thanks for the memories

thanksgiving has come and gone and it was a whirlwind of activity.  we hosted both sides of the family at our house for the first time.  i love the fun-ness of having people over and hanging out. but as my dear, sweet husband recently pointed out, i also have the type of personality that gets me all into a cranky frenzy when preparing to have people over.

i decided that the best way to keep myself from going over the edge was to take a logical approach and prepare for everything ahead of time.  armed with my menu and grocery list (all stored in my whiteberry) i hit wal-mart on the sunday before thanksgiving.  i picked up all of the food items that i would need and also got a much needed oil change.  gotta love multi-tasking at wally world.

at this point, i was feeling ahead and the game and like i had a handle on things.  until tuesday night, when our air conditioner decided to stop working.  normally this shouldn't be a problem in late november, except that i live in houston, tx, home of the purple sprite crazy weather.  supposedly a cold front was going to hit by turkey day, but all i could picture was 15 of our relatives sweating to death in our hot ass house and the holiday being ruined for everybody.  i had taken the wednesday before thanksgiving off from work, so after a frantic call to our home warranty service and a few fervent (shouts out to DP) prayers, i had an appointment to have someone out to the house that afternoon.

wednesday morning i dropped babylove off at daycare and went by my neighborhood heb to pick up all the drinks for thanksgiving. i was planning to make some sangria to go along with the usual sodas and waters.  even though i'm grown with a child of my own, i always feel like my mother is silently counting my glasses whenever i drink "adult beverages" around her.  with sangria, at least i could disguise it with a bunch of fruit and stick it in a nice little pitcher.

i also needed to buy one of heb's cajun seasoned turkeys, which ended up coming with a bunch of assorted items as part of the combo loco. usually, i love combo locos because not only is it fun to say "combo loco", but, everyone loves free ish. however, i REALLY hate when the items are not all grouped together in the same spot.  here i was on a Mission to get in, grab my turkey and drinks and get out, but there was no way that i was leaving free items on the table, even if the free items were an foil pan, some salad dressing, iceberg lettuce salad, store brand sodas and ice cream, frozen asparagus tips and some store brand stuffing.

so, after schlepping all over the store for my items, i was back home by noon and ready to start cooking. i had baked the cornbread for the dressing and boiled sweet potatoes for the casserole just as the a/c guy showed up.

when i tell you this guy had me SO worried that thanksgiving was gonna be a bust!  he just seemed generally out of it and unsure of himself and was puttering around for like 2 hours before he finally found the problems.  besides the freon not circulating properly, apparently some duct work blew out in the attic, so we basically had a stream of nicely chilled air blowing out through this giant hole and disappearing into our hot ass attic.  lovely.

a/c guy wasn't authorized to repair duct work, but he was nice enough to rig up a covering for the hole with a bunch of trash bags and some duct tape. very macgyver-like indeed.  needless to say, this was a bit nerve-wracking being so close to quitting time on the last business day before a national holiday.

while he was working, i cut up the fruit and combined all the ingredients for the sangria.  apparently it needs to marinate chill overnight for all of the flavors to be at their best.  once the a/c guy left, i decided to run by hobby lobby to whip up my DIY table runner.  i had drawn inspiration from a couple of blogs that i frequent, so i was feeling very creative.  i had already used metallic spray paint on some gourd vegetables and a couple of leftover halloween pumpkins to use as a centerpiece, so i found this cute gold and black fabric to match that theme.


veggies

plus spray paint



equals fabulous. eat your heart out BHG!

late in the afternoon, i was starting to second guess myself about the amount of food that i had bought.  i'm used to cooking for two, but more than that-not so much.  after some googling, i ended up making another run to heb for a second, smaller turkey (which was, of course, followed by me hunting down all of my free combo loco items).

i got back home with all my loot and then decided that i needed to make more sweet potato casserole.  at this point, my feet were hurting from standing all day.  with my well-orchestrated shopping plan in ruins, i didn't have the heart to go back to heb where the cashiers could probably recognize me on sight, so i slunk over to fiesta instead.

by wednesday night, things were back on track and i made plans to start the final food prep the next morning.

the thursday morning cooking was pretty uneventful.  i did have one last minute snafu and, yes, ANOTHER trip to heb after i discovered that the foil pans that i had baked the side dishes in were a little too big to fit into the base of my chafer set.  picture me 5 minutes before the store closed with my huge foil pan from home in one hand in the aisle literally testing out the smaller ones to make sure that they would fit. not a pretty sight.  once i got home, i then had to transfer four pans of food into the new ones, which i was still doing when guests started to arrive.

check out the spread:

front entryway

for the non-turkey eaters

winner for best repurpose of free loco salad goes to...

 i forgot to take a pic of the sangria, but trust me, it was good!  i really had a great time getting my black martha stewart on and spending time with family.  and after 3 years of marriage, a bunch of previously unused wedding presents (like our margarita pitcher set, fine china and silverware) all saw the light of day.

hope y'all had a good one!

white is the new blackberry

a few weeks ago, some {in clueless valley girl voice} LOSER, stole my blackberry. i actually have to take partial responsibility since i made it easy by being absent-minded and leaving it in public.  i had only had the phone for about 6 months and didn't have insurance on it, so i was out of luck on having t-mobile give me another one for less than $500.  i was really hoping that the goodness in people coupled with the adorable screensaver of my husband and babylove would lead to its safe return. 

yeah, no such luck.   

before i lost my phone, i was totally one of those people that you see glued to the phone at every free moment.  although it's never gotten quite this bad, i've definitely had a few close calls while walking. 

at first, i thought that not having my phone would be unbearable. no spontaneous checking of e-mails or facebook or checking in with friends.  but, for a few days, it actually was pretty nice to have an excuse to be unplugged from the world for a while. 

about a week into my involuntary blackberry vacation, i got to try out the hubby's iphone, which led to the realization that i hate touch screen phones.  at that time, my phone service was still on, so i could check my messages remotely and call people back if necessary.

the only times that i actually missed the blackberry were when i needed to google something right quick or when i wanted to "watch" a tv or sporting event with all of my facebook friends and giggle at their crazy comments. 

about 3 weeks after the phone disappeared, i finally decided to give up the ghost and order a new one.  after scouring the interwebs, i decided that ebay would be my best option.  being the impatient person that i am, i decided to pick the "buy now" option.  i was able to get a new (to me) blackberry in pretty good condition from one of the sellers for a week and a half of babylove's daycare tuition $320 with free shipping.  since i had the chance, i wanted to change it up so that i could maybe trick myself into thinking that the new phone was my idea.  i looked at other types of phones, but i'm pretty addicted to my crackberry, so i decided to get the same phone, but in white.

luckily, i had backed up all of the files on my old phone, including hospital pictures of my babylove from when she was born, and i wanted to make sure that i could just swap everything onto the new phone with a minimum of wahala.  i was able to escape phone number exchange hell since t-mobile has this niftly little automatic backup feature that came with our plan.

after the requisite scrubdown with clorox wipes (who knows where this phone came from / has been), i'm back in business and loving my new "whiteberry".

although i did miss a possible interview (grrr) by not responding quickly enough when the recruiter called, there were some positive things that came out of losing my phone.

i used to get a bunch of newsletters coming to the phone from various websites including about 5 baby-themed websites.  while i do like the convenience of reading up on babyloves weekly milestones, i realized that one of them, while pretty funny at times, was also a bit of a downer and was also one of the first things that i was reading each morning.  what a way to start the day with a dose of negativity without even realizing it!  needless to say, i unsubscribed to that mailing list.

i've also been able to scale back some of my addictive phone checking/texting.  i lost all of the hundred or so e-mails that had stacked up on the phone, and it was such a relief!  i've started being really vigilant about deleting e-mails once i am finished with them instead of letting them pile up on me. now i usually keep about 12-15 e-mails on the phone that i am following up on and i delete anything that's over one week old.

all's well that ends well, but i would have rather skipped the whole experience.  and i have one last message for whoever has my old phone:

the good wife

a couple of months ago, my husband and  i went to see corinne bailey rae at the house of blues downtown. her first cd was part of the soundtrack to our dating relationship, and we came thisclose to seeing her in concert in new orleans the weekend that we got engaged in 2007.
i was looking forward to her next album and tour cycle. but, unfortunately, tragedy struck when corinne's husband died in march 2008.  i remember how shocked i was when i heard about it. i had only been married about 5 months, and at that time, losing my husband was probably the worst thing that i could imagine happening to me.  i say that because now losing my daughter would definitely be #1.

i felt a real sense of sadness that corinne was so young and had lost her first love and partner of 7 years.  i googled for months afterwards trying to find stories in the british media about how she was doing and if she would recover. i figured that she might never make music again, and that if she did it would be too sad to listen to.

so i was excited to hear that she was back with a new album.  but, in all of her tv appearances supporting the album, the topic of her husband's death never came up.  i was stoked to see her in concert and a little curious to see first-hand how she had overcome the grief and come back to her music.

we had just gotten back to houston a few hours earlier after going to my friend's wedding but i was determined to make it to the concert.  we left babylove with my mother-in-law and set out for the house of blues.  the concert was awesome, of course. she sang a lot of her older songs as well as songs from the new cd.  i haven't quite gotten into her new sound, but i'm sure it will grow on me.

i don't know if i expected to see her break down during some of the songs or what, exactly, i was looking for.  she did have a ring of some sort on her ring finger, but from the outside, she seemed to be holding up okay.  i can only imagine that with the highs of touring and performing, that there must be some terrible lows mixed in.  i was reading the crash course widow's blog today. she also became a young widow after her husband died unexpectedly 5 years ago and her blog deals with her grieving process and how she tries to teach her young daughter about the father she can't remember.

i'm not overly obsessed with this subject, but it is something that i think about on occassion.  a few years ago, i read this really touching book written by a lady whose firefighter husband died on 9/11, which was also their anniversary. her descriptions of the emotions that followed were so deep. 

my first "real" job after college was in a clinic where we treated patients with bladder, prostate, testicular and kidney cancer.  there were a few patients close to my age, which was totally sad.  but the images that stick in my mind eight years later are of the wives of the men with cancer.

these women would schedule appointments for their sick husbands and they would sit stoically in the exam rooms and listen as the doctor dropped bombs in the middle of their universe.  it reminded me of this painting from grant hill and tamia's african-american art collection that we saw at an exhibit at texas southern university when we were dating (i wanted to post the drawing but i couldn't find it on the net).  on one side, it showed a couple on their wedding day, and on the other side, it showed the man's lynched body hanging from a tree.

like the woman in the painting, the cancer wives never could have known on their wedding days just how tragically their marriages would end.  these women would literally shoulder the burden of their husbands, weak from chemotherapy and disease, who needed someone to help them walk into the waiting room.  as the cancer grew worse and their husbands got sicker, these women would push wheelchairs, and prop pillows, and smooth the hair of their men all the while waiting patiently to see the doctor for more bad news. 

there were days when i would watch with a lump in my throat and just pray to God that a) i would never have to experience anything like this, and b) that if i did, that i could be a good wife to my future husband like these women were to theirs. 

before we were married, my husband made it clear that part of the reason that he chose me was that he knew that i was capable of taking care of our future kids should anything happen to him.  so i  also prayed that afterwards i would have the strength to take care of my kids and myself.

this song by india.arie has always moved me, and sums it up well.

everyone loves: free make-up

i was planning on writing this post last week, but got sidetracked by current events. now back to our regularly scheduled program.

i'm not a big girly-girl type.  i like to look nice, but i'm of the "less is more" frame of mind when it comes to things like make-up and beauty routines.  luckily, i have really easy to care for skin or else i might have to a do a bit more.


at night, i use some wal-mart store brand eye make-up remover and facial cleansing cloths.  for my morning routine i use a facial cleanser with microbeads to wash my face in the shower.  i used to use mary kay products, but the ordering process took a bit too much time for me. the wal-mart stuff seems to work just as well and it's a fraction of the cost.


one thing i don't skimp on is my make-up.  for years, i've used m.a.c. products.  they're a bit on the pricey side for me, but they've never let me down.  plus, i love that you can go in any m.a.c. store and get made up (gratis) for special events.  they did my make-up for my baby shower, and this summer when my husband and i were out in l.a. for the b.e.t. awards, i even stopped by the the m.a.c. store on hollywood boulevard to get my make-up done.  they were totally booked and i couldn't get in, but the nice chick behind the counter did at least take the time to give me some pointers.

i use m.a.c.'s under eye concealer for my baby bags.  i skip the foundation and all that other stuff and just apply a thin layer of pressed powder in nw50 to even things out.  i use m.a.c. eye shadow as well,  but i'm still a fan of my classic maybelline mascara.

a couple weeks ago we went to college station for a health education conference. while packing up, my toiletries pack must have gotten dropped, because the next time i opened up my powder, i saw the dreaded dropped compact effect with the powder all broken up into small pieces.


i made it out to the m.a.c. store last week to pick up some new powder and some black eye shadow. while i was there, i decided to ask about a rumor that i had heard a while back. you know, the one about if your bring 6 empty make-up containers to the store, you can get a free item?


now everyone may not love free make-up, but everyone definitely loves free ish.  i first heard the rumor several years ago and started collecting a stash of empty compacts and concealer tubes at home. but i was kind of skeptical about the whole thing, so i never did anything with them.  everyone knows that nothing is really ever free. take the oprah/ kfc chicken debacle for example.  sadly, i was one of those foolish folks who printed out my coupon and took my happy tail down to the nearest kfc on my lunch break, only to be turned away hungry and slightly ashamed.


but, to my surprise, the girl guy person that checked me out confirmed that yes, you can actually get a free lipstick if you bring in 6 empty containers to the m.a.c. stores in macy's.  he must have seen me looking, like who the hell wears lipstick in 2010? when he added that if you take the items to a free-standing m.a.c. store, you can get either an eye shadow, lip gloss or lipstick.


very cool....i'll still probably call first just to make sure.

everyone loves: the chilean miners

i was actually planning to write a different post about something that everyone loves.  i don't plan on regularly writing about current events and the like on this blog.  BUT, i just had to speak on the whole chilean miners rescue story-or actually the public reaction to the chilean miners story.

on tuesday night, i was busy working on a project on my laptop and trying to keep babylove away from my laptop, so never had a chance to turn on the television or surf the net.  wednesday morning, i log onto the book of faces, and all i see are these status updates saying "yay for the chilean miners being rescued", "they've got the first one out", "praise God the chilean miners are being rescued".

now, i'm a christian and do believe in being thankful and giving Him the glory in things big and small.  and there have recently been a lot of stories in the media about miners dying on the job and how dangerous the mining industry is in general.  but i guess i was just surprised/ shocked at how personally invested everyone around me seemed to be in this story. 

at first, i chalked it up to the fact that since the majority of stories on the new are negative-earthquake in haiti, somebody got murdered, the economy is tanking, politicians are being corrupt-that people were just happy to finally get a happy ending.  but, i think it's something deeper than that.  i mean, let's face it, there are plenty of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad tragedies happening everyday all around the world and even in our very own neighborhoods.  the only difference is that the media doesn't have a camera rolling on them 24/7.  take the ongoing aftermath of severe the flooding in afghanistan that nobody seems to care about, for example.

maybe it's the cynic in me, but i had to stifle an eye roll early tuesday afternoon when i pulled up msn's page and saw the big red "breaking news" box announcing that the first miner had been rescued.  i actually kind of tuned out of this whole miner saga about a month ago when i heard a radio "news" story about how the wife of one of the miners found out about his previously secret affair with another woman due to all of the media coverage.  it's one thing to write or report a story, but when the story being reported is about the effects of the story being reported, it kinda makes my vision blur and my head start to hurt.

it's kind of like the whole preacher plans to burn the koran on 9/11 story that got blown all out of proportion and resulted in deaths around the world as well as probably posing a threat to our national security.  this "preacher" is probably just some random loser that nobody every heard of who lucked up into notoriety because of our 24/7 news cycle.

i love me some cnn, but last night while i was watching ac360, i just had to change the channel when anderson started talking to a correspondent on the scene.  with a straight face, this reporter was talking about how the cheating miner's mistress loved watching the movie, titanic, and how she and this miner planned to hole up at home for days watching the movie now that he had been rescued.  um, gag me with a spoon!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rescue in Chile
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

i guess i'm not the only one that noticed.

i'm a news junkie and all, but this whole, putting people on a pedestal and the media's tendency to try to create a fairy tale out of real life is a bit off the chain these days. google, "propoganda" with pat tillman, jessica lynch, or ft. hood hero policewoman if you don't believe it.  don't bother googling the phrase "chilean miners", i can already tell you that you'll get 345 million hits. 

i'll just a take a tip from the cheating miner's wife and sit this one out.

seriously?!: captcha edition

i'm generally not a fan of the captcha.  you know, those little word-gamey test thingies that it seems like nearly EVERY website is using nowadays to make sure that only robots, machines, spam viruses humans can log onto their sites.

my beef with them is that even though i'm not a robot, a machine or a spam virus, the images are so hard to decipher that half the time i can't even figure them out. 

a typical scenario goes something like this:

me: {tilting head to side and squinty eyes} is that a lower case "d" or a "c" and an "l" real close together and tilted to the side?

website: you have entered an incorrect entry. please try again.

me: {banging head against the computer screen}

sometimes, i end up having to re-captcha about 3 or 4 times until i get one that i can actually figure out.  usually the phrases seem like a random pairing of words that don't make any sense, so i figured that they were the result of some kind of randomly generated program. but last week i got the following when i was trying to log into the book of faces.

surely this is someone's idea of a joke.

 maybe it's the new parent in me, but i didn't really find it funny...

guest room mood board

i’m a very visual person, so when i start decorating any room in the house, i always create a mood board (a technique i picked up from yhl).  before i started using mood boards, i used to send all these different e-mails to myself from each store’s website so that i could remember items that i liked.  but, since this was a little confusing and hard to keep organized before, i hate to think of what a mess it would be now on baby-limited sleep.  i would also (and still do) create shopping lists at each of the home décor store sites that i frequent. 

if a brick and mortar store exists for whatever i have chosen, i usually end up picking it up in person.  but, i actually really hate shopping and hate crowds even more, so online browsing definitely beats hoofing it around town to a million different stores in my free time.
  
for the mood boards, i use powerpoint to copy and paste pictures of the items. since i do about 99% of my home décor window shopping online, i also embed a link back to whatever websites that i found them on so that i can easily keep track of price changes and availability.

without further ado, here's the guest room mood board: