Tuesday, December 2, 2008
General Banter and Seasonal Busyness
First I had to just show you my big lab Sally. Doesn't she just look so sweet sleeping there? Sally is inside because of the cold weather, which is where she would prefer to be all the time and would be if her hair didn't clog my head up so severely that I am miserable 24/7. Anyway, she was snoozing big time in this picture and I was watching her while she was moving her right paw up and down, I swear it looked like she was driving and shifting gears!! I was laughing so hard. Sometimes she'll move her legs like she's running - that's pretty funny too. And I wish you could have heard her snoring. She and hubs are a snore duo.
It's gonna be a bit quieter on my blog this month, especially on the food front, for a bazillon reasons, so thought I would pop in this evening and blab a bit to get it out of my system for a day or three.
I'm WAY behind on my online coursework and running out of time to finish it so I gotta buckle down and focus. Basically I have to finish a 6-month course in about a month and a half now since I've spent very little time on it the last 5 months. I don't know what is wrong with me but I have just not been "into" it. It's for my CLE and a non-credit kind of career course, so the professor set no deadlines. Just gotta finish it in 6 months. Oh well, I tend to work better under pressure anyway.
I also goofed on my Angel Food box for this month and by the time I realized it was pick-up day, I had missed the pick-up time and my order had been given out to other people! Apparently with the switch over to internet ordering their shipment was shorted by some food boxes from what was actually ordered, so the people who managed to remember to show up on time got theirs, but those of us who didn't seem to know what day it was, well we were shorted. Well, big duh for me!
Anyway, I didn't really want a refund, so the pastor was gracious to replace my food order with an equivalent dollar value in other stuff and I ended up with 2 cases of senior meals. These are home style frozen dinners that are made specifically for elders in order to provide them with a balanced meal. I think it's the same type of meals they do these days for those meals on wheels types of things, except they are packaged for Angel Food Ministries. Honestly, since I'm the one who goofed, I was happy to get anything! I've eaten a couple of them and while they aren't like fresh cooked meals full of salt and fat yumminess, they do taste like homemade meals that have been packaged and frozen. So anyway, now I have a large section of my big freezer full of those dinners and hubs and I need to eat them to make room. I guess that means I get a bit of a break from all the shopping, and planning and clean up that goes with the cooking which means that I can focus on that course thing I talked about up there. Cooking takes a lot of time when ya think about it.
I also have a freezer full of steaks piled up from previous Angel Food boxes and I tend to be pretty purist with those - grilled steak, salad and a side of some kind of steamed vegetables. Not a lot of creativity there! One of the advantages about living in the south where winters - what little we have of them - are generally mild and so we pretty much grill outdoors all year round. Course you wouldn't know that here lately because frankly I did a walk-around in my yard this afternoon and it was still pretty darned cold for it only being fall. Over the Thanksgiving holidays it was very spring-like, but it rained almost all day Saturday and then a cold front moved in.
During my walkabout I noticed an area under my fence that was a bit dug up so I think my turtle may have gone off elsewhere to hibernate. Last spring I had a turtle make her way in my yard and she stayed here all summer. That's her up there. I'd gotten pretty attached to her and really enjoyed going outside and having her come up to me for food, so I was hoping she would burrow down in the side garden over the winter and stay, but it looks as if she may have gone off in search of a better spot. I just hope she's safe in this cold. I know that she hatched at least one baby in a debris pile in the back corner of the yard, but I haven't dug around to see if the baby is still there. There are plenty of worms in there and in the compost pile next to it, so the baby might be hibernating back in that pile. While I was out there I grabbed a couple more bell peppers off of the plants and a few green tomatoes that had gotten large enough to do anything with figuring the cold weather will do them in completely this time.
Course Christmas is fast coming up and I still have a few gifts to iron out yet.
Plus, of course, I also need to get the tree up and decorate the house too. In order to get to my decorations, which are in a closet in the back of the garage, generally this means that I have to straighten up and clean the garage a bit first. My house is small and storage is at a premium so with the garage being only a single garage, it tends to take on the characteristics of a storage room. Or the-place-where-everything-with-no-home-lands. So I have to straighten up the garage, unload the storage closet, decide what to use this year, get it all up, and then reload everything back into the closet until it's time to put it all away again. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
I definitely need to get my Christmas cards addressed and out pretty soon here. We got our first one in the mail today. Which reminds me I need some Christmas stamps! Guess that means a trip to the post office too now.
Oh and I also need to make an appointment and get back to the eye doctor because these new contacts are definitely not workin' for me at all. I took those suckers out and didn't even wear them at all last week. So in other words I'm right back where I was before I ever went to the eye doctor to begin with!
Hubs also has a birthday coming up in less than 2 weeks and believe me when I say this man thinks his birthday should be a national holiday! He expects to be king of the day I tell ya! It's really kinda funny, so I have to figure out what I'm gonna do to make his day a very big deal. I think I'm gonna get him a new pair of boots so I gotta run by the boot store. He's a western boot kinda guy ... that all he wears, and I usually get him a pair every year either at Christmas or his birthday, but last year I didn't get him any because they're pretty pricey, so that'd be a good gift for this year. I'm thinking some black ones this time.
Somewhere in here I've got to make a shopping run for household items and groceries because the list is getting long. Hubs is pretty good about picking up a few things here and there for me, but on bigger runs, well ... not so much.
Oh and I gotta run out to the home store too to pick up some birdseed and squirrel food because that's just about gone and they sure have come to rely on that supply.
And then there's that four letter word D-I-E-T.
Ugh.
I knew it was coming back to haunt me any day now, I've just been in a carb heaven form of denial. I spent the entire year last year trying to low carb to lose weight and while I did lose some weight, then I just stalled, got discouraged, gave up and put it all back on. I found out real quick that my body needs to eat more balanced and virtually no starches is not balanced. Not that I've been doing that here lately or anything! Nope. I've just been pretty much eating. Whatever I want.
So then after the low carb reality hit me, I was gonna try to just eat more balanced and more reasonable, lower the fat a bit and follow Weight Watchers to keep the calories right without alot of tracking. But then ... I started following and falling in love with the food blogs and cooking real food again, and I decided to revive my own blog, and start documenting my cooking and well, like I said, there was no rhyme or reason. I've just been eating! Whatever I want!
I guess it's no secret that I love my carbs for true, and my sweets too apparently based on my recipes here lately, but I really do need to try and reign it in just a bit between now and Christmas so I can enjoy the Christmas meal without guilt. My daughter in law has decided to host Christmas dinner at their pretty new house instead of doing it at her grandmother's so now hubs and I get to be part of the family celebration too! Last Christmas my grandson was only a couple of month's old so this Christmas should really be fun and I'm so excited!!
Anyway, back to that dirty diet word. I'm carrying quite a bit of excess water weight right now from all the carbage lately, and I need to dial it down a bit and get back to eating 3 square meals, more balance with a protein, carb and veggie at each of them, doing more salads, remembering to take my vitamins every day and my calcium magnesium at night, and drinking more tea and definitely more water, instead of so many diet sodas. Even though I can hardly bear the thought, I might even do a bit of low carb (eek! did I just SAY that?) because it only works for me in the short term anyway, but it usually knocks off the water weight pretty fast before it quits working. We'll have to see.
And somewhere in here I want to try my hand at decorating some cookies too. Oh I would love to bring some to Christmas dinner. Which of course totally conflicts with what I just said in that paragraph above doesn't it? Don't know if I'll get to it, but let's just say it's on "the list."
Wow, it really is gonna be a busy time this month! And I'm pretty sure there's a handful of other things I'm totally forgetting at the moment.
Anyway, it doesn't seem unusual with blogs to kinda slow down a bit around the holidays because I've already been noticing it with other blogs that I visit. Heck, except for a handful of people that I know who stop by my itty bitty corner of the internet, I don't think anybody will really notice! But if you happen to miss me, these are just some of things that I will be preoccupied with for a bit.
Okay, guess I've goofed off enough now! (See how easy it is for me?) See ya real soon.
~
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I haven't gotten my decorations down yet either. My husbanc keeps talkin' about gettin the tree up. I wish HE would. I am envious of your good weather in the winter time. I grill out year round but sometimes I am standing out there while it is snowin'. Good post.
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