Stupendous Saturday! Friends and yogurt...and mulch?

(insert big satisfied smiley face right here!)

What a great Saturday I have had.  My husband and I both had friends over, and it was a great day, even if it poured most of the day.
Yesterday morning Mona and I headed over to a meetup (with another group) and met some great people.  On the way out, they gave us these beautiful flowers!

This morning I decided to attempt to make yogurt after a friend sent me a link to the http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ recipe.  I only have skim milk and skim fage yogurt, so this might end badly, but oh well I can buy the proper ingredients next time!  After putting the ingredients in the crockpot, allowing the milk to heat for a couple of hours, stirring in the yogurt and letting it cool, I put it in the oven (OFF!) and covered it with everything I could find (including sending my friend upstairs to grab a towel to wrap around it.  I have two aprons around it, and there might be some place mats.  Whatever...it works!

you can't really see anything but the string hanging down from my apron

It says 'NO TOUCH! yogurt"  It was a small sticky note...and a bad marker!

Since I didn't want anyone preheating the oven and starting a massive fire, I also put a sign up...








One of the things that my friend Mar and I love doing is coloring.  No joke...I like it more now that I'm an adult than I did when I was in school.  This is our latest...project.  If it were more zoomed you could see how her side is perfectly even and beautiful and mine is...well me.  Not always inside the lines and uneven.  Pretty much sums up my personality-messy but effective...

It is hard to see, but it is apparently a picture of a sorcerer's chamber. The orange thing at the bottom was supposed to a lion. 

Last night the husband and  I hit up Costco for some serious produce.  Mona and I shared some of hers as well, so I now have mangos, cantaloupe, pineapple, avocados, a sweet potato, spinach and 2 asperagus shoots. I can eat asperagus, but no I don't like it.  This fact is making it really hard for me to finish.  I sort of gave mona most of it.
The menu this week worked pretty well.  The hubs either ate a couple of bites of my food or had it for left overs, which worked pretty well. I ended up cooking the hamburger meat yesterday, and then we can make tacos whenever we want.  We ate at Costco last night since we were there, which made me feel a little guilty but my husband doesn't deal well with hunger, so I had to feed to beast.  Here are some yummy produce shots...



Twice a year we apparently have to mulch our front garden.  This is okay in theory, but I didn't know jack about mulching.  I made a big mistake. Instead of getting the more expensive stuff that is darker, I got the cheap red crap that it looked like they had put down before.  Dyed...wood. What was I thinking?  Basically, I don't now won't eat anything out of the garden (there was an herb garden) because God knows what chemicals they use.  Oh well...lesson learned.  Next time, I'm getting cedar or pine. Does anyone know anything about using dyed mulch? I've never mulched before. I'm glad I was planning on simply container gardening anyways!

Before the red mulch fiastco I pulled out a bunch (no seriously, it takes over) of mint and decided to make mint lemonade from a recipe I found online.  It's good...I've had way too much. I ran out of lemon juice...two bottles. I should be shot for using it, but I had it on hand and...they did all the work for me! I just had to measure it, right?  It was a good project for 9pm.

That is it for tonight!  I'm thinking tomorrow will be low key.  I will try to get some pictures of our front garden now that it is mulched, even if I will grimace every time I look at it...just a little.

My day in pictures.

I had such an awesome time today! I woke up early, had breakfast, showered and headed over to visit my friend Eric.  After watching Megamind (hilarious!) and catching up I headed over to see my friend Sophia.  Eric and I have been friends ever since he started talking to me his freshman year in band class. I quit band, since I was getting tortured daily by this girl behind me (and oh yeah, private lessons actually taught me something) but I kept Eric.  Good  choices on my part. 
She requests that I write about how much I totally love her. Sophia--I LOVE YOU (and you are awesome)!
Now that that is out of the way, Soph is like my sister. In fact, I call her that frequently. She is awesome, fun and hilarious. She's 8 years younger than me, so when I graduated from high school I handed down my locker shelves that my dad made.   As we were leaving the middle school one woman asked if I wanted to join the PTA. I told her that I would have to have been eight years old to be Sophia's mom, and we walked out.  Nice to know that I can look mature occasionally, right? Either that or it speaks to how young some parents look. 


Picture time! People seem to love the pictures, and unless I run out of space on here I will continue to post copious quantities of them. 


First to Eric's house! 

Eric attempting to remove a dog from my lap

there are 3 dogs there all sniffling each other and attempting to sit in my lap.  The small dogs weren't bad, but that big dog is HUGE (like 250lbs).  Yes, one of the dogs is licking my chest (hence my laughing so hard)

When I arrived we were chipper and awake (mostly)

When I was younger my dad took me to this Chinese Buffet.  I felt this need to find it again to have lunch with Sophia. It isn't in as good of shape as it was 10 years ago, but the food was still yummy.  The wallpaper however, garish beyond all description, so of course I had to take a picture!

Yummy...

 Next we went to the mall where we walked around for awhile. On Monday I start water aerobics and I needed a swimsuit which we quickly found.  Basically I sent her out to get anything in my size, and then she told me which one she liked best. It worked well for me!
After seeking 'nourishing liquid' (in the form of Starbucks Frappachinos) we were getting tired and then saw...a Brookstone! I love Brookstone and I love the man there named Gary who hooked us up in these awesome massage chairs for 15 minute massages (he would have let us stay longer but we didn't want to hog the awesomeness).

relaxing 

I was captured

We saw this guy walking around with this odd thing on his head. It is a head massager.  Sophia gets migraines, and immediately fell in love with this device. Find it here!
It's experience, but man it works!

We each got a pillow too so we could get a sale and split the cost.  I finally got my memory foam pillow. I love it! We actually hung out on the tempurpedic beds in the back for awhile trying out all of the pillows.

My dorm room sure as heck wasn't this big!! Plus she's got a sink, and a bathroom across the hall. I'm a bit jealous. 

At the end of the day, we were tired but happy!

If anyone noticed that my shirt changed half way through the day, it was because the first thing I did when I got to my friend's dorm was buy a school t-shirt. It is so soft, and I'll advertise.  


Thank you my wonderful friends for a great day! Next my mom and I head back to my parents house so my dad and I can play with records.  Want to know what I'm talking about? Check back in a couple of days for details.

New meetup.com group--Happy Housewives!

I am a housewife.  There is no other way to say it. I’m not unemployed and looking for work, and unless the perfect job falls on my lap, I don’t intend to go back to work any time soon.  If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I am suffering from a severe and acute case of loneliness after moving away from all my friends.  

One of the things that I discussed was joining meetup.com and finding some groups that fit my interests, and appealed to me.  The only thing is that there aren’t very many.  There is a cooking group, there is a sewing group, there are mommies groups but there aren’t any housewife groups.  I wanted a groups of women, who don’t have children (or who just really want to get out of the house occasionally without their child) that want to expand their groups of friends.  So...my solution? I made my own group! I’m still trying to figure out if being an organizer of a group is worth the fee they charge, but it seems like an excellent networking tool to bring women together.  If I just make a few friends from doing this, it will be worth the price.  

The group’s website is:
www.meetup.com/happy-housewives

If you live near Baltimore, MD please join my group! If you have suggestions on events, just post them!  I scheduled a random date to meet up, but the time can be flexible.  

Note: The main picture right now is of penguins.  I picked it because a. penguins are cute, b. they were in a group and c. I had no other pictures that I didn’t have to pilfer from google image.