a hot cup of yum

{ February 1, 2010 @ 10:20 pm } · { Domestic Goddess }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

Hot Cranberry Tea

Normally a recipe I’ve only had at holiday time, I’ve recently been enjoying it more and more when I just want a hot drink that doesn’t involve milk.  I’m not a huge fan of straight up tea, so this recipe makes me happy.  I don’t know where it came from originally, but it has been in my family for my entire life and we make it every Christmas to sip on throughout the day.

What you need:

4c water

4 black tea bags (or however many tea bags to make a quart of tea-Lipton works great)

4c Cranberry juice cocktail (doesn’t matter what kind- works just as well with low/no sugar added or regular)

3/4 c sugar

1/2 lemon, sliced

1 stick cinnamon

8-10 whole cloves

dash nutmeg

How to make it:

Boil or microwave the water, then add the tea bags and let it steep until it’s nice and dark.

In a pot on medium-low heat, put the cranberry juice, sugar, lemon slices, cinnamon stick, cloves and nutmeg. When the tea is done steeping, add it to the pot. Warm it all throughout and then it’s ready to serve.  You can also make this in the crock pot and keep it on low and just keep helping yourself to the tea!

Hope you get as much joy out of this recipe as I have.

I really hope this works

{ February 1, 2010 @ 3:05 pm } · { Project Fusion, life }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

So much for my “good health gratitude” post the other day.  I’m full-on miserable with this sinus infection.  Normally I’m sure I would have been able to nip this on my own, but it’s become obvious to me that my immune system ain’t what it normally is while pregnant.

I’ve been trying to do all of the right things:  Taking Umcka, Vitamin D, Vitamin C…

Using the neti pot a few times a day…

Only taking Tylenol on occasions…

I thought I was getting better over the weekend, until last night my head felt like I had been hit with a baseball bat.  My jaw, teeth, forehead are in so much pain I can’t even chew food.  It made sleep very difficult and I was in tears this morning.  I decided I had to have an intervention, so I went to my primary Dr.

She prescribed nasal steroid spray and vicodin, and said that if I didn’t start feeling better at all by Wednesday then we can think about antibiotics.  I upped the ante and got myself the makings for homemade chicken noodle soup, since I can’t chew anything.

So I really hope this works, because as it is I don’t like the idea of taking any drugs right now.  I think because I am in the 3rd trimester that there should be no ill-effects on the baby.  My Dr. said antibiotics can cause you to feel really crappy, and have diarrhea which in turn can trigger preterm labor. Lovely, huh? So I just don’t want to go there.

It would also be kind of cool to be able to go back to work…I can only take so much daytime TV.

Please work!

At least I have good company.

The 100 things de-cluttering challenge

{ January 31, 2010 @ 4:39 pm } · { Domestic Goddess }
{ Tags: } · { Comments (3) }

I heard about this challenge from my friend Rochelle on one of her blogs.   The challenge involves either decluttering and getting rid of all but 100 things in your house, or easier, get rid of 100 things.

I honestly don’t know how anyone could live with just 100 things in their house, although it totally depends on how you categorize it. Would you have to count each individual plate, book and piece of underwear?  I honestly think homeless people have more than 100 things in their shopping carts. So that’s really out of the question for me.  I am not a clutter fan, nor a collector of anything, so decluttering is one of my favorite things to do, and clutter-free is my favorite way to live.

That said, I’ve been in MAJOR de-cluttering mode for the past month as we are preparing to move in less than a month.  And having been at our current place for over 3.5 years, we’ve accumulated more than I wanted to bring to the new place.   I’m very certain I have already accomplished this challenge a couple weeks ago, when we cleaned out our garage and took about 2 Honda Element loads of donations to a charity. It included furniture, video games, lots of clothes, and more.

Now that we’re actually packing things in boxes, the de-cluttering continues.   I kicked this challenge’s butt again just yesterday.  Here’s what we got rid of:

These are just the books...most of them anyway.

It’s interesting how having Kindles has changed my life and my desire (or complete lack thereof) to lug around books I will never read again.  As much as both the hubby and me have wanted to have a library some day, it just doesn’t seem worth it to keep most of the books we had.  We kept classics like Harry Potter and some of the more “important” books, including reference books and things we know we’ll want to share with our children.  But the rest had to go.  All together we donated 147 books.

More than just books- here is what else was gotten rid of:

1 Eyeglasses

2 Halloween Costumes

1 Queen Sheet Set

1 Duvet cover

1 Sony digital camera

1 Side table

3 window fans (new house has AC, hallelujah)

3 Rugs

3 baby blankets

5 pair baby shoes

10 baby clothes

11 puzzles

7 blouses

6 tank tops

1 bra

4 sweaters

4 jackets

4 T-shirts

1 dress slacks

1 fancy ball gown

2 fleece jackets

1 polo shirt

1 wig

1 nintendo gamecube with 2 controllers and 8 games

7 PS2 games

2 handbags

All in all 236 items.  That is just what was donated, there were also a couple bags of trash. Fortunately most of what we got rid of can be re-used and didn’t go into the trash.

We’ll see how many more times I complete this challenge in the next 26 days. We’ve only finished the spare bedroom, garage, and downstairs bookshelf at this point. Haha!

I am amazed at how much we have gotten rid of considering we live what I consider to be pretty clutter-free. I am definitely more conscious about bringing things into my house over the past few years, and I don’t do it unless they have a specific purpose and place.  I am also very happy about the fact that we’re moving to a place with a lot more square footage and less stuff than we have here! Hooray.  I’m betting this challenge gets done again next weekend and the week after.

My new favorite breakfast

{ January 31, 2010 @ 4:15 pm } · { Domestic Goddess }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

A few weeks back I referenced the dutch apple pancake recipe I found on epicurious. It turned out delicious and great, but I didn’t take any pictures.  I decided to make one again yesterday and documented it this time!

I highly recommend it anytime you’re looking for something different for breakfast. I enjoy it because it’s made with eggs, but I’m not always a huge fan of eggs on their own. So you get protein and some sweet and fruit without a diabetes-inducing breakfast like french toast.

The recipe originally comes from epicurious though I modified it slightly by substituting granny smith apples and adding extra cinnamon and brown sugar to the apple baking step.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup whole milk (I used 3/4 cup of 1% and 1/4 cup heavy cream)
  • 4 large eggs
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 2/3 cup all purpose flour
  • 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
  • 12 ounces Granny Smith apples (about 2), peeled, cored, thinly sliced
  • 5 tablespoons (packed) golden brown sugar, divided (2+ 3)
  • Powdered sugar (optional)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 425°F. Whisk milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, salt, and cinnamon in large bowl until well blended. Add flour and whisk until batter is smooth. Place butter in 13×9-inch glass baking dish. Place dish in oven until butter melts, about 5 minutes. Remove dish from oven. Place apple slices in overlapping rows atop melted butter in baking dish.  Sprinkle with cinnamon and the 2 tablespoons of brown sugar.  Return to oven and bake until apples begin to soften slightly and butter is bubbling and beginning to brown around edges of dish, about 10 minutes.

Pour batter over apples in dish and sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake pancake until puffed and brown, about 20 minutes. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, if desired. Cut into squares and serve warm. (Saves and reheats well too.)

Here it is with a dusting of powdered sugar and ready to eat:

Yum!

time for some gratitude

{ January 27, 2010 @ 2:58 pm } · { Project Fusion, life }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

I’ve been kind of bitchy lately, about this stupid cold I seem to have caught. I am annoyed, because I just had a cold a month ago and here I am with another one.   This one has yet to really manifest into a cold. So far it has just made me feel like shit, with head, body aches, and swollen lymph nodes in my throat.  I spent the first two days this week working from home, trying to recover, and other than the body aches getting better, it hasn’t really changed.

But instead of being so bitchy, I decided I should express some gratitude for my overall good health. I just went to another midwife appointment, which I’m doing every 2 weeks now, and as usual I have absolutely no problems with this pregnancy.  My blood pressure is consistently good (98/60 today).  I have no protein in my urine, no swelling, no gestational diabetes.  Baby is head down and doing great, though her shoulder is pressing into my ligaments now which KILLS. Sleeping is difficult and I’m uncomfortable a lot. My hips ache and my pelvis hurts. When it’s all put into perspective I feel these are lame complaints, and that I have many more reasons to be grateful.

I am grateful to be so healthy and to be having such a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy. I am grateful my cold hasn’t turned into an all-out phlegm fest. I am grateful I have avoided the flu altogether. I’m grateful I have a healthy baby growing inside me and that it wasn’t a struggle to make her in the first place.

I think when I do get a cold or something minor and my health’s not 100% it’s so easy to just bitch about it, but really, I’m grateful that’s the worst that ever happens to me.  Health is one of those things we take for granted until we don’t have it, and then we realize how important it is and how precious.  Not feeling quite 100% this week has made me realize how grateful I should be for how I normally feel. And even despite this minor setback, how really I am fine.

We’re moving!

{ January 21, 2010 @ 7:12 pm } · { Ummmm..., life }
{ } · { Leave a Comment }

Words cannot express how excited and relieved I am today.  I have been on pins and needles all week, and while I kept telling myself and knowing inside that “everything would work out”, nothing takes the place of having it actually work out, in writing.

You see, the past few months I have been trying to save money for my maternity leave. Which I thought I would have to take some unpaid time for.  So we have been sticking to a budget and diligently socking away money every month.  A couple weeks ago I met with the director of HR to talk to her about my maternity plans and find out exactly what my options are. She told me that since I am exempt technically I get paid for the whole day if I just work 15 minutes of it.  So I am going to be working at home for my maternity leave. I will probably take 2 weeks of PTO right when the baby’s born and then start the working from home part. They asked me to just fill out leave tickets for any time I didn’t work, after the fact, but basically if I work at all on a particular day I get paid for it.  For me, and the nature of my job, checking email on my iPhone would actually qualify as work.  Isn’t it nice the way things work out?  Here I was worrying and scrimping and saving and it turns out this is a better deal than I would have had at my previous job.

So, my realization was, that since I wouldn’t be needing this money to live on during my “leave”, that we could actually afford to move.  Security deposits, that sort of thing.  So I started looking for places to move TO.  We have been “over” our current place for quite a while. It has served us for the time, but we are tired of 2 flights of stairs, no yard, and having to hear our neighbor’s showers/bathroom/laundry/music/picksomething.  I’ve been eyeballing craigslist and watching for homes in a particular neighborhood where our baby is going to be going to school/daycare/whatever you want to call it.  It is a beautiful area and is a place we think we would like to build a home in once we are ready to buy.

I began looking back in December and about a week ago I decided that even though it was a bit early, I could still email these people with the ads and find out more info and see if they would be amenable to a March move-in date.  I only heard back from 1 of the 3 that I emailed. Fortunately it was the 1 that we were most interested in.  It is a home only about a year old, it was a model home in the exact neighborhood where we would build a house. They are still building homes in there and I thought this was a perfect opportunity to “try before you buy”.  A new neighborhood, the commutes, etc. See how we like it, and if we like it, then in 8 months or so, we could purchase a presale and have our house built and done by the time our lease is up. Not a bad plan in my humble opinion.

There were also some other drivers for this move and wanting to make it happen soon.  One is, I’m having a home birth and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about a tub to labor in. Should I pay $350 to rent one? Ugh. Should I buy a kiddie pool? Or, should we find a house that has one, and move into it before the birth?  We chose to pursue the last option. Because in reality we both have been longing for a big tub to take baths in for a loooong time.

Say hello to our new bathtub. It’s big and deep, and I love it:

The unfortunate part of all of this is that our lease is not set to expire until after the baby is born. And the more I thought about it, the more the prospect of moving after or right around the due date scared me.  I tried and asked our current renting people if there was any way they could let us out a month early, but of course the answer was no, even though we’ve been good tenants for almost 4 years and never paid late. But I guess I would have been surprised if they said yes.  We decided it was worth it to just pay rent in 2 places in March and get moved and settled before I go into labor. Good plan, yes. Hopefully the baby will not decide to come 2 weeks early.

But all week this has been causing so much anxiety. We looked at another house in the same place, different neighborhood, and it was cheap, dirty and ticky tacky and we just didn’t like it as well. Plus there was no tub, which sucked.  So we decided to put in an app with this model home because it was exactly what we wanted, and they did not have a problem with our pets, or a March 1 move in date (actually end of February, whee!).

Everything came back fine of course, except the renter’s history. It just wasn’t coming back. For whatever reason our current people were dragging their feet and not responding to inquiries. It was driving me mad and I wondered if this was just part of their evil plan to try and force us to stay so they could keep collecting rent from us. But FINALLY today upon being called for a fourth time they were magically able to look it up and return the info, and 5 seconds later we were approved for the house.  I have literally been losing sleep over this the past few nights, wondering what if something bad happened or they lied and said we were bad tenants or something.  We did not see another house we liked at all anywhere near this one. But it’s a done deal now and we will be moving in a little over a month. 

I am so glad we began purging stuff over the past few weeks and have been preparing to pack and move.  Secretly, I am also excited that I have a free ticket to not do much during the move except direct traffic, pack, and unpack. HAH! Because I so hate moving.

Anyway here is a picture of our new house. It has a garage on the back of the house. Hooray for a 2-car garage!

I’ll provide more details and pictures when we move in but this is at least a taste of what is in store for us.

does this baby make me look fat?

{ January 21, 2010 @ 6:48 pm } · { Ummmm... }
{ Tags: , } · { Leave a Comment }

I had a very annoying experience this morning regarding my pregnancy.  This lady I see at least once a week or so walks her dogs on the same trail we walk our dog on, so I’ve seen her quite a bit over the past year. We always talk, or more accurately she always talks our ear off and we participate until we are late for something and have to go.  The past several months of course I usually had a coat on when out there, because it has been chilly but the past few days it’s been beautiful in the 50s and sunny, so I was out without more than a mere sweater.

To make a long story short she asked me how I was doing, in such a way that seemed like a genuine “how is the pregnant lady doing” kind of thing, and I said I was doing well but that Jeremy had a nasty cold. And she launched into how I was going to get sick and all this, even though he’s been sick since Saturday and I’m absolutely FINE.

Anyway, then she asked did you get your H1N1 shot? And I said “Hell no, I’m pregnant, I’m not going to inject my body with mercury and some vaccine that’s untested on pregnant women. I don’t do flu shots anyway.”

And her jaw dropped and she said, “Oh my, you ARE? That’s so great! I had no idea… I was thinking you looked kind of “poochy” but I wasn’t going to say anything…”

What the fuck lady? Learn some tact.

Do I really just look like a fatass? Because by this point I feel like it’s pretty obvious I’m pregnant since fat usually involves rolls and not a protruding belly.

Sorry once again for the potty shot but I’ve been annoyed about this all day and needed to just get it out, crappy picture or not.

Here’s a close up of my “poochiness”:

Call me crazy but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the profile of a fatass. (Well, a non-pregnant fatass).

She then proceeded to tell me how now we’d need to move and get more space and should we ever need a realtor we should call her, MY (FAT) ASS!  I didn’t have the heart to tell her we were already moving and I would never ever use her in a million years. I just had to walk away.

Meals this week

{ January 11, 2010 @ 5:36 pm } · { Domestic Goddess }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

Yesterday I made a fabulous new thing for breakfast- a dutch apple pancake.  It was really beautiful, stupidly I didn’t think to take a picture of it. So I may need to make another one soon so I can document it.

I got the recipe online here at epicurious.  I wanted something for breakfast with some eggs in it, but I didn’t feel like eggs for eggs’ sake. I didn’t really want anything all that savory, but didn’t want something so sugary it wouldn’t be a good breakfast, so I thought of a dutch pancake.  I saw my 2 lonely granny smith apples sitting there too, and looked for one with apples.  It was really super and delicious. Very easy to make, and sweet enough, but not too sweet.  I modified this recipe a bit- used granny apples instead of golden delicious- because they were more tart I sprinkled some brown sugar (and extra cinnamon) on them before putting them in the oven for 10 minutes.  I didn’t have whole milk so I used 1/4 cup of cream and 3/4 cup of 2% milk.  I think that’s all I changed. It’s prettiest the first day, but I brought the leftovers to work today and it was just as tasty the second day.

But on to my dinners this week. I’m finding that due to only cooking for 2 people we end up having a LOT of leftovers. Even last week I made the skillet lasagna recipe, which said it served 4. It served the two of us more than twice. More like 3 times and I still threw some away.   I’m going to start halving recipes, and I’m also just not planning to make more than 3 meals per week, because I never fit in more than that. Some weeks I don’t even use the three, because there are so many leftovers. We are still only trying to eat out one night a week too and can stick to that pretty easily.

This week I’ll be fixing:

Curried Chicken and Rice (didn’t make last week) from The 30-Minute Best Recipe. Will serve this with the frozen naan I still have, and maybe a cucumber salad.

Turkey Tacos

Swedish Meatballs (going to try this recipe from Alton Brown, even though I hate him, it looks tasty and I have all the ingredients already). Will serve this with some buttered noodles and green beans.

That should be enough for us this week-  We’ll use the taco meat to make nachos or a taco salad later in the week, and be able to eat leftovers every day for lunch and a few dinners too.

I’m getting better at using things up from previous weeks and really widdling down my shopping list- for example last week I needed 1/2 lb. ground beef and 1/2 lb. ground pork for the lasagna, but could only find 1 lb. packages of each. So I made up a package of the ground beef and pork and stuck it in my freezer, and I’ll use it this week on the swedish meatballs.  I read Michael Ruhlman’s blog today and was inspired how he had a recipe for a roast chicken, then chicken stock, and finally chicken pot pies all using the same chicken.  So I am planning to do that next week, after I locate some pans to make pot pies in. And, I didn’t want too much chicken this week. But what he did is exactly what I’m trying to do more of. It’s less wasteful, cheaper, and delicious!

I think I’m getting better at looking at what I currently have, and then finding recipes or dishes to make out of it. It certainly makes groceries cheap- I only need to get 5 items at the grocery store this week to make those three meals. (I still buy the staples at Costco- such as ground turkey, chicken breasts, milk, etc. and I’m stocked up!)

Holiday Recap (a.k.a. the most excruciating visit ever)

{ January 8, 2010 @ 6:05 pm } · { life }
{ Tags: , , } · { Comments (2) }

Today’s kind of a hard day at work so in between disabling people’s access and feeling bad for them, I am distracting myself and trying to get up to date on my blahg.

Because I am too lazy to post pictures individually, I created a Smilebox slide show type thingy. It’s basically scrapbooking for lazy people. And since I have no digital scrapbooking happening right now due to my computer situation, this was the next best thing. My MIL gave me a subscription to this website and it’s only minimally ok, to be honest. My biggest gripe with it (which in my opinion IS a dealbreaker) is that you cannot rotate or orient your photos, so in slideshows and scrapbook layouts, if your photos don’t happen to be the right orientation for the box, they just get cut off. It’s dumb. Totally a bare minimum feature that any digital photo software should have, free or not. In my case, I have the non-free version, and it still sucks.  But!  It did allow me to quickly throw together some photos from Christmas and post them here:

Click to play this Smilebox photobook: Christmas Pix 2009

 

The pictures probably make it look like we had a good time, which we did at first.  But it went downhill quickly. I’m not sure exactly why, but it could just be that my focus shifted. The first couple of days I did a lot of cooking, which I enjoyed. But then the visit became extremely boring. I didn’t have anything to do, literally. The parents were content doing nothing but staring at the wall/TV/etc.

At one point I came upstairs to the main level after being in the office for a bit. It smelled like the dog had taken a crap on the rug. Very strong poop smell. I asked J “OMG, did the dog go poop in here?” He whispered “No, that’s my dad…”  So imagine if you will a person disgusting enough to pump out enough anal gas to fill an entire 750 sq. feet so strongly that it smelled like there was a fresh steaming pile on the carpet.

Needless to say I was revolted. It didn’t just happen the one time, it was every day.  On top of that he was sick, and coughed and sneezed and hacked constantly all day. Did he wash his hands? No. Did he make attempts to not get everyone else sick? Hell no.  So I decided to quarantine myself to my bedroom, where I read, watched some TV, and played around on the computer, but really, a person can only take so much of that before they want to scream.   And, it did no good- well, I guess at least I wasn’t smelling farts. But I still got sick and so did J.  Fortunately the day before they were supposed to leave, Jeremy took them to a hotel by the airport to get the sickness out of our house. That was a relief and I was finally able to have my house back. I opened all the windows and turned the fans on, and got out my Lysol.

So the nice four days I was looking forward to after they got dropped off at the airport, became four days of feeling sick and trying to get better. I disinfected and cleaned the entire house to try to get the crap out.  I had to febreeze the hell out of the couch. But in honesty, Jeremy and really want to throw our couch away because we just don’t feel anything could come back from what was done to it. 

I already posted preemptively about the church stuff, so I’ll refrain from going into it any further. But we did NOT go to mass despite being asked more than once.  I’m really hoping they get the hint one of these days but I’m afraid it probably won’t happen. There will be a time, perhaps in the not-to-distant future where my outspokenness is going to get the best of me, and instead of keeping my mouth shut like I usually do, I’ll tell them they need to stop asking us to go to church, because we will NEVER become Catholic. Period.

I posted about the clothes earlier too- that was another thing that went from being potentially cool to just damn annoying. It was too much, it still is. It’s WAY too much. No baby needs that many clothes.  I have been sorting through and tossing out the vomit-stained and collecting the otherwise hideously ugly crap, to donate to charity. So nice of me. MIL insists anything I don’t use I should just re-sell but for fuck’s sake… if it’s vomit stained I don’t think anyone will want it.  The ugly crap, maybe.. it’s a taste thing.   I can’t remember if I posted about the baby blankets.  I’m starting to think this woman’s going to turn into a full-on hoarder once she gets up in years, because the amount of shit she has held onto for generations astounds me. And now they have been bequeathed to me. I have about 20-30 baby blankets that are “heirlooms”.  The problem is, I hate antiques. And these aren’t even antiques. They’re just plain ugly, stiff, nasty smelling, and not something I will ever wrap my baby in.  So I am pissed about being burdened with this crap that I would not think twice about throwing away, but because they are things passed down that great-grandmothers made, I feel I can’t rightly toss them.   So thanks, MIL, for dumping your shit on me once again.  I can’t wait until you visit again and bring another few bags of crap for us. Thank the lord Jesus Southwest doesn’t charge you per bag like all the other airlines.  I wish they would so she would stop bringing it. The price of the extra bag would probably be enough to insult her cheapness and maybe she’d think twice about lugging all that crap across the country. 

It will be interesting to see what I do, because hubby and I will be moving shortly after the baby is born. Our lease is up at the end of March and we are moving into a real house!  But just because we will have more space does not mean we get to take more crap with us. We both hate clutter and needless crap.  So starting this weekend we are going to be massively purging shit that’s been in our garage for 3 years and not used, I’ve decided to get rid of all my clothes that aren’t in my current size range. The reality is, that hanging onto those clothes has done me no good thus far, and I’m going to be in nursing tops for the next year, which I will have to buy, and I am going to work on losing weight once the baby is born, so I’m just going to buy new clothes when I need them.  Anyway, I am excited about the upcoming purge. It really feels good to purge. I am annoyed that my baby has already accumulated way too much crap and it already needs to be purged, and she isn’t even born yet!   Between you and me, if those baby blankets magically happen to not show up when we move, I have no idea what happened to them.

Once again I feel like a bad person for saying all of this. But it’s really how I feel. And if I can’t vent on my own blog, then I am just fucked.

Ahh, the holidays. I used to never really get why people would stress out so much over the holidays. With my simple and small family, holidays were always easy, relaxed, and fun. We would do whatever we wanted, without worrying about extended family, and it was really, really nice. Now I am in the shuffle where we have to plan who goes where, and if I had my way, I would never spend another holiday with hubby’s parents.  I love him to death, so of course I will take the entire package and just deal with it.  But all I wished the entire week was that I was with my parents and sister, because I have not seen them for 3 Christmases now.  I delight in the fact that next Christmas we will be spending with my family, and that it will also be our baby’s first Christmas. I think it will be a lot of fun, and I am already looking forward to it.  And already dreading the following year, when the inevitable will probably have to happen.  I wonder if an almost-2 year old would be too young to take on a cruise over the holidays…hehehe.

a happy distraction

{ January 8, 2010 @ 11:46 am } · { 1 }
{ Tags: } · { Leave a Comment }

Having had my Kindle2 now for about 8 months and loving the heck out of it, sadly I’ve spent the last month or two away from it, as I’ve bought some reference-type books in old school paper form and have been reading those in preparation for having a baby/breastfeeding/etc.  But I miss my Kindle2 dearly and have decided to take a break from the nonfiction baby learnin’ and am going to dive into some sort of wonderful fiction story for a while.

I am grateful to my friend Ro for the inspiration on a book- I downloaded the free sample of The Historian and read most of the way through that last night. I am on chapter 3 and I will definitely be buying that book once I get to the end of the sample. (One of my favorite things about the Kindle is the ability to download samples of books and try them out before you buy- oh and the fact that the books cost so much less in electronic form.)

 I am in love with the way Elizabeth writes, reading this book makes me feel smart again, I don’t know really how to explain it, but I really had a love for literature when I was younger (high school and college) and reading this reminds me of those types of books, yet I find it more enjoyable than “required reading”.

In addition, I have been wanting a light to go with my Kindle2 and cover, and for a long time these lights have been out of stock. Literally months and months. I saw that they had gotten more around Christmas, and when I went to order them they were out of stock and Amazon said they didn’t know if they’d EVER get more in.  Sheesh.  Well, they DO have more, so I decided to order one for me and one for J while they had them, because who knows, right?  This little light is perfect because it fits in the M-edge cases that we both have and are not bulky like the big clip-on lights.

Lastly, I chose this really cute skin which I think will go nicely with the blue leather cover I have for it. My Kindle2 will purr with happiness…and so will I.

I’m secretly hoping that once I get enveloped in the world of fiction on my Kindle again, and finish The Historian, that I can go back to Dragonfly in Amber and finish that darn thing. The first book in the series I read straight through, during my old bus-riding days. But the second book, for some reason, is very difficult for me to stay with. I don’t know exactly why.  But I desperately want to finish the whole series because I love the characters and setting.  We’ll see! I really hate leaving books unfinished for some reason.

« Older entries