Investment

There are ten open boxes of cereal sitting on my kitchen table.

All the boxes are open and some of the bags, and now the boxes are all skeewhompas (no idea how to spell that one!) since the bags have been removed and shoved back in.

And it is a shame that my camera is broken because I would love nothing more than to take a picture of me sitting on my table in my stinky gym clothes with my ten open boxes of cereal.

Why?

Because I just got the worlds best deal EVER on cereal.

I had to make a late night run to the grocery store tonight to get a treat for Gwen's preschool tomorrow. They were having an okay sale on cereal so I got some (five boxes for $7.50) and put them in my cart. I meandered around on over to the produce section where I saw a giant display of the cereal that was on sale. After considering for a moment I decided to get an additional five boxes. But then I noticed something...

On these boxes it said that I could win CASH. Woo hoo, big deal, no one ever really wins, right? But then I noticed it said 1 in 10 boxes had a cash card in it ranging from $5-$25. Hey, I was buying ten boxes, statistics say that I would get at least five bucks, right?

You may not know this about me, but I am such a gambler. Seriously. Not like a poker playing gambler (though I am sure I could get into that if I let myself!), but I love intermittent rewards! It's why I like to do priceline. I could get an awesome hotel, I could get a meh hotel.

So I looked like an idiot picking out my cereal, trying to guess the right boxes that could have MONEY in them. I'm sure I looked like a freak.

So I got my ten boxes (and incidentally a coupon printed out for $2 off of 5 boxes of cereal! HELLO good deal!), and immediately ran home to open them all up, because as I mentioned, I love to gamble.

I got 3 cash cards! THREE! Two five dollar ones and one TWENTY FIVE dollar one. So let's see...my cereal cost me $15 and I won $35. So I made $20 by buying ten boxes of cereal.

Beat that coupon mom.

Actually she probably could...I better watch what I say!

It was so awesome! And apparently I will be using that $35 to purchase a new camera because mine is broken. Grrrr....

Syncrhonicity

Once upon a time I made a recipe that called for tomatillo salsa. I used the 1/4 c of the salsa and put the rest of the ginormous jar into my fridge. There it sat for many months. Tuesday on a whim I cleaned out my fridge. Contrary to popular belief, I don't clean out my fridge ever often. I thew out the salsa. It had been sitting there taking up space for months it was near the expiration and I was doing a big grocery shopping trip that night. Not only did I throw the salsa out, but I took the bag out to the curb and the garbage man took it away moments later.

Earlier in the day I had planned my weekly menu and made my grocery shopping list. One of the recipes was for Southwestern Egg Rolls, they lood delicious. I went grocery shopping at night and got all of the things I needed (and it only cost triple of what Janssen spends per week at the store!)

Today I went back to www.allrecipes.com to read how to make the Southwestern Egg Rolls. Every single reviewer said that you simply must make "Amy's Cilantro Cream Sauce" to dip them in. Every reviewer. I read the recipe, it sounded delicious and I had everything I needed to make it.

Except tomatillo salsa ("salsa verde").

Cruel irony. I can't go back to the store since Bentley is on his deathbed, and if 500 people tell me I HAVE to have the sauce I can't very well eat it without it, can I? And even if I do go to the store I will be stuck with yet another big ol' bottle of tomatillo salsa.

Anyone in Austin have it on hand for me to borrow? Anyone?

Too Much Fondue Tuesday

So I haven't been keeping up with my weight/exercise reporting, GET OFF MY BACK ABOUT IT.

Actually, no one gave me any grief about it at all, so uh...you missed your cue. If I miss a day give me grief, send me hate mail, call me fat. This is a team effort people!

Alright, but just kidding about calling me fat, that's just rude.

So... I went faithfully three times but that stubborn scale is still stuck between 133 and 134.

Just so you know though, when I weigh at home it says 129 (sometimes, more often 131 but still a lot less than the gym).

So I'm in a weight loss rut, any suggestions? Perhaps laying off of the Mothers Day fondue? Fine. I'll try.

And just so you know, I have a new gym mantra courtesy of Stacy.

"You've gotta squeeze your buns or else no-one else will!"

And on that note...

Bye.

Shower

So....a few things about planning an awesome Mother's Day surprise for your wife. Like, say you planned an awesome surprise and she would unexpectedly be going to dinner at a nice restaurant with friends, these are just a few little considerations to, well, consider.

1- If you've noticed that she has worn the same outfit (gym clothes, no less) for two days in a row, early in the day you might mention that she might consider taking a shower. Maybe comb her hair. And if she's feeling extra ambitious maybe she ought to put on some deodorant. She may seem offended at first and perhaps she won't speak to you for a while, call you a jerk behind your back or whatever, but when she shows up to said restaurant and notices that all of her friends are wearing cute skirts and have brushed their teeth, she will forgive you.

2-You would also be wise to inform her to feed the baby before you send her on her way or else you may be in for a looooong night. And she won't even feel bad, at least not really bad.

3- If your wife is sporting a triple chin you might suggest, ever so kindly, that she might like to wear a scarf or something because undoubtedly Ralphie will take pictures of the triple chin and post them on the internet for all to see. What a gal.

Read about the awesome Mother's Day surprise of 09 here

Thanks Blaine for the fun surprise! I loved it! Especially the rose, and the fondue. Mmmmm, fondue.....

Dignity, always dignity (part II)

The thing about going to garage sales is that you have to maintain your dignity. You're buying people's old stuff. Stuff that is not good enough for them anymore. They are better than you, that's pretty much what you are telling them when you go to their garage sale. So usually it is easy to cower your head, to acknowledge that you want their old, used, useless-to-them stuff. Not me though. I walk with my head held high, I look the seller in the eyes, I shake their hands. I've got pride.

But sometimes as I am leaving their house I step off the curb and into the street, and occasionally the road is a bit further down than I remember so I trip and flail my arms and fall on my face while tossing my new found treasures through the air, and I am left to hobble away with bloody knees, a twisted ankle and a $3 baby bjorn that was (moments before) in like new condition.

Dignity, always dignity.

PMS

I was blogstalking an old friend and reading about his happy life and how blissfully in love he and his wife are and how everything is peaches and cream and rainbows and butterflies. It kind of made me sick, and it also made me scoff. Surely people aren't that happy all the time, right? That's just the stuff of movies. In real life hard things happen. In real life you have to haul your naked child out of the mall. In real life people get muddy, ruin their doors with steak knives, and get pregnant when it should be physically and statistically impossible to do so. Or is that just me?

I don't know about you, but I relate better to people who are imperfect. I find hope in their struggles, and feel triumphant when they do. I laugh and cry with them. And so I kind of focus on the "imperfect" in my blog. So in honor of keeping with the imperfect...

I thought I would dissect a recent argument that Blaine and I had. Because unlike the aforementioned friend and his spouse, Blaine and I do fight, a lot. Not like duke-it-out fight (well, not usually anyways), but we get annoyed at eachother and mad at eachother and frustrated with eachother, just like every other normal, healthy, realistic couple.

On Sunday we had some friends over for dinner. True to form I was getting all stressed about an hour before they got here. Blaine had been up taking a Sunday afternoon nap, which was totally understandable and justified as he had gotten up early to go to ward council and he had been fasting, etc. After he had been sleeping a while I called up to him a couple of times to see if he would occupy Gwen so I could finish making the cake and clean up a bit. She had been "helping" me make the dessert for a while by then, and as fun as it was to work with her- it was getting to be crunch time. He never answered my calls, so I grudgingly wrestled Gwen down for a nap. Then I went and shook Blaine awake and asked him to come help me get ready.

He moseyed down the stairs, took a big whiff and said, "Wow! It smells really good. I can't believe you were able to whip up that cake so fast!"

I heard : "Wow, that cake took you no time at all to make. You probably had a nice nap and came down and whipped that cake right up, it was no trouble for you at all. "

So I scoffed and said "Well, I didn't 'whip it up really fast' it was really hard to make!"

and he said, "what was so hard about it?"

but I heard: "what was so hard about it? You probably just used a cake mix and beat in an egg or something. You are such a whiner, making a cake isn't that hard."

So I said, "What was so hard? [shaking him by the collar] WHAT WAS SO HARD? How about the fact that I am tired too. And I want to take a nap and Gwen was down here 'helping' the whole time and now people are coming and the house is a mess and the cake is burnt and you think it was easy to make but it was really hard and no one is going to like it because after all of that hard work I burned it because I was upstairs putting Gwen to bed while you were SLEEPING. Not to mention I didn't use a cake mix, I painstakingly followed the recipe and it took two hours, plus our brown sugar was all lumpy and hard and someone is probably going to break a freaking tooth if they get a lump of it in their cake and and now no one is even going to know that I worked so hard because it is probably going to taste sick and I wasted the whole afternoon. THAT'S WHAT WAS SO HARD".

To which he responded, "well if it helps at all, Ivy was crying so I wasn't sleeping the whole time or anything"

And I heard: "I was working just as hard as you, whiner"

To which I responded: "Oh you mean kind of like how she cries every night and I always get up with her? Like that? And yes you were sleeping! Either that or ignoring me because I called for your help a hundred million times!"

And a tense silence filled the house. Until he apologized. Like he always does. He's really good at apologizing first, and I am really good at holding out my apology for a really long time. It's a pretty big flaw of mine.

The weird thing about this particular argument though was that for some reason I was able to step back and see that what I was hearing was not what he was saying. I realized that when he said "mmm that cake smells good, I can't believe you were able to whip it up so fast" he really meant "Wow sweetie, thanks for taking the time to make that cake. You're a great cook and you can make good desserts in a matter of hours, thanks for doing that". Yet I chose to take the one word out of his compliment ["fast"] and blow it out of proportion and take it as an insult.

Then when he was being empathetic and trying to understand why the cake was hard to make, I took that as an insult too. Like a "why are you complaining" rather than an " I can tell you are worked up about it, let's talk about why you are so frustrated".

Ah, Blaine is such a patient person. He's very quick to forgive and nice to not point out how irrational I get sometimes; actually I take that back, sometimes he does point it out but I think he has learned he's better off to just pretend like I am being logical : ) . I love him for that. I guess sometimes I just feel like fighting and egging him on. He's a trooper and I am glad to know that he still loves me despite our little disagreements and my fight picking.

And the burnt cake? It was delicious and totally worth the two hours of "hard work". It wasn't really that hard, but a lot harder than taking a nap, that's for sure. And I just really felt like I needed Blaine to know that right then.





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FREEdom

How I ate for free today.

Woke up and went to chick-fil-a for a free breakfast item (each day this week!)

Then for lunch headed over to KFC for my free two piece meal. Took my shot gun, heard it is crazy in there.

And for dinner I plan on heading to Carinos for my free three course meal.

Nothing better than free food!