(according to my friend Darrell). But here are some places that can take stuff I hadn’t even thought to recycle. If you’re in the Cincinnati area, please check out the links below. These places could use your old stuff, and they’ll keep it OUT of the landfills!
http://www.hcdoes.org/sw/treasure_wish.htm#Franciscan
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080422/LIFE/304220007
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ab/20080422/LIFE/304220008
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Healthy Choice Café Steamers – Chicken Margherita
Um, this thing is good. I mean, I don’t usually even like Healthy Choice entrées; I’m not sure why but it just seems like every one that I try is a disappointment. But not this time. The description reads “White Meat Chicken With Angel Hair Pasta & Roasted Garlic In Balsamic Vinaigrette Sauce” (their caps, not mine). This thing had 3 strips of chicken and actual whole garlic cloves. That might be a turnoff if you aren’t a big garlic fan, but I am, so it worked for me. And the sauce had just the right amount of sweet.
330 calories, 8g fat, 4g fiber for a total of 7 Weight Watchers POINTS®. Also, it has 550 mg Sodium which was actually less than I expected for a frozen entrée.
All around good eats. I highly recommend it, and the American Heart Association approves, too.
one of my favorite things in the world is a bargain. but how is a consumer to know if that store brand "compare to" product is really a comparable product and not just a shoddy replica? well, in general, i don't know. but in the specific case of meijer-brand miniature fudge shortbread cookies, i can tell you definitively that they are indeed, a suitable replacement for the keebler brand.
now, i have a strong emotional connection to the keebler fudge stripes. my mom was a blood bank nurse, and she and my dad often worked opposite shifts. they used to joke that it was because they couldn't stand to be around each other more than that. at least, i think they were joking. i digress. when we would go into the blood bank, mom's friend beryl would stuff us with pops and cookies. i think she enjoyed hyping us up and sending us home with my mom. the fudge stripes were my favorite of all the cookies and we never had them at home so they were extra special when we could get them at the blood bank. so don't take this endorsement lightly.
i sometimes wonder if it was all this early exposure to the blood bank that made my brother and i so incredibly squeamish.
…coping the inside joints for Kelly’s crown molding, that is, but oddly it spilled over into not coping with all of my own life. Weird.
For baseboard molding, and even some chair rail moldings, you can just do a 45-degree cut on the pieces for an inside corner so they fit together like a picture frame. But if you are working with the curvy crown molding, you have to do this ridiculous thing called coping where you cut the molding with a little hacksaw until it is “just so” and then you put the pieces together. It’s hard to explain without visuals and it’s really pretty boring anyway. Whew. Now, they have these corner blocks you can get, and you just butt the molding up to them, so that’s way easier, no coping involved, just straight cuts. And for some reason (stupid, stubborn, who knows?) that just didn’t seem good enough for me to do for my friend Kelly. So I spent (wasted) a lot of time at her place last week trying to figure that out while everyone else was actually getting things done. And I never did figure out how to cut those little effers.
I decided to go down to the basement last night and just dink around until I got it and I finally did. So now I am hoping I can finish hanging Kelly’s molding sometime soon and then her bathroom will be all pretty and finished, except for the light fixture that I was too afraid to install because the box had a LOT of extra wires running in to it, and I don’t want to end up being the person who wired the light that caused a short that set a fire that caused the house to burn to the ground. You know.
By the bye, we got a goodly amount of work done at Kelly’s place. Her extra bedroom-turned-rec room got painted (green!) and we moved all the furniture back in but now she has to do the constant rearranging that goes with any room re-do. I caulked her tub and shower surround, hung the paper holder, and most importantly – hung the medicine cabinet. The next thing is when we will have Hanging Day – not that kind of hanging, but we are going to hang all of her cool window treatments from – where else? – IKEA, and also one really cool one from CB2. I will get pics of that to show because Kelly has amazing taste in picking out all these cool and funky artsy things. I want to hire her to be my personal shopper. She is really good at it!
So, I’ve calmed down considerably since my last ranting post. But it has become apparent (and been pointed out) to me that I need to discuss this with my doctor. I have an appointment with her next week so this will be the point of discussion. I have struggled with depression for pretty much all my life, and she knows that and helps me figure out the right dosages and what not*. After my brother died, my already higher-than-normal anxiety levels really spiked and we have been working on finding the right treatment for that ever since. But I was trying to taper off of one medicine, and this is the result. It is amazing to me the difference that the medicine makes and how sensitive I am to changing it, and this past few weeks have been further evidence of how closely I need to watch myself to not get off-balance again. Like, in my head, I was really feeling trapped, thinking I had made all these horrible, awful decisions that more or less ruined my life, and there was no way I could figure out how to “fix” them. I think that feeling has subsided for the time being so I hope I can just stay something close to sane until I get to the doctor and we figure something out together. So thanks to all of you for your concerns and your sympathies and also those of you who let me know privately that I was clearly getting out of whack. I was whack. Crack is whack. Whatever, Whitney.
*(“what not” is one of my current favorite expressions, as used in that Jay-Z song where he says “let me rub on your ----s, and what not” – and in my head it sounds like 2 words so that’s how I type it)
I have been having a really hard time with life lately, and the proverbial straw happened when I went out to my car this morning. I walked out, realized I had left the windows down all night, thanked my lucky stars it hadn’t rained, and then noticed that some absolute effing a-hole had come along and dropped a cigarette butt in the passenger side and left a hideously ugly burn mark as a permanent reminder that I am too forgetful for my own good.
I have been having such a massive internal struggle and feeling like I have ruined my life. I don’t even know what that means, exactly, because I can’t even picture in my head what I can do to make my life “right”. I don’t even really think any of it is fixable, because it’s just my own personal anger at the fact that life itself is unfair and sometimes hard and that even if I work hard and do right by the world, it doesn’t mean that I things will work out how I want them to (see above story as evidence). I am also acutely aware that complaining about my life is somewhat akin to crying that my golden shoes are too tight. I know there are people who have so much more to worry about and struggle with than I ever have. But I still feel this way.
Possibly, if I can just get the sod down, I will at least feel like I have finished one project. I think a good chunk of my despair comes from feeling stuck in all these different aspects of life. Like, in every aspect (project) where I have a choice to make, none of the choices or their outcomes are particularly palatable to me. I also feel like every project I start, and pretty much everything I touch, just goes right into the crapper. I keep hoping that maybe just getting one project completely finished will open the door to finishing the next one and perhaps that will ultimately clear a path to some kind of contentment.
Oh, and I just got a feeling of déjà vu about doing sod and working where I work, which is strange (as all déjà vu episodes are) because I haven’t ever worked here and had a sod project going on before. Odd.
Oh, and I just-just got a call from the sod people telling me the sod is on the way. Today. When I’m at work. Not tomorrow, as we had agreed yesterday. I’m pretty sure this is officially my last DIY project.
I left it there, at least for now. It had a stain on the side arm, you can’t see it in the picture, but it had a very unnerving quality about it. That fabric is fantastic and the frame of it is nice. I’m still kind of torn. I mean, it’s got great bones, and I do love the existing fabric. And maybe I could re-cover the part with the unnerving stain. I just don’t know, and it will just be another project to have to do later. But I have been wanting to learn how to re-upholster, so this seems like a good starter project. So.Completely.Torn.
I called today and the sod is not coming Saturday. The man said that it will probably be next Saturday instead. This is fine as I have plenty to do to keep myself busy, but the real problem at this point is that I am either going to have to leave myself open to this same situation for the next however-many weekends, or possibly take another vacation day to put the sod down during the week.
The upshot is I have a little more time to go OCD on getting the leveling just right.
I have about 50 things I need to paint, so I think I’m just going to drag them all out into the carport on Saturday and do that. It’s supposed to be nice, but I guess they can’t cut the sod when it rains which means they probably wouldn’t be cutting until Saturday at the earliest, anyway. This sod stuff, I just don’t understand how it works as far as the timing of the cutting and the laying. The guy actually laughed when I called and said, “I’m supposed to be getting sod on Saturday and I can’t remember how this works with the whole rain/no rain thing,” so they must get that a lot.
And I think I’m going to go up to Urbana on Sunday and go to the Flea Market with my dad. Yay!
grading a yard is hard. dont let anyone tell youl otherwise. i cannot for the life of me get the soil to be level. i guess its technically the leveling thats hard. my recommendation: dont buy a house. and if you do buy a house, make sure you have enough money stashed away that you can hire some cheap migrant labor for jobs like this. because this project has actually made me want to hurl myself through a plate glass window.
