Friday Fluff: Must Lay On All The Things

On Tuesday, I invited some friends over for a movie and craft night. My friend Sara was working on a scrapbook-type project, and brought over her bin of supplies. Elliott spent about three hours laying in that bucket amidst all the bows and papers. She loved it.

My own project was quite a large undertaking, and I am not quite finished yet. I am finally — FINALLY! — framing our wedding photos and arranging a gallery wall over the stairs. I'd been purchasing cheap frames from Goodwill with the intention of painting them, and all my frames had been sitting around untouched for months. So I made it my goal for the evening to get all the frames painted and re-assembled. I'll be posting about that as soon as I get all the frames level on the wall, since right now it looks like something that should be in the Burrow and not in a house lived in by regular Muggles.

What projects have you been working on lately?

Grown-Up Veggies

I swear, last week Matt told me he liked brussels sprouts. He has no recollection of this conversation ever happening, but it's too late, I already went to the Farm Patch and got some fresh ones.

I hadn't eaten brussels sprouts in at least 15 years. Since my parents weren't really cooks, I only ever tried frozen sprouts, which were always in a weird sauce and kind of terrible. But hey, tastes change over time. I didn't like eggs when I was a kid, and look at me now! (Well, you can't see me ... but I do enjoy eggs for the most part. Especially if they're deviled and sprinkled with paprika.)

The unfortunate thing about eating a lot of frozen veggies as a kid — who are we kidding, as an adult too — is that I am kind of clueless as to what to do with fresh veggies beyond steaming them. I thought about roasting the tiny cabbages, except that I don't actually know how to do that. So I threw them in the Crock Pot instead.

I served them with pork chops (and let's be honest, I only thought to pair brussels sprouts with pork chops because there was a picture of sprouts with them at the bottom of the recipe).

Aaaaand the verdict is ...

Not bad! Brussels sprouts are not going to go down in history as my favorite vegetable of all time or anything, but they were fine. Matt agreed with my assessment. The butter + Dijon sauce was good though, and I might use it on other veggies in the future.

Do you like brussels sprouts? Any foods you hated as a kid but love now?

Commercials I Saw While Watching Sports

I have watched A LOT of sports on TV this week. Between eight hours on a sports network-endorsed charter bus traveling to and from Arlington, visiting family during the U.S. Open, and Matt watching a few more baseball games since we've been home, I've seen so much sports coverage that Matt owes me about three days solid of E! and VH1.

Anyway, though these various TVs were constantly broadcasting Sports Center or golf or recaps of baseball games I don't care about, I did see a few new commercials that I thought were fun.

Granted, I saw this at 1 a.m. on a bus, but my tired brain I thought "Oh snap!" :)

I like the premise behind this — having always liked Peanuts — but I think it kind of makes the insurance guy look like a jerk, even though he's touting a service price that's actually really good. I think they could have spun the "5 cents" premise in a more positive way, so Lucy and Charlie Brown could get on board with the actual price instead of trying to undermine it.

I really liked this one! I think it is clever. Just goes to show that all of us may want to have adventures, but sometimes taking the leap is literally just too scary!

Have you seen any good commercials lately?

The Happiest Place on Earth

A few weeks ago, Matt won tickets to a Texas Rangers' baseball game from a local radio station. The prize included not only two game tickets, but food vouchers, two hats and T-shirts, and a ride from College Station to Arlington and back on a a Fox Sports Southwest-sponsored charter bus.

The game was Saturday, so we headed up to the Ballpark in Arlington to see the Rangers beat up on the Houston Astros. The bus dropped us off a little early, so Matt wanted to walk around the ballpark for a while. From the second he walked through the gates, he had the biggest grin on his face; it was like seeing a kid light up on Christmas morning as he took in the smell of ballpark food and the sight of thousands of other fans. "I think this might be my favorite place in the entire world," he told me.

A hot dog, garlic fries and a half a Diet Coke later, and I still couldn't decide where my favorite place on earth would be. I think I'm just always happy to go wherever it is we're going, and maybe I don't have a favorite place. Or maybe it's something silly, like how I couldn't wait to fall into my own bed at 1 a.m. because it's really hard to nap on a bus.

The Rangers won, of course. It was a really good game. Then we loaded back onto the bus for the long ride home, back to the best bed on earth.

What is your favorite place?

Routine, Interrupted

Matt and I watch a good amount of TV. We're young, we're busy and we like to eat dinner while watching our favorite shows. (Not that I need justification, but we genuinely use our TV time to bond, and until a time comes when we have impressionable velociraptors running around, I don't see a problem with it.)

But all of our shows have now ended for the season. We have to wait several more months to get new episodes of The Big Bang Theory and The Amazing Race, and as much as I love How I Met Your Mother, I'm getting kind of tired of the re-runs.

True story. via

And now that The Pitch has finished it's short summer run, we are down to one show on the DVR for the summer.

ONE.

And it is So You Think You Can Dance.

So we're in desperate need of summer shows. I'm not really interested in things that aren't currently airing. We don't have streaming Netflix and we don't usually watch TV on our computers. We don't have HBO, Showtime, or any channel that is above 100 on the cable box. We just want to watch SOMETHING that is entertaining, on any day of the week, that can get us through the summer until better stuff comes on.

What are you watching this summer? What do you recommend?

Fifty-Two Books: Part 5

I can't believe this rounds out the halfway point for my 52 books in a year challenge!

22) "Living Dead in Dallas" by Charlaine Harris

I think I would have liked to continue reading this series, but Book #2 is the last one I have, so I guess it's time to focus on other, non-"fluff" reading. Bummer, since I have enjoyed this series so far. Continuing from my last review, Sookie's telepathic abilities are out for hire when one of Bill's vampire friends contracts her out to a vampire nest in Dallas, so she can determine who kidnapped one of their members from a local bar. In addition, Sookie's friend and coworker Lafayette is murdered and stuffed into the car of Bon Temps' private investigator. Can Sookie figure out who the killer is and save the kidnapped vampire without winding up dead herself? (You already know the answer: yes, because there are a lot of books in this series. But it's entertaining nonetheless.)

23) "The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus" by Lee Strobel

Bible study pick. We dug into some heavy books during the spring semester, and they have led to some really great discussions. In "Christ," Chicago journalist Strobel does not believe Jesus is the Messiah (or really, that anyone needs a Messiah in the first place), and is horrified when his wife becomes a Christian. So, in true journalistic fashion, he decides to interview the leading experts in the country on Christianity and Jesus to try to prove that the religion is not sound enough to hold water. But he is surprised when the gospels hold up to historical, archaeological, medical, psychological and scientific scrutiny.

24) "The Shawshank Redemption" by Stephen King

I had never read anything by Stephen King before (other than his column in Entertainment Weekly), mainly because I'd pigeon-holed him as a horror writer, and I don't like scary stories. But Matt took a trip to Louisiana in May for a friend's bachelor party and picked up the "Shawshank" audiobook for the drive, then passed it along to me. In Shawshank Prison, Red is serving three consecutive life terms for killing his wife and two of his neighbors. While he's serving his time, banker Andy Dufresne is charged and convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, despite his claimed innocence. The brutality of prison life wears plenty of men down, but over the years Andy figures out how to manipulate the warden, the guards and the other inmates and exacts his revenge. The book was fantastic. We watched the movie a few weeks later, and it was also excellent.

25) "The Crooked Hinge" by John Dickson Carr

I really enjoyed this mystery novel, though I found the ending a little ridiculous. I  found it quick and engaging, if not a quite tangled story. Sir John Farnleigh is a wealthy man with an inherited estate and a good life, until another man shows up claiming to be the real John Farnleigh, and accuses the former of being an imposter. His former childhood tutor has the fingerprints of the real John, and subjects the two of them to a fingerprint test, but before the results can be discovered, the fingerprint evidence is stolen and one of the John Farnleighs is found with his throat slashed. But which John Farnleigh is dead — the real one or the imposter? And was it a guilty suicide or a malicious murder?

26) "11/22/63" by Stephen King

THIS BOOK WAS SO GOOD, OMG GO READ IT RIGHT NOW. I think in a matter of weeks I've gotten addicted to Stephen King books. "11/22/63" tells the story of Jake Epping, a present-day English teacher. Jake often visits a diner, Al's Fatburger, and as Al succumbs to cancer, he tells Jake how he had stumbled upon a wormhole years ago that allows him to travel back to the summer of 1958, every visit a "reset" of the time before. Al convinces Jake that he has to go back and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, a task Al was sure would change history for the better, but was not able to complete due to his illness. However, both Al and Jake discover the past does not want to be changed, and will do anything in its power to prevent change from happening; even the smallest alterations to history can cause ripples in the future. Jake knows he'll have to stay in the '50s and '60s for more than five years in order to prevent the assassination, and after so long of living in the past, he might not want to come back to the present after all.

What are you reading right now?

Great Expectations

When I was about 10, I had this grand vision of what I would be like at age 16. I imagined that I would have waist-length hair that was gorgeous and shiny and supermodel-esque. I would drive a black Geo Tracker — chosen because when my dad was buying a new car in 1997, I got to sit in the driver's seat of one and thought I looked like Hot Stuff. Clearly, that allllll happened. Geo was totally still in business when I turned 16, and I'm a hair model right now, dontcha know? ;)

———

I've been thinking a lot this year about life expectations. I always expected that I would graduate college, find a job I loved right out of school, be ridiculously successful and fabulous at it and make a good living supporting my now-husband as he finished his million years of schooling. And now that we're here, I've been trying not to set expectations for any future phase of our lives, because a) for the first time ever, I'm not sure what my expectations for my 20s are supposed to be, and b) I keep being disappointed when reality doesn't live up to my perfect picture of How Things Should Be. A few weeks ago, Matt commented, "I expected that by age 25, with two bachelor's degrees and a master's between us, we would be bringing in like, (salary) a year." Which we are nowhere close to, thanks and gig 'em.*

For a hot minute, I felt really depressed, like it was my fault for trying something new and not being an overnight success; that our inability to "live the American dream" right this second was somehow my burden to bear. Until I realized that almost everyone I know in our demographic is struggling with the same issues: crippling student loans, credit card debt, childcare expenses, unemployment, the never-ending costs of home-ownership; deferring dreams in exchange for monetary stability.

I keep coming back to the same question: How can we be as successful as our parents' and grandparents' generations were, when all the rules of the game have changed?


Or maybe they haven't changed, and I just don't understand how to win the game yet, if it's possible at all.

How do you define success? What did you think life would be like at 16? 22? 30?

*I declare that I can say "gig 'em" this week because I was mistaken for an Aggie at a wedding we went to last weekend. That means I've lived here too long.

Freshly Farmed

Last Saturday, I finally took my first trip to the local open-all-week farmers' market. And right about now, I'm kicking myself for having not gone sooner, because I could have been enjoying this for the last three years!

The Farm Patch in Bryan. Local produce and flower market!

I don't know why I had never gone before! It's really close to my house, and they have things that my regular grocery store doesn't! (Plus, it's cheaper and the produce looks way better.) And it makes me happy knowing that I'm supporting local farmers.

I bought entirely way too much stuff; since I didn't know what to expect, I didn't make a list and just bought anything that caught my eye. For under $12, I got cherry tomatoes, corn on the cob, a head of lettuce, some new potatoes, apples, plums and a carton of fresh strawberries.

Mmmmmmmmm.

I'm in love. :)

Do you enjoy going to farmers' markets?