It would figure that, since I walk to the gym, a brand new Mexican restaurant would open up in the corner of the strip mall where the gym is located, and I would have to walk past the smell of fajitas and frying tortilla chips every time I went to and from working out.
My inlaws are arriving this afternoon and will be leaving Monday morning. This means I need menu plans! By my count, with one dinner out for husband’s birthday, I need 2 dinners (pick 2 from fri/sat/sun), 2 lunches (sat/sun), and three breakfasts (sat/sun/mon) planned. And probably one dessert - my MIL is bringing a carrot cake with her.
For dessert, I’ll be making these apple dumplings. They do not masquerade as health food. They look a little strange. But oh dear lord are they amazing.
Breakfasts:
Lunches:
Dinners:
Normally things like fish and steak would be… uhh… budget busters. But I live right near the incoming fish/shrimp boats offload point, so I can get seafood for amazingly cheap!
If anyone wants recipes for any of these, let me know! Many of them are Anna’s Mama or Anna’s Nana’s recipes 
The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. According to another blogger, they encourage us to:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)
I figure 38/100 isn’t bad!
This is based loosely around Annie’s Chicken and Spinach Lasagna.
You will need:
1 large can of chicken breast meat, drained well
1 can of sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
1 large can Hunt’s Traditional Spaghetti Sauce (the big one)
12 oz cottage cheese - I used low-fat
1 egg
6-8 Lasagna noodles - use the “cooks in the pan” kind, not the “boil first” kind
1 cup shredded mozarella cheese, divided in half
Italian Seasonings (Parsley, Basil, Oregano)
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
1 2-quart ceramic casserole dish (I love my Pyrex)
Large skillet of some kind
Heat the skillet over medium high heat with 1 TBSP olive oil. Saute onions for a minute or two until they start to turn clear. Add chicken and cook for another minute, until starting to brown. Add garlic and mushrooms, cook for another minute (DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN). Add 2/3-3/4 of the can of tomato sauce, put the rest in a container and freeze for individual spaghetti serving some other day. Heat until just boiling, and then add in herbs. I used about 1 TBSP each fresh parsley and basil, and about 1 tsp fresh oregano.
In a bowl, mix cottage cheese, egg, and half cup of mozarella thoroughly.
Now for the fun part! In your casserole dish, place a good ladleful of the sauce to coat the bottom of hte dish (this keeps your noodles from becoming cement on the bottom of your casserole dish). Then a layer of noodles (two for each layer was all I needed). Then 1/3 of the cottage cheese mixture, spread out. Then 1/3 of the sauce.
Repeat twice, until you have on top a final layer of sauce. Sprinkle with the other 1/2 cup of mozarella cheese.
Bake covered at 375 degrees for 30-45 minutes (until bubbly on the edges) and then uncovered for another 10 minutes to brown the cheese.
So, since I’ve not been to the Gym yet, and I’m grumpy, allergic, and hungry, I decided to try being positive.
I do feel rather better now, actually. (: I think I’ll go have breakfast.
Apologies in advance for the whining, but I’m a little frustrated.
Granted, I did not manage to spin every day of the Tour, but I came pretty close (I did go on vacation for part of it, and airports don’t look kindly on long pointy sticks with hooks in the end).
So today I went to go look at the spindlers and rookies threads on Ravelry to get some inspiration for taking pictures of what I’d spun.
And discovered entire threads of pictures from people who have been spinning for 1-2 months that is perfectly balanced, even, and in huge quantities. I’m not sure if the difference is the spinning wheels (most of the rookies have wheels), or that I have crappy spindles, or if I just absolutely suck and should not spin anymore, but I’ve been doing this for a year and can’t create yarn like that.
Needless to say, I’m not bothering to post my meagre, lousy skeins. They’re only going to get felted anyway.
Oh - and Statler and Waldorf (the two heckling old guys) have their own account too. They’re home.
Many thanks to Adam for showing this to me. I’ve not laughed so hard in a long time.
You suck.
Love,
Anna
Last weekend (the 11th of July-ish) I took a short jaunty vacation up to Seattle to meet up with some friends. I had a fantastic time, got almost no sleep (night owl friends plus 2 hour time difference meant going to bed when my body thought it was 5am… and still waking up when my body thought it was 9am), and managed to pick up a real humdinger of a cold in the airport on the way up.
I also had some of the most colorful airplane experiences on those flights.
Flying from Houston to Seattle on Southwest is a direct flight with one stop in either Phoenix or Denver where you don’t get off the plane but where about half the plane exchanges with new people for the second leg of the trip. This makes the trip a great deal longer, but also a good bit cheaper.
For the first leg (Houston to Phoenix) I was sitting next to a sleeping rocker dude with some seriously awesome dreadlocks and an older man who reminded me pleasantly of my dad (in a non-creepy way). However, that meant I was sitting in the dreaded middle seat, and even though I accomplished a great deal of knitting, the lack of armrest/legroom/place to put my head and snooze got to me.
So I tempted fate and swapped seats, moving up a few rows and snagging a nice aisle seat during the exchange of people who didn’t really want to go to Seattle on that particular trip.
My tempting of fate did, in fact, bite me in the arse. The people that ended up sitting in the window and middle seats seemed quite pleasant as they got on the plane(though one of them was screaming in his iPhone as he asked me if he could sit by the window). This illusion was broken after both of them had consumed two drinks without having any food. I was then subjected to said screaming man’s pictures of his (admittedly awesome) house, yard, greenhouse, motorcycle, campsites, touring pictures, and any other pictures he’d taken.
One more drink into each of them resulted in his going off on a rant about how men weren’t real men anymore, and what was wrong with women in the world (serious barefoot and pregnant vibe at this point) and the woman between us cracking obscene comments (”you can’t teach a d*1do to mow the lawn”) and smacking me on the shoulder in an attempt to get some sort of agreement out of me. She was, I think, too drunk to notice that I was tired, had been in airports/planes for nearly 8 hours, am relatively shy, and would really have liked to just get back to my book, thanks.
THAT flight couldn’t end fast enough.
Oh - that was the flight where the people in the row behind me proceeded to make all sorts of awful and disgusting bodily noises as they dealt with whatever version of the plague that they happened to pass on to me.
By Sunday the combination of talking to people (GASP!), lack of sleep, and IMPENDING DOOM of chest cold had me squeaking.
The flight home was entirely uneventful (the two screaming, incredibly sunburned infants that were making our lives in the staging area miserable both passed out within 5 minutes of boarding the plane) though didn’t help much with my being sick, and I spent most of last week holed up with cups of lemon and honey tea and bowls of chicken soup.
I’m finally feeling better now though (yay) and am back to walking the walk again. And, you know, talking like an adult woman instead of a 12 year old boy.
My last year of college I was fortunate to live right off the “Bear Trail” - a 2.25 mile walking trail that went all the way around Baylor campus. I also lived with two great roommates - and the three of us would go in the evenings and do two laps several times a week.
Around that time I found the Eowyn Challenge - a walking program where you track your miles based on the Lord of the Rings trip from Hobbiton to Rivendell. I eventually made it to Rivendell, and then kind of quit tracking miles (and for awhile, quit exercising all together).
This past week, however, I noticed that there was a new fitness place that had opened up - 5 minutes walk from my apartment. So I snagged a trial membership, and have really loved it so far. And… I’ve started tracking my miles again.
I’ve set out from Rivendell to Lothlorien - 462 miles.
My goal for the summer is to log 15-20 “miles” per week - that’s one day of Fellowship Travels for each week. I count miles either by miles walked (I did two on the treadmill today) and then one mile for every 15-20 minutes of good exercise I do elsewhere (walking to and from the gym, and weights).
I’m currently putting together a “tracking” widget for my sidebar, so you can see where I am along the road. I’m hoping you guys will help keep me honest - and on the road!
