springading.com

Eating very little during the day just so I can eat a couple slices of homemade bread fresh out of my bread machine and still stay under my calorie count = WORTH IT.

This week was a good week. Another niece had a baby. Went to Jim’s family reunion. We were the most recently married, so we won a peppermill with different kinds of pepper to be used in it. Awesome! I’ve always wanted a peppermill. Went to Jim’s mom’s to see his aunt and cousin. Got belated birthday giftcards, one to Chili’s and the other to Houlihan’s.

Jim and I have already planned on using one of those this weekend. Oh my god, I’ve missed eating out.

A really wonderful thing that we got was from Jim’s aunt. It was a belated wedding present–a check. A check, might I add, that covered the rest of Jim’s school books (we couldn’t afford to get them all) and will pay for his calculator for his math class, too. HUGE WEIGHT off our shoulders, let me tell you. Now the extra money I’ve been making from overtime will be shoved over into savings to save up for new tires instead.

Jim and I have been noticeably less stressed since we got that. Someone is getting a thank you card.

What else? I’ve been cooking a lot. Cookies, pancakes, bread, and brownies–all from scratch, no boxes here! Cheaper to make it yourself. Besides, I miss cooking. Know what I miss even more? A big kitchen to cook in. But at least I have an appreciative husband to eat all this stuff.

Oh, yeah, something I’ve failed to mention: Jim is off the Chantix–he’s been a non-smoker for over two months–but he is now eating a ton. It may sound odd, but it makes me happy. I always hated that I could actually outeat him. Now I can’t keep up.

That’s not the only appetite of his that’s gone up. BOW-BOW-CHIKA-CHIKA-BOW-BOW. (That’s supposed to be porn music, not a weird puppy chow jingle or something.) Needless to say, we’ve been a very happy couple lately.

And you know what was a really nice way to end a really nice week? This link, posted by my friend Paul on his Tumblr. He has to know that I’m going to totally repost an article called “10 Badass Women from Fantasy Literature,” ESPECIALLY when, right at the top, it features one of my favorites from Game of Thrones, Arya Stark.

One could argue that Arya is a little girl, not a woman. I’d like to see how well you argue with Needle up your nose.

Anyway, this reminded me that I had been thinking about writing my own list of my favorite women in sci-fi/fantasy for a while now. (Hm, that seems like a very Paul-like thing to do. Maybe he’s a bad influence on me!) I’ve never written it, though, because it would be hard to do a top 10 or anything like that. I mean, I could come up with ten favorites just from Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone.

Still…someday.

But not tonight. Tonight is for sleeping. Tomorrow is for overtime.

This week may have been good, but I didn’t say it was done.

You know what I found myself thinking the other day? I miss Warcraft. Yup, really, although I don’t know why. Nobody I know really plays anymore; or, at least, nobody I know in real life. I think I miss it when we all played. Right now, they’ve all moved on to a play-by-post game that I opted out of because I’ve been too fried to do anything like think, much less be creative. Oh, well. Moving on.

There are other cool things happening. First of all, my niece Amber went into labor this morning, so Lily should be arriving soon. The really cool thing? Today is my dad’s birthday. Tomorrow is mine. In a little over a week, it will be Amber’s sister Jasmine’s birthday. So, yay for adding another Virgo to the ranks!

Last I heard, Amber was only dialated 2 cm, so there is a very good possibility that Lily might hold off making her debut until MY birthday. As cool as that would be, I would rather Amber NOT have to be in labor that long. Today’s just fine by me!

Anyway, normally on Sunday evenings, I start getting edgy because I know that the next day is Monday, which means work all over again–especially hard when you’ve just worked six days. But, as it turns out, I decided to take my birthday off, and I even made up the overtime that I would have missed tomorrow by working it yesterday instead, so now I won’t have to make it up next week. Smart thinking, eh?

I thought Jim and I would do some of the celebrating today, considering that this is the ONLY full day off we had together this week. While I have tomorrow off, Jim still has school, so it’s not like we can spend much time of it together. Jim even asked me last night if I wanted to go to one of the state parks around here today, to which I agreed.

And then today, he told me he was going to the local comic book store to fix terrain with the guys he plays 40K with. He left after breakfast, and he won’t be back until dinner.

…

Yeah. This did not endear me to Warhammer at all.

To be fair, Jim mentioned planning on doing this earlier this week, but I’d forgotten. And, apparently, he had forgotten at one point, too, because he asked me to go out with him today–and then backed out of it when he remembered this so-called lunch with the guys.

I say so-called because lunch does not take six hours.

At least he surprised me with a nice, clean bedroom yesterday. You have no idea how messy it was and how much it was bugging me. So that was nice.

Anyway, all this unexpected alone time means I can surf as much as I want. I found some really cool stuff:

• Bristol Renaissance Fair. I found this via Chronic Geek’s Live Journal. And, like her, I cannot afford it this year either. But next year! Totally…well, maybe.
• Sweet and Spicey Pickled Grapes with Goat Cheese. Yeah, you can tell I’m playing on Live Journal right now. And oh my god, this looks so good. And not TOO many ingredients, so I think I might even be able to afford this. I wonder if I can get the stuff for this on my next paycheck?
• A Year of Slow Cooking. You know, I think I’m just hungry. But seriously, this site looks awesome. Especially because I’m severely lacking in crock pot recipes, and crock pots are the shit. I’m pretty sure those are one of those Life Lessons that my mom taught me–albeit, minus the “shit.” My ma, not much for the swearing. She’s a classy lady.

Oh, and the other thing I did today was delete my Flickr account. You might notice the pictures from it are gone from the right-hand corner of this page. After copying and pasting my ID and password for the third time and only finally getting in after my fourth attempt, I had had it. I’ve been having that issue with Flickr, and it’s been pissing me off, so as soon as I got into my Flickr account, I saved all my pictures, deleted my account, and moved them to Picasa.

I still need to do this to my old Flickr account, the one I had before the divorce.

Anyway, this post has bounced around enough. I’m gonna watch Firefly. Hope Jim’s having a good time and he feels relaxed when he comes back–because HE is making dinner. Hmph.

I guess I should post something in here other than “Homebrewed” posts, particularly because 1) the last two posts have been “Homebrewed” posts, and 2) I plan on posting another one tomorrow.  That’s the key word, by the way: plan.  As we all know, I plan for lots of things.  Doesn’t mean much.

However, I’m not so good at the wedding-planning.  Jim and I did decide on a date, though:  April 30th, 2011.  It was kinda random.  We were driving to get some lunch, and I just suddenly flipped open my checkbook and said, “Okay, Jim: spring or fall?”

I thought for sure he would say fall, since it’s his favorite season (hold the Spring jokes, please!) and, being a guy, I thought he’d want to push it off as long as possible.  Silly me.  Jim is not the typical guy.  He really wants to get married sooner rather than later, and he was very specific about the time frame, picking either April or May.  He knows I don’t want to do the typical “June bride” thing.

Funny thing: It turns out that although we hadn’t discussed it before, we both had been thinking April 30th in the back of our minds.  WEIRD.  What are the chances of that happening?  (Yeah, yeah, one out of 365.  I know.  Smart ass.)

So we have a date, and today, Jim gave me a ring.  We’ll have to have it resized.  We actually took a peek at wedding bands for the first time online today.  Jim likes the silver-looking ones better than the gold ones, so we’ve agreed to price them, and if we find some we like, we’ll just get the setting on my engagement ring changed to something that somewhat matches.

And…yeah, that’s as far as we’ve gotten on that subject.  Every once in a while, I try to look at dresses online but…well…I hate clothes.  And dresses.  And I get bored and go do something else.

You know how there are some women that you suspect might be only getting married for the actual wedding?  Yeah, I am not one of those women.  This all just sounds like work.  I can’t understand why we can’t just get hitched in someone’s backyard, eat Boca Burgers (meat for the carnivores), and eat Hostess Cupcakes instead. 

(Well, Spring, that would be because Hostess Cupcakes have beef fat in them, which we don’t eat.)

(Good point, Spring.  You know-it-all bitch.)

Okay, then!  Other stuff.  Um.  This weekend was busy.  When I wasn’t being bitchy, that is.  And I really was.  Even I was like WTF?  What happened to me?  But when I wasn’t being a total jerk, I was cooking.  The menu for the weekend?  Chocolate chips cookies and homemade macaroni and cheese.  Proof of the process:

Chunks of cheese for homemade macaroni and cheese. Kraft can bite me.

It’s a little blurry, and no, I didn’t take pictures of the final product.  The only reason why I have this is because I became bored and remembered that I had a digital camera, and that, you know, I really should use it sometime.  Which is how I also got the following picture:

Some damn good cookies.

I have to admit, I mostly made the cookies because I was such a brat this weekend, Jim deserved an apology.  Did I have some of this “apology”?  Damn straight I did!  I cannot tell a lie: I make some pretty good cookies.

In other news, Jim got into a contest over at Dakka Dakka.  (I guess it’s limited to only so many people.)  But he got in, and I got some pictures of him working on his Space Marine logo thingamabob.  I got pictures of that as well, like this one:

Jim, hard at work.

Muhahaha!  Look at me, I’m totally getting use out of my digital camera.  I’m pretty sure that Jim’s gonna kill me for putting that up.

Oh, and speaking of contests, I apparently won the Hearthstone soap contest over at Chronic Geek.  WOOT.  And I didn’t even mean to, I just wanted to tell my creepy-weird-funny Warcraft story.  But next time, I’m gonna smell good while telling it.

Er, okay, I gotta go.  Jim wants me to get off the computer.  He actually wants to–gasp!–hang out with me.  Who’da thunk?

Checkin’ in, ma!  And a real quick check-in because I signed up for overtime this week, and I’ll need to be going soon:

• Last night, Jim and I finished off Angel.  Now, you’d think being the big Buffy fan that I am, I would have watched all of Angel a long time ago.  Not the case.  I saw some of it but not all of it.  And WHY?  WHY?  It’s great.  And leave it to Joss Whedon to let that axe fall where it may when it comes to killing off characters.
• I’ve decided to try to cut down on Internet usage.  Why?  Because I feel like I waste a lot of time really doing nothing on here.  So I’m going to pop on here for an occasional post, check email/Facebook, a couple blogs, and then leave.  I’ll probably leave Warcraft mostly for weekends.  What will I do in the meantime?  Well, cleaning, for one.
• Last night, I started my less-Internet thing on a good note: I spent most of the night shopping for groceries and made Jim buttermilk oven-fried chicken, which he LOVED.  I don’t know if worked as well with my Quorn, but he was pleased, which was the point.
• Since we got leftovers from last night, I know tonight won’t be spent in the kitchen, so my plan for tonight is to start working on the next “Homebrewed.”  So look for that.
• OH.  Guess what Jim told me?  Jim took yesterday off, and the lady from the bank was back with court papers for me.  Apparently, The Ex is losing our old house again.  FOR THE THIRD TIME.  Luckily, after going to court last time, I found out they’re not after me for the money (I’m actually not on the note, so if he loses it, they can’t come after me)–they’re only summoning me because of “interest” I might have in the property.  Which means that if my ex sells it and gets money from it, I could get possibly get a portion of it.  Which, no, I have no interest in.  I’m only interested in getting my payments, not extra money.  In all fairness, I told the ex he could have the house, so I don’t see why he shouldn’t have any profits that he can get from it.

Which begs the question: Where is his money going?  He’s not paying his bills, he’s not paying me.  (He’s almost 5 months behind in his payments.)  Jim and my guess?  Up one of their noses, heh.

Oh, well.  That’s his problem, not mine.  My problem right now is that I need to run to work and put in some overtime.  And, boy, am I dreading it.  Yesterday, several portions of our system was done the entire day, so today, we’re probably going to get slammed with people calling back from yesterday along with the normal Tuesday crowd.

I already can’t wait to get back home.