OH NO!

Omg!!! I completely missed my Friday 5 post! I feel horrible! I love to blog and try not to miss a day, but since I took on another job, I’m having trouble finding time to connect with y’all.  I’ve just realized that it’s Saturday!  That’s what a never ending work week will do to a person.  I need a break!

I should settle into it sometime this week and hopefully get back to who I am at the core, not just a line cook or a driver or a personal assistant.  I’m working on it and I’m excited to share all of my new developments.  I miss blogging.

What’s for dinner?

I love this time of year!! The garden is producing almost everything you could possibly want to eat, and there are still lots and lots of blooms on the squash, cucumber, melon, pole beans and zucchini plants as well as the fruit trees! I’m so excited! Brought in quite a haul today. Plenty to have a nice dinner and drop a few peppers in the pickling brine!

Too bad we don’t have any ripe tomatoes yet, but I did find some at the market. So tonight’s dinner will be roasted baby root veggies (carrots, turnips, potatoes, kohlrabi, and onions), steamed green beans with slivered almonds, fried green tomatoes, and a cold cucumber, tomato and onion salad. Oh, I’ll grill some pork chops too…for those pesky carnivores! LOL

What’s for dinner at your house?

My day in pictures

Rabbit Stew starter kit?? (Don’t flip out, it’s just a joke)

The girls waiting to be judged at the 4-H fair.

Getting ready for today’s horse show.

He was wishing someone had pulled his “bangs” out from under his bridle.

We had a good morning at the fair. The kids I went to watch did very well in their rabbit classes. 10 first place and 7 second place ribbons between the two! Very proud of them…

and then my day went bad!

It’s just the water pump, but seeing my baby leaving, on the back of a wrecker is enough to turn a good day bad, in a heartbeat!

Feeling sorry for myself.

Why is it that when you find your life in a somewhat volatile state, everything blows up, every single time.  There’s no way to keep it from happening, nothing in particular that we could have done differently.  Our only option is to sit back and watch things we’ve worked hard for fall in shambles at our feet.  Maybe I should contemplate the fact that when one tiny thing goes wrong, it can’t just go by itself, it must take larger and larger things with it, until you are standing on the street with your hands in the air, thinking “what the hell did I do wrong?”

Since it’s impossible to go back in time (without a ‘flux capaciter’, that is), and take steps to keep that teensy weensy pebble in place, we have no choice but to deal with the rockslide.  The question is, how do you keep from being burried so deep in it that you suffocate?  Oh, and why do I feel like I’m the only one trying to move the rocks from on top of us.

—————

I’m at a complete standstill on the house.  I can’t go any further without help.  Dad won’t move the rest of his crap out, or even come and tell me what he wants me to do with it.  Finally there is a plan for a roof, possibly the most important part of the house, since it’s leaking and all.  The problem is that I need man-power, and I’m not getting any help.

We are working on the ‘pay as we go’ plan as I refuse to finance things, no matter how impatient we get.  I must say though, that it’s much easier to pay as you go if you don’t have to keep sinking money into vehicles, that seem to have new issues every day!  Within one week of putting the house on hold to get hubby into a different work vehicle, my car decided to do something stupid.  I’m thinking that a loud squeal followed by the battery light flashing is a bad thing.  I brought it home and parked it, but no one has had time to look at it just yet.  With a little luck it won’t cut into the budget enough to effect the progress on the house.

It’s FRIDAY! Time for my Friday 5.

Bless the Friday 5 for giving us something to blog, on that last day of the work week, when we just have nothing left in our feeble minds.

This week the catagory is “Scattergories”.  It’s simple!  First you go to this online letter generator and reset the “number of random letter sequences” to 1 and click the button!  You will get a letter to use for the answers to the questions below.

1. What random letter was generated by the online random-letter generator? (this doesn’t really count as one of your five questions)

My random letter was “Y”. (You’re kidding me, right??)

2. With what famous person, whose name begins with the letter in question #1, would you most like to be stuck on a desert island?

Hmmm…. Yoko Ono?? (What kind of a sadist gives a person the letter Y to play Scattergories with??) At least she’d bring music! Rofl!  Maybe she’ll bring this hat….and let me borrow it!!!

3. What food item, whose name begins with the letter in question #1, can always be found in your pantry?

Ohhh…this one’s easy!

Yucky food! I love to cook, and am constantly trying new recipes that I find on the net, or see on t.v. Now and then we get lucky and the food is really good, but most of the time the ingredients just live in the pantry. Funny how something looks so good, but when you actually find out what’s in it, not so much.

4. What song, whose title begins with the letter in question #1, always makes you feel good?

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing an old disco song by Leo Sayer. You can’t help but chair-dance when you hear this song! I actually had a little baton routine to this song when I was in 3rd grade!

5. What is your least-favorite film whose title begins with the letter in question #1?

You, Me, and Dupree Okay, I didn’t really hate this film, but it wasn’t really my kind of comedy.

6. What unusual animal, whose name begins with the letter in question #1, would be a fun pet?

Oh, this is easy, (yeah, right) I would love to have a Yapok!!! You know, the aquatic version of the opossum. Wouldn’t it be cool? A wet little rodent, twitchy pink nose, tiny ears, beady eyes, webbed claws. Awwww…I can’t wait to get one! (Okay, you’re right. I googled this one.)

Life on a Tuesday.

Hello and welcome to my blog all about my house and it’s history!  Today we’re going to talk about my cousin’s wedding and my upcoming job interveiw!  (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)

My day started early.  I needed to get moving because I had an appointment at 3 o’clock to have my bridesmaid’s dress altered, and I didn’t have shoes yet!  I grabbed a cup of coffee at the C-store across the way and drove to the nearest shoe store, 20 miles away.  I couldn’t believe my luck, the first store, first pair I tried, perfect fit and style!  I went to the cash register and waited…and waited…and waited.  At least ten minutes passed (I hate these self serve stores, but cheap is good for shoes you’ll only wear once) before someone actually acknowledged my presence.  Then she came to the register and didn’t even say “hello” or anything.  She rang up my twenty dollar shoes and I gave her a one hundred dollar bill.  It’s what I had.  She then treated me like I was a complete moron and said, “Like I can break that!”  Wow!  I haven’t been keeping money in the bank so I had to call hubby to see if there was at least $21.39 in there so I could use my debit card.  I ended up writing a check and then going straight to the bank to deposit money.  If I didn’t hate to shop as much as I do, I’d have gone somewhere else.  Instead I just felt sorry for her because she obviously hates her job.

After that, I killed some time at my dad’s house and then headed over to have my dress altered.  Funny how you try on the size and the style you want in the store, then they order it in the right color and it cuts you in half when you get it.  There’s no way I’ve gained that much weight in this amount of time…or is there?  Betty, the lady altering my dress, told me that it’s hard telling how many times that dress in the store had been tried on, and that it was probably stretched out.  What a nice sentiment, but I’m still going to have to lose 10 pounds to make it hang properly.

Somewhere in the midst of all of that, I got a phone call from a number that I didn’t recognize.  It’s a good thing I answered it, because it was the owner of a restaurant that I’d applied to some time ago.  I was interested in a cooking position that they had available at that time.  I didn’t get the job, but apparently their first choice didn’t work out, so now I’m up.  Part of me wants to tell them to “stick it”, but a bigger part of me would like to have a little something to pay the bills.  I’ll go tomorrow morning at ten for an interview.

I’m actually looking forward to getting back into the scheduled workforce.  I think it will help with my writing time also.  Seems when you don’t have to punch a clock, people don’t consider your writing “work” and don’t mind interrupting.  But when you punch a clock and then try to take some time writing, they consider your feelings a little more.  Maybe it takes that “time clock job” for them to realize that you do not have all the time in the world to get things done.  I don’t know the reason, but I do know that I get more done when I am pressed for time.  Wish me luck!!

It’s Treasure Hunt Tuesday!

In true Tuesday tradition, I’ve found my treasure!  Thanks to my dear friend over at Little Conversations, I’m now in constant search of little literary gems to share on Tuesdays!

You hold me without touch

You keep me without chains

I never wanted anything so much than to drown in your love and not feel your rain.

Again I’ve pulled mine from the lyrics of a song.  –Gravity by Sara Bareilles

Feel free to share your gem here or at Little Conversations!

Why does moving have to be such a pain?

I’ve known that we were going to be moving this summer since mid-May, but do you think I’ve packed yet?  Nope!  I took a few things over to the big house during that first week (pictures, dustables, books, etc.) but I probably could have packed some other things by now.  There have been a couple times that I’ve actually picked up an empty box and went into a room with good intenetions, but then I think “what if I need this before we get moved in?”  I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a professional procrastinator.  I’ve been working at it my entire life and I think that I may be better at procrastinating than I am at any other single thing.  Hmmm, is there a market for that by chance?  I could be on Oprah!

“…and how did you make your first million?”

“Oh thank you Oprah.  I just put it off and put it off unitl I had a million dollars!”

I keep thinking that there isn’t anything that can be packed right now because we don’t have a definite move in date yet, but if I’m honest with myself, we haven’t used the Wii, DVDs, anything in the buffet or china cabinet, my sewing machine, or even taken a book out of the bookcase in months and months.  I probably could go ahead and pack up those things without disrupting our lives much.

Another downfall is that my husband is even more of a procrastinator than I am!  How anything ever gets done around this place is beyond me!!   Apparently I’m not the only one.  If you google “procrastinate” you’ll find 1.42 million results!  I don’t feel so bad anymore!

Lazy Sunday

Why is it that morning smacks you in the face when you’re least expecting it?  I stayed up way too late writing and then fell asleep on the sofa watching TV Land.  Just 4 hours later my sister called to ask if I’d check on my dad.  He wasn’t answering his phone and that was very unusual.  Luckily hubby was already out and about town so I asked him to stop at dad’s in his ventures.  Thank goodness all was well, he’d just decided to sleep in this morning.

I had so many plans for things to do “tomorrow” when the sun went down last night, yet all I have done today is go to my sister’s softball game.  My list was long.  Finish clearing the junk out of the parlor and then give it a good spring cleaning, shop for paint or wallpaper for the upstairs bedrooms, get everything out of our bedroom so that we can pull the carpet up and fix the floor underneath and hopefully get a few more boxes packed and moved to the house.  The best part about living in a house that big is that you can remodel parts of it while living there, and not feel like you’re in a construction zone!

There is still time though, it’s only 3 o’clock.  I think I’ll go find something for lunch and take a nap!

Weekend Gardening

I was planning to take a break from research and work on the house today.  My plans were foiled once again!  I started on the parlor (turned bar room) this morning but it was hot in there and even my ipod didn’t keep me company, so I found myself on the porch instead.  I really love that porch!  Soon my dad saw me outside and asked if I wanted to ride with him to the farm and see what the garden had produced since yesterday.  It is really looking good! 

 

We found some nice cucumbers that were ready, a few snow peas that were leftover from yesterday’s harvest and then thinned the carrots, onions and turnips.  I like to keep the baby vegetables that we get from thinning.  They are so tender and flavorful!  I grabbed a couple green tomatoes also because hubby loves them fried.  This was today’s haul.

 

Oh!  I forgot all about the peppers!  We have banana peppers galore!  Dad and I were trying to think of something to do with them so we sliced them up and put them in a solution of 1:1 vinegar and water and added canning salt.  After a few days in the fridge they were okay but missing something.  Dad dug through the refrigerator and came out with a jar of pickled jalapenos!  So we sliced a fresh jalapeno and added it along with the few pepper rings left in the jar and about half the remaining juice!  Here we are three days later and OH MY!!!  They are wonderful!!! 

Tonight we are having roasted baby root vegetables, fried green tomatoes, and angel hair pasta with grated parmesan cheese for dinner!  I love summertime food!