Author: JenLivingLife

Just living life and having fun whenever possible.
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Note to self #23: Kick butt, repeat!

I feel like a super ninja rock star.

The days started with the hubs suggesting Chick-fil-a for breakfast. Have I told y’all lately that he’s awesome??? Anyhoo, we back out of the garage and hit the garage door opener to close it but nothing happens. Thinking the battery just might be dead he hopped out and grabbed the remote from his vehicle. Still nothing. Hmmmm??? We tried the code on the wireless entry pad, still nothing. To hell with all that, we finally break down and use the front door to get out of the darn house. Our front door is there to let the cat in and out now that she has decided she’s scared of the dogs who’s butts she could totally woop, to check the mail/package delivery and to fend off solicitors. We never use it as an entry/exit point. We are obsessed with keeping the garage clutter free enough to park our vehicles.

We pick up Chick-fil-a and adjust our return route to include an ocean drive by because what day isn’t better after seeing the ocean.

When we return home I toss the load of towels I washed earlier into the dryer. Now, let me back up a little. This will be the first use of said dryer… Over the past weekend I went to wash a lone towel I’d used to clean up a leak (I’ll get back to the leak later). The towel was so icky I didn’t want it washed with anything else so I washed it all by itself. When I tossed it in the dryer I hit the start button and nothing. I checked the breaker out in the garaged. Flipped it off and back on again just for good measure. Still nothing. It did this once a few weeks earlier when our son was visiting and had gotten his shoes soaking wet. I’d tossed them in the dryer with a towel for a bit to speed up the drying process. *For future reference: it’s much faster and more effective to use a hair dryer to dry shoes* I figured the machine was just pissed about the monsterousness of the shoes flopping around in there and stopped itself. After a few minutes of rest and the removal of the shoes I tossed the waiting wet load in and it started up just fine so all was right with the world – until this weekend when it did this again. Only this time the machine didn’t get over itself nor had there been any monsterousness that took place prior to it’s deadness.

Now 1: We are not the most mechanically inclined people. The last time I messed with a dryer I shot myself clear across the room while pregnant. *no worries, that kid is now at the Naval Academy so no noticeable damage to him. 2: We are thinking about selling our house, traveling the country for a year or two and then downsizing when we buy again which means everything we don’t get rid of when we sell will go in storage for a good while. I’m not incentivized to pay retail for a brand new dryer that is going to sit in storage. and 3: I’ve never liked this dryer anyway so I’m also not incentivized to hire someone to come fix it unless I just can’t find something used, cheep and immediately available. Seriously y’all. I had washed that towel by itself so hanging it out to dry was no biggy but I had three loads behind it I had fortunately procrastinated and not even started washing yet.

Craig’s list hooked me up. Found a dryer that actually matches my bad ass washing machine for $100 bucks and just a few miles away available in a few hours (when the seller can get back home). Drag the hubs over to pick it up. Seller has it hooked up and turned it on. Opened so we could see that warmth was coming out of it. We are all good to go. Load that bad boy and head home. Remove the dead one into the garage which means I’ll be parking outside until I figure out how to get rid of it – ugh! Put the new one in place only to discover it has a 3 prong power cord and we need a 4. No biggy, pull the one off the back of the other machine to put it on the other. This part sounds easy but it ended up requiring a few google searches to figure out since the wire colors and hook up spots were not matching up but we got it. Hubs flips the breaker off before I plug it in as to not have a Flying Jen repeat performance. It’s plugged in, breaker’s back on and we have a working machine. All is right with the world – or so we thought.

All of that was exhausting. The dryer is situated awkwardly and unbelievably challenging to get behind to work.The call of alcoholic beverages far outweighed the call to do 3 loads of laundry and the drying did not get it’s first load until a couple of days later. The day we went to Chick-fil-a for breakfast.

 

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Note to self #22: Buy Noodles or Not

In an effort to be all #BeAwesome I decided to make my seriously out of this world spaghetti after we returned home from a long few days in the woods. I had some browned meat in the freezer so I got that out and announced my awesomeness to my husband who wholeheartedly agreed that this was definitely a #BeAwesome worthy moment. 2016-01-02 15.18.48

I had an ulterior motive here though. Our son’s girlfriend had just come for a visit and left us with a lovely bottle of wine. It’d been just too hot to be motivates to drink wine while she was here and finally it was cold, well cold for Florida, ok more like less than sweltering.

It was only around noon when I announced the awesomeness we would be indulging in for dinner and by 5pm I couldn’t wait any longer for the wine part. I popped the top and poured. Mmmm, son’s girlfriend did well.

By the time glass #2 was gone I was ready to start the cooking – which really just entailed the making of the noodles, heating of the meat and sauce, and throwing some butter and garlic salt on a few slices of bread to toast up. Note: our idea of awesomeness is pretty simple. Anyhoo…

Meat’s in the pan heating, pot’s full of water, a dash of olive oil and salt just waiting to boil when I go to the pantry to get the noodles. I have NO noodles. Honestly y’all I don’t know how this is possible. I always have spaghetti noodles on hand. We’re not big pasta eaters so I don’t have a wide variety of noodles at all time but I always have spaghetti noodles yet I absolutely do not have any spaghetti noodles. We scoured the pantry, each of us, hoping they might magically appear in an odd spot but no such luck.

My husband, in his dismay over the lack of noodles happened to look over at the meat on the stove longingly and then tilted his head slightly while scrunching his eyebrow. “Oh great, what now?” I asked fearful of even looking to see what was wrong. He asked if that seemed like a lot of meat in that pan so I looked. Hmm, that did look like a lot of meat. Crap that was two pounds of beef not one.

Light-bulb-momentLightbulb Moment

Let’s review – I’ve had two glasses of wine and no food. Roger’s had a few beers and running to the store for noodles is out of the questions but we have and excessive amount of meat heating on the stove. This is when the concept of Sloppy Joe’s hit me. Naturally, when I make Sloppy Joe’s they are hard core spicy so we have appropriately renamed them Sloppy Jose’s. Since this would be an Italian take on them, served on garlic toast it only seemed appropriate that I should holler out while wielding a spatula in the air “We’ll have Sloppy Giuseppe’s” followed by a little self indulgent #BeAwesome dance. *I know y’all but it was the only Italian name I could think of at the time. The rest of the evening went off without a hitch. We enjoyed our Sloppy Giuseppe’s and all the rest of the wine. Ok so I drank all the wine. 2016-01-03 00.30.28

I prefer to think of this incident as a #BeAwesome moment in creativity and “improvise-adapt-overcome” rather than an indictment of my grocery shopping skills.

 

JLL-Be-Awesome

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New Year, New Tao

JLL-Be-Awesome

I recently read another one of the books by one of my favorite authors, Jen Lancaster. The books was called The Tao of Martha. I knew this book would have something to do with Martha Stewart and while I have absolutely nothing against Martha I’m just not the ultra crafty, super organized, master chef and make it look easy kinda gal so I really didn’t think I’d like the book but it was one in the series and I didn’t want to miss some of the other parts of Jen’s story. I’m so glad I did. I’ll avoid spoilers by not going into to much details but one of the things Jen pointed out was her dog’s total and complete awesomeness. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a dog in your life as special as her Maisy you know what I mean. The bottom line was that Jen came to the conclusion that the “Tao of Maisy” was to “be awesome, give awesome, get awesome.”

It was such a simple and obvious concept but it really struck a cord with me. I’ve decided to make the Tao of Maisy my 2016 Tao. Not a new years resolution per se, just a tao – Be Awesome. That’s all. *tao: “the source and guiding principle of all reality” is the definition which I have chosen to apply here in case you were about to go look it up like I had to when I started the book.

This came about partly due to a lost friendship a few months ago. We were like a round and a square peg. She’s twice divorced. I’ve been married forever. She’s a retired teacher and I would rather chew off my own arm than teach in schools these days. She’s 20 years my senior. She’s left of center and I’m right. But somehow we just had the best time together – until we didn’t. She took offense to something I said (nevermind that she said about a gazillion things first to which I could have taken offense) but anyhoo that was that. At first I was hurt, upset how this would affect our mutual friends and generally saddened by the loss and then I turned the corned and realized I like me and I’m just not going to be upset because someone else doesn’t like me. Life is too short and too full of other stressors to let things like this bog you down. I can’t force people to like me and I can’t keep trying to turn myself inside out to be “likeable” to everyone. I am me. I like me. I am brutally honest. I am serious. I am funny. I am crazy and I am fun. I’m fierce and passionate and I’m good with that.

So this year I am going to be awesome. Awesome for ME, not for anyone else. 

**Note added later: Husband’s truck batter suddenly died on us so I tried to #beawesome this morning (New Years Day) when I suggested we hit Chick-fil-a for breakfast in route to the auto shop. Chick-fil-a was closed, for the holiday I guess. Not awesome, not awesome at all. This #beawesome thing might be more challenging than I thought. 😉