Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A (brief?) hiatus

We’ve been very busy lately, and I’ve been trying to convince myself that it’s only temporary… but I’ve begun to realize that it really isn’t.  I signed up for a general education class this period, with the expectation that it would be an easy one (thinking I’d be quite occupied with the house) but there’s are a lot of required participations, AND we have to do a group project.  (Do any of you like those?)  So it turned out to be way more than I bargained for, and an absolutely gigantic drain on my time.
We finally closed on the construction loan Tuesday, so that will get going sometime in the next couple of weeks as well.  We’re already busy patting ourselves on the back for hiring contractors - now that we have the money, anything that happens from here on out is somebody else’s problem.  Whoopeee!

I’m building a Leaning Tower of cooking magazines on the kitchen table, as a monument to the things I don’t have the time to do lately - like clipping recipes and cooking healthy, tasty meals.  I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t posted pictures of the baby shower, or blogged about the party, but here’s the thing: it’s just not going to happen.  I just don’t have the time.  So this is my official announcement.  I’m taking a break because I can’t keep this up right now.  Maybe Jeremy will contribute every now and then….

But then again, let’s be realistic.  We’ve been eating a lot of pizza around here.


Written by Angela at 6:50 pm - Filed under Our Little World - 1 Comment

Monday, April 28, 2008

A full weekend

Jeremy and I had many-many adventures this weekend, and for the first time in separate states!  Obviously I’ll have to go to work soon, so we’ll write with more details later, but we went for hikes and motorcycle rides, catered a baby shower, attended an Iron Sharpens Iron seminar, and had sushi for the first time.  It was a good weekend, although a little rushed for both of us.

It is very, very good to be home.


Written by Angela at 6:39 am - Filed under Our Little World, Friends and Family, In the Kitchen - No Comments

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Anybody like eggs?

I’m testing recipes for my sister’s baby shower brunch, and one of the dishes is Eggs Chevre (ingredient combo and egg-knowledge courtesy of Dan Rosenbach, Red Cottage Restaurant, South Dennis, MA - sorry, no website). The thing is, I’m testing Eggs Chevre “for a crowd”, and I’ll be cooking two dozen eggs at once. We are not going to eat two dozen eggs in one night, eggs really aren’t any good reheated, and I don’t want to throw away most of the pan.

So, do any of you in the area want to stop by? The dish consists of scrambled eggs baked in a large pan in the oven and mixed with Chevre cheese and chives. I will be testing cooking time as well as proportions of add-ins. If you like eggs and don’t mind being a guinea-pig, please leave a comment or give us a call and let me know you’re interested. I’m planning on doing this next week (4/13-4/19), probably on a weeknight. It will be informal, paper plates etc so don’t worry about spending all evening here, you can in-and-out it.


Written by Angela at 3:04 pm - Filed under Our Little World, Friends and Family, In the Kitchen - No Comments

Saturday, April 5, 2008

BTW

Fairpoint officially purchased Verizon this past week.  If any of you live in ME-NH-VT: do you know how we can pay for our phone service??  We haven’t received a bill, and the only reason I know that we’re officially not Verizon customers anymore is that I tried to sign on to the Verizon website and was not allowed.

Apparently Fairpoint is under fire because they promised to maintain an online bill pay option and didn’t.  For this reason alone - never mind that we heard on NHPR this morning that people have already been having problems with their phones (we’re on day 5 of Fairpoint ownership) - we will be switching to cable VoIP and internet.  But in the meantime, I’m assuming we need to pay some kind of Fairpoint bill… and I haven’t seen one… and I don’t want to get cited for a late payment on my credit report!

Somebody please tell me how to pay my phone bill!  Or even get my phone bill!  Please!


Written by Angela at 9:02 pm - Filed under Our Little World - 1 Comment

Bullet points

  • We’ve talked to the bank, and the person filling in for our loan officer last week was shocked that the appraiser put together an appraisal without a written list of material, blueprints, and costs. She will be speaking with her manager and with our loan officer. At the very least the appraisal will need to be re-tooled, and we’re going to argue to have it completely redone by someone else. So the story is not quite over yet.
  • Related: I think I’m finding that I generally need a day to recover in the face of a catastrophe. Night 1 is sleepless and Day 1 is listless, sick-feeling, and better-not-burst-into-tears-at-the-office. Night 2 is exhausted-sleepful. Day 2 is hopeful. It’s that first 24 hours that is a killer.
  • Related: Someone just drove over our lawn again. If things with the house continue to nose-dive, there are a few things we want to do anyway. We want to build a porch, a closet in the bedroom, and a low, pointy wall as a welcome to the trespassers.
  • We went to Concord today and bought our spring/summer clothes. Under $300 to clothe two people for six months, and I needed a completely new wardrobe because I’m different sizes than I was last year. I still need a few cotton cardigans, but stores are pretty desperate with this new recession so there are a lot of sales going on. They should be easy to find.
  • Related: We also had lunch at Ruby Tuesdays today. Two Ruby Minis with fries and the salad bar was just right. Bonus: right now their fresh-squeezed strawberry lemonades have free refills!!
  • We’ve pre-ordered Wii Fit. If we do the house, you’re all invited to play! And if not, well, Wii will travel…. In fact, I believe we will be Wii-ing it up tonight. Link must be lonely.
  • We tried AJs in White River Junction last night, and were very pleased with the atmosphere. The person who sat us was warm and friendly, seemed very at home and made us feel at home. However, we ultimately left very disappointed: it seems that when two people split an entree, they charge for one entree and one salad bar. The salad bar is $9.95. That makes it a ten dollar plate charge. If we had not intended to go in and split a good steak, we never would have known about this policy, since it is not printed on the menu. As it was, we had our appetizer and left. I get that they can’t keep track of who’s using the salad bar and who isn’t, but it occurred to me in the middle of the mushrooms that we were not being charged for the privilege of splitting the appetizer. If you don’t trust people, at least don’t trust them consistently! We were impressed with the atmosphere and will go back some other time when we’ve planned to blow a hundred bucks on dinner. But that’s going to be a while. I’m really feeling ambivalent about the place.
  • I’m still in the middle of a 16-week online class right now, and apparently I’ve already become accustomed to 8-week stints, because this is seriously dragging. At least now I know, and can plan accordingly. I really want this degree, but there are other things I want to learn too, and I’m already lining them up in my head as a post-degree study dream. First and foremost, I want languages. French, Italian, Spanish, Hindustani. Then I want science - a little physics mostly, perhaps some biology (without labs. I hate labs.) And music - I want to find a used French horn, spend some serious time with my harp, and get the piano rebuilt so that I can pick up some Mozart again. I miss Mozart. I was often criticized for it when I was younger because his music was regarded as too “simple”, but Mozart has always been and is still my favorite.
  • Related: My harp is still in the shop. It has been there for three months. It is going to be there for another five weeks until we are in the Concord area again. I’m getting a little miffed. I told Jeremy last night, “Thank G– that I am just trying to pick it up again, and I was not in the middle of studying it!” Can you even imagine? In the middle of a practice session your instrument breaks, and you can’t get it back for four months?? Holy moly.

Written by Angela at 5:15 pm - Filed under Our Little World - No Comments

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A challenge to our readers

Jeremy and I want to take a random day off together, but we don’t want it to be just any day off. I mean, we don’t want to wake up that morning asking each other, “So what are we going to do today?” and end up wasting it all because we can’t think of anything to do. But…. we can’t think of anything to do!

So I proffer this challenge to our readers, in the hopes that we can construct an awesome day:

What should we do on our day off?

The person who comes up with the idea we use will score a dinner invitation for any date beyond the completion of our house project. I’ll make anything you want, as long as I know how or can figure it out - and can get my hands on the ingredients. Alternatively, if you are a long-distance reader and don’t want to make the trip, I will overnight you a batch of our favorite cookies. (Why not your favorite cookies? Because these will be your favorites as soon as you try them. Believe me. This is true. I wish to high heaven I could take credit for the recipe.)

There are a few limits on the ideas we can consider seriously:

  1. It’s too early in the year to hike (too wet)
  2. Gas is very expensive. We don’t want to go father than a half hour
  3. Jeremy doesn’t want to use this day to clean up the yard
  4. We would like to keep the day under $100

So please give us some awesome ideas, and good luck!


Written by Angela at 5:52 pm - Filed under Our Little World - 5 Comments

Thursday, March 13, 2008

A couple of things

First, I finished almost everything on my To-Do list tonight. The only thing I didn’t do was 1/2 of the exercises for my class, but that’s ok because we don’t start the next chapter until 3/22. And I didn’t do that one thing because I really stretched my brain and over-did the “participate [in] online [class]” item. Stretching one’s brain takes time.

Second, I was over at Andy’s website today, and realized anew that he has some seriously beautiful shots of Taiwan. You can click on Andy to the left.

And speaking of pictures, Peter’s project A Picture A Day for 30 Days is shaping up nicely. You might want to give him a click too. I especially like Stairing contest and Sunset on technology. What’s your fave?


Written by Angela at 8:06 pm - Filed under Our Little World, Friends and Family - 1 Comment

Sunday, March 9, 2008

An educated vote - fact or myth?

Jeremy is downstairs with a friend right now, and I don’t have much to do except the homework I don’t want to do, so I’ve started doing some research on the presidential candidates, focusing on McCain and Obama as the most likely contenders.  I started with Obama’s website, (note: I’m not picking only on him because I’m absolutely positive McCain is doing it too) and of course he’s making a bunch of promises without mentioning about how he’s going to accomplish them.  Two that really stood out because they were right next to each other are “Provide a tax cut for working families” (essentially eliminating the income tax for about 10 million people) and “Simplify tax filings for middle class Americans” (by requiring the IRS to offer pre-filled forms based on the documents they receive from your lenders and employers.)  Noble goals.  Helpful to millions, I’m sure.  But reading the little blurbs describing these goals, all I can think is:

WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM??  WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM??!  Simultaneously cut taxes and make it more expensive for the IRS to process them?  Huh?  Basic math folks.  If it takes ten dollars to run the government and you’re only bringing in nine from taxes, then you cut the taxes by 2 dollars and raise the cost of processing them by 2 dollars….  9 - 2 - 2 = 5, and that’s only half of what you need to run the government.
You know what I think?  I think we need an economist slash accountant for president.  When I listen to the airy promises of the candidates, all I can hear is what isn’t said about the details.  What I really want to do is sit each of them down in my kitchen one at a time over some lavender pound cake and tea, and make them give me real numbers in lieu of their hollow promises.

Is there even any point in researching this?  I’m only going to find what they think I want to hear.  How on earth am I supposed to place an educated vote?


Written by Angela at 3:28 pm - Filed under Our Little World, Musings - 1 Comment

Saturday, March 8, 2008

I am the greatest hero who ever lived!

So said Jeremy as he stepped out of the desert dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  I have to say, we’re having just as much fun with this one as we did with Mario Galaxy, only more so because this game is incredibly long.  We just beat a monster by spinning around on a “spinner,” jumping back and forth between twisty tracks to hit him in the head.

We’ve played about 40 hours already, and Ganondorf was only just introduced.  We’ve recovered the pieces of the Shadow Mask, earned the Master Sword, picked up a whole bunch of toys (although we haven’t found the bigger wallet yet which is driving us up the wall), and we’re just heading out to find the pieces of the Mirror of Twilight.  Although we’ve finally started seeing the Triforce symbol here and there, it hasn’t been explained yet and we’re apparently nowhere near that part of the story.  After 40 hours.

Amazing.  I hope these people made a TON of money.


Written by Angela at 8:45 pm - Filed under Our Little World, Toys & Gadgets - 3 Comments

Monday, March 3, 2008

Flashback, forward, someway….

We’ve been working on side-by-side computers tonight, Jeremy working on TrueTech’s website and me working on homework (schoolwork that is, not house-work). I called it quits before Jeremy and started browsing TripAdvisor.

Angela: You know, we should go to the Cape for a vacation this year. It’s been long enough. I bet we could have some fun.

::pause::

Jeremy: Yeah, we could do Diver Ed again.

Angela: Um, that’s in Maine.

Jeremy: Okay… I think I totally just missed what you said.

Angela: I said we should vacation on the Cape this year.

Jeremy: OK. Here’s what’s really funny. You said Cape, which made me think of the ocean, and that’s how I got Bar Harbor out of it.

I am so totally cracking up.


Written by Angela at 10:03 pm - Filed under Jeremyisms, Our Little World - No Comments

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