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Being Married Means

Being married means understanding when your spouse needs a treat without them having to ask for it.

By the way, I’ve never seen a husband so excited to buy his wife a foot massager before. He literally walked around the store with it and wouldn’t let me say “No, put it back.” I think he got tired of my putting my foot in a pot. 🙂

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Being Married Means

Being married means sometimes your spouse snores loudly in their sleep, and you have to rub their head softly to get them to stop snoring.

Being married also means sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with your spouse’s loud, snoring nose in your ear. Literally. In your ear.

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Being Married Means

Being married means knowing when your spouse needs to vent more than you do, even if you had a crappy day, too. Sometimes your spouse just needs to talk, and you just need to listen.

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Hair and Seek

Every couple months P & I get brave and decide to sweep under the living room sofa. Besides 10 pounds of dog hair, loose leaf paper (I have no idea…), and dust, we found some interesting things.  I’d have to say the best things we found were: old painted pictures, my pair of shoes that I thought I lost, dog bones and toys, and a box of Captain Crunch Oops! All Berries. You’d better believe I was pretty sad to see that my box of All Berries was hidden underneath the sofa, opened, and stale. The dogs did enjoy the Berries though :).

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Looks Like Somebody’s Got a Case of the Wednesdays

Being the “Computer Literate” person at my office, I often have to fix the computer problems. Sometimes this means I do it on my own, sometimes I must research the problem first, and sometimes I just have to call my computer software engineer husband. 
I thought it might be good to get to the office early today, so I could get some work done. I logged into my boss’ computer, because his computer has the accounting software (and I am the accountant)…and this popped up as soon as I turned the computer on:
Then I laughed for about a whole minute straight. Until this and this started popping up:

 To which I turned off the computer and did this:

And now I am going back to work at dinner time with my husband to counteract all of the above.

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Baked Kale Chips Recipe

We joined a CSA (community supported agriculture group which lets your prepay and then you pick a bag of groceries each week) last year and we loved it. I never realized how little I eat vegetables until I was forced to eat them every week in order to clean the veggie drawer of the fridge in preparation of the new week’s grocery pick-up. We normally get potatoes of some sort, squash of some sort, a couple fruits, and a bag of green things. The bag of green things goes both ways…some weeks we get string beans–YAY! Some weeks we get weird greens (mustard greens, dandelion greens, beet greens, collard greens, kale, spinach, etc.–actually…spinach isn’t weird). What the heck does one do with 2 target bags of kale???

I think I figured it out. I am not a country cooking kind of a girl. I generally don’t use a lot of oil, salt, or butter, and I don’t want to use pig fat or whatever it is that makes string beans taste like salty ham.

However, since I have 2 bags of kale in my fridge, I realized I might have to allow one of these things into the mix in order to get rid the kale.

I spotted a recipe for some typical Southern food recipes (bleh), and then one recipe caught my eye: Baked Kale Chips. “What? Baked kale chips? That sounds nasty,” you say? Yea, I thought it would be weird, but it was the most un-Southern recipe I found, so I decided to give it a try. I am very glad I did, too! They are deeeeelicious!

All you need is kale, salt, and a Pam spray or olive oil.

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Cut kale stems apart from the leaves. 
  3. Break leaves into chip-sized pieces.
  4. Spray cookie sheet with Pam.
  5. Place kale pieces on sheet.
  6. Spray kale with Pam.
  7. Sprinkle salt or seasonings on the pieces.
  8. Put in oven for 10-15 minutes–until the pieces start to get a little brown. 
  9. EAT AND MAKE MORE!! 🙂
They kind of resemble potato chips and are not bitter at all. I put some garlic and onion powder on them, too. Yum! 
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Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper Review

We adopted Lennon, the Australian Cattle Dog mix, because we wanted a pup, and she was just too adorable. White and brown hair, white stripe down the nose, white socks, 2 different-colored eyes, peed out of excitement when they put her in the little room with us. She didn’t move from the puppy fetal position for about 20 minutes, but then eventually she crawled into my lap. I was sold.
Lennon needed a friend, and I have always been a “everyone needs a friend” kind of person. We found a newspaper ad that said someone was selling a litter a black lab mix puppies. On our trip to the seller’s house, we soon realized we just had to adopt a puppy from them, because leaving a dog there would just be cruel. They were drunken, sloppy people who were amused by feeding the puppies beer and screaming at them. The puppies were all well-behaved and cute, and Peter really seemed to fall in love with Lily, her one white foot, and her whiny nature. 
Now that you know the background, you can see that it never occurred to us that having 2 dogs with different -colored fur would be a problem…until about a day later when the light tiled floor was covered in black hair and the dark wooden floor was covered in white and tan hair. And since then, our floor, clothes, couches, car interior, etc. are all covered in hair of one color or another. Lennon’s hair is the worst–it is like little needles that are impervious to vacuum cleaners or lint brushes.
Just as an example, here was my dark brown carpet with Lennon’s white hair before.
Today I decided I would try one more thing–the Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper–and I am seriously glad I spent the $7.99. It cleans the black and white hair up sooo well! I cleaned my sofa, the front seats in the car, my ottomans, my coat! 

After a swipe of the Sweeper, here is the carpet after. Yahoo!

Yay, now I don’t have to look like the only person in a business meeting with a suit covered in dog hair!

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Being Married Means

Being married means sometimes you have to share the bathroom sink…and that means you might have to brush your teeth at the same time…which may lead to accidentally spitting on your spouse.

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IKEA: Part 2 (with some sneak peek pics)

We decided to go for it and ordered IKEA furniture online. They make you pay a shipping fee, but let me just say that, with our small cars, it would have taken at least 2 trips to get the stuff anyway. So we saved on gas money, food, and time.

Peter was going to go to DC on a work trip, but things got a little crazy with the weather, and it ended up being cancelled (–I know some dictionaries say it’s spelled, “canceled,” but I am of the phonics rule that if you have a syllable with a short vowel sound, when you add -ed, you need to have a double consonant. Ex: sun-ned, rub-bed, surpass-ed [has 2 double S’s at the end already, so you can just add -ed]. You get the idea. I’m an English nerd). Therefore, we didn’t end up getting the panels and coffee table. We are still debating the coffee table, but we found an alternate draping for our window nooks.

The bookcase that was going to go horizontal over the desks is absolutely way too heavy, so that is just not happening. We have another idea for it.

You can see the gray wall color we picked and the new door handle that we added to our tiny, minidoor.
Now we won’t bang into a doorknob all the time. Yay! The white trim makes such a difference. LOVE IT.

We searched high and low for a cute, white, minifan.
The loft has an angled ceiling, so a regular-sized fan just won’t do.

This is my joyous couch. I will let my dogs on this one. For $150, it’s not too shabby.

Here are some sneak peaks.