ginger shrimp and snow peas

We like shrimp.

It is our preferred method for getting fish into our diet.  We should probably branch out and get more actual fish of different types but shrimp is pretty easy and cheap to buy frozen.

For me, I think it has to do with growing up so close to the Gulf of Mexico and I still prefer Gulf shrimp to any other variety.  Among my earliest memories are “Fish” fries at church during Lent.  But there were no fish involved for me – just a big pile of boiled peel-and-eat shrimp.

I made this recipe from Real Simple a couple of months ago.

It has a nice gingery flavor and the snow peas add a crispness to the dish and I enjoyed it despite all the onions.  We served it over couscous and may have had a salad on the side.

It will definitely make a reappearance.

summer stir fry

I haven’t looked at hardly any of the recipes on Pioneer Woman Cooks (or her sister site, Tasty Kitchen) but I do read the new ones as she posts them.  And you might say that she’s the inspiration behind the step-by-step picture method of posting recipes that may or may not happen here.

I tried one of her summer recipes a few weeks ago.  I didn’t take step-by-step pictures because she’s already done it.

Here’s the final product:

It was really easy and very tasty.  It had a lovely light summer taste which is perfect for hot weather.  Will didn’t even mind the tomatoes!

Here’s the link from Pioneer Woman: Summer Stir Fry.

reagan’s 1st birthday

I didn’t even remember I had these pictures on my camera until I finally cleaned off the card in the Canon.  They’re too cute not to share.

Susan, Tim and Reagan had been out of the country until Memorial Day weekend and decided to have a small first birthday party for Reagan on Memorial Day a few days after they returned.  It turned out that Evite was too smart for its own good and since Susan set up the invitation in Switzerland, it adjusted for the timezones and the party ended up being at lunch instead of dinner – oops!

Given the hour, the guest of honor slept until it was time for cake.  The rest of us had a great time awaiting her arrival but then it was time for cake.

  
Better keep an eye on the knife, Will!

 
Um, Mom, what do I do with this?

 
With a little help from her friends…

 
Ah, happy girl enjoying her cake.

And we don’t know how to follow directions so we brought her a present.

I think she enjoyed it.

Hey Mr. Will, you want some balloons?

 
I know what Will wants….

crafty crafty

So I randomly will decide to get crafty at times.  Ok, I know that cross stitching can be considered crafty but there’s not too much personal creativity in it for me (because there’s a pattern to follow) – but that’s part of the joy of it for me.  I think it’s a math-brained thing really.

But I do like to get creative sometimes.  I really loved coming up with the various paper design elements for our wedding – the programs, the place cards and the table numbers.  I think that part of it was that I spent easily 3 hours or more searching the internet for a free source to provide me with the exact same font on our wedding invitations (I found it a whole bunch of places for sale for about $50).

Of course, what you can’t see (and there aren’t pictures) is that inside each place card there’s a “fun fact” about us (thanks to Ruben and Sarah for that idea) and on the back of each “table number” is a story about our time spent in each state.

I’d also designed the invitations for my matron of honor’s bridal shower and bachelorette party.  If I wasn’t in NC, I might make the effort to dig them out and take pictures.

Sometimes I wonder about trying to make an actual paying side project out of it like Michelle has but then I just don’t think I’m creative enough in a graphic design sense and I stick to just doing what I like for people I like – and myself, of course.  Besides, I don’t need to encourage my Paper Source habit in the slightest.

Oh – and I’m lazy.

Oh – and I really am going somewhere with this. 

I swear. 

It’s just that sometimes I feel the need for intros when I launch into something new and then the posts get really long if I continue on to my point and I don’t like that. 

caulking

We’ve been keeping up quite the pace with the home projects recently. 

After beginning our basement organization on Monday, we decided to tackle recaulking our tub on Friday.  We figured that since we were going tubing and camping for the weekend, (a) we weren’t getting up and taking showers and (b) there would be plenty of time for the caulk to set up before we got home on Sunday and needed showers.

I’m mean and gave Will the hard job of removing all the old layers of caulk.

Here he is working on the particularly stubborn upright edges of the tub:

The long side of the tub came up a bit better but was the gross portion of the project:

He fought with all that old gross caulk for about an hour and half before it was all done.  I then took over to clean the edges and apply the new caulk. 

Well, Will doesn’t seem to enjoy taking pictures of me doing work as much as I do him so I don’t have any pictures of the grossness that was under the old caulk.  I doused it in bleach and scrubbed with a toothbrush that we have set aside for such projects.  Then, following the directions I got from Bob Villa’s website, I taped off the tub portions that needed caulk.

Then it was time to apply the caulk.  We’d gotten clear silicone caulk that was supposed to set up in 4 hours.  I had a bit of a problem getting the caulk to start flowing.  That’s when Will stepped in and kindly read the directions (I’m an engineer; I can just skim directions) and discovered that you have to puncture the seal before the caulk will flow.  Oops.

It went really well after that.  It’s actually super easy – you just squeeze the bead of caulk out into the crevice, smooth with a damp paper towel, remove the tape and smooth again.

The only problem – clear caulk doesn’t conceal the space between the top edge of the tub and the bottom (uneven, of course) edge of the tile. 

So we have to do it all again in the near future with white caulk.  yay.

We also discovered definitively that the tub has been resurfaced at some point in the past.  We kind of thought so given the condition of the floor of the tub but the fact that we’ve found the chipped edges, seals it.  Just something else to cover up with the white caulk.

blog roll, part 4 – finale

I found Good Things Catered through Emily and have really enjoyed. I’ve made a few of her recipes already – lemon chicken and pink champagne cake – and have been very pleased. She’s been a bit MIA lately though.

I found A Cup of Jo through STF actually. Jo is Joanna Goddard one of the STF writers but A Cup of Jo is her own personal blog. She writes about interesting design related type stuff. Just quick things that are interesting. I’ve actually started to notice that she’s included in the blog rolls of a bunch of other sites that I’ve come across.

Ok… I’ve already professed my love for The Pioneer Woman on here. And I’ve already heard from someone about losing many hours with Ree as a result of me professing my love. I’d heard of her before but I can’t remember where so it was really Emily again to turn me on to this one. The Confessions section is hilarious and interesting. The Home & Garden section appeals to the daughter of an interior decorator in me. I haven’t read all of Pioneer Woman Cooks but I did recently make one of her recipes and it was scrumptious. But it’s the Photography section that is proving most instructive – I’ve been trying to incorporate her tips and instructions as I take my own pictures.

I found Shit My Kids Ruined through A Cup of Jo and it’s just downright funny. All I can think of as I look at the pictures is that Mom would have had plenty to add to the collection if my brothers had grown up in the age of digital photography.

I found out about Linda & Harriet through a Daily Candy post several years ago. But what I didn’t know until recently was that she had a blog. Also another design type blog but she’s also blogging about her life in NYC.

Hot Guys Reading Books was posted to Facebook by a girl I went to high school with and Catalog Living was posted to Facebook by a friend from college. Both are just highly amusing. Though HGRB’s author did inspire my “to read” page based on the BBC’s top 100 books.

Ok… I really am finished now.

ah, the big bang theory

When The Big Bang Theory first came on air, we weren’t pleased because it seemed like CBS was giving it more support than our favorite sitcom, How I Met Your Mother.  So we refused to watch it.

Well, we randomly would watch an episode here and there until it was finally added to the rotation towards the end of the last season.  We’ve spent the last few weeks watching the first two seasons on DVD.  We LOVE it.  Smart hilarity is amazing.  It doesn’t hurt that it’s touching too.

Each episode is named to be some sort of scientific principle.  We started to wonder if they’ve repeated any of the words.

So in keeping with the dorkiness of the show… I put all the titles in Excel to answer that very question…

Used twice (so far none have been used more than twice in 62 episodes): Alternative, Conjecture, Corollary, Experiment, Hypothesis, Paradigm, Polarization, Reaction, Vortex

Used only once:  Acquisition, Algorithm, Amplification, Annihilation, Anomaly, Approximation, Capacitance, Catalyst, Collision, Congruence, Conundrum, Decay, Decoupling, Deficiency, Deviation, Duality, Effect, Equivalency, Excitation, Expansion, Expedition, Factor, Fluctuation, Formulation, Fragmentation, Implementation, Indeterminacy, Instability, Isotope, Juxtaposition, Nanocluster, Paradox, Permeability, Postulate, Recurrence, Renormalization, Saturation, Solution, Stimulation, Sublimation, Theorem, Topology, Triangulation, Turbulence