Month: January 2016

Well. We’ve survived the first couple of days back in the real world for the most part. However, full disclosure, I had a moment yesterday morning when the alarm went off and I immediately began to think about how long it will be until the next morning when we can sleep in and wanted to cry when I realized it’s at least ten days away.

I’ve spent most of my time catching up on everything I didn’t do over the Christmas vacation. My email inbox was embarrassingly full and my refrigerator was embarrassingly empty. So I’ve slowly begun to tackle email and made a trip to HEB to stock up on all the groceries our life requires. Normally I start the new year with all manner of healthy eating resolutions, but I’m just not feeling it right now. Although I did buy both spinach and kale to hopefully offset the Sour Patch Kids and Hot Tamales. I think maybe this year I feel like survival is key for the first week back and I’ll work on being a better person starting next week. Baby steps.

I also don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I just signed on to write a fourth book and it’s due in June. For those of you who are gifted in calendar math, you will quickly realize that June isn’t nearly as far away as it may seem right now and maybe I should start thinking about writing some words for that bad boy. Which is what I’ve attempted to do this week but I always have to write sixty-four things I hate before I stumble upon one thing I can actually tolerate.

There’s also nothing like a looming book deadline to make me feel like it is extremely important for me to clean out every room and closet in my house. I even found a chart on Pinterest that gives you a clean out assignment every day for forty days. This is great in theory, but I am a binge cleaner. I couldn’t possibly sustain the drive or the energy to clean out a section of my house every day for forty days. This is also the reason I’ll never run a marathon. Some things in life are much better as a sprint. (Hypothetically speaking. In reality I prefer not to run sprints or marathons because RUNNING.)

So I may have to tackle a few closets and drawers just for my peace of mind. I realize I need to write a book but there is really nothing that makes me feel more accomplished than cleaning out a whole box of stuff from a closet, especially when I finally commit to getting rid of something that I’ve held on to for way too long.

Speaking of, I have kept all manner of old DVDs even though we don’t even have a DVD player anymore. But I look at those Baby Einstein DVDs and The Little Mermaid and Shrek and I can’t help but remember how they were such a vital part of Caroline’s toddlerhood. (Not that I let her watch that much T.V. This was only during the downtime that we weren’t reading together from War and Peace and eating organic baby food I made from scratch.) However, they are taking up room that could be used for something we actually use. I’m so conflicted.

And we also have a cabinet in our dining room which is where craft supplies go to die. I’m not sure how it became our designated craft cabinet, but it is chock full of glitter sticker letters, pom pons, googly eyes and packs of construction paper. I’ve thought about cleaning it out before but I get scared when I open it and quickly shut the door again and pretend it was all a bad Martha Stewart dream.

Anyway, the fact that I’m discussing the contents of various closets and cabinets in my home is a sure sign that there just isn’t much going on around here except pure procrastination. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually clean a bunch of stuff out just to get it over with so I can focus on more important things.

Like organizing my spice rack.

And scrubbing my baseboards.

Or checking to see if Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are still a thing.

Christmas break is officially over and I’m vacillating between all the stages of grief. It felt like two weeks absolutely flew by and, although I really do feel like we took full advantage of the break, it still doesn’t feel like it was long enough. I would like one or six more weeks of staying up late watching Parenthood and sleeping until sometime that is significantly later than 7 a.m.

But I realize you can’t live in vacation mode forever. Mainly because I’ve now made three batches of homemade Chex Mix and I’m not sure my digestive system can take much more of my holiday food groups which consist of sugar, butter, and a side of sugar. Although I did make some banana pudding just a little while ago in what I believe to be a culinary swan song to Christmas vacation. Plus it felt like the right thing to do in light of Downton Abbey starting again. You know Mrs. Patmore can probably make a mean banana pudding even though I’m not sure she had access to many bananas. Food history isn’t really my forte.

We had a fun New Year’s Eve at Gulley’s house. Our friend Jamie and her family came in from Dallas and Gulley picked up Mexican food and we all just hung out, watched football and let the kids set off some fireworks that are probably not legal in the city limits. Speaking of football, the Aggies…nevermind. Let us not speak of any more football for the time being.

None of us made it until midnight because we are at a point in life where we realize there’s no shame in welcoming the new year at 10:00 a.m. the next morning. Which is pretty much what we did. Jamie and her crew got to our house on New Year’s morning and P cooked us all breakfast tacos before we packed up and headed to the ranch for the day. Gulley and her guys had other plans, but Caroline was more than happy to show Jamie’s city boys the ropes down south.

It was a cold, rainy day so we spent a lot of time hanging at the house and shooting at targets from the front porch. And taking pictures.

We did drive around a little bit and saw a few deer, some rabbits, and a bunch of cattle. And then as soon as it got dark, we broke out the fireworks that Trevor and P had bought earlier that day.

It was decidedly not safe. There were fireworks going off everywhere and, long story short, P set off something called Air Force Attack that I have no doubt got that name because sparks fly everywhere and you literally feel that you might be under attack. And then we wrapped the whole show up with the grand finale firework called Lord Of War. Because that sounds harmless.

Of course the kids thought it was awesome. And Jamie and I mostly enjoyed watching them have fun with the exception of the sound of 100 shot Saturn Missiles that I will continue to hear in my head through the remainder of 2016. We did our best to take a quick group selfie (a groupie?) before we headed back to San Antonio.

Don’t be jealous of my sweet hat.

Saturday was cold and rainy all day long. We slept in (Actually, Caroline and I slept in. P got up to go to a gun show. As you do.) and then I was ambitious enough to do two loads of laundry before I decided to shower, put on a clean pair of pjs, and sit by the fire watching football the rest of the day. Don’t worry, I made sure to stretch and stay hydrated.

We stayed up to watch TCU make one of the greatest bowl comebacks ever later that night and then it was a rude awakening when P woke me up at 7:45 a.m. Sunday morning to get ready for church. And even ruder when he mentioned that Monday morning was going to feel even worse.

But I thoroughly enjoyed church once I had a gallon of coffee and was at least 65% functional and then we had a lazy afternoon that was made even better knowing that I had Pioneer Woman’s slow cooker chicken tortilla soup in the crockpot.

I have kind of sworn off crockpot recipes over the last few months because I’ve decided they all start to taste and smell the same and sometimes the meat seems weird. But, listen, this could just be me. I also believe they were eating a lot of banana pudding at Downton Abbey and the truth is I just make this stuff up in my head as I go along. Maybe they also ordered Pizza Hut delivery on the nights Mrs. Patmore wasn’t up to cooking. BLASPHEMY!

Anyway, crock pot. I love the idea but just not always the execution. I think I like a dutch oven in the oven better. All that being said, the chicken tortilla soup was a winner, mainly because you don’t have to actually touch the raw chicken. In fact, I just made up a new phrase to describe it “WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER”.

Except I didn’t make that up.

And I don’t know anything about the history of banana pudding.

And I’m also thinking it’s more likely that Mrs. Patmore made figgy pudding. Although I’m basing that solely on the lyrics from We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is the new Miss Universe is Miss Colombia.