this day rolls around. 😉
Completely unrelated to my post title, what I really wanted to do here was brag about my husband again and his ridiculous cooking skillz. What was on the menu last night, you ask? Oh, just some more homemade brisket/green pepper/Colby jack burgers with 25 year balsamic vinegar ketchup and a side of mushroom/peppers risotto (grated parmesan on all, yum!). We were out of buns so the toasted bread ended up being a tasty touch. What was the occasion? Tuesday. 🙂
Scrumptious!
I really am spoiled by R’s cooking. I wasn’t lying when I said if it were up to me we’d be living on bowls of cereal and pb&js, so I totally lucked out in the culinary department with this guy. He’s trying to clean out the fridge and get all of our meals back to basics – meat and potatoes (or veggies of some sort), nothing fake or phony, little to no processed foods, local ingredients as often as possible.
R grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s 100% a meat and potatoes guy. He loves making his mom’s recipes on which he grew up too, and I have come to fall in love with pretty much all of them. They’re delicious, hearty, healthy, easy – what more could I want? Their farm is no longer a functioning dairy producer, but his dad still butchers hogs every so often, so we reap the benefits of that as well. 75 lbs. of fresh pork from your home for free? Sign me up! I’ll make room for it in the basement freezer amongst all the bags of breast milk. 🙂
Are you familiar with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? It’s a campaign to get America to eat healthier, fresh not processed, specifically targeting kids and schools. Now with D in the mix, the importance of good food and proper nutrition is even more in the forefront of our daily lives. R has taken his cue largely from Jamie’s show, and it’s fantastic. Check out his site and sign the petition – it really is an awesome idea and cause: http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/home
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the best part. R declared yesterday his personal spring break, so he opened a bottle of my favorite wine to go with dinner. It was a heavenly treat for a plain ol’ Tuesday night.
Today we had all the best intentions to get a lot of work done on the house, since we’ve been extremely remiss in that department lately and the four year mark of this remodel is knocking on the door. Honest.
However, an early rise by D, followed soon after by a 2 hour nap for her that allowed R to sleep in and me to go back to sleep too resulted in us turning this day into a fully lazy family day. And it was pure bliss.
We don’t get these often, and the skies have never come tumbling down when we’ve put off house work before, so we took full advantage. I did no cleaning or laundry, R hung not one inch of trim, D got to be in jammies all day after her bath this morning, and we spent the entire afternoon and evening catching up on and finishing the series Big Love. Ahh….
D’s cold is back – AGAIN – but her usual smiley little self was in full effect between naps, complete with laughing, squeaking, and scooting around the house. This afternoon I was blessed with 2 hours of my left arm full of this, though:
Beautiful sleeper
Followed by a little of this:
Happy 'lil girl
Tonight we cracked open 3 bottles of wine, simply because we can. They were great, too. I can’t remember the last time I actually thought each bottle we opened was really good. Here’s what our personal wine tasting entailed:
Lindaflor Malbec 2007Menage a Trois 2009Cupcake Shiraz 2008
It’s been a wonderful day. And the best part? The weekend’s only half over!
Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta. No, not really. But I was going to put “Ahh, it feels good to be back” to start this post, and then the Geto Boys lyrics popped into my head instead. 🙂
It does feel good, though, to have my new theme all sorted out. Kind of like being *home*. My old one just felt too sparse and blah, so I love the splashes of color and little extras I can do with this one. I am pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to manipulate the website code to change things, too. Last night when I was showing R the header I created and how I’d taught myself to change icons and stuff, he kept saying, “Oh that’s easy.” Well, yeah, duh, when you’re a web/computer genius, but to us laypeople looking at code is like looking at Mandarin Chinese – a whole bunch of random letters and symbols that don’t make any sense whatsoever. So I’ll just continue to pat myself on the back thankyouverymuch. 🙂
So this post is just gonna be about a whole bunch of random things, because all the stuff I have floating around in my head this morning doesn’t really have much connection. (see, that sentence right there didn’t even make a whole lot of sense) For starters, I feel like I look like a total frump. Since Winter has decided to come back, I have on a gray sweater, black pants (which would be great if they were a little truer black. they’re more like a black khaki, so i keep worrying that people are thinking they look too much like faded black jeans, which are disgusting), and a pair of hiking sneakers. Blech. These pants are new, and are the exact same style as a couple other pairs I have for work and absolutely love, but like I said the color is just a little meh. And since I’ve never worn them before, I realized this morning that I don’t really have any shoes to go with them. They’re not dressy enough to wear my cute black faux-patent leather flats, and I apparently have no other casual black shoes. So sneakers it was. Gross. *I’m open to all suggestions for good casual black shoes. The comfier and cuter the better.*
And since we’re back in the 40s today from the gorgeous sun and 60s yesterday, I had to get another jog in last night to take advantage. I decided my new rule is I’m not running unless it’s at least 50 degrees outside, because I hate running in cold weather. And I don’t see 50s in the forecast again until next week, so I made my butt get in gear last night. I changed up my route again – went 2.11 miles in 18:56, which is 8:57 pace. Woo wee! I’m very surprised I broke the 9:00 pace, because it certainly felt like my slowest run yet. I was expecting to get slower from when I started before I get faster though, seeing as my body has to get back into shape after the weirdest, probably most traumatic thing it’s ever been through. So that’s pretty encouraging. I could feel it in my left knee and ankle by the time I got done, though, so a couple days off may be a good thing right now.
D has decided to be a little stinker lately and not take her afternoon naps at daycare. Hence, she’s tired and cranky when we get home and has to take an evening nap, which I was hoping she was starting to drop. Tuesday we were supposed to go to swimming, but she was so tired she fell asleep when I fed her when we got home and I didn’t have the heart to wake her – she ended up sleeping for an hour and a half. I figured she needed that more than being dunked by Mommy. 😉 When she doesn’t nap well she doesn’t sleep as well at night either. She’s awoken a couple nights this week, with last night’s wake up coming at 4:00. Fabulous. And since she ate then, I had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t going to be hungry when she woke up for good this morning. I was right. I tried to feed her anyway, and paid the price. She bit me! Numerous times in a row! I know she obviously doesn’t do it on purpose – she’s not hungry but has something in her mouth, so it becomes a chew toy instead – but goddamn, does that hurt! And I’m afraid I scared her this morning too, because when she did it for like the 4th time in a row I pulled back and said, “Stop biting!” She looked up at me with these huge eyes and a tiny little frowny face and almost instantly started crying, big tears and all. I felt so terrible. I should have learned from the first nibble that she wasn’t hungry, but I kept trying. Poor little thing. Why is Mommy shouting at me? I’m just lying here looking up at her with my gorgeous gray eyes. 🙁 Oh man, I felt so mean. That beautiful little face was so sad; I don’t think I’ve seen her cry from fear before. Needless to say, she got lots more hugs before we left for daycare. Unfortunately, her lack of eating leaves me in the ever-so-lovely lopsided state. Bleh.
She loves playing in her playpen now too. How adorable is this??
I think I finally found a blog layout/theme that I like, and here it is. What do you think? It’s the same one I’ve had the past couple days, but I figured out how to make the top picture my own. I really liked the water and colors in the shoreline one that originally came with this theme, but I wanted it a little more personalized. So I found a shot that captured the stunning colors of the water and then just incorporated my old header pictures into it, since I thought they were pretty bland by themselves. Isn’t that picture awesome?? R took it in St. Thomas last year. You really can’t beat the scenery down there.
I figured out how to change a couple other things on here to give it more SM flavor too. Website coding – fun stuff. I might tweak the header a little more, but this should be pretty much it. So I just wanted to get this quick post on here to let you know that hopefully you won’t see a different site each time you check me out anymore. 🙂 I’ll be back later with more good stuff to tell ya.
I love music. But I am absolutely terrible at knowing who sings the songs I like. Do you do that? You love a song, can sing along to all the words at the top of your lungs, but you have no idea who the artist or band is. Or am I the only weirdo that doesn’t pay enough attention to the soundtrack of her life? 🙂
Ever since R and I started dating, I’ve become a huge fan of classic rock. He’s listened to our local classic rock station his whole life, so once we got together I started listening to this genre too. Mainly because our relationship was new, I was soooo in love, I thought everything he did was fantastically awesome, and I wanted to do and like all the same things he did. Granted, some of that brand new relationship mystique has worn off by now (what?? no way!) and there are certain interests of his that I could only tag along with for so long, but this is one of his “things” that I ended up really genuinely enjoying.
Prior to R, I was a total hip-hop, rap, gangsta chick. Well, not me personally, but my taste in music. My high school was completely ghetto, and music was the one area of my life in which that “style” had any influence. Snoop’s “Doggystyle” is, has been, and always will be one of my favorite albums of all time. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, if I hear that one come on I can rap along word-for-word as if I was Lady of Rage herself with my afro puffs. Hands down, it’s my favorite driving album. I know every word to every song, and it instantly turns my Toyota Highlander into a low-riding pimped-out Caddy rollin’ on dubs and bouncing with hydraulics.
My ghetto ride when Snoop blasts
But back to my point. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a relative newcomer to classic rock or what, but even my favorite songs I often have trouble telling you who the artist is. I’m sure it annoys the piss out of R too, because I constantly ask him, “Who sings this?” He’s probably like good lord woman, don’t you know by now?? (maybe not really, maybe he pays no attention to how many times i ask, but i always feel like i get annoying) I’m really bad figuring out lyrics too. I often do the classic gloss-over to words I don’t know for sure. You know, you’re singing along great then you hit that one spot on which you’re a little unsure, so your voice gets a notch lower and you try to just smear some words together that sound like the real thing. There’s one song in particular where I just figured out a line a few days ago – REO Speedwagon’s “Time For Me To Fly”. When they say, “Enough of the jealousy, And the intoleration…” I never knew what that last word was, then all of a sudden I heard it again on the radio the other day and it’s like a light bulb went off in my head. Ah ha! Intoleration, that’s what it is!
Maybe this is why I hate karaoke too – I don’t want to have to learn the words to a song as I’m reading them on a monitor in front of a bar full of people. But I’m sure everyone would just be so blown away by my beautiful singing voice they wouldn’t even notice if I flubbed a few words in typical SM fashion. (joke. i can’t sing for crap)
And maybe someday I’ll finally figure out who all the artists and bands are that have been playing these songs I love for all these years. Meh, probably not. I’ll just keep bugging R and asking, “Who sings this?” 🙂
Sorry guys, I’m messing around with the theme on my blog right now, so if you’ve visited a couple times and each time the site looks different don’t worry. You’re not going crazy, I’m just trying to figure out what I like best. 🙂
