Pillows and Peanut Butter Pie

It is pretty late here, but I haven't updated in a while and the internet is FINALLY working again. So I think it is blogger time. I mean let's face it, I definitely slept until 11 am today (so LAZY) and I'm not tired at all. On the other hand, Michael is sleeping next to me, snoring away. :) Lucky for me he has a quiet little snore. He has to be up for work tomorrow in like four hours.

We had another busy weekend. Dylan and Nick were over at the house Friday and Saturday, which meant I should probably cook for the guys, right? :) We had cornbread and chili on Friday and pulled pork sandwiches on Saturday. Guy food. Saturday morning I got up and baked a chocolate graham cracker pie crust, so it could cool in time to make peanut butter pie. It was really good. Only half of it was eaten though, so Michael took the rest to work yesterday, a highly effective way to get rid of leftovers.

We also got a few things done around the house. We dressed up the couches we bought from Michael's friend. They came with these horrible "matching" pillows that were black on one side and a brown/tan geometric pattern on the other. The guys said they liked them....right....


Anyways, we got some new pillows and a grey shaggy rug:

And we got a new side table, which is now home to our three board games and magazines. The color scheme is still in the works, I need more color! Maybe a couple of bright warm tones to make it look happier....

Dylan is also being so kind and lending us his television, so we don't have to use my tiny one for the time being. Dylan is Michael's old roommate from the barracks, and I'm pretty sure his new roommate has a bigger television. So.... we get to use it! Yay for good friends! We got a new TV stand at Target for it, my television was just sitting on one of our stools from the table set. Now the video games, dvds, and cds have a home too! And bonus, the Wii and playstation aren't on the floor anymore!

Since I haven't really posted many pictures of the house.... Lets take a glance at my little kitchen, which I think is cute and perfect for us right now. (Although, I do hope that we have a dishwasher in our next place!)

I put all of the wedding cards on top of the cabinets, they line the whole opposite wall, too...

This is the other side of the kitchen. Love love love my mixer! I can't believe someone actually got it for us!!! Since we can't paint, I'm trying to bring in lots of colorful elements. :)

And last, but not least, Roma is getting so big! She has blooms too, so the tomatoes are on their way! She's even bigger than this picture now, except we forgot to water her yesterday... so she was a little droopier than usual this morning. She's probably happy now because it has been raining for a couple hours. We're going to give her some plant food this weekend.
Well, thats all for now. Hopefully I'll get another post in before the end of the week. The internet people are coming out tomorrow to get our internet working better. Michael turns 21 this weekend!!! Time to cuddle with my snoring boy.

Yogurt and Surprises

I discovered that like Greek yogurt over Christmas break this year. It was a breakfast item that the inn we stayed at for a week included in their daily breakfast baskets, which they kindly placed at your doorstep in the mornings... how cute is that??? They also had fresh baked muffins or scones, fruit, and juices. Loved it.

Anyways, I'm a big fan of Tillamook yogurt, strawberry to be exact, which they DO NOT sell in NC. Which sucks, but whatever. So, I've been trying different yogurts here and I settled with the plain ol' store brand variety. Mostly because it is cheap, but I do miss Tillamook's rich and creamy texture with little bits of fruit in it.

On my quest for a good yogurt I tried Dannon's and Yoplait's Greek varieties. Dannon was way better. The fruit on the bottom was way more enjoyable than Yoplait's consitent pink colored mess that tasted nothing like strawberry. Just thought you might want to know.

I was kind of bummed when I discovered that I forgot to pack my perfume and have been perfume-less since I've been in NC -- that is until today! Michael surprised me with a present that he brought home after work. It was wrapped all pretty like with a purple bow on the top. It was a set of the perfume I usually wear! Isn't he sweet?

Stormy Weather

The weather here has been stormy lately. Since last thursday, when it got really windy and started thunderstorming while Michael was still at work.

We had a busy weekend, as usual, but got to spend a little more time at home than the past few! On Friday we picked up a Wii (Impulsive...I know. ) We used our 10% off because it was on our registry at Target AND they already had a sale going on so it was only like $157. Couldn't pass that up, RIGHT?

Then we went to dinner with a friend, who came back to our place while we got the Wii set up and running. I like it when we have visitors here. I hope it happens more now that we have furniture in the living room.

On Saturday we had a lazy morning and then headed to the mall to find a duvet cover for our king sized comforter. We went to the only three stores in the mall that had bed linens and had miserable luck. There were no duvet covers at all in the first two stores, and the king bed linens were so limited. The last store, Belk had a similar selection. Belk is just like Macys or JCPenneys. Michael was digging through their clearance items and found the only king size duvet cover in the whole Jacksonville mall. Blue, brown, light green, and cream stripes..... I loved it. And it had 99.99 hand written on the side of it, but when we were checking out we found out that it was 70% off + an extra 40% off the original price. So.... we got a $200 Nautica duvet cover for only $36! I love good deals!

It was so cheap because the bedding collection the duvet cover went with was no longer being sold there or something, so we couldn't get any matching pillow cases or sheets. We just took it over to Target and got some pillow cases, sheets, and a decorative pillow to match. I want to get a couple more pillows later!

For dinner last night I made pita pizza with spinach artichoke hummus, tomatoes, feta cheese, and left over pulled pork. They were sooo good. We will definitely make this again. The pork was boneless pork ribs which were cooked on Thursday night in the crock pot with beef broth and onion. I seasoned it with seasoning salt and some pepper then let it cook for about 4 hours on high. When it was done I shredded it with 2 forks. I refrigerated enough to make another dinner with before I added BBQ sauce and baked it in the oven for our pulled pork sandwiches. Yum!

After dinner last night Michael played Harvet Moon on the Wii and I watched the lightning! I got a few good strikes on video with my camera. '

Plaid.

Michael really likes plaid. :) When we bought these plaid shorts, he said that he wanted the wear them with this one shirt...

"Your plaid shirt?" I asked. Yes, that was the shirt he was thinking of.

Yesterday, after he got off work, we were getting ready to go to the grocery store and he puts on this ensemble:

Oh, I do love him so! The light gray in the shirt matches the light gray in the shorts.... I see where he was going with this, and they are nice pieces. Just not so much when they are part of the same outfit. It is not that bad, but its not good. (You might recognized the shirt from my first post, when we got dressed up and went to dinner. He looked quite dashing!)

So I wrestled him out of the button up shirt. I mean, it was like 97 outside yesterday. Do you need to wear 2 shirts?

So glad that we got to go to the grocery store. Now I have food to cook with! Yesterday I ended up making tomato soup and potato wedges for dinner. Homemade tomato soup that is! Its was very tasty, but not very healthy. Tonight I'm trying out pulled pork sandwiches in the crock pot with some twice baked potatoes and asparagus on the side. Yum!

I'm so happy it is Wednesday! We get to take the recycling out to the curb tonight. We have a lot of recyclables to get rid of. And the week is more than half over now, which is good because Michael seems really tired this week. His burn is healing, but it blistered a bit on his neck and scalp. Poor guy! :(

Early Mornings

Blogging by candlelight right now. Just because I want to.

Today is day two of getting up at three am with Michael to spend time with him in the morning while he gets ready to leave for work. He is carpooling with two guys that live in Richlands with us this week. I made him pancakes and hot chocolate this morning. :)

Yesterday he didn't get home until 7 pm, and the poor guy was soooo sunburnt. I slathered him up with sunscreen today. He's coaching at the range this week, so he has to stand outside all day.

I got a lot done yesterday; had plently of time on my hands. Cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed the carpet, rearraged the furniture, organized the playstation stuff, did a little laundry, lint rolled the new sofas, and went a little crazy with the magic eraser getting rid of all the little marks in our house left over from construction.

I also had a little surprise yesterday. Ding dong! The UPS man came a whole day early and brought me my dishes, so no more plastic plates! Now I have big plates and little plates and bowls and serving platters and serving bowls etc.

Oh gosh, UPS was driving me crazy the last couple weeks. They had FIVE packages for us and they weren't delivering them because they thought our address was wrong. UGH. And they broke my cake stand, so.... we are waiting for a damage claim to go through. Sounds like I won't have a cake stand for Michael's birthday. :(

So, after I removed all the dishes from the two boxes, and threw all the cardboard they were packaged in on to the growing Everest-like mountain of cardboard that we've moved to the spare bedroom, I washed all of them. By hand.

And then I made Michael my version of one of his favorite things. Tuna Pasta Casserole. It was pretty good, I must say. Simple too! I just made a bechamel sauce with 2 tablespoon of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour, and 2 cups of milk. Then I added 1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese and 3/4 teaspoon of salt. Then I stirred in 2 cans of tuna, 2 servings of pasta, and 1 crown of broccoli cut up into floweretts. Then I added it to a small casserole dish and baked it covered at 350 for 30 minutes.

Alright, well I've probably bored you with my rambling. I'm going to wrap this one up with a couple pictures of Jedd and Annabelle, because I do miss them so!

Oh Honey

Michael is putting together furniture. So, I'm going to enjoy some computer time.

While we were at snoqualmie falls, we picked up a little souvenir:

We intended on hanging on our front door, but I'm concerned that the bugs will destroy it. So, maybe it will hang on our front door one day. Just not today.

Talking about honey, I need to share our new favorite thing to put honey on.... popovers! They are sooooo good and really easy to make. I used this recipe here. To ensure a light and fluffy texture, make sure you let the egg and milk sit out for about 30 minutes so that they come to room temperature.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and in a small bowl add:

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 egg

Mix gently until only slightly lumpy. Add even amounts to four lightly greased 6 oz ramekins. Bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees. Then, without opening the oven door, lower the temperature to 350 degrees and bake for about 15 more minutes until the tops are golden brown.

Serve warm with butter and honey.

They went great with our brown sugar glazed ham and green bean casserole. I think they are also a great brunch item. I tried making them in a muffin pan, they were good, but not as good as they were in the ramekins. I think I used too much batter and that the baking time at the high temperature needs to be decreased.

Well, its time for me to go. We need to start hanging blinds and I'm on sawdust clean up with my new orange Dyson!

The North Carolina

Okay. So we get home from the honeymoon. Open all of our gifts and then we are back to reality....

We packed and packed. We took advantage of the fact that Michael can have three 70 lb checked bags for free. So our baggage was a bit ridiculous. We ended up having one 70 lb roller(whew...glad we didn't stuff more into that one), one 64 lb roller, one 50 lb roller, two kind-of-pushing-it-might-not-fit-on-the-airplane rolling carry ons, one large backpack "personal item", and one hat bag "personal item". For the third flight we had to check the rolling carry ons, because it was such a small plane. We made it through just fine though!

So, after 3 flights and 14 hours of travel (not including the drive home), we made it to our humble home in North Carolina.

It is cute. It has white trim, yay! My washer and dryer work amazing. Lots of storage in the kitchen. I promise I will post pictures of the place when we get it all set up. We have a mountain of cardboard in our living room right now, that I'm not too fond of...

I let michael put the new table together, while I documented the accomplishment.

Isn't it beautiful? We were looking for tables at the store and when we sat down at this one our first dance song started playing. So, we had to get it. And the stools work well in the small space we have for it. :)

We also planted a little tomato plant, which we fondly call Roma. I helped with this one, I promise. She's doing pretty good, we moved her to the back patio today because I think she needed more sun.

Next post will probably involve food. And if I were you, I'd look forward to it.

Honeymoon

I have so much to cover. So I'll probably post at least a couple times today. Let's start with the honeymoon...

The Salish Lodge was awesome and fun and great. The falls were beautiful and the people were friendly. I must say I could get used to breakfast getting brought to my room every morning. The valet employees were super nice. Michael would call down and ask them to bring the car around because we were headed down stairs. haha.

We even got dressed up one night and went to their "fancy" Dining Room. They gave us a private room to eat dinner in, with a nice view of the falls. I got the best chicken and waffles a girl could ask for and finished with chocolate mousse dessert.

The lodge was right next to a railway museum, which Michael was dying to check out. We were also able to take a daytrip over to Washington's very own Bavarian town of Leavenworth, which was so fun! Thanks mom and dad for an awesome honeymoon!