Eggcelent Trivia April 12, 2006

I just put 18 eggs on to boil so that Ben and I can decorate them later this week. I’m feeling quite on top of things compared to some of my past Easter performances:

• At least once, I completely forgot that you need vinegar to dye eggs. The decorating kit remained in the pantry til next Easter.
• Last year, in dumping out the water from the pan after the eggs were done boiling, I was so careless that 5 of the dozen I had boiled cracked. (Hence the 18 eggs this year
• I’m sure that at least once, I’ve gotten so carried away with other Easter preparation that we just didn’t get around to the egg dying at all.
• In an un-egg-related event, when my brother and sister-in-law were visiting with their family from Michigan one Easter, I got so carried away with hosting duties that I completely forgot about getting anything for Ben’s Easter basket. Thankfully, Mom had some Easter candy that I took home, we added a book we had been saving for Ben, found some old basket grassy-stuffing from the craft closet and presented it all to Ben at the end of the day in a gift bag. Yep, I’m taking home the Mother of the Year trophy for that one!
• And one last egg fact that should dispel any notion that I am an expert cook – every year I have to look up the amount of time required for hard-boiled eggs. I literally need a recipe to boil an egg!

Despite my flounderings, Ben continues to find great joy in decorating Easter eggs. He particularly likes to take all the cups of left over dye and pour them back and forth from cup to cup, creating new colors until they are all a brown, murky mess. This year, we are going with an egg decorating kit, that is right up our demographic alley: The Star Wars Egg Decorating Kit. This is yet another time when he can revel in being an only child, with no sibling to divide the dying privileges and no little sister to demand a Dora Decorating Kit. Decorate the eggs, we will!

Shopping List Download April 10, 2006

I was going to title this post, "Open Source Home Management." Then I got all creeped out by how easily that web-geekiness came to me What this post is really about is sharing something I’ve found to be very helpful in my role as Official Purchasing Agent for BaileyCorp. Here you’ll find a list

I use every week for grocery and household shopping. Our usual suspects are all on there, so I have something to jog my memory when I’m putting together the weekly list. Having everything written down not only makes it faster, but it also reminds me to check on things I might have forgotten that we are low on. That way, I spend less time making last-minute trips to the store because oh-shoot-I-forgot-to-check-our- toilet-paper-supply-and-now-we’re-down-to-our-last-square! And, true confession here, I have this fantasy that my house will function just like Target, where if we use up one item, a replacement will spring forward on the shelf from behind it

All credit for this goes to Katie, who developed the original. I just changed the grocery list to reflect our food preferences and added the household items we use on the other side. (I usually reserve the stuff on the household side for my once/twice monthly trip to Target.) So, just as she shared with me, I’ll share with you!

Thoughts and Happenings – Last Few Days April 5, 2006

Behind on my blogging, not for lack of things I want to blog, just that sweet commodity, time. So, bullet points to the rescue!

• Ben and I got sick simultaneously Sunday. We both woke up with a bit of a sore throat, which got worse throughout the day and progressed to include achiness. Ben stayed home from school on Monday and I worked from home. We were both kind of whiny. It was actually good to be sick at the same time – misery loves company, plus I could help Ben more based on what I was experiencing. Though he didn’t appreciate it much when I said he was well enough to go to school on Tuesday, because I was well enough to go to work.
• It’s baseball season again! I’m not exactly in love with baseball, rather the idea of it. Especially the sounds of it. There is something very soothing about it all.
• We have already started filling out forms for the next school year! Really. Someone tell me where this year went. Because August seems like yesterday. And there’s no way that Ben can be that close to 5th grade!
• One of our family’s best grocery store finds in the last year is some really great, all-natural french fries made by a company named Alexia. We get ours at SuperTarget, but I think I’ve seen them at Walmart and our local health food store. Baked in the oven at 450 for 25 minutes, sprinkled with salt and dipped in ketchup – it totally fulfills my fry cravings. Those + turkey burgers are one of our favorite weekend dinners! (Stay away from the Sweet Potato fries though – quite pasty) 
• Theresa reminds me of how glad I am to be done with the baby phase in a movie-scene worthy post. In fact, if I saw this in a movie, I probably would have said, "Well that was a little over the top – like that would ever happen in real life!" Theresa, hang in there – it couldn’t get worse!
• I watched Pride and Prejudice the other night all by myself! I felt completely indulgent watching a movie just for me. During normal circumstances Brian would have watched this with me, but it is book-writing season and his spare time is very spare! Good movie, but didn’t quite live up to the hype I had created in my mind. For me, Keira Knightley + Jane Austen had the potential for oh-mi-gosh-one-of-my-favorite-movies-ever. It was pretty good, but did not quite capture the warmth and sense of humor that I would have hoped. To me, Emma is still the best Austen movie.
• And as I considered a bullet-point weblog post and Jane Austen’s writing at the same time, the glaring difference between the two cracked me up! Can you imagine people from her day communicating in bullets? Perhaps "high points of the ball,"  or "happenings in the fortnight at Bath," or "thoughts whilst strolling the grounds." Yeah. I doubt they even thought in bullet points back then!