Photographic evidence

This is what an engine mount bolt looks like when it shears off.

And what happens when the bolt is sheared off? Why, the engine drops!

Luckily, there are (I hope) two other bolts still holding my engine in place so when it dropped it didn't hit the ground. Needless to say, this needs immediate attention. Unfortunately, my emergency fund is pretty wiped out from other recent events. With any luck A. can do this work himself... if he can get the other half of that bolt out of the hole...

So, for the time being, I'm housebound. Pretty much sucks with holiday errands still looming over me but I won't drive the car. Instinct (along with the information I dug up on the internet about broken engine mount bolts) tells me that driving the car in its current condition is BADBADBAD, despite A. telling me it can be driven as long as we baby it.

A. is hoping to manage a half day today so that he can get under the car before it gets dark. I'm not sure how much he'll be able to accomplish without the use of my grnadfather's tools and blocks, but with my grandfather in the woods (seriously, the man is pushing 90 and he's gone hunting again) there's no alternative but to try. Well, I suppose we could take it to a mechanic somewhere but without ready funds I'm extremely hesitant. Besides, there's this whole big lack of trust when it comes to mechanics.

So I guess today I bake, clean, and wrap presents. At least until A. gets home. Then there's a chance that I'll be playing grease-monkey assistant.

Menu - December 16 - 22

Hey. Early posting of the menu. Yay.

Actually, the menu got done because I'm pretty much couch-bound due to some Ny-Quil knocking me flat on my big fat behind. Now I remember why I don't take that stuff. Seriously.

Because I'm still fairly stoned out of my mind from the dose of Ny-Quil I took last night, I've got nothing to say beyond that I'm ready to go back to sleep now.

As always, much gratitude for Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie for hosting Menu Plan Monday.

Sunday
lunch: leftovers
dinner: shepherd's pie

Monday
lunch: raw veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers
dinner: pot roast, mashed potatoes, peas

Tuesday
lunch: raw veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers
dinner: salmon/tilipia, broccoli, corn

Wednesday
lunch: raw veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers
dinner: chicken, cous cous, green peas

Thursday
lunch: raw veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers
dinner: ???

Friday
lunch: raw veggies, fruit, cheese, crackers
dinner: turkey, dressing/mashed potatoes, random veggies, salad

Saturday
lunch: leftover turkey
dinner: ???

Have a great week, world.

Menu - December 9 - 15

Running a little later than I wanted to be with this entry, but here it is.

Last week was... crazy busy. This week is going to be just as crazy but maybe not quite so busy.

A. is on his way to Washington D.C. right now. He'll be gone until Friday afternoon. He made sure we had a tree before he left, and he and K. put the lights on last night. He also got most of the holiday decorations down (so I don't kill myself trying to get them myself) before he left. K. and I will finish decorating the tree tonight and tomorrow night.

I think we're keeping the decorating to a minimum this year, but I'm not sure yet. How I feel will play a large part in how much decorating gets done. I'd rather not decorate as much and use what little energy I have playing with my family than decorate a la Martha Stewart and not have any energy or time left for my family. But the decorations are out of the closet and if I happen to find an extra bit of energy surging through my aching limbs, you can bet I'll spend half an hour or so fussing with putting out/up decorations. The same goes with the baking. I have my master baking list and I'm getting to it a little bit at a time between now and the end of the year... and not fussing over what doesn't get cooked.

So! With A. out of town for the week, K. and I are having a rather vegetarian/munchies sort of week of meals. I'm hoping it will help boost my energy a bit (not to mention my metabolism) as well as help offset some of the sweets and heavier meals coming in the last two weeks of the year. I know it won't completely balance the scales, but the lighter meals this week should help get me (and my stomach) in the mood to eat less of the heavy and super sweet foods I'll not only be encountering but also baking after the 15th.

I'm not listing the extra baking or cooking that I have tentatively planned for this week because I'm not certain that I'll feel up to it. With the cooking for the meals so light this week I should be ok to do some of the extras but I'm not going to bank on it.

As always, much gratitude for Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie for hosting Menu Plan Monday.

Sunday
lunch: Wendy's (out shopping)
dinner: leftovers, mac & cheese

Monday
lunch: grapes, cheese, crackers
dinner: leftovers, tuna, chips

Tuesday
lunch: raw veggie plate, fruit
dinner: boca meat, mashed potatoes, random veggies

Wednesday
lunch: ??? (shopping with Mom)
dinner: leftovers, salad (pizza hoagies?)

Thursday
lunch: raw veggie plate, fruit
dinner: lima beans, corn, random veggies (and pizza hoagies if K. is still hungry)

Friday
lunch: raw veggie plate, fruit
dinner: salmon & tilapia, broccoli, corn

Saturday
lunch: ???
dinner: shepherd's pie

Menu - December 2 - 8, 2007

So... yeah, it's been a while. Life is still working on getting back to normal, or at least, my version of normal. It's taking some very detailed lists on my part, but slowly I'm getting back into the swing of things. I do need to work on getting to bed before 2 or 3am again, but I'm getting there.

I think the majority of my holiday gift shopping is done. I've got a lot of list making and revising to do to be sure, and then the wrapping begins. There's also the baking list to be seen to. I need to double check ingredients and make that shopping list... then I need to plan out a baking schedule. The next few weeks should be busy.

Having been awake until just after 5am this morning, I slept until just before noon and am... a bit... behind. My day is... off. Oddly, I doubt I'll have any trouble at all sleeping tonight... assuming I ever stop moving long enough to lie down and close my eyes, that is. Still, I need to get moving so that I try to catch up on some of the cleaning.

So, the purpose of this post. Food! And I've added lunches into my menu so that I don't have to think about what to eat while I'm so busy but still manage to actually eat. (I'm bad about skipping meals when I'm alone.)

As always, much gratitude for Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie for hosting Menu Plan Monday.

Sunday
lunch: Wendy's (out shopping with Mom)
dinner: pot roast, leftover veggies

Monday
lunch: raw veggie plate (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, dip) and grapes
dinner: fish (breaded cod for them & salmon for me), lima beans, baked potatoes, salad

Tuesday
lunch: raw veggie plate, grapes, cheese, crackers
dinner: chicken salad

Wednesday
lunch: ??? (shopping with Mom)
dinner: pork chops, corn, unknown peas (from mom), salad

Thursday
lunch: raw veggie plate, grapes, cheese
dinner: beans, rice, salad

Friday
lunch: cheese sandwich, chips
dinner: ground beef, leftover beans, tortillas, salad

Saturday
lunch: ???
dinner: pot roast, salad, broccoli, corn

I am still alive.

Ok, so, it's been a while. You think the lack of updating has been bad, you should see my mailbox. I've not managed to actually READ anything in months. At most I could sit in the chair and delete mail I knew I'd never read once I started reading my mail again (sales and other such "junk" that doesn't quite fall into the "spam" sector).

That should be changing now that my husband has bought me a shiny little laptop all of my very own. It somehow seemed easier for him to open a Best Buy credit card and charge what he did for this thing than it was for him to spend 1/4 of the amount on a decent chair and have to rearrange the living room again. The logic went something like "we could get the chair, but you'll still want a laptop and I'll end up buying both in the long run anyway. This way we'll have the Best Buy credit already established for appliance buying later when we need it and when we get a house we can buy furniture we like, not just settle for something because it's cheap now". Or something like that.

Then, lo, then there was a laptop in my hands and wee! I am a happy girl.

So. Catching up.

K.'s birthday went well. We had fun. There was mommy-made cake and home-made pizza and there were lots of presents. She made out like a bandit and was happy.

I kicked off November by having something that wanted to be the plague. After many hours of sleeping, I started feeling human again. I made the mistake, however, of thinking I was "fine" and started pushing myself to get things done again. It didn't last long. I've been on a roller coaster ever since. Right now I'm in a low spot, with a sore throat and violently swinging body temperatures. And I've not been sleeping again. Wee.

My birthday!! SURPRISE!!! I GOT A PARTY!!! It was a week early (he wanted my it to overshadow Thanksgiving, not the other way around) but there was cake (that I didn't order or bake or even know about!!) and food (ditto) and presents (that I didn't know about, let alone purchased and wrapped!). I was a happy girl. My mom scored me some of the writer's reference books I'd been hogging from the public library (you know it's time to buy the book when you've checked it out 13 times in the past 6 months), my brother got me a season of Airwolf on DVD, A. got me the entire Robin of Sherwood series on DVD, K. got me (with her own money, no less) on DVD, and K. and A. got me the original Highlander movie on DVD. This past weekend A. brought in the mail and there was a card from his dad for me. He sent me money with instructions to go buy me something for myself. He even underlined "yourself". Part of me wants to go buy a Christmas tree, part of me wants to put it towards this lap top, part of me wants to stash it in my savings account (4.5% interest! WOOHOO!!) and part of me wants to go to Bath & Body Works and the closest book store for a little retail therapy. For now, the money sits on my dresser in the card. I'll figure out what to do with it once my head clears.

Thanksgiving. It was... different. Instead of everyone in the family going to my grandparents', Mom and I shared cooking duties and had a buffet-style lunch over at her place while one of my aunts hosted dinner at her house. We hung out at Mom's all day while my grandparents went (were taken?) to a city an hour or so away to my aunt's. I still haven't heard from my grandparents. I've called a few times but no one answers the phone and I've stopped leaving messages because no one returns them.

Update on the apartment. The bathtub faucet still leaks, but at least it's a faucet and not a pipe. The bathroom no longer leaks and it drains now, too. There are still a lot of little minor things, but I'm not up to having them here to fix them, especially while I'm gearing up for Christmas.

The house hunting has been going slow. Molasses in winter slow. It's the time of year when the market is always slow, though. The real-estate agent that's been showing us houses... I don't think she understands us or our desires and/or needs. Yes, I still want to see houses, but don't send me emails telling me you hope I feel better indicating that you know I'm sick, then a few days later send me an email wishing me a blessed Thanksgiving and in that same email get all passive-aggressive with the need for reassurance. Truly. I'm not up to dealing with it at this time of year when I'm also sick. Also, I'm not looking at ANY house on a holiday weekend. Especially Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's. Or Easter. Or Valentine's Day. Or Mother's Day or Father's Day. Those are off limits, as are birthday weekends. So, yes, send information on houses and when there's one that I want to visit, I'll let you know. But I'm not going to look at houses in an area of town I don't want to live in. There's no point. And by the way, learn my daughter's name.

And I guess that's about it for today. Or at least, for now. I'm still trying to recover from Thanksgiving and get my apartment back in order and have a lot of chores to catch up on, and it's getting close to that time when I start pulling boxes out of the closet to decorate. Decorating is going to be a challenge this year because our "Christmas tree corner" now has my desk in it and I don't know where I'm going to put the tree. I'll... think of something. Probably after a nap.

Menu - week of October 14, 2007

Oops. I completely forgot to post last week's menu. I blame it on stress.

My grandfather has been incredibly ill recently. It's not a huge shock because he's 89 years old and has been sick for a number of years, but it was still a deep blow to see him looking so fragile last time I visited. He's been taken to various doctors, been poked at a bit, had some blood pumped back into him, and he has another appointment on November 2. What happens now is up to him and God, and I'm having a hard time suppressing the selfish feelings welling up inside me. I accepted long ago that death is part of the life cycle, but this is my grandfather -- the single most important male influence of my childhood and the man that I still measure all other men against. It's selfish of me to say/think/feel that I don't want him to die, and yet I don't. This world -- my world -- will not be the same once he's gone.

Things are slowly improving in regards to the apartment issues. And I do mean slowly. The biggie -- the bare pipe in the bathtub -- has been covered. Finally. That doesn't mean the bathroom is complete yet, just that I no longer have a big ugly bare pipe sticking out of the tub where the faucet should be. And there are other issues that need tending to, issues that were created by the workers while they were, but the complex has a(nother) new maintenance supervisor so I have hope that things will gradually get better. Even so, we're still looking for a house, it's just not as urgent now.

Speaking of houses, we're looking for a house. We even have a "preliminary commitment letter" with a dollar figure on it. Woo-hoo! Now to find the house we want and convince someone to sell it to us for less than that dollar amount. That's going to be the hard part. The market here is... expensive doesn't seem adequate enough, but it'll do. We could probably qualify for much more than what we asked for, but we asked for $xxx,000.00 because it will keep our monthly payments where we want them, even with all the taxes and other stuff added in. And that's important to us because we don't want to move into a house only to loose it a year or so down the way because we can no longer afford it. Luckily, we have A.'s eligibility for a VA Loan to help us out, and we're first time home buyers so that should give us some help, too. Still, the hard part isn't all that financial stuff, it's finding the house we want, where we want it, for what we're willing to pay.

K.'s birthday is the end of this month (October 25, to be precise) and we were planning on doing a family dinner out that weekend but, again, my cousin's wife has scheduled their boys' combined birthday party for that weekend. Their boys birth dates fall near the beginning and near the end of November. That's right. NOVEMBER. So they have their birthday party at the end of October. (Yeah, it boggles the mind. Right there with ya.) This is the second year in a row that they've done this and last night it had K. really upset. (She eventually cried herself to sleep, after snorting snot all over my shirt. Don't ask.) We hadn't formalized any plans for the dinner yet because things have been happening and getting early commitments from my family is like getting candy from a bear -- it's doable, but often tricky work involving much pain. (A.'s family is even worse.) It's bad enough it's almost impossible to collect enough of her friends to do a party because of Halloween, but now that her cousins' (actually second cousins?) birthday parties are being planned in such a way as to, basically, make the family chose between being here for her birthday and driving an hour or so away for their combined party... yeah, see, I'm not feeling a whole lot of familial love right now and it's got her in a wicked twist. I do plan on declining the party invitation should it be extended to us again this year. I'll probably bite part of my tongue off in the process of being polite about it, too because it's not like they don't know when her birthday is. She gets a card from them almost every year.

I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo in November. November is always an insane month for me because of the onset of the holidays, and now that I'm heaping the task of a 50,000 word story on top of all my usual November craziness...? Yeah. I'll be a babbling, drooling idiot come December.

And if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, that brings us to the menu. Yeah, it's a stretch of the imagination how I connect the dots, sometimes. It's best if you just smile and nod. Or so the husband says.

So... food!

As always, much gratitude for Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie for hosting Menu Plan Monday.

Sunday
dinner: pasta

Monday
dinner: breaded cod, corn, broccoli

Tuesday
dinner: sheppard's pie

Wednesday
dinner: pot roast, mixed veggies

Thursday
dinner: chicken, couscous, leftover veggies (or lima beans)

Friday
dinner: pizza

Saturday
dinner: taco meat (and/or leftovers) on tortillas


You know, I really should start planning lunches again, even though K. is in school and it's just me home for lunch now. Maybe next week.

Menu - Week of September 30, 2007

No blahblahblahing about the apartment today.

A. returned Thursday night rather than Friday night, and while I was considering letting him walk home so that I didn't miss CSI that wasn't really an issue since his plane was delayed for two hours. He arrived just after 11pm. It was 130am before we got back from the airport and fell into bed.

The weekend was... interesting. Saturday morning we met up with one of K.'s friends from school, bopped around the Museum of Science and Industry with her, then headed out to do grocery shopping after the girl was drug off by her family.

Sunday morning found us picking her up and taking her with us to see The Game Plan. Cute movie, by the way, especially if you have kids. After the movie and kid drop off, there was more grocery shopping.

All in all, it was a busybusybusy weekend... largely with an extra child.

This week won't be so busy. A. is driving to a city some two hours northeast of us everyday (he rented a car for the week). He's getting up at 3am so that he can leave here between 430 and 5am to be there on time. He'll be getting home... when he gets home.

This gives me the unique opportunity to be up woken up just before he leaves and have quiet time until 7am when K. has to get up for school. This gives me a jump on the not only the chores, but also the writing. If I can have my chores done by 745am when I take her to the bus stop, then when I get back I have the rest of the day to focus on writing and doing research. I don't know what time we'll all be wanting to fall into bed, but it should prove to be an interesting week. Just not too terribly busy.

So. Menu. Because my family really does like it when I feed them. And so do the little dinosaurs living in my tummy.

And there will probably be some additional "extra cooking" items added later, as whims occur. I guess it'll just depend on which way the wind is blowing.

As always, much gratitude for Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie for hosting Menu Plan Monday.

Sunday
dinner: Chinese/take out

Monday
lunch: leftovers
dinner: pasta, salad
extra cooking: sauce

Tuesday
lunch: leftovers, fruit
dinner: Autumn chicken and apples, mashed potatoes, lima beans, salad

Wednesday
lunch: grilled cheese sandwich, fruit
dinner: make it up out of the pantry and freezer as I go, salad

Thursday
lunch: sandwich, fruit
dinner: parmesan crusted tilapia, macaroni & cheese, green peas, salad

Friday
lunch:
dinner: tortillas, taco meat, salad
extra cooking tortillas

Saturday
lunch: ??
dinner: homemade pizza