Time for a Change

Another day, another dollar. It sounds so simple, but employment is such a big part of modern life. For the last two years I have worked at a job that was good for a while, terrible for a while, and then ended up being great. My coworkers are nice, my boss is the best boss I've ever had, and the hours are completely ideal- but I have hit a dead end. A few weeks ago I was promised a promotion, and then a change in company policy made said promotion impossible. In fact, this change made it highly unlikely that I will ever be able to advance. My boss laments the fact that I will not be able to do this other job he had intended for me, but this bolt from the blue came from high above his head. So although there are a lot of things that I really like about my job, it is time for a change. I am putting the feelers out there for a new job. Although some people would be fine with a never-changing job, I am not one of those people. I need to be able to grow and improve. So I will take my time and find just the right job that will probably be pretty similar to the one I have now, but with advancement opportunities. I have been at my current job long enough so that it won't look like I can't hold onto a job, and I will be leaving on great terms with lots of good recommendations. So I feel that the time is right for a change in employment, hopefully at a place where I can stay until I have my degree, 45 years from now.

Anna Returns

After a shamefully long hiatus (attributable to an increase in my professional workload, starting school, and a rather nasty bout of food poisoning,) I'm back!

To be completely honest, one of the reasons I haven't written anything in the last few weeks is that I haven't had much to say. I have all of these good ideas, but implementing them one after the other sort of defeats the purpose since I can't really establish a habit for any of them. Since I can't really start anything new right now, I thought a simple status report might suffice:

Good Idea#1: Freezer Cooking- We still actually have several of these meals in the freezer. We will be eating one of them tonight, as a matter of fact.

Good Idea #2: Debt-Busting- After about 3K in unexpected expenses this spring (Damn you, Murphy, damn you.) we haven't made much headway. Our "budget" has pretty much consisted of getting the bills paid and feeling pretty good about it.

Good Idea #3: Non-Negotiable Priorities- Haaaah! Ummm yeah. These are still all-too-negotiable. It comes down to 2 factors, the foremost of which is that I don't have a lot of time. The second factor is that when I do have the time to exercise or read scripture, I just don't want to. Now that it is staying light out so late (isn't it lovely?) I think I am going to start walking my dogs after dinner. Goodness knows they would like it. As for scripture study, I just don't know. I'm right in the thick of the Mosaic Law right now and....ZZZZzZzzzzzz.....*snork!* What was I saying? Oh right...Old Testament. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there but MAN do you have to work to find it. I guess church as a whole is not yeilding much satisfaction right now. I think most of us churchgoers go through phases like this where church just loses meaning for a while. I guess I'm in a bit of a spiritual funk. I'm sure it will pass.

Good Idea #4: Going Back to School- This is going swimmingly. I love being back in the classroom and doing something I absolutely love. I finally feel like I am headed in the right direction, academically speaking. I really can't wait until I'm designing professionally. *sigh* It will be bliss.

Good Idea #5: Eating Healthy- This has been going fairly well except for the aforementioned food poisoning. I am currently trying for the nth time in my life to give up soda. I loves me some Coca Cola. I haven't had a coke since last Thursday which has to be some kind of record. I did drink a lot of sprite over the weekend, but since it was the only thing I could keep down for about 48 hours, I didn't feel too bad about it. The Hubs is down to the last notch on his belt and is going to have to buy a new one soon. Why can't weight loss be that easy for women? Garrrr. One good thing that seems to have come from my recent illness is that I now have somewhat of an aversion to fast food (from whence the food poisoning came). Certainly less fast food in my diet will be a great thing.

And thus are the good ideas.

I would also like to add that I crocheted 2 (count 'em- TWO) dish cloths this weekend. Next stop, dish towels. OOOooooo.....

Good Idea #5: Healthy Eating

In a recent development, The Hubs has become terrified of diabetes. He is strong and fit and healthy as a horse, but all of a sudden he wants to take steps to ensure that he doesn't become diabetic and have to have his feet amputated. A worthy goal, undoubtedly. However, I'm not sure why the sudden worry. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he is turning 25 in June (yay car insurance discounts!).

Anyway, we are cutting way back on the sugar (I have always had a very insistant sweet tooth) and upping our intake of fruits and veggies. I am also trying to eat more whole grains and use less processed food in my cooking. On that note, I am proud to announce that last week, I made my own butter. It is fabulous. It is creamy and delicious and contains only two ingredients: cream and salt. No monohydroxyunsaturated anything in my butter.

If you'd like to try making your own butter, take heavy cream and put it into a large bowl. I started with a gallon of cream and ended up with what looks like about 5 lbs of butter. You can use a stand mixer with the whisk attachment, or if you are like me and do not have the counterspace for a stand mixer, (*sulks bitterly*) you can use a hand mixer with the whisk attachment. Just beat it! First it will form thick strands off of the whisk, then soft peaks, then stiff peaks, then something a little firmer and then all of a sudden the cream siezes and buttermilk floods out, leaving butter behind. Now, since you didn't start out with cultured cream, the buttermilk isn't cultured which means its basically like unhomogonized 1% milk. It is delicious over cereal. Anyway, once your butter gets to that point, drain out the buttermilk and knead the butter in a bowl of cold water. Once the water becomes cloudy, dump it out and fill it again with fresh water. Repeat until the water stays clear. It is important to wash all of the buttermilk out because if you don't, the butter will spoil much more quickly. Incidentally, I am in the market for a French Butter Crock. If anyone knows where I can buy one locally, please enlighten me in the comments.

I am really excited about our foray into healthy eating. I have tried to make this change on my own before, but without the support of a spouse, it is infinitely more difficult. The Hubs, for most of our marriage, has worked at fairly labor-intensive jobs, during which a dinner of Chicken Ceasar Salad was completely insufficient. Now he is behind a desk a lot of the time and his caloric needs are much closer to my own so that, in order for me to eat healthy, I don't have to cook 2 dinners. Yay desk.

On a less healthy note, we ate a freezer dinner last night that made all of the other freezer dinners we muscled through completely worth it: Bacon Wrapped Chicken.


It was divine. Not something you'd want to make often because there isn't much that's healthy about it, but wow. It was good. It would be a great dish to take to a party because its easy (albeit time-consuming) to make but looks and tastes tre gourmet. I served it with fresh broccoli to up the healthiness factor and what a meal.

Hopefully the healthy changes to my diet and the regular (I can't yet say daily...) walking will make for a more energetic me that can keep up with full-time employment, part-time scholarship, and all-the-time wife-ing. Go me.

Good Idea #4: Going back to School

Back to school, back to school, to prove to Dad I'm not a fool...

And to earn a degree that will let me do something I actually enjoy doing and make money doing it. That's right folks, I'm going back to school for a degree in Graphic Design. I started college as an art major, but since I didn't really know much about what I wanted to do, everyone convinced me that I'd be a starving artist or a secretary with a useless degree. So I switched my major, sort of foundered around for a while, and ultimately dropped out because of some personal and family issues. Now that I've been a working adult for several years (as a secretary with NO degree,) I have figured out how I can use my artistic abilities to earn a living. I am SO excited to be going back to school. I wouldn't change the choices I made- I still believe that they were the right ones. Still, it was really tough watching all of my friends graduate and feeling like I'd never get there. I am tying up all of the loose ends concerning enrollment, registration, and the like, and I will be starting my first class(Fundamentals of Design- YAY!!!!) 2 weeks from this Friday.

Education has always been really important to me and my lack of a college degree has always left me feeling, well, lacking. This is a self-improvement that I have wanted to make for quite some time and it feels so good to finally be getting there.

I'z goin too bei smarterr nau...

Since I have been out of town for the past few days, I have no food review for today. Honestly, I'm getting pretty tired of the freezer dinners. They just aren't the same as fresh food. Yes, it was quite enchanting the first week, not having to cook, but the quality of the food was just blah and after an entire month of it, I don't think I can do it again. I am, however, going to try a different method of making things ahead. I am going to go back to planning 2 weeks of meals at a time, shopping every other Friday, and just doing everything I can do ahead of time as soon as I get home from the grocery. Chopping, browning, etc. That way I will still have a plan, still save time on work nights, and still have fresh food that isn't a drudgery to eat. We will finish up the freezer meals we haven't eaten yet (except maybe the Chili...I may just throw that out when Alex isn't looking) and next payday I'll buy groceries like a normal person.

So overall, I'd say OAMC has its merits, but it isn't for me. I enjoy cooking (and eating) too much. When I know I am capable of "Wow!", "meh..." just isn't good enough. Also, I plan to start using coupons a lot more in the coming months, and that isn't easy to do when you only shop once a month. That takes a kind of planning that is well beyond my abilities.

And so, Good Idea#1 dies a quiet death after it fell on the "error" side of the trial and error process. So long OAMC, I will remember the good times.

Anna Rambles

Being sick has gotten in the way of a lot of things recently, namely my Non-negotiable priorities. Still, I have found that categorizing exercise and scripture study as non-negotiable keeps them on my mind a bit more than they heretofore were. The past few weeks I have done them about 40% of the time, which, while it is not perfect, is better than the < 5% I was averaging before. My hope is that as my cold disappears and the weather improves, my batting average will increase.

In other news:

I cleaned my ENTIRE house on saturday. Dishes, Laundry, sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, the works. I am the queen of my domain.

Daylight savings time started which means last night it was light out well after 8 o'clock. I can smell camping season quickly approaching.

I am going to Vegas this weekend with The Girls. A few weeks ago, The Hubs gave me a few dollars to get a coke and I told him I was going to save it for my trip. When he asked why I would hang on to such a paltry amount, I replied that where Las Vegas is concerned, one never knows when a girl will need some singles. He wasn't nearly as amused as I was.

My favorite dessert is Tiramisu.

That is all.

And now, the dinners we have tried since my last post: Spaghetti and Sweet Onion Pork Chops.
The Spaghetti sauce was good. That's a pretty tough one to screw up. I think I may save that recipe, make a whole stock pot full of it, and can it someday when I am feeling adventurous. (Maybe canning will be a "Good Idea" in the future. I have never tried it. Frankly, the idea that something may explode in my kitchen is not confidence-inspiring.) When I asked The Hubs what he thought about it, he said "Its spaghetti- what's not to like?" It was really nice, however, not to have to brown the meat. Cook noodles, dump in sauce, warm through. Nice.

The Sweet Onion Pork Chops were really tasty. The sauce was tangy and sweet (although next time I will be adding a prodigious amount of hot sauce and liquid smoke) and was quite good. It could have used more onion. I also think that it would taste better over chicken, but don't tell The Hubs I said that. He doesn't like it when I blaspheme.

Sweet Onion Pork Chops:
The Hubs: 9 (I believe this is his highest score yet)
Me: 8
Wrench: "Its good"

Tonight we will be having Creamy Lemon Chicken, which I am looking forward to. The promise of broiled swiss cheese topped with fresh lemon slices gives me great anticipation. *wipes drool off of chin* Tune in tomorrow for the review!

The Hubs Has a Good Idea

He's a pretty smart cookie actually, he has good ideas quite frequently. But don't tell him I said that, I'd never live it down. Last night as we were eating Lime Pepper Chicken (more on that later), The Hubs suggested that some of our dinners for next month come from the Crock Pot. I readily agreed and so, next month some of our Freezer Meals will be designed for the Crock Pot. Also, since none of the freezer recipes we have thus far eaten have wowed me with their excellence, I will be keeping only the best of the freezer recipes and then just making and freezing a bunch of stuff that I already make. Jamaican Jerk Chicken, for example.

The Lime Pepper Chicken was good. Nothing fancy, the flavors were not complex, but it was good. Oddly enough, there was no pepper of any sort in the recipe. If I make this again I will add some habaneros or scotch bonnets for a little kick. Once again, I forgot to get scores from The Hubs and Wrench, but they both approved. I'll give it an 8. Not bad for a work night.

My cold persists and so without further ado, I bid you adieu.

If, in today's post, you find grammatical errors, stories with no conclusion, or other nonsensical ravings, please forgive yours truly. I. Am. Exhausted. I forsee a nap in my lunch-break future.

Since I am scarcely able to string together a coherent sentence, I will be brief. Beef and Broccoli = yuck. After running a slew of errands both on my lunch break ( I still squeezed in a walk later in the day!) and after work, by the time I got home I was tired and starving. Usually in that state I am able to wolf down large amounts of dinner without even tasting it, but the unsavoriness of the Beef and Broccoli trumped my tum. The flavors were weird, the meat was tough, and the broccoli was soggy- not a good combo. The Hubs and Wrench said it was fine (I was too tired to even remember to ask for their scores) and that they didn't mind it at all, but as for me, I will not be making it again.

Beef and Broccoli:
Me: 1.5
The Hubs: "tastes fine"
Wrench: "Its good"

As part of my debt-busting good idea, I'd like to share some ways in which I save money. Today's tip, FREECYCLE. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of freecycling, it is based out of a website with local groups all over the country. You sign up (free!) with your local group and start the fun! You can post things that you don't want anymore (I'm talking anything- from an old lawn mower that may or may not work to your leftover coupons to the couch that you just replaced) and people come and get them. You can also post things you want or need. I have gotten many items from freecycle. For instance, last night I acquired a whole bag of jeans. I wear a really hard-to-find size (translation: expensive) and although these are much too short, I am going to cut them all down into capris for the summer, saving about $100 I had planned for just such an expense. So now I can use some of that money to replace other parts of my wardrobe that are nearing the end of their life-spans. Unless, of course, I can find those on freecycle too...