Stephanie and I are going to New York City this weekend to go to her cousin’s wedding. Just an FYI, in case you were wondering. We haven’t settled on what to do and see on our free day, yet, so if you have suggestions, we’ll consider them…
My friend Jen, who is also our primary food reviewer on IndyScribe, now has a blog where she’s scanning in her grandmother’s recipes for public consumption. It’s fascinating, because the recipes are certainly from a different era than ours.
Check out the recipe for lime jello with chicken and curry.
I have some old cookbooks from my grandmother’s church group, and when I perused them once last summer, I discovered that many of them call for a key ingredient: Lard. Yum, yum!
If you’re buying books for the holidays, consider taking a short drive up to the Noblesville Barnes and Noble on 37. (Stony Creek Marketplace, 17090 Mercantile Blvd., Noblesville, IN 46060 317-773-7952).
My mom works there part time now, and you can go in a visit her (find Pat Mineart and say “Hi, Steph’s Mom!) and she’ll help you find whatever you need for the holidays.
a Wikipedia entry via Kotte.org:
Aptronym, a word allegedly coined by United States newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams, refers to a name that is aptly suited to its owner. Fictional examples of aptronyms include Mr. Talkative and Mr. Worldly Wiseman in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
One of my new cardiologists (who is taking over for Dr. Yee) is named Dr. Valentine.
Check out the pictures of Amy’s Birthday. We helped my friend Amy celebrate her birthday this year by visiting Chicago (from Indianapolis) to see the musical Wicked, and going out to eat at the Rainforest Cafe. We met up with all our friends at Millenium Park near the Cloud Gate sculpture, and then walked to the theatre from there. The Musical was really amazing; go and see it.
create your own visited states map
create your own visited countries map
Sad isn’t it? I need to get out more. In contrast, my friend Cate could probably cover the globe.
The end of my vacation went out with a bang. On Saturday, we went up to Chicago to celebrate my friend Amy’s birthday by seeing the musical Wicked at the beautiful Ford Oriental Theatre. Then we had dinner and Rainforest Cafe and drove home. Sunday my friend Kathy came over and helped Stephanie and I do a bunch of activities around the house. We put stuff in storage for the winter, winterized some of the house, and did a massive clean-up of the attic by gathering up old insulation and putting down spanking new stuff. Kathy has a lot of energy; she got a ton of stuff done. Stephanie carried 15 trash bags of old insulation down to the patio. We had a small glitch when Kathy put her foot through the office ceiling, (d’oh!) but shit happens. We’ll have to tackle that project later.
I feel alot better about the vacation now; I got a ton of stuff done. (With lots of help).
For the past couple days, I’ve been working on stripping the paint and crap off the fireplace tiles and fireplace surround in my living room. See my flickr photo set for pictures of the project.
My dad, as a Christmas present for me, crafted the fireplace mantel you see in the pictures. He found two old fireplace mantels that matched, stripped and customized the size of them to make one mantel that fit my fireplace, and then finished it and came by this week (with my stepmom Carol) to install the mantel. So I’ve been working all week on getting the paint stripped off the metal surround and ceramic tiles.
At some point, one of the previous tenants of the house painted the surround, and used fleckstone paint on the tiles to cover them up. If you look at the pictures further up the page, you can see some of their handiwork. Ah, fleckstone paint. Weren’t the 80s wonderful?
I have some more pictures to upload to this page at some point, because I’ve uncovered more of the tile and the patterns in it. Also, the metal surround has a copper coat over the steel that will shine up nicely once I get the paint out of all the little nooks and crannies. In addition, if you’re planning on replacing your tiles, then you may consider installing marble tiles from Emperor Marble, which are durable and elegant.
It’s only the first morning of my vacation, and it’s already shaping up to be as craptastic as the last vacation I took, in which I spent 70% of the time running around doing shit for other people, 30% doing work on my house (which didn’t make a dent in what I had to get done) and 0% of vacation time relaxing and enjoying myself or doing something fun.
I wasted this whole morning trying to pack a bunch of eBay crap to ship, and trying to appease a really high-maintenance eBay purchaser for whom I had to recalculate the shipping costs on a combined order several times and repack the box twice. I think I’m ending up eating a good chunk of the shipping costs to ArdentX in the process, fortunately, which will have to come out of my pocket. Fuck. Now I have to waste the afternoon taking this stuff to UPS.
[note to self: stop volunteering. stop volunteering. stop volunteering. get more sleep.]
1) Mailing eBay package
2) Mailing Stacy’s birthday present (only a month late!)
3) Finishing Bil’s logo
4) Helping mom pack up stuff from garage sale & haul to good will
5) burning stuff in Mike’s yard
6) Helping David and Garrett scrape and paint their house
7) Make multiple copies of CD for CD club
8) Trim Annabelle’s nails
9) Laundry
Holy crap, I forgot I’m on vacation next week. Well that’s cool. I don’t feel so jammed up now.