National Chocolate Day

A co-worker informed us that tomorrow is one of multiple National Chocolate Days. In celebration I ran to Holiday during lunch and picked up a few odds and ends to put together some haystacks for the occasion.
A tasty mix of party peanuts and chow mien noodles covered in melted semi-sweet chocolate and butterscotch chips. Easy and there's no baking involved. They're chilling in the fridge right now before their trip to work in the morning. Another co-worker is making chocolate cupcakes with some kind of surprise cream cheese filling. Mmmm....breakfast.

Mom stopped by my work today and dropped off one of the graduation photos she ordered from Wilson's graduation. She chose two different poses, but this one was my favorite.
Nobody wanted to see pictures though, they wanted to know where the beer was. Mom never comes without beer so the workers at the building and sanitation counters look for it first thing. She knows how to bribe public employees!

Triple word score

We must be desperately bored to whip out Scrabble. Chris hates playing board games, but the temperature still hadn't dropped below 90 degrees by 8:00 pm so there was no walk in our future.
Since he won with his made-up words he may be more likely to break it out the time the going gets slow.

Movie Monday

We spent our day off going to the movies. We caught a late morning showing of Knight and Day (Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz). While not the best film ever made, it kept us well entertained for a couple of hours. After the movies we just hung out at home for the afternoon. Again it's too hot to go out. The Canadian watched some 'how it's made' shows on TV and I finished filling out a reference questionnaire for C's missionary work application. I had to actually think of three traits of hers she needed improvement on. Besides her love of country music and the lack of estrogen in her household, it was really hard to think of any.

For dinner tonight I made a new recipe out of one of my Giada cookbooks (Everyday Italian). It was pasta with asparagus, smoked mozzarella, basil and prosciutto.
There's no sauce, just gooey smokey cheese and salty prosciutto. Besides the prosciutto and cheese wanting to lump together in big clumps it was delicious. Chris is happy to be taking leftovers for lunch tomorrow. I even managed not to overcook the asparagus as he always claims I do. Heaven forbid I be able to pierce it with a fork.

Hopefully it'll cool down into the 80s before midnight so we can go on a walk tonight. Preferably before we go to the gym at 9:00 pm. I'm getting stove up from sitting on my duff all day. I get paid to do that, I don't want to spend my days off doing it too!

97 and rising

It's too hot today to be fooling around outside for 4th of July. It's supposed to be pushing 100 degrees and so far it's up to 97. Ugh. We're hunkered down inside drinking pots of iced coffee and watching racing. We did make one small trek across the street to our neighbor Doug's house after church this morning for a little brew sampling. Doug's a home-brewer and had invited us over yesterday for a little taste of his latest creations. He's got one of the two-story versions of our house, but had added a family room, complete with wet bar, onto the back of the house years ago. It was really cool. His wet bar had two taps with mini kegs installed full of his beer. Could you imagine the Canadian with his own little wet bar? Anyways, besides visiting Doug, I haven't done much but spend some more time scrapping. Finished two more pages.
The Canadian is going to do a little bbq-ing for us tonight for dinner. Got some kielbasa to grill and stick in hoagie rolls and he's going to grill up our monster zucchini I picked on Friday. I just realized how silly it was of him to just hop into the shower since I'm about to send him out to the sweltering bbq jungle soon. Oh well, what's a third shower right?

Vegetable bounty

Yesterday Chris texted me in the afternoon to remind me to go out to the garden and check our ever growing zucchini. We wanted to pick it before it got the bad idea to die on us like all the other vegetables. It's by far the biggest vegetable we've ever grown.
We could probably use it as a door stop. I'm leaving the fate of the zucchini up to Chris. We'll have it tomorrow night with out bbq'd kielbasa rolls.

Today we finally went back to OSH to return our dead lemon tree. If you save the receipt, they have a lifetime warranty on all their plants. We didn't replace it for another lemon because we inherited Mum's Meyers lemon when they moved. Instead we chose a seedless lime.
I'm sure Chris has got a beer or two that would benefit from a lime wedge.

When we got home I pulled out a new treat I picked up at the Starbucks kiosk in Safeway yesterday. Instant iced coffee.
It comes slightly sweetened, and with a little half and half, makes a delicious afternoon drink.

I finished another scrapbook page last night. This one about Gold Nugget Days back in April. You can't tell from the photo, but the butterflies in the upper left hand side are raised on foam squares for a little dimension. And the rest of the title is in white alphabet stickers hence why you can only clearly see the word 'gold'.
Last month I had bought a scrapbooking kit of papers and embellishments from Studio Calico (that's what the background paper is from). It was such an awesome kit that I signed up to keep receiving the monthly kits. It makes it so easy to put together my pages without having to drive to the local scrapbook store and ponder over rows and rows of paper. I use what I get in the kit and I love the finished products. The July kit will be on it's way shortly. Can't wait!

Stuffed

I cooked up our eight-ball zucchini for dinner tonight. After looking at various recipes online I settled on this one. It was full of ingredients I already had on hand like kalamata olives, rice, sun dried tomatoes and basil and it just sounded delicious. They were really easy to assemble and quick to bake.
With a little side strawberry and feta salad and some crusty bread, it made a tasty dinner.
I'll have to either beg my co-worker for more, or actually wake up early enough on a Saturday to get over to the farmers market for some. A chorizo and rice filling sounds good for next time.

Carpool gifts

I gave a co-worker a ride to work this morning since we were having a going-away party for her tonight and her husband was going to be there to take her home. As a thank you for my kind generosity and legendary motoring skills she brought me a little gift;
It's a balsamic vinegar and olive oil set from her family's olive oil company out of Corning. There's peach and blueberry balsamic vinegars and a manzanillo olive oil. I'm so excited, I've been bugging her for months to produce some olive oil to try. But I had to keep my gift on the down-low or my co-workers would be jealous and expect me to share. Which, as you know, I wouldn't. It's all mine, mwhahahahaaaaa!!