I’m more geek goddess than domestic diva. That said, tonight’s dinner was GOOD! Crab dip with pita chips, chicken and sausage jambalaya, and cheesy shrimp and grits. Oh, and I have dough rising for an attempt at beignets. The things you can do with a four day weekend… I had a day to shop and prep and have two days (!!) to recover.

I love having a happy family around the dinner table. We’re all in our pajamas – some of us in the Christmas family pajamas we put on last night, and some have changed into sets they got as Christmas presents. Our bellies are full and my heart is very happy.

Trying out a new form of organizer…  doing it a bit more simplistically.   Instead of hauling around a DayTimer where each day’s page needed to be the same size (and for which I ended up lugging around a bunch of sheets of mostly empty paper), I’m trying out a technique called bullet journaling.  Each day, I keep notes of appointments to keep, things to do, and any notes worth mentioning.  I keep a monthly calendar page, sort of like a calendar on the wall in my kitchen.  Just holds enough to remind me of an event.  I keep a future plans page – listing any events that don’t fit on the current month’s calendar.  And there’s an index page at the front, where I log any significant entries I think I’ll want to get back to.

For some folks, their bullet journals are as much works of creative expression as organization.  That’s not me.  My writing is still scribbles, I don’t doodle or calligraphy in it, and if I’ve changed ink colors, it’s because that was the pen at hand.  Today I did upgrade a bit, and started pasting in a calendar printable, rather than writing the days out on the page.  I’m also trying out a monthly habit tracker printable to see if it helps keep me accountable for reading my Bible and exercising.  Housecleaning might make the list, too, I guess…

I’ve been testing this out since November and am very happy with how it’s worked out for me.  I’ve generally been the type to lug around notebooks anyway to jot things down in – this just extends that with a bit of structure.

Two pumpkin shake recipes, separated by 460+ calories per serving. Was enjoying the thought of the lower, but now am so tempted by the higher.

Pumpkin pie shake #1: the lighter version.

Pumpkin pie shake #2: the oh-that-sounds-so-good version.

And we have cans of pumpkin on the counter….

Seen on the back of a cake mix: calorie breakdown for cake as mix, and cake when baked. Loophole: those of us who eat the batter! Add in the calories burned worrying about salmonella, and you might have a real light food!

It’s rare that I go out to eat for lunch. Takes too much time, between getting somewhere, ordering, eating, socializing, … And either I’m just generally too cheap, or I don’t value the experience enough, because spending $10 or so on a midday meal doesn’t strike me as reasonable, no matter how big the portion sizes are. (Cut my portion size and charge me less: I’ll eat less, making me happier both for my wallet and for my waist line.) Today I decided to venture out, though not for a dine-in experience. I was looking for a Caribbean restaurant that I had heard mention of on Chowhound. For whatever reason, I was craving something different, some sense of culinary adventure. Jason and I used to regularly hunt out new dining experiences when we were dating, but the required marital attention to budgets and kid-friendly dining have severely limited those expeditions.

Didn’t find the Caribbean place, but did find a Latin restaurant / take-out. Latin to the point of Spanish television channel on, other patrons speaking Spanish exclusively to the wait staff, and a Spanish beer other than Corona being featured prominently. Picked an order nearly at random and headed back to the office. Ordered the rotisserie chicken, fried yucca, and fried plantains. Yum! I’ve had plantains before – I think we had them on our honeymoon. The chicken smelled wonderful and was absolutely delicious, but still, it was chicken – nothing particularly adventurous there. Yucca was a new experience. At first I thought the server had goofed – this stuff sure looked like french fries to me. Doing a bit of poking online, discovered that they’re supposed to look/taste like potatoes. And that they have vitamin C, as well as are a good source of dietary fiber.

Cora’s a fan of french fries – she’ll happily ignore the entree in any kids’ meal and scarf down the fries. That causes me no small amount of mommy guilt. But I see yucca possibilities here…. Definitely worth a venture to a Latin restaurant with our two year old – see if we can pull off the Folgers’ yucca switch. And I think I may regularly try to find other interesting dining around my work… woman cannot live by brown bag lunch alone. (Or she could, but it’s a lot more interesting if she doesn’t.)

Peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches?? What a weird, tasty combination, tastefully prepared for me by my husband. For other ideas of peanut butter sandwiches, see Sally’s Kitchen. For the record, I’ve now tried all combinations except the peanut butter and bacon combination. Pig and peanut butter – culinary combination designed to clog your arteries in record time.

Now that the baby has decided she’s just about on her way, I guess it’s finally time to finish painting the nursery. One wall at a time, the Caribbean green/aqua scheme that was there is being transformed into a light shade of purple. I won’t go so far as to paint the girls’ room pink (until they’re of an age where they themselves request a pink room), but figured purple was doable. Light purple over bright/dark shades of green takes several coats, I’m discovering. I primed the room a while ago, and thought that it’d only take one coat of paint. But I suspect that I’m not going to get off that easy.

Does this count as nesting, I wonder? I’m taking it nice and slow, stopping at the end of each wall for rest and refreshment (in the form of big glasses of water and big spoonfuls of chocolate pudding – girl’s gotta have some way of rewarding herself). At this pace, though, the room will be done when the girls’ are going into kindergarten!

Folks who’ve had to live with me know that I’m not a particularly neat person. I attribute it to just always juggling too many things – a clean home ranks among the priorities, but it’s handled in amongst all of the other things that vie for my time and attention. It bothers me when I stop and look around my house and see things that need attention, but my times to stop are few, and the times when I actually have a moment to do something about it seem even fewer. I’ve often been tempted to hire professionals to come in and do it for me, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. One, I’d be embarassed to have someone else clean my house. Two, it feels like cheating, like I somehow can’t handle the own mess that I make. But, boy, does it seem like a losing battle, this housework stuff. The best I ever seem to do is to keep a reasonably low level of clutter (reasonably low varying depending on my particular time to pick up vs. clutter tolerance level balance), and then rotate through areas of the house, making each one individually at least cleaner than it was. The whole house never seems to be clean at once, and that’s not even counting tackling the basement. It’s not as if we have a large house, either- in fact, I’m fairly well convinced that I never want a large house, just because then the cleaning problem would expand with the increased square footage.

Tomorrow’s task list looms large, even without the household cleaning chores. The lawn needs mowed, and we need to get a new lawn mower because the old one’s decided it’s time to retire. The nursery needs its paint job to be completed. Milk’s mostly gone, so we need to do a grocery run, and heck, might as well do the weekly shopping if you’ve got to wander in the grocery store for something else. And that’s before the vacuuming, dusting, bathroom cleaning, and floor mopping that ought to happen, too. Even if we didn’t aim to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, there’s really no room for chore spillage there, as we have duties at church, and it’ll be Jason’s birthday, so we’ll have cake/ice cream/fancy lunch. Monday it’s back to work, with an hour or so available in the evening after Cora’s gone to bed.

How did folks ever do this before time-saving devices like dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuums??? When women had six or seven children running around, how’d they then have time to tidy up the place and make the dinner? Granted, they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so no bathrooms to scrub, but I’m not ready to retreat to a little shack in the backyard with a half-moon cut out in the door. (Is that where we get the idea of mooning someone, I wonder?)

Just my rant for the evening, I guess… spent a bit of time attacking the kitchen, but feel like someone else walking in would notice what’s _not_ been done, whereas I’m the only one who notices that, gee, it looks a lot better! Pretty depressing…