Week in the Life: Monday

This week I'm taking photos of my day to day activities and sharing them so that we can be bored together! Here's what my Monday looked like:

Ready to head out the door at 6:30 am for my 25 minute commute to P-town.
Clickity clack, type, type, type. I oversee the garbage franchise and spend a lot of time sending code violation notices.
I lunch in the breakroom every day from 1-2:00 pm. I always watch Rachael Ray 30 Minutes Meals followed by Barefoot Contessa as I enjoy a half can of veggie noodle soup and read the newspaper. I am quite the creature of habit.
Today I ran to the grocery store at the tail end of my lunch to pick up some last minute ingredients for Thursday's dinner knowing I'll be too busy the next two nights to do it.
My youngest sister's best friend dropped this necklace off for me at work this afternoon. It's a beautiful Mexican fire opal necklace from their recent Mexican Riviera cruise that was my sister's graduation present.
Cooking the Canadian some gourmet ramen for dinner to help soothe his sore throat. I just had leftover potatoes, tuna and beans from the other night.
After dinner I changed into some comfy clothes and did a little internet surfing.
The Canadian pretty much stayed in this position all evening demanding juice, crackers, grapes and popsicles. Please ignore his hideous practical joke called a 'mustache'. Gag.
While Chris watched an old Elvis musical (I only wish I were kidding) I got busy in my craft room.
Finished something in record breaking time! A layout for Mother's Day.
9:00 pm is gym time, so on go the hot pink New Balance and off I head to the gym. Chris only goes on Fridays and Sundays with me so the rest of the time I'm on my own. Then it's home, shower and bedtime.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting adventure!

Cake mix cookies

Yes.....we made another recipe out of my Rachael Ray magazine for dinner tonight. There were a lot of pasta and potato based recipes in this month's issue which is great for me because white pastas, potatoes and rice are foods I can easily digest with my gastroparesis. Tonight I made the 'Pasta with Minted Pattypan Squash'. It was literally bow tie pasta with pan seared mini pattypans flavored with lemon juice, chopped mint leaves and some grated parmesan. The Canadian and I both really liked it.
The original recipe was for four, but even cutting it in half still produced four servings. God bless your enormously large servings, Rachael Ray! No one at her table will ever go hungry!

We're once again stuck in the house today because it's 97 degrees outside. Wait, apparently it's dropped to 93.4. Point is, it's too hot to be playing outside or going for a walk. Bah! So instead I cranked on the oven and made some cookies while the Canadian watched our favorite British driving show, Top Gear. A couple years ago my self-made chef sister, Jessica, gave me a Gooseberry Patch booklet full of recipes with cake mixes. Knowing I had a box of chocolate cupcake mix from Harry & David stashed in my pantry I looked up the 'cake mix to cookies' recipe reference in the back of the booklet and found how to turn my boxed mix into chocolate cookies. Taking it a step further I dug out an unopened box of Andes mints from the pantry, chopped a couple (or a lot) of bars up, and added them to the mix. Chocolate mint is the bomb!
While some would consider this shortcut cheating, I guarantee that a chocolate craving belly won't be able to tell the difference!

Seriously gross

Yesterday we found ourselves being ambushed by a gang of bad-ass ants that were appearing from under Chris' side of the couch. Frustrated at continuously brushing them off of our feet and legs, Chris finally declared martial law this morning and announced that we were going to move the couches away from the wall and clean underneath of them after 3 years of blissful ignorance. Of course his side was worse because he's a tornado of debris, but crap almighty, it was gnarly.
No wonder the ants were coming in, look at all those tasty treats. On the second shelf of the coffee table was an inch thick layer of nuts, chips and toenail clippings. Gag.
While we had everything moved, we even took down the window blinds for a complete hose down outside.
Our neighbor, Heath, works for a glass company and had given us the most magically bottle of window cleaner ever, so right now Chris is out front applying said window cleaner to the outside of the front windows trying to scrub off the hard water stains from years of sprinklers.
While the end product isn't crystal clear it's a bagillion times better than it was and that's good enough for us!

Tasty treats

I got up early this morning and commanded myself to go to the downtown farmers market. I love the goodies I find there, I just don't like getting up early on my one day a week to sleep in. But I specifically needed mini patty pan squash and cherry tomatoes so I was up and out the door by 8:00 a.m. I found my squash and tomatoes and also picked up some Japanese eggplant, cucumbers, plums, the most delicious olive bread loaf from Tin Roof bakery and a cranberry orange scone, also from Tin Roof.

For lunch Chris bbq'd the farmers market eggplant, some of the patty pans, and one of our own home-grown crooknecks. Then we mixed them with some cooled penne pasta, left-over cubed smoked mozzarella (from the other night), cherry tomatoes from the market, and basil from our garden. Before serving, I poured a homemade olive oil/balsamic dressing over the whole mess.
I was very impressed for a made-up recipe. I called dibs on the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

It was a hot day today so we spent most of our time inside. I did a little housecleaning/chore duty including laundry. While closing the folding doors on the laundry closet I somehow got my forearm caught in the fold of the door, so as it closed and flattened, it pinched the bejesus out of me.
There was tears and bemoaning. I'm lucky I didn't lose an arm. Laundry is dangerous.

Our one trip of the afternoon was to go get Chris' hair cut. Since I was so well behaved while being subjected to the most annoyingly talkative hair stylist ever, I insisted on stopping at Wendy's on the way home and picking up a frosty.
Dear frosty, you are so delicious that you almost make me forget how bad my disfigured arm hurts. Almost.

For dinner I made another recipe out of my new Rachael Ray mag, the 'white bean, tuna and potato salad'. I had to make the dressing twice because the first version tasted like poison. On the second go around I left some of the ingredients out and toned back some of the others. The end product worked out nicely.
Halfway through it, Chris declared it too dry for him and added some greek salad dressing to his, but I thought it was perfect. Especially with a slice of our new salty, briny olive bread.

Even with all the cooking and self-mutilation, I still found time to crank out a scrapbook page today.
A page commemorating my friend's 50th birthday. I scraplifted this layout from another site online and that's why it was so quick to put the page together. I just had to pick out the papers.

I'm now realizing the flaw in my early morning farmers market run - it's only 7:00 pm and I'm ready to fall asleep...zzzzzz

Second chance

In a random act of brilliance I accidentally washed my camera Wednesday night because I didn't know it was hiding out in Chris' work pants. But, after sunbathing outside at Chris' work for a day it seems to have come back to life and is turning on and taking pictures again. It might be acting out those last lucid moments before it truly dies, but I'm putting it back to work before it does!

Today was my second Friday back to work and it was just as hard as last week. 5:30 a.m. came way too early and I was completely uninterested in driving up the hill for four meager hours, but I did it because I like the bigger paychecks. The Canadian emailed me at work and checked my lunch schedule because he had to run up to P-town around 11:00 a.m. and would be swinging by home around noon if I was interested in a lunch date. So we hooked up for lunch and went to Ginger's (Chinese in the Almond Orchard) where we were tortured by two small children running around the restaurant chasing each other and squealing. Loudly. Apparently the parents were deaf, and dumb, because they never said a word. Even though the little hellions were getting in the way of the servers and being disruptive to the other patrons - namely me. Small, loud children are on my top 10 list of things that annoy me, right behind lazy parents. Followed very closely by barking dogs and John Mayer. Alright, enough about that.

Yesterday I got my copy of the newest Rachael Ray magazine in the mail and spent the evening perusing it, bookmarking numerous tasty looking recipes. Tonight I tried the Ham and Spinach Salad with Mustard Seed Dressing.
Sliced up ham steak, hard boiled eggs, mushrooms, and red onion slices on spinach with a blended dressing of red onion, toasted mustard seeds, sugar, cider vinegar and olive oil. It came out like a sweet onion dressing - very yummy. The Canadian was appreciative of my effort to make a non-hot meal on a hot day which is not my specialty. For some reason I feel called to make raging hot soups and stews on 90+ degree days. It's just part of my charm!

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.