it's snowing outside. Hard. And it's sticking! :D

Since my last post I have:

Decided to get glasses.
The doctor says I don't really NEED them, but I wanted them so he wrote me a prescription for reading glasses. I have to say...I'm a little disappointed. I'm legally blind in my right eye, which normally doesn't bother me at all, but it's a bitch to deal with when putting on eyeliner. So I had this fantasy that if I got glasses, I could just maneuver my eyeliner brush around the frames and put my eyeliner on that way, which would be a lot easier than what I do now, which is basically like, put a little on, open my eye to check the work, put a little on, open my eye to check the work, repeat repeat repeat. But my optometrist said that glasses like that wouldn't be practical. The correction for my right eye would apparently be crazy huge, and he said that since I don't use that eye normally anyway, ACTUALLY seeing out of it would probably 1) be something I could only do by "manually switching" to that eye (which is hard to explain to people who use both eyes all the time, but I totally knew what he meant, and it makes my left eye cross), and 2) it would probably give me headaches and make me nauseated, because I'm just NOT accustomed to using that eye. So, bah. I guess it's still going to take me fo-eva to put on eyeliner.

By the time my doc gave me the bad news about my eyeliner situation though, I'd already picked out frames I liked. And I WANTED them. So, because I'm a freak who actually wants glasses, I was like, "what CAN you give me a prescription for?"

He said he could give me reading glasses, since sometimes my poor little left eye gets tired from reading/beading/etc, because it has to work doubly hard. So I got reading glasses. Brett got his normal prescription, but with entirely new and different frames. Our optics shop was having a sale, so before the sale price and insurance, his frames and lenses totaled about $350 (his lenses are expensive). After the sale - $215. After insurance - $15. After the HSA card - $0. Mine were about $260 before the sale price, but then went down to $205, then $5, and obviously we paid that with the same HSA card mentioned above, so we walked away paying $0. Except for what B put into the HSA card initially, which was pre-tax income with matching funds from his employer.

If your employer offers an HSA with matching funds and you plan on using your body for things, ACCEPT THEIR GENEROUS OFFER, PEOPLE!!! Little bits of money (the amount is up to you) are taken from your paycheck each month, your employer automatically matches those funds (so the amount doubles, duh), and then if you, say, hypothetically, go to the dentist for the first time in seven years and need two cleanings, a fluoride treatment, eight fillings, a root canal, and a crown (I am SO glad that's over), not only is it NO STRAIN WHATSOEVER on your daily budget, but you might even have extra money left over for things like fancy reading glasses and expensive prenatal vitamins. (I'm not pregnant yet. STOP ASKING.) Three cheers for good financial planning!!!

Been told that I'm going to San Francisco as an early birthday present. Woo!
Apparently, despite the "early birthday present" label I insisted that my iMac be bought with, my mom and dad have also been in cahoots with Brett planning a long-weekend getaway for the two of us down in SF. We'll be staying at a cool boutique hotel downtown, hanging out with my little brother (Sam) who lives in the area, eating lots of good (DF) food, and possibly, if I can talk Brett and my brother into it, going to Maker Faire. I want to go sooo bad. But we won't have a car, so Sam will have to drive us. But Sam would love Maker Faire. I bet. So he should totally go with us. And we should go. Pleeease?

Been feeling a bit under the weather, and have consequently let the house go to shit.
All last week I had a headache, congestion, and a feeling of like...blah. Just not good. I thought it was allergies, and when the achiness set in I thought it was allergies + pms. But then Brett got sick too. REALLY sick. He spent most of Saturday with a fever over 100, and I took my own temperature as well, and it was 99.5. So we were sick. :P We were SUPPOSED to spend Easter with his family at his parents' house, and I was supposed to bring dairy-and-soy-free biscuits and gravy, but since we were sick and Ali is seven months pregnant, the consensus was that Brett and I spend Easter quarantined in our own filthy sicky house, so that nobody, fetus included, would get our cooties.

So I went to the store and bought a dozen eggs, determined that, come hell or high water, I WOULD have deviled eggs on Easter Sunday. Then Sunday came around, and I was too exhausted to actually cook them. And since I'd been feeling sick all week, the kitchen was so disgusting that I couldn't really cook much of anything. I actually don't even remember what we ate that day. I think we made a sort of half-assed chicken soup. It was Brett's idea and really it tasted pretty good: just chicken broth, carrots, rice, onion, and garlic. No actual chicken. if there had been chicken in it, I would've considered it whole-assed. But sans chicken I give it only half an ass.

Brett stayed home sick until today. He was MUCH sicker than I was, so he had every right to lay on the couch all weekend creating a massive pile of dirty dishes, snotty tissues, sweaty blankets, food crumbs, dvd boxes, etc. But I just didn't have the energy to feel yucky, take care of him, AND keep up with the mess. By the time he went back to work today the house was like, COPS messy. You know, like on COPS, when they go into someone's house and it's totally disgusting, and the person is all like, "yeah, I've been meaning to throw out that dead cat for awhile now." But like, there's so much shit all over the floor that the camera can't even FIND the dead cat, but the cops just keep commenting on the smell?!?

We had no dead cats (thank God), but it did take me all day just to clean up the living room and bar. And I barely made a dent in the kitchen. I swear, never in the history of our marriage do I remember our kitchen ever being this messy. This morning I went in to make breakfast, and since I only had about 5" of counter space, a couple of spoons, and no cookware, I ended up microwaving canned soup in a mixing bowl and THAT'S what I had for breakies. And lunchies. I managed to clean it up enough to make beef stroganoff in the crock for dinner, but it still has a looong way to go. Man I hate getting sick.

Incidentally, I worked on that dairy-and-soy-free biscuits and gravy recipe for THREE DAYS, and it was really good. Not a perfect milk-and-flour sausage gravy base exactly, but an excellent sausage gravy, never the less. Made with a bacon fat roux, crumbled breakfast sausage, sauteed onion, and a combo of almond milk, beef broth, and water as the "milk" part. It looked more like something that should be coming up rather than going down, but it was delicious.

Been totally obsessed with LHotP.
LHotP, aka Little House on the Prairie, is a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Aka LIW. I'm actually obsessed more with the whole "Laura Years" series, but I refer to it as LHotP. I have them as audio books performed by Cherry Jones, with Pa's Fiddle performed by Paul Woodiel. I normally prefer audio books to actual books, but the extra treat of Cherry Jones' soft accent and soothing voice, and the singing and fiddling of songs that, in the books, would've just been written out as lyrics has been awesome. I read the whole series of books over and over again as a kid, and for some reason I got the urge to listen to them as audio recently, so...I have been. I like to listen to them on le ipod while I'm cooking, cleaning, madly clicking through (fluff)Friends, etc. It's been quite nice, and it's put me in a very nesty sort of mood. Which, since I'm a homemaker anyway, is a very nice way to feel. :)

Been more okay with the idea of moving.
Brett's wanted to move closer-in for awhile now, but I LOVE our house, neighborhood, and town. And I don't want to leave them. But as the population of this area has grown, the traffic has rapidly gone from bad to worse. Brett's average commute is about 45 min each way, and we're spending about $200/month on gas, so living here just doesn't make sense any more. Moving closer-in will most likely mean moving into a smaller house, which seems like a bad idea since we're also planning on having kids in the near future (and we want to have three), but lots of people have children in small living spaces, and it's just fine. It's funny - when we moved into our current 1800 sq ft house I thought it was TINY, but now that I've lived here awhile I feel like I really don't even need all this space.

There are some things I'm having a hard time letting go of; I still want more than one bathroom, I want a dining room, two separate living areas, a master suite with plenty of closet space, etc, but I've let go of my previous demands that our next house HAS to have a music room and it HAS to have a bar, a hot tub, etc. Because really. WTF. It sooo doesn't have to have those things. All it HAS to have are places to sleep, eat, play, and relax. And places to go to the bathroom. Preferably multiple places to go to the bathroom.

Because this one time, when I was little, I was staying in someone's house in OKC with my aunt and uncle and cousin for a wedding, and there were so many people staying in the house that all four of us were in one suite together, with my aunt and uncle in the bed and my cousin and I on the floor. Then my cousin got sick and barfed in my hair, and we only had ONE bathroom for the four of us, so my aunt cleaned the barf out of my hair with a washcloth while my cousin was sick in the bathroom, and then my aunt got sick too (food poisoning, it turned out), and she and my cousin had to SHARE THE SAME BATHROOM for their barfs and rhea. And they stayed in there together, doing those things, all night. I had to pee, but chose to hold it until morning and use someone else's bathroom. Hell if I was going to pee in that toilet.

The lesson I learned on that disastrous trip: multiple people need multiple bathrooms. Even with just Brett and I living together it's been helpful, because if one of us is sick to our stomach, the other one can continue going about their normally scheduled bathroom business in the other bathroom, completely unhindered. And there have been quite a few times after road trips or long days out on the town where we both enter the house and immediately want to head for the bathroom, and why, isn't that lovely! We can both go at the same time. No queue!

On that note, I think it's time for me to pee, listen to some LHotP, and then hit the hay. Good night! :)

I usually watch video podcasts while I eat lunch, because it's pretty much the only time I'm willing to sit (mostly) still and stare at a screen without interacting. One of the videos I watched today was Cook's Illustrated's Four-Cheese Lasagna episode.

If you love to cook (I mean REALLY love to cook), you might want to think about subscribing to Cook's. Brett and I subscribed for years and found it amazingly interesting and educational. Pros: each issue is stuffed full of helpful info & recipes. Cons: it's mostly text, so if you're a visual person like me it might feel more like reading-for-homework than reading-for-pleasure. Also, each issue is STUFFED FULL of info, so this is not a magazine that you can flip through for an hour and be done with. We decided not to renew our subscription just because we never had time to finish reading them cover-to-cover.

That being said, I love their podcasts. They contain the same sort of information you'd get from the magazine, only in quick blips of video. If you want to watch them for free, you can do so in iTunes.

Back to my point: today I watched the Four-Cheese Lasagna episode. It looks delish. Rich, fatty, completely unhealthy, and mouth-wateringly, soul-cradlingly, delish. If you figure out an equally delicious, 100% dairy-free way for me to make this dish, I will give you one MILLION dollars*. Now that I've had some time (almost a year!) to adjust my diet, my milk allergy usually doesn't feel like much of a constraint, but food like this...well...boo. :(

Also making me bitter about my milk allergy today? Oddly enough, this:


Don't worry, no one was hurt. Yesterday morning a train derailed about 20 blocks north of my house. It derailed because it hit a semi that was parked across the tracks:


Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer comes across a jack-knifed sugar truck and ends up shoveling up all the sugar to keep for himself? When I heard about this accident, my first thought was that I hoped no one was seriously hurt. My SECOND thought was, "I wonder what was in the truck..."

Guess what was in the truck?

Can you guess?

I bet you can't.

PIZZA AND CHEESECAKE.

(sonofabitch!!!)

Also, completely not related to milk at all, but kind of in a way related to the train derailment since it happened closer to her house than mine: my friend Kim has a new blog. I've also updated her link in my blogroll on the right. CHECK IT OUT! :)


* you will not actually be paid.

I have a problem. Well, not so much a *problem,* I guess. But I care waaay too much about the Easter Egg hunt on (fluff)Friends. In all fairness to myself, I am currently playing NO video games. I haven't touched Zelda in like...almost a month. And I haven't played Elebits since Christmastime. So really, this (fluff)Friends thing has become my game replacement. Brett plays his world-domination games (Civilization, Age of Empire, whateva), and I play with sweet, cuddly ♥(fluff)Friends♥.

Here's where I've decided that it's become a problem, though: I usually keep an .xls doc open with a bunch of "to do" type info: what I'm cooking and on what day, an on-going grocery list, chores for each day, on-going tasks that have no specific day assigned, you get the picture. But after the (fluff)Friend Egg Hunt started, I actually started a new worksheet in that document JUST TO TRACK MY EGG HUNTING STATISTICS. It's insane. It's not super complicated or anything; just some countifs, concatenate, a little conditional formatting, etc. But still. For an egg hunt on facebook. I'm such a freak. AND I put so much work into hunting/updating my chart every day, that right now I'm actually blogging as EGG HUNT PROCRASTINATION. Because I now feel like it's more something that I HAVE to do (to finish what I started) than something I want to do.

Sigh.

I'm glad we're going out tonight.

Okay, so this afternoon B and I went to the library, and we still hadn't figured out what kind of junky, effortless crap food we were going to eat for dinner tonight. But he's not feeling well, and I'm not feeling motivated to cook, so we knew it definitely needed to be effortless.

In order to get from our town library to our house, there's really only one road to take. And on that road, you pass the "Taco Hut." It's not actually CALLED Taco Hut, but that's what "we locals" call it, because it's a magical fairyland where you can get Pizza Hut and Taco Bell at the same time, in the same drive thru, and it's all even on the same receipt. And who doesn't love eating tacos AND pizza?!? (Incidentally, you should see this place at 2am on a Saturday night; the drive thru line literally winds around the parking lot and out into the street. Because when you're drunk, tacos and pizza are The Best Thing Ever.)

So this afternoon, I realize that we don't know what we're doing for dinner, and that we're about to pass Taco Hut. I get excited. My eyes widen, and I gasp. An actual lightbulb becomes visible above my head. And then I remember: I'm allergic to milk. The only thing Taco Bell makes that I can eat are Cinnamon Twists, and I'm pretty sure that even the pop at Pizza Hut has cheese in it. No Taco Hut for me. :(

So instead we decide to just go to FM and get groceries. Brett was feeling worse by the minute (as of now he's actually passed out on the couch, sound asleep), so he decided to just get bread, fruit, and ice cream. I made the mistake of shopping on an empty stomach (I hadn't eaten since dinner yesterday), so I wanted EVERYTHING. I ended up getting a vegan roasted veggie pizza, some df ice cream, and DAIRY FREE BEEF AND BEAN BURRITOS!!! A huge bag of frozen microwavable crappy cheap ones, which is just how I like them. The ones I USED to get added whey to their recipe last summer, so I haven't had a frozen burrito since like...idk. Sometime last summer. But guess what I'm eating for dinner tonight?!? PIZZA AND BURRITOS!!! :DDD Which is honestly what I would've ended up eating from Taco Hut, since I like burritos better than tacos anyway.

On a completely random and unrelated note: this morning as I was stretching out in bed mulling over the idea of getting up, I realized that with very little effort, I can touch both of our bedside tables at the same time. We have a queen size bed and there's about 6" of space between each bedside table and the actual edge of the bed, so BUHJEBUS. I must have the wingspan of like, a pterodactyl or something.

Sometimes my height makes me feel attractive and stately, but sometimes, like this morning, it makes me feel...manish? troll-like? hulking? gentlemanly? It's hard to describe the feeling, exactly. But NOT feminine. So that sucked. But once I was out of the shower and putting on makeup I felt a little bit better. It's amazing what a little eyeliner can do.