Freezer Food Friday

13 Nov 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Food, Getting Organized, Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo Tags: , , , , ,

I know that doesn’t sound very appetizing, right? Well, darn straight. Because it’s not. And as such, it won’t be a regular thing.

Some frozen food is good. The music department at my daughter’s school sold pies as a fundraiser. Frozen pies. Really quite yummy frozen pies (for frozen pies). So we bought several and so did my mom. No complaints there.

Now that my mom doesn’t live just down the road, I have to wait for a weekend to bring her the three pies that she ordered. So all the pies are in our freezer — her three plus our three. More

NaBloPoMo Day 9: No Apologies

10 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Construction and Repairs, Laundry, Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo, The Daily Prompt Tags: , , ,

Conveniently the Daily Prompt for November 9 was:

No Apologies.

Convenient because I didn’t get a blog post out for November 9 (aka NaBloPoMo Day 9). It’s like the universe was saying to me, “It’s okay. No apologies are needed.” 

It knew I had work. It knew that it was Monday. And it knew that we had our monthly homeowners association meeting that evening. 

I like to go to the meetings when I can because our community has issues. We had six months of pink insulation and no windows just last year … I like to know what’s going on. 

More

NaBloPoMo Day 7

08 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo, Writing Tags: , , , , , , ,

Yes, Day 7 I say. It’s still November 7 in mountain or pacific time zone. Arizona? I might be two hours early in parts of Arizona. (I need to look at a map.) In my time zone it might be like November 8th already, but it’s only 2:35 AM or so. Ugh.

Yes, that’s right. I fell alseep and didn’t get my post 7 done. (At least not on November 7 in my own time zone.)

I had a cranky day.

It started with an appointment with Geek Squad to fix our TV. It’s the biggest TV we have, and it hasn’t worked in a while, and we figured it was time to get it fixed. I got up early to clean up a few things in the living room. So that probably started it. I like it when things are clean. I like cleaning up dirt just fine. The clutter? No so much. Getting rid of clutter makes me cranky. But I worked on it nonetheless.

We turned on the TV early in the morning to make sure everything was set up correctly and … WAIT … we turned on the TV.

It worked again!

So after leaving it on for a while and still having it on and working with a picture and everything, we called Geek Squad and told them the TV was working again. We asked if they could tell anything about the, now working, broken-TV and still be able to fix it. They told us they’d have a hard time figuring out the problem of the picture not coming on if the picture was coming on. OK. So we then cancelled / indefinitely rescheduled the appointment.

I took my daughter to a volunteer pumpkin reloading task at a pumpkin patch. This pumpkin patch sold pumpkins for charity and now that Halloween was well-past done, they loaded them back on a truck to donate to an animal park.

It was a drizzly, very October kind of day (even though it’s now November). Which was just fine since they had unloaded the pumpkins to the pumpkin patch on a day that was beautiful full-on sunshine. It was nice to feel not quite so much like summer for pumpkin-reloading.

The rain made the unsold pumpkins look such a deep shade of orange. My daughter wore her bright green Orchestra T-shirt. I told her she probably shouldn’t wear her Orchestra T-shirt to a pumpkin re-loading because if anything happened to the Orchestra T-shirt then she wouldn’t have it when she needed it for Orchestra. But she felt like it would be fine. I was happy I grabbed her bright magenta rain coat as we ran out the door. I let her know I was happy that I grabbed the rain coat. (I think I was already a little cranky at this point.) Later, she would say that she too was happy I grabbed the rain coat.

I ran a couple of errands while she was re-loading pumpkins in the muddy drizzle. Dave sat at home with the TV in a stare-down so see who would last the longest. Dave won.

The TV died again. I called Geek Squad back and told them our TV was NOT working again. Could they come now (hopefully before I need to get my daughter to her dance lesson)?

No. No, they can’t. No appointments scheduled for the same day, thank you. So we rescheduled for another morning this week that is exactly one-day before our extended warranty runs out.

(I’ll add here to that maybe Dave has a history with non-working TVs that might work again. And maybe I didn’t want to see the same thing happen again. I still have hope for this TV. And maybe Dave is having a cranky day too at this point.)

Then I couldn’t find the scissors because my daughter used them and didn’t put them back. Before that, I couldn’t get a coupon to print correctly from some coupon-printing thing on the Internet. (I want that hour+ of my life back.) I found another coupon-printing thing on the Internet, and I got that to print several coupons. I wanted to use some of them while my daughter was at her dance lesson. But no scissors. No time to look either since it’s time to leave for dance.

Then I got gas and the machine ate part of my receipt. I use the receipts to help me keep track of my gas mileage. Thanks machine.

Basically, by now, it’s hard for anybody to do anything around me that is not going to stretch my nerves beyond where my nerves are actually comfortable. I’m pretty sure that officially made me cranky. I’m also pretty sure that my body had already decided days ago that on Saturday I would be cranky. Because that’s how I felt. Sorry world, it’s beyond my control right now.

But the major cranky ended there.

We had a nice chili dinner on this drizzly day. My daughter ate her chili in the last bread bowl, and she loved it. I ate mine with a little bread on the side and some corn chips, and I loved mine.

Then we watched a Harry Potter movie on my iPad mini because we have no working TV in the living room. The temporary TV that we had in there previously was no longer in there. We wanted to keep things simple for the TV repair guy (who didn’t come today). Just the broken TV is now in the living room.

But Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is one of my favorite Harry Potter movies. My daughter activated all the glow sticks she got for Halloween, and we shared them between us. My daughter even made a cat-sized glow-stick necklace and put it on our very patient cat Fletcher. He was, indeed, very patient and left on his glow-stick necklace until it fell off when he ate dinner. He looked glow-y and adorable. I got extra glow-sticks out of the fridge since we had extras. I figured today was a good day for extra glow sticks. We sat side-by-side with Harry Potter and our glow sticks, and all was right in the world.

That’s when I fell asleep and didn’t get my day 7 NaBloPoMo post done on day 7 in my own time zone.

How was your day?

The Very Tiny Post

06 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo Tags: , ,

It is Friday. It was about 80 degrees here today. That’s cray cray. It’s November! We watched Back to the Future II again. We’d have watched it outside on the balcony but then it poured rain so we went inside to watch it and eat dirt cake instead. Then it stopped raining. I’m on a late-night cat food run. Hopefully, everyone will survive the cats’ meows until I get home.

That’s all for NaBloPoMo Day 6  (I need to get other stuff done tonight). 

NaBloPoMo Day 4

04 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

I’m working on several posts for the upcoming days but none are finished yet, and I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open right now. I fear that if I close them for a short cat nap then it will be tomorrow before I open them again. I’m only four days in to NaBloPoMo and am not ready to throw in the towel. So here’s something.

Several things happened today other than all the normal stuff like food, laundry, work, and getting my daughter to school. 

I got some paperwork in that has been on my to do list. Always feels good to get something done.

I officially changed calling plan for my iPhone. Verizon has some better deals now than when I first got my phone. For $20 less per month I get 50% more data than I had plus unlimited texts and mobile hot spots. I’m still tempted to jump ship to an even less expensive carrier but giving Verizon a second chance for now.

Unlimited texts would never have mattered to me until September. We got our daughter a nice and nicely priced Andriod phone for her birthday along with a very inexpensive calling & data plan. It’s working well. Thank goodness she has unlimited texts!

I’ve reached my text limit two, yes two, months in a row. Crazy. Part of the problem is that we tend to send strings of short little messages that spread across five or so individual texts. That adds up. We could have put it all into one or two text messages but instead it’s more like this:

“Hey mom”

“I’m done with homework”

“Can we watch Back to the Future II?”

“Can I have pie?”

“R you going 2 b home soon?”

“Kk”

And I answer her in equally short messages. Now, we are both free to send mini-texts to our hearts’ content.

We

Can 

Even 

Put 

Each

Word

In

A

Single

Text

If

We

Like!

Which I probably won’t do because it’s a pain. But, hey.

And I’m excited about mobile hot spot because it means I can connect my iPad mini while I’m out and get more stuff done without trying to read the tiny symbols on my phone as my fingers type a string of typos that I have to fix. Once I figure out how to do it, I can mobile-write a lot more easily (at least I sure do hope so).

Virginia had a little earthquake early this morning. I don’t think I felt it.

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison passed away today. She wrote E.T. She was also married to Harrison Ford for many years. Hello!, a smart, talented writer married Han Solo. That counted for something back in my teen years. I was sad that they divorced, but I’m even sadder to read of her passing.

We’re having an unusually warm couple of days and more tomatoes and peppers are still growing and even ripening on our balcony! It helps that the balcony is on the sunny south side of the building. I think having plants close to the building helps extend the growing season too. It’s November! 

Made a really yummy Tortilla Soup for dinner complete with a few balcony tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. My kiddo had hers in a bread bowl (pictured below) because bread bowls are yummy.

Trying hard to keep on schedule with writing. Every day is a challenge. I like the writing it’s the schedule that’s the tricky part.

That’s about all for now. I’m typing with my phone while leaning on one arm reclined on the couch and my leanin’ arm is starting to go numb. Perfect time to shift and post.

Have a good one, folks!

Catch Up Day – Still Not a Food Thing

18 Sep 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Games, Laundry, Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, Time-saving, WordPress, Wordpress Writing 101 Tags: , , , , , ,

Urgh! I’m supposed to be writing stuff and somehow hardly anything has gotten done this week. I managed some reading because, with apps on my phone, I can do that just about anywhere in tiny bursts. To some extent I can do that with writing too, but it is slower. Much slower. I only got a bit of writing done. Somehow time in this past week has evaporated like the last wisps of summer sun.

For the past month I’ve been meaning to do my nails and shave my legs.  I don’t get the bug to do my nails very often, but it does show up once in a while. So nearly every day I’ve been thinking, “oh, maybe I can do them today.” Then there’s laundry. Or a cat barfs. Or something else comes up. So that didn’t happen yet. The summer color I’d planned on doing just ain’t gonna happen at this point. I’m looking at you, Autumn.

Last week I had a follow up appointment with my Physical Therapist. I reeeaally should have shaved my legs if I was going to wear shorts there. Did it happen? Nope. If I’d have remembered this little tid-bit of info then I might have worn longer pants instead.

After that I should have, at least, shaved ’em over the weekend to avoid any more mishaps. Still no. Two days ago, I managed to haul my cookies up on an exercise bike again, guess what? I could feel my leg hairs swaying in the wind as I peddled. It’s not even like I can claim “winter legs.” At least I showered. 

Earlier I managed to paint a card for my daughter for her birthday. I’m proud of the card (proud that I finished it befor her birthday was over), and I’m even more proud of her.  I think she is a very cool young teen.



We had my daughter’s birthday party last weekend so it was a busy one. Plus we got her a nice but inexpensive cell phone, and activating it took a lot longer than I was expecting. 

First I’d tried to set her up on Cricket which didn’t work at all. It should have been the correct type of GSM unlocked phone to work there, but I think something is whacky. I’ll probably need go into a Cricket store to get the SIM to work. Like I have time. I can’t even manage to shave my legs.

Walmart Family Mobile plan to the rescue! I didn’t even know this existed until a few weeks ago. I’ll even save $5 a month over Cricket (but with slightly less high-speed data). I hope the coverage works OK, but the website for the service actually makes me feel like somebody put some thought into making it family friendly. More important, it actually worked. Excellent.

I meant to bake maple or caramel apple cupcakes for her birthday party, but that didn’t get  done either. Instead I purchased not-bad-for-store-bought cupcakes in vanilla and chocolate and decorated them with pumpkin spice marshmallows. They were a hit. Especially the marshmallows. I think they’ll be good in coffee or hot chocolate this fall.

We had a lot of fun at my daughter’s Laser Tag Adventure party. She has some great friends! The laser tag games are fun and the location was nice. But they had lots of video game redemption machines there, and some of the kids went a little wild with playing those. Seriously, why does it seem like so much fun for a machine to spit out paper tickets?

You can never get much with the tickets you trade in for “prizes” there or anywhere. Put in 25 cents and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to trade your tickets for a nickle worth of goods. 

My daughter got some Now & Laters — little hard taffy bricks that I’m pretty sure are nothing but an evil ploy of evil dentists. My daughter chose banana flavor. Against my good judgement she convinced my to try one. I promptly pulled a crown off my molar. I should have known better. Taffy is pure sweet evil incarnate, and this is not the first time that that crown has come unglued. It’s a fairly shallow, flat tooth.  At least I didn’t swallow it this time. That happened. And that’s another story for another time.

My mom and stepdad are moving in these next few days. I’m excited for them but also nervous as they’ll live farther away. This will be a big change. I helped with a few things yesterday, and I’m determined to help more this weekend.

I’m also determined to get some writing done, so here’s something. It looks like I’ve actually managed a blog post. I also have a couple of Cherokee Purple tomatoes finally ripening in our balcony garden. What’s not to like? It could be a good weekend.

I’m resetting my goals for the next couple of days. I am setting aside time. Still haven’t done my nails or shaved my legs though.





Accidentally Froze a Bar of Fels Naptha

01 Sep 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Laundry, Mom Stuff Tags: , ,

I accidentally froze a bar of Fels Naptha laundry bar soap … for two or more weeks … in the freezer at work.

I’d made a quick, lunch-hour trip to Walmart. I put a bag of frozen food into our freezer at work so I’d have some quick lunch options. There were several packages of Lean Cuisine and some bags of frozen veg. Lean Cuisine are not my favorite lunch by any means, but they are quick when I feel like something hot. Servings are wimpy so I usually add extra veg. On the same trip I’d also purchased a few items for home, one of which was a bar of Fels Naptha laundry soap. I sorted all the items and thought I left non-parishable items for home in the car. I guess I forgot about the Fels Naptha somewhere along the way. That was two or three weeks ago.

Today, I reached into the bag and pulled out what I thought was another box of Lean Cuisine from behind a bag of frozen peas. It was a bar of laundry soap instead.

I decided to have a sandwich for lunch.

In other news, my daughter had “Locker Night” at school this evening. (Not really evening, more like late afternoon.) It was very hot and crowded, but my daughter got her locker and schedule for the upcoming school year. She’s excited for school to start back up again. I’m excited for her though I wouldn’t mind a few more weeks of summer. It was so hot I was sweating and kind of thinking that a bar of frozen soap might feel good about then.

Why Fels Naptha? I still like Zote, but I wanted to test Fels Naptha a bit again. Read my comparison of laundry bar soaps here: BAR FIGHT. And why I use them here: What Kind of Freak Uses Laundry Bar Soap?

Not the prettiest lunch. Pepper jack cheese with a pepper jack &  turkey sandwich on whole grain white and a container of pudding from home. Later I enhanced it with a couple of fresh cherry tomatoes and a chili. That helped! (I did not eat the Fels Naptha, but couldn’t resist a photo.)

Summer’s Tail – Kicking and Screaming

16 Aug 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Games, Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, Vacation, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s still hot like summer, but in many places kids have already gone back to school. Some as early as August 1. Summer is over for them. It’s the tail end for us, and I want to grab on to these last few weeks kicking and screaming as I lick the last bit of salt off my fingers before summer goes away again. My daughter can’t wait for school to start back up. She’s excited to experience her new classes and see more of her friends. I still have unfinished plans and goals and more tomatoes to grow!

We did some fun things this summer. We took a trip to Pittsburgh where I participated in Pinburgh, a pinball tournament. Pinburgh has been around a few years, but this year it was held at a huge new classic video game festival called Replay FX. I brought my daughter because, hello, video games and pinball! And they had other kids’ activities like a velcro wall, giant inflatable obstacle course, and slides. For a video game festival my daughter actually got a lot of exercise!

While Pittsburgh may not bring to mind the typical image of summer vacation paradise, there was much fun and our hotel room had extra niceties that kept us saying, “wow, cool!” This made for a fairly complete vacationy experience.

Our room had a motion sensor foot light (like a night light at the floor that turned on when we stepped out of bed), pull-down individual book lights on each headboard, and in the evening, when we returned exhausted from a full day of game play and activities, the hotel supplied milk and cookies (free of charge for kids 12 and under). It was great!

We had another very mini vacation this past Friday night when we slept over at the National Museum of American History as a Smithsonian Sleepover. Last summer we did this at the Natural History Museum and loved it. There are scads of activities and crafts centered around various exhibitions in the museum. Then folks get to roll out their sleeping bags and camp out under a whale or antique machinery as museum lights are dimmed. Continental breakfast is served in the morning. And it is all so way cool!

Next year my daughter will be too old to do either of these sleepovers (there’s an age limit), and we’re super glad to have done them. I’ve always loved the Natural History Museum with animals and minerals, but I forgot how much fun the American History Museum can be. I feel like we made the kind of memories that can last a lifetime, and I think (I hope) my daughter feels that way too.

Earlier this summer my daughter had camp, so most weeks I had to drop her off in the morning and then run out on my lunch hour to pick her up and drop her off either at home or somewhere else like another camp (from which I’d have to pick her up again later). Most of the camps have been wonderful! She’s learned more music and dance and even cooking.

For me, one or two days of driving at lunchtime isn’t a problem, but week after week gets tiring. Exhausting even. I need some down time, or I start to shut down. On top of it, I fell and injured my knee last March (for crying out loud) and it has been slowly healing. At the beginning of summer it was much better but still painful on a regular basis. Pain is exhausting. (I have much more empathy for folks who live with chronic pain.) I’ve been trying to fit physical therapy exercises into my daily schedule to help my knee heal. Here at the end of summer I finally feel like I can squat to take care of our balcony plants without groaning in pain at the same time.  Long and short of it, instead of writing and blogging more this summer I remained rather unproductive.

These last few morsels of summer I have no plans of driving anywhere at lunchtime — at least nothing major. I may still run occasional shopping errands or drop my daughter off at a friends house and such. But mainly I plan to eat lunch.  I plan to write.

I’ve set goals for myself.  I want more summer fun. Maybe a quick trip to the beach! Maybe tubing. Definitely more swimming. I want more tomatoes to grow! More peppers! I want to write regularly and am setting daily and weekly goals. Really, I want more summer!

I swore I wouldn’t: A Balcony Garden Journey Part 2

15 Aug 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening Tags: ,

I absolutely did not go to Home Depot with the idea of purchasing plants or seeds and most definitely not tomato plants.

I went there to have a key made and to purchase a spray bottle so I could mix up some homemade cleaning spray. My old bottle stopped spraying.

The smell of the store was distinctly Home Depot — earth, chemicals, metal, and concrete. People milled in and out of the garden area, and, as it was almost spring, I could see greenery with each flash of the sliding door.

I had to go take a peek. It was the promise of sunshine and green life pushing through dark soil.

I resisted the urge to purchase plants right there and then. I wanted to think about what we might grow and use and liked the idea of sharing the experience with my daughter. She’s much older now than the last time I grew plants on our balcony.

I knew I would have to be very strict about how much we tried to grow. Several years ago I grew too much which made for a lot of work. There were some plants I hardly even used. Pineapple sage, for example, was beautiful and smelled great fresh. But it didn’t dry well or hold it’s flavor in cooking.  It really became more of a decorative plant. I don’t mind some strictly decorative plants, but I really like plants that look nice and offer something we can eat. It makes for space well-used.

A couple of hot peppers and strawberry plants in hanging baskets seemed to be about right in my mind. Maybe a couple of herbs too.

Years ago the squirrels didn’t seem to be able to raid the strawberry plants when I had them in hanging baskets. The hot pepper plants they left alone after the first few bites. This seemed manageable. Fun. Pretty. Hopefully giving us a few things to eat for the trouble.

When I brought my daughter near the gardening section, it was the seeds that caught her eye. Well, dang, I hadn’t planned on trying to grow anything from seed. In fact, I already had a few packets of 5-or-more-year-old seeds collecting dust in a cabinet somewhere. I let her pick out two of something new.

She settled on cucumbers and a variety of marigold called Cottage Red.

I guided her to a variety of cucumber called Picklebush since they seemed like they would stay pretty small and produce cucumbers that look like deli pickles. Cottage Red marigold were not edible flowers like some (Lemon and Tangerine Marigold are edible), but they looked pretty on the packet and marigolds are usually good at keeping away garden pests. So there’s a usefulness there.

As far as plants, I quickly picked up a Tabasco Pepper plant and some jalapeño peppers (one mild variety and one standard). My daughter doesn’t like anything too spicy. I looked for a parsley plant but found none at the time, so I grabbed a packet of flat-leaf parsley seeds and a packet of Siam Queen Basil seeds. Plus we selected two strawberry plants — the only everbearing ones that looked good at the time — Ozark Beauty.

My daughter pleaded with me to get tomato plants, but after my somewhat bitter memories of squirrels that consumed every single tomato my plant grew the last time I tried. I told her, “no.” I said it several times. And we left with no tomatoes.

I didn’t know I would be back to Home Depot so soon. There were not only more strawberries in our future, but possibly tomatoes too.

(Part 2 of a series. Visit again later for more.)

Now That I Started

14 Jul 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Getting Organized, Laundry, Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, WordPress Tags: , ,

I’ve started half a dozen blog posts since the end of the school year — even more of you count the ones I started in my head. There’s a lot going on — gay marriage is legal, the flag has come down, photos of former planet, former non-planet, now dwarf planet Pluto are streaming in — and I’ve managed to publish exactly zero of the blog posts I started. I can make a lot of excuses as to why. Many of them are legitimate excuses… But I still think I should have been able to manage to publish some with just a wee bit better time management or focus or something. 

It’s not for lack if topics!  Along with all that stuff in the news, we have a small balcony garden again. Yay! And my daughter has been having fun in Strings camp (kind of like band camp only it’s a day camp for orchestra). Zomagad, I even found Zote laundry soap in flake form instead of bars. 

That whole 10-minutes-of-writing-per-day thing worked well for a while. But I seem to have misplaced my 10 minutes (maybe under a tomato plant).

The one blog entry that I might actually manage to publish is about how I’m not blogging. This one. Which makes exactly zeros cents. I seem to best be able to blog about how I’m not blogging. I need to work on my priorities!

Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries