Best day of the year

Still figuring out the picture thing works. I think that it is crooked. This is a picture from the best day of the summer maybe even the year. CW and i were in Chicago for his brother Bob's graduation. It was nice weekend but the culmination was Saturday evening we walked down to Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium park where the Grant park symphony was playing Mozart's Requiem. We sat on the grass, rested our feet and enjoyed the sunset and beautiful music. We just had a great meal, we walked around one of my favorite places in the whole world (chicago), the weather was ideal - Life doesn't get much better then that.

My Husband

The other day i went to get the mail and found that we had a package. I get the box and notice that it is from Amazon. CW ordered a few books and even on for me which will probably be the next book i read -World without End by Ken Follett. I read the first book by him which is the Pillars of the Earth. Anyway, the package and his habit of collecting (and reading) books made me think of the first time i met him. I met him on a saturday morning. Our mutual friend Johnny was having a BBQ at his apt. that evening and so he picked me up and then i dropped him off at work so i use his car to run a few errands. One of those errands was to buy pop and drop it off at his apartment. There sleeping on the floor was CW. Johnny and CW hung out the night before and i guess that it was too late to go home. So i inadvertantly woke up CW and we chatted (the lightbulb went on). He asked me if i could give him a ride home, he was cute so i said yes. As i was dropping him off, he asked if i wanted to come up and i accepted under the guise of "checking my email". When i walked into his apartment he had a couple of tall bookshelves full of books and piles of other books all over. I have to say this was one of the things that impressed me most about him (to that point) and solidified my crush. I still love that he loves books and he continues to impress me with what he reads and wants to read!
(on that day i also discovered that he liked Christopher O'Rielly and that impressed me beyond belief and i became a Red Sox fan, they were in the playoffs and i watched for the first time in my life a complete baseball game by myself just to have something to talk about)

Another Week in Review

Well here i am again. I have a lot to post. Since i haven't been feeling very well in the evenings i have read a lot lately. I finished The Shipping News. I really liked the book. I like books that slant your life a little bit. I mean that certain books make you think about things a little differently even if just for a little while. This book was very well written and at times it was not very pleasant. I mean that this is not a feel good and be happy book but it was still good. The characters are not elegant or even very pretty but they get along and in the end are happy and have accomplished something in their life. I am not at all doing justice to this book but it is good. Another random consequence of reading a book set in Newfoundland (that is where this book is set) is a good portion of the book talks about fish and seafood. I kept having inordinately insane cravings for clam chowder, lobster, fish and chips, and the list goes on. To bad i live in a landlocked desert and am limited to what seafood i can eat fresh or not.

With that i will talk about my restaurant review. Los Compadres is a mexican food joint just down the road. It is fast, quick and pretty good. I got a #6. My usual - a taco, tostada, and a buritto with green chilies. I have been having a problem lately of nothing being appetizing to me. I get hungry but most food repulses me. So i ended up only eating the tostada. The rest will probably be lunch today. It is your usual american-mexican type food and i like it. CW, on the other hand had problems. It didn't sit well with him and he was up all night with heartburn and visits to the bathroom. I don't think we will go there again for that reason.

Dog Farts Fell Family of Four

Actually i am just figuring out how to add pictures to my blog. So let me introduce Winston. He is my co-worker Erin's Dog. He comes to work everyday with Erin. Everybody here has a dog except me and as i am learning there are traits that are particular to different dogs and bulldogs happen to have many in common with crotchety old men. Winston sleeps a good portion of the day and snores like crazy. I am sometimes amazed at how loud he is. Next is he is very stubborn. He doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do. You often have to persuade him with a dog treat. And lastly, this dog is a lot better now but this dog has some toxic gas. He can clear out our small office very quickly. Don't get me wrong, i have come to love Winston very much. I mentioned that i am the only one that doesn't have a dog here and despite that I am one on the ones that Winston likes to hangout with. I don't know why. He just sleeps under my desk snoring and farting away.

Fresh & Easy saved my life

A new store in the neighborhood just opened up. Fresh & Easy. I love the place. The produce is, well, fresh and well priced with a good selection. There are a lot of premade meals which has saved me from my husband’s hungry tummy. Or pre-prepared and all you do its cook it up. It is a small store that you can cruise through in a matter of minutes. They keep the costs down by having few employees and all checkout lanes are the self serve type, and finally because they are part of the Tesco family. Tesco may not be a familiar name to most but it is a British shop (originally, now global) that has buying capabilities to rival Wal-Mart. In fact they are Wal-Mart’s biggest competition internationally. It’s kind of funny actually. While on my mission in Hungary, most of the grocery stores were small type stores and even then, we didn’t use them that often. It was off to the bakery (pekseg) to get bread or the stand on the corner for our fruits and vegetables. But two of my areas, Szeged and Pecs, they opened a Tesco while I served there. It was all people could talk about for months. The excitement was palpable. We missionaries were pretty excited. They had an amerikai food aisle with such luxuries as corn flakes and peanut butter. I also had a companion that liked their Fank (a doughnut type thing with jam in the middle) and we went often for that. So for the second time in my life Tesco has changed my shopping habits - once going from small to large and now from large to small.

PS I heard that Wal-Mart is now looking at opening up smaller shops!
PPS I don't shop at Wal-Mart, the nearest one, i've heard from a reliable source, has vermin of the 3 letter word variety that are only cute in animated movies.

Week in review

Well this is more of a general week in review as I often don’t have the energy in the evenings to do anything except lay on the couch and watch Olympics. I don’t know what I will do without them.

Okay here are a few things that I will try to write about in my blog:
Reviews of books I read
Definitions of words I come across
Review of dining places
Etc.

So we will start with the book I just finished - Mr. Norrel & Jonathon Strange by Susana Clark. I enjoyed this book. It was pretty long and I kind of had a more grand idea of how it should have ended but it was not enough to make me dislike the book. I know that is vague but I don’t want to spoil anything in my “review”. I liked how thorough she is in her explanations of characters, spells and myths. It is obvious that she completely thought these out to add depth to the story.

My next book is The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Often I don’t read with the dictionary near but this book is different and leads me to the word of the Day… EXCORIATION
ex·co·ri·ate /ɪkˈskɔr iˌeɪt, -ˈskoʊr-/ Pronunciation Key -[ik-skawr-ee-eyt, -skohr-] –verb (used with object), -at·ed, -at·ing.
1. to denounce or berate severely; flay verbally: He was excoriated for his mistakes.
2. to strip off or remove the skin from: Her palms were excoriated by the hard labor of shoveling.

Food Establishment reviews: I haven’t really gone out anywhere special in the last week.
So for consistency’s sake, yesterday I went to Subway for lunch. I got a oven roasted chicken breast 6” on wheat. I asked for a little lite mayo. I don’t know if he wasn’t quite paying attention but he loaded it on - like gobs and gobs . So when I actually tried to remove some of it back at the office, I couldn’t really scrape it off without taking half of the lettuce as well. Needless to say, my sandwich was pretty good with all of that slathered mayo much to my surprise!

So this is long enough and I will try to figure out how to add pictures soon.

one more thing

I think the next post will have something to say about not judging me by inability to spell or use grammar correctly.  Yikes! 

Cutting costs

This seems to be a theme in my life right now. Okay, before i start i will state another disclaimer. That is as i try to figure out what to post i am having a hard time differentiating a journal and blog. I know that someday i will actually tell someone that i have a blog and thus all my posts will be subject to thoughts and responses from everyone. My journal, well i wouldn't share that to anyone and so i can pretty much create this stream of consciousness that only i and maybe my sister can appreciate. As if this just doesn't prove my point.

Back to cutting costs - I am trying to live more fully within a budget. I am also supposed to be thinking of the total amount of money that i would need to support myself, a child and a husband (husband- mostly just food costs) on a monthly basis. It is a difficult thing for me. I feel like i am pretty frugal and live pretty cheaply but at the end of the month - no money. I am working on it.

I work at an Interior Design Firm. Our business is high end residential design. Cutting costs seems to be a theme there also. Our client the S_ family is building a second house in the area, not a cabin, they already have one in Jackson Hole that would put any cabin i know off to shame. This is more of a ranch house with a barn for their horses, lots of room to entertain and although i don't understand this - lots of desert landscape - i am not a fan. The builder gave them the estimated costs (without the Architect's and Designer's fees) the estimated total was 6 million dollars. They responded that they only wanted to spend about 3 million. We are scrambling to cut costs with out ruining the desired effect of the house. (how about not spending 90 thousand on your pool)

Client number 2 the D_ family. This house is going to be amazing. I am excited to see it finished. This is going to be a french farmhouse including actual reclaimed elements from original buildings in France. Anyways the D_'s are were not sparing any expense until their costs exceeded 6 million as well. They only budgeted 5 million. So they are going "cheap" on a few things.
man life is hard.

DISCLAIMER

I have been reluctant to start a blog because i have high expectations for myself but am unable to actually create what i think i should be able to. It is the same with scrapbooking. I feel like i should be able to make these fabulous things but then when it comes down to it - i am crap. To quote The Most Interesting Man in the World "Find out what it is in life that you don't do well and then don't do that thing." So despite that sage wisdom... here i go.