Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Jimmy's Party Pic

Since I was unable to post this last week, here's a nice group pic from Jimmy's party. There were loads more people there, but this is the best of the group pics that I have. As you can tell, we are all in a few beers by this time, LOL. It was definately a good night!



18 and 0!

Wooohooo! We're 18 and 0! I'm so excited that the Pats are in the Superbowl again this year! What a year to be a Beantown sports fan!

We enjoyed hanging out and watching the game on Sunday. Shana and Danny came over and I made some chili and taco pinwheels. Shana made the yummiest potato thingies with boursin cheese. They were so good and seemingly pretty easy to make. I'll have to give them a try.

The rest of the weekend was pretty chill. We went to see a couple of houses on Saturday. They were nice, but I think the bedrooms were made for hobbits - they were soo tiny. Oh well... We enlisted the help of the realtor we met with to help us scope out some other houses. She seems really nice and I think she'll do a great job for us. Michael and I are pretty much done with looking throught the paper and searching online. She already had some houses in mind that will be coming on soon for us to look at. Do I dare say that maybe we'll be in a house of our own by my birthday? Only time will tell...

Michael had to work on Monday so I was able to lounge around for the morning then did my dry cleaning in the afternoon. I used those sheets that you put in the dryer. Those things are great. I did 12 pairs of pants, a skirt, 3 shirts and a bunch of sweaters. I figure I saved over $100 doing it this way rather than taking them to the actual drycleaners. =) It did take a little time. You can do each batch of 4 or 5 things in a 20 minute cycle. Well, since it was soo freezing outside and I had no intention of leaving the house, I was quite content to just run into the kitchen every so often and put the next batch in. I also tackled the mountain of laundry baskets and got all of those clothes put away. I can actually walk on my side of the bed now. Yippee! I think I'm actually FLYing again! Now, let's just get that guest room all finished up...

That's all for now.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

It's Thursday!

Yay! It's Thursday and it's almost time to go home! I am very excited to have a long weekend coming up. We were away in NYC last weekend to go to a friend's surprise 40th birthday party. It was a load of fun and we got to see a lot of our friends from the Catskills days. I was going to post a pic, but apparently the site is having an issue so I'll have to do that later.

While we were in the Big Apple, we went to Mike's restaurant on Saturday night. It was soo yummy. I will definately go back next time we're in the city. We finished up the night at Paddy Reilly's for some good ol' diddly diddly music and a few pints.

We came home Sunday early evening and luckily had some time to recover before the work week began. I must say, I am really looking forward to just chilling at home this weekend with no real plans other than watching the Patriots play on Sunday and making a big crockpot full of chili. Yum.

I'm thinking tonight might be a Sonny's night for dinner if Michael isn't working too late. I hope so, I haven't been there in a while on a Thursday.

Anyhoo, I need to pack up here and call it a day. I hope you all have a nice evening! Toodles!

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Happy Hump Day!

Hello all!

Last night I spent a little time (maybe a tad more than 15 minutes) in the guest room. My project of the night was to get the TV and surround system re-hooked up. Thankfully this set up was much easier than the living room so I was a happy camper. Sadly, the clicker for that TV seems to have gone missing so I think I'll need to pick up a new one. Luckily I know they have them at Radio Shack.

I think tonight's project will be to swap the furniture so the flow will be better.

So far so good with getting down to business in 2008. I've pulled out my mini control journal and have actually been looking at it. I have a full size binder that lives in the kitchen, but I've found my mini one that I can take with me keeps me on track. It has my home and work routines and it feels so good to be able to cross the tasks off as I've completed them.

I've also been doing well with my other 2008 goals. My sink is staying shiny, I've been blogging more, I'm more focused and not as easily distracted and quitting smoking is going well too! Go me!

Monday, January 7, 2008

Brie and Mushroom Toasts

Michael and I made these yummy bites last night and enjoyed them while we watched tv. Here's the recipe (please note that these amounts are approximations as I just threw this together and didn't really measure):

Brie and Mushroom Toasts
Ten toasts

10 slices of French baguette, sliced thin
10 slices of Brie, cut to fit baguette slices
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
1 cup (+/-) sliced mushrooms, chopped
2T butter
1T olive oil
Splash of wine, I used Chardonnay
Salt and pepper to taste

Lightly toast the french bread slices in the oven or toaster oven.

Meanwhile, in a small skillet, saute onion in butter and olive oil for a few minutes. Then add chopped mushrooms and season with salt and pepper. Saute a few minutes more and then add some wine. Let the alcohol cook off for another few minutes.

To assemble, take a piece of the toasted bread, top it with a slice of Brie and then a spoonful of the mushroom mixture. Place assembled toasts on a baking sheet and place back in oven to melt the cheese - 10-15 minutes.

Enjoy!

Weekend Wrap-up

Well, we finally have our new speaker system set up in the living room! We were totally getting beaten up by it on Friday evening and could only get 3 of the 5 speakers working. Grrr...

Anyhoo, we decided to just go up to bed and look at it again with fresh eyes in the morning. Michael was off to work very early Saturday morning so I was left to fend for myself in the sea of cables. After lots of finagling, I was able to get all the speakers working! Yay me! Then, I couldn't get the cable picture to come through so I went to the cable office and traded our cable so that it would be compatible with our new receiver. The picture was still all wacky so after a several calls into tech support, we ended up plugging the cable picture into the tv and the sound into the receiver and voila! We have surrond sound tv and digital picture!

Since this project took the better part of the day on Saturday, the guest room still has not been addressed fully so I don't have any progress pictures for that. I did survey the mess and realized that it's not as much as I thought so maybe I can tackle it the Flylady way of 15 minutes at a time. Maybe this way I can get a lot of it cleaned up before next weekend so I won't have to slave over it and I can enjoy my weekend.

I did get most of my other tasks taken care of so all was not lost for the weekend. Sadly, the Christmas tree is down, but I will be leaving the window candles and wreath up for another couple of weeks. I also shined my kitchen sink and left a nice paste in it this morning so hopefully it will be even shinier when I rinse it off this evening when I get home. I boogied my car to get rid of all of the junk on the passenger floor. I'm going to vaccuum it on my way home tonight so it will look great. I also finally dropped the bag of clothes I have been driving around with for weeks off at the Goodwill bin when we went grocery shopping on Sunday.

We had a nice evening last night watching tv and eating some yummy goodies we made.

That's all for now. I'll post more later.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Get it together in 2008

This year I am determined to get it together. As many of you know, I am a fan of Flylady. I've got the basic routines down but I don't have the whole system running all the time just yet. I know what I need to do so I just need to "get off my frannie" as Flyladay would say, and do it. This year's Flylady slogan is "Do it now! Don't wait! Things get done in 2008!" I am going to do my best to stick with it and have our home be even more of a sanctuary than it already is.

Part of this mission will be to figure out a system for our mail. We get so much junk and it just piles up. I try to recyle/shred it but it's hard to keep up with it all. Any ideas?

I really want to get my weekly routine back in full force so that the house will run itself and I can have more time to enjoy fun things and not feel like I'm spending all my free time cleaning and straightening.

I also want to get my work routine back in line. Though I get everything done, it's not the way I'd like it to be running.

I have been so distracted and a bit of a space shot these last few months that I can't stand it anymore.

I know I can do it, I just need to get moving. OK, enough talk, I am getting moving! =)

Reclaiming the Guest Room

Michael just called and he has to work tomorrow so I guess we'll have a quiet night tonight. He's on his way back from shopping and he was able to get the speakers we wanted for the living room. So movie night it is!

My plan for tomorrow is to once and for all get our guest room back to a guest room. Michael moved our desk to the attic landing and it looks great so now our guest room will only be a guest room! Yay! We're going to set up our old tv in there too with the old dvd player so it will be nice to be able to watch movies in there.

It's such a disaster right now, but I am going to conquer it! LOL. I have an idea of how to rearrange the furniture so I think it will look great when it's finished. I'm also going to hang the curtains I got for that room months ago but I just haven't gotten around to it.

I'll post some pics of before and after tomorrow.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year All!!

I hope you all had a safe and happy night. Michael and I had fun. His cousin and his girlfriend came over and we hung out and toasted with some bubbly. Our neighbors had some people over too so we partied between the houses. We went out for breakfast on New Years Day and it was yummy and a great way to start the new year.

We also chucked the cigarettes. I started on the patch and Michael's taking his Chantix. Hopefully it will stick. So far we are on day 4 of being smoke free. Yay us! Sean came by last night and came in smoking (he didn't realize we quit) and we were like "Get outta here with that!!" So he went outside and put it out and then came back in. We didn't realize what a trigger it would be. I've found that when I'm sitting in the living room and I crave a cigarette, I start a crossword puzzle and the urge passes. I am going to be the queen of crossword words while we go through this - who knew there were so many clues for an asp. Almost every puzzle so far has had a snake in it, LOL.

Oooo, we also got an awesome new stand for our tv. I'm so excited! It makes our living room much bigger. I'll have to take a picture to show you. The ones I have came out pretty blurry.

We'll I'm off to work on a slideshow for the Kodak frame we got for Christmas.

Happy Friday!