Texas Breakfast

This summer DH bought me too many tomato & jalapeno plants. Our tomato plants produced 2 quarter sized tomatoes but we have an overabundance of peppers. I've sent two bags of peppers to the school where sister#2 used to work. The lunch ladies are hispanic and they make a mean salsa.

Last night DH remembered he got a pepper cooker for Christmas from an old boss. This morning he decided to make stuffed jalapenos. This is definitely not my first choice for breakfast, but they were tasty.



The cooker worked well in the oven but it was taking too long so he fired up the grill.



I guess I can't complain about too many jalapenos anymore.

Her first batch

Friday night DH took J to his first Jesuit game. A got to do what she's been asking to do for awhile. She baked cookies all by herself.

I told her earlier in the week that she could bake on Friday night. I was sworn to secrecy because she was afraid that the cookies would turn out bad. If she told DH & J that she was baking cookies and they turned out bad, then they would come home and want to have a cookie. She couldn't bear the thought of having to tell them that her cookies were bad and she had to throw them out. (Like I would throw them out even if they did taste bad! I told DH her logic, he said she gets her pessimism from her mother. I wonder where he got that idea??)

She did a terrific job in the kitchen. She made the cookies and they turned out delicious. She had no reason to fear her baking abilities. I did help here and there. I showed her how to pack the brown sugar. I showed her how to get just the yolk from the egg. She did the rest.


Following directions.


Good recipes are always splattered.


My favorite lesson, baking always includes cleaning.



I didn't get pictures of her actual cookies. They didn't last long enough!

3653 days ago

3653 days ago, DH & I were married. 3653 days sounds much more impressive than 10 years ago. (I think I got the math right.)

It is hard to believe that it was 10 year ago. At this exact moment we were at our reception having a grand old time with family & friends.

10 years ago, I don't think I could have dreamed that I would be here right now. This is a good place to be.

DH & went out for an anniversary lunch. He surprised me with new diamond earrings. I've been telling him for years that such things were frivolous, but I was delighted with his gift. We spent the evening playing football & soccer with the boys & making homemade pizza with A. After dinner, we had family game night with a few mean games of Labyrinth.

It was a lovely day, just like our wedding was 3653 days ago.

Wow, what a cookie

Sister #5 stopped by last night with a bag of cookies. She had 2 wisdom teeth out on Friday and she couldn't eat the cookies she made. I generously took them off her hands. It was the nice thing to do, wasn't it?

These are awesome cookies. They are soft, chewy and delicious. They are in the kitchen taunting me right now. I think there are 7 cookies left. Do you think I could eat them all without the rest of the family noticing?

I doubt it.

Leftover crafting

Over the summer we had great plans for doing stuff & making stuff. Very little of it got done. We have a long list of things to do someday that we still talk about.

The one thing we did do was dye yarn. We used bare yarn from KnitPicks, Wilton Icing dye and this tutorial. The yarn has been hanging in my laundry room for awhile now. I bought myself a ball winder for my birthday so I wouldn't have to wind the 400+ yards of yarn (each) myself. I've very happy with the investment because now I can take pictures of pretty yarn cakes.

A dyed her yarn blue & purple. The dye didn't soak through all the yarn so it bits of white between the blue & purples. We decided it has a tie-dyed look.



J tried to make camouflage. His turned out bright green & orange tones instead of camo but he likes it.

Failure

I'm not good at it. At all. I take it very hard. I will struggle through, lose sleep, obsess until I make it work rather than fail.

I failed today.

A couple of weeks ago a friend called to see if I would do a little side work for him. A few hours a week, nothing too difficult. I wrote about how it wasn't going well. I struggled through it for the past week or so.

I have worked on this project 6-8 hours a day. This was suppose to be a 10 hour/week deal. I'm not sleeping well. I feel nauseated when I think about it and it is constantly on my mind.

Last night I sat at the computer at 10pm crying. I thought I was going to stay up until 2 am working again, but I couldn't do it. I had no idea how to fix it and I didn't see how another 4 hours on little sleep was going to help. I went to bed. Of course it took me almost 2 hours to fall asleep because my mind was racing. I was back up again at 5am trying again to figure it out.

This morning I told DH I was done. I couldn't do this anymore. I had failed and I couldn't continue on this way. I had to call and quit this job. The extra money would have been nice, but it wasn't worth all this. Luckily he kissed me and said he agreed.

I dropped the kids off at school, did a sudoku puzzle while I got up some nerve to call the boss guy. I had to tell him was in over my head and I couldn't finish the project. I knew I was going to disappoint him and I hated making that call. I was going to tell him I was sorry for the trouble but I had to quit.

Instead, he apologized to me. He said he knew that this project was too big for me to start on. It was way more complicated than he thought I should have and he should have pulled it when he first heard that they had assigned it to me. I'm going in today and he's going to give the mess I made project back to the manager who gave it to me and give me something else to work on.

I took a deep sigh of relief. Maybe this isn't total failure, maybe it will be okay. The anxious/sick feeling isn't gone yet, but the total dread when thinking about this job is lifting.

He's way older than two

I walked into B's room to wake him up this morning. He has his second day of preschool today. Here's our conversation.

B: (whisper) "Not yet, Mommy. I sleeping."

me: "But, it's time to wake up. Do you who you're going to see today?"

B: (whisper) "My teacher."

me: "Yep, it's a school day, are you ready?"

B: (whisper) "Not, yet. I still sleeping. Two minutes."

I can only imagine the teenage years.