Dude! Cool Your Jets!

Sometimes I wonder if my husband was ever meant to be a dad.   Wow, that sounds so very compassionate.  I know he has a job he hates, working with people he hates, living in a body he hates...  Unfortunately, all that hate has to come out sometime and someone will be affected.  Unfortunately, that someone is usually a family member.

It sure seems to me that if you know that it's not the family member that's irritating you, that you should make an effort to speak civilly to the family member regardless of how you feel and what's going on.  And if you can't do that, you should at least apologize

Grab Them By The Ears

Do you ever come across someone that you want to grab them by the ears, shake them violently and yell:

SNAP OUT OF IT!!! 

Me too.  Today.  My husband. 

My daughter was trying to explain something about herself, about who she was and what she's been through... the shape of her heart... Granted, she should have used "I" statements, but heck, she's 16 and she's still learning the grand art of communication.  At least she's trying.  So she's explaining this... okay, so what it is, she was explaining how in her perception, her sister is her dad's favorite.  She already has a low self esteem, and of course what she perceives is in no way reality, nevertheless it is HER reality.  Well, her dad pole vaulted into the land of false conclusions, got super defensive and angry (three of his most excellent skills).  He yelled at her all the way home.  Did I mention this happened on the way home from  church?  He said he felt like she'd slapped him in the face - I am still trying that one out.  I tried to explain that it was her perception and reminded him that it isn't what is, it's what's perceived (one of his famous fallbacks for justifying the way he responds).  I also told him he can't use that for himself and then not allow someone else to use it.  Since he can't understand why she perceives it that way, well, she's wrong.

This strain of miscommunication has been prevalent throughout my married life.  Not on my part...  don't get me wrong, I know I miscommunicate at times, and I'll be the first to admit it.  BUT, I always strive to do better, to learn a new way of getting my point across clearly without degrading the listener, and listening to their point as well so that I have a better understanding of where they're coming from. 

So, his answer?  Whenever he can afford it, he's going to go away for a few months.

What the WHAT!?  Since when is running away the answers to all your problems?  That's rich... I updated my facebook page the other day with this exact thing:  "I want to run away"... (refer back to hypocrisy meter).  The only difference between him and me in this respect is that I was simply tired of adulting and wanted to run away from my responsibilities.  He has conflict that he can't master (or be master of) and he folds.

Our church is hosting a one day leadership seminar, and one of the breakout sessions is on communication.  I was looking forward to attending the event with my husband, but he has now decided he isn't going.

Here's the thing that we all must remember: 

Because in the end, we are all only responsible for ourselves.  For our thoughts, our actions, our responses, our beliefs.

My daughter needs to change her thinking.  My husband needs to change how he responds.  I need to change my thought pattern to say "I am not responsible for fixing you or your drama". 

My husband is up from his nap and is now watching hunting videos, and I'm spent and can no longer concentrate. 

I guess this journal is doing its job.

Rental Woes

My husband and I have always rented the homes we've lived in, we have never owned.  Our mind set has always been, why buy, when you can rent?  Someone else would be responsible for repairs, taxes, insurance, etc...  Plus, why be chained to one location?  When you rent, you're mobile, you can choose to find a new home should you tire of your current one.

Well, our mind set has changed.

In December, we moved.  We'd lived at our previous residence for 3 1/2 years, dealing with an anal landlord/owner and our elderly next door neighbor who thought he was the Mayor of the road we lived on.

It takes about a year to really get a feel for a new place, and to really feel like you're home.  It was about this time frame that we began looking for somewhere new.  We were so relieved to finally find something, and moving our of our previous place was stuff of nightmares.  The owner was so anal with details of our move out that he hired a cleaning company to go over the work of the cleaning company we hired.  He was spiteful and abusive in his communications with me.  I am so glad we no longer have to deal with him.

It took 2 1/2 years of looking, off and on, to find the house we're in now.  Best house yet in all our 21 years together.  2300 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath, REC ROOM - hello!!!  Not to mention that even though it's five minutes from a large shopping center, it's rural.  Deer walk through our property ALL THE TIME!!!  Tons of quail, rabbits and birds.  Even though with the tremendous rainfall this year and the rec room flooding, even though the water pressure sucks, even though the windows need new seals, even though the kitchen faucet needs replacing... even though all of these things, we loved the house.  Loved it! 

Catch that past tense?  Keep reading...

Two days after we signed the year lease, the owner died.  That's right, died.  The house is now in a trust and and the FIVE siblings have decided to sell the house, putting it on the market first week of April.

FUCK.  ME.

Now, I have to say this.  The trustee that we've been dealing with, who lives just two houses down, has been very kind and generous.  He has offered us incentives to break our lease early, and has reduced our rent by $300 since we will have to give realtors next day access to view the house.  Plus, we've been promised our full security deposit returned.  Very generous.

This does not, however, make me feel better.  The first week after hearing the news, I was all screwed up.  Couldn't sleep, on the edge of tears, frantic.  I am normally the glue in the family.  I don't stress easily, but this has me by the... ahem....

So, the search for a new home begins... again.

Blog CPR

Stayin' Alive, Stayin' Alive, AH AH AH AH

That's me doing chest compressions on this blog.  It was dead, but I'm bringing it back to life, mostly for the sake of my sanity.

Sometimes life becomes so overwhelming that you want to crawl into a dark corner, curl up in the fetal position and cry.

That, or run away.

For me, it's not one big life crisis.  It's all the little things that add up, like being caught in a riptide.  You swim and swim and swim, but you end up further away from your destination than when you started.

And I am so freaking tired.

I hardly ever get time to myself, I don't do anything for myself, and I don't have any close girlfriends to talk to.  That's why I have decided to resurrect this blog, so I have someone, or in this case, something to talk to.  I need an outlet, and this is it. 

Total transparency.

Blueberry Power Bars...er...Muffins....

So my husband works at a local ski resort during the winter.  He drives a snowmobile and assists ski patrol in medicals, but does a lot of other tasks as well.  He's quite the go-getter - all go, no quit!  Often times he does not get to sit down and eat his lunch and he will come home having not eaten anything all day.  He used to snack on Tiger's Milk Bars, but since becoming aware of how poisonous processed foods are to the human body, he no longer eats them.

He is happy he is doing a good thing for his body, but he really misses them!

So I did a bit of research in effort to provide some type of healthy snack that he could just pull right out of his pocket and chow down on.  I've collected many recipes for 'power bars', but I chose the blueberry ones to make first because the man LOVES his blueberries!

I was rather impressed with the recipe.  I actually made three batches total - blueberry, strawberry and pineapple.  The blueberry turned out the best.  I was going to tweak the recipe to make them not so moist (they were quite 'eggy'), but first I need to ask him if he wants me to pursue it.  I don't think he was looking for muffins as his snack!

In case you're interested in trying them yourself, you can find the recipe here.

Strawberry Power Muffins

Pineapple Power Muffins

Blueberry Power Muffins

Gluten Free Pigs In A Blanket: A REVIEW

About a year ago, our family made a change.  We went gluten free.  We are not Celiac, but we found increased improvement in our overall health by giving up gluten.

My family misses 'junk food' greatly.  So when I get time, I experiment with recipes I find on the internet.  Some of them are fantastic, others - not so much.

Tonight's dinner was one such experiment.  The recipe is below (and can be found here), then my review will follow...

Ingredients

2 cups (280 g) high-quality all-purpose gluten-free flour
1 1/2 teaspoons xanthan gum (omit if your blend already contains it)
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon (4 g) sugar
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup (6 fl. oz.) warm water (about 100°F)
3 tablespoons (63 g) extra-virgin olive oil (plus an extra tablespoon for drizzling)
16 gluten-free cocktail weenies (about 8 ounces)

Directions 

Make the pizza dough. In a medium-size bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, place the flour, xanthan gum, yeast, sugar, and salt and whisk to combine well. To the flour mixture, add the 3 tablespoons of olive oil and the water in a steady stream, mix with a spoon or fork to combine, or mix with the paddle attachment of your stand mixer on low speed. Stir or mix constantly while streaming in the water and continue stirring until the mixture begins to come together. If the dough seems super sticky, add some more flour a tablespoon at a time, and stir or pulse to combine. Press the dough into a disk.

Place the dough in another medium-size bowl and drizzle it with olive oil. Turn the dough to coat it with oil. This will prevent a crust from forming on the dough while it is rising. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place it in a warm, draft-free area to rise until doubled in volume (about 1 hour).

Shape the dough. Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with unbleached parchment paper and set it aside. Once the dough has finished rising, divide it into 4 pieces of roughly equal size, and with floured hands shape each piece into a ball. Place one ball of dough at a time (covering the other two with a moist towel), on a well-floured surface, and dust the dough liberally with extra flour. Roll into a rectangle 8 inches long by 6 inches wide, and between 1/8 inch and 1/4 inch thick, dusting with flour if the dough becomes sticky. With a sharp knife or pastry wheel, slice the rectangle into 4 smaller rectangles, each 2 inches wide by 6 inches long. Repeat with the remaining 3 balls of pizza dough.

Assemble the pigs in a blanket. With a sharp knife, slash each weenie on one side, along its length about halfway through the weenie. This is to allow steam to escape while the pigs bake. Take the first rectangle of dough, place a weenie on a short side right at the edge, and roll the weenie up tightly in the dough. Press the edge against the weenie to seal, and place the pig and blanket on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining rectangles and weenies, and place them about 1 inch apart from one another on the baking sheet.

Bake the pigs in a blanket. Place the baking sheet in the center of the preheated oven and bake until the dough is brown around the edges and lightly brown on top, about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool briefly before serving.

. . .

So the dough went together quite easily, no problem there.  I was afraid that the dough would be a bit sticky as most gluten free dough ends up to be, but it was not.  It was actually quite crumbly.  I squished it together and slathered it with oil as the directions said to do.  We had a fire going, so I put it on the hearth to let it rise for an hour.

It did not rise.

I wasn't going to just toss the dough, so I went ahead and rolled it out on a large wooden cutting board to about a quarter inch thickness.  I had seen a different technique  for wrapping the weenies than what the recipe suggested.  I split the dough into two and rolled it out.  Then I used a pizza cutter and cut the dough into long triangles.  I wrapped the smokies and they looked so beautiful!  Just like they were supposed to!  I had to bake them about ten minutes longer than as described in the recipe and then they never really browned.  They also never puffed up.  The dough didn't taste bad, but it was harder than I'd expected.

I will try this again, but I will use my tried and true pizza dough recipe.  At the end of the recipe, I saw that it had been adapted from Gluten-Free on a Shoestring: 125 Easy Recipes for Eating Well on the Cheap, by Nicole Hunn.  Nicole Hunn has published several books and is well known for her gluten free adaptations of lots of different popular, mainstream recipes.

My final thought is, if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Savannah's been working on her plating techniques

Double Double Toilet Trouble

So we've been in our home for a little bit now, well, in March it will be a year.  We don't own it, but we have fantastic landlords!

Well, anybody would be fantastic compared to what we came from.

Couple days ago, I was showing Savannah exactly how the bathroom was to be cleaned.

Pay no attention to the detailed instructions in the clear page protector...

We were working on the toilet and she said, "Hey mom, the toilet's leaking."  I wrote it off , and told her it was just condensation that had collected and was dripping down.  She's like, "Uh, I don't think so..."

So I take a look, and sure enough, there's a pretty good drip going on.  I put my hand up on the tank and it rocked!  I have NEVER had a toilet tank do that before.  Well, when it rocked backward, a bit of water came out and ran into the toilet bowl.  AH!  It suddenly made sense why there is a hard water stain on the base near the tank.  Mind you, this stain was there when we moved in, and I had made mental note of it, wondering at the time why it was there.

So to continue, we wiped up the water and flushed the toilet.  We went into a bit of a frenzy when a trail of water began to snake across the floor!

Oh my.

So I sent a text to my landlord and he came over the following day to take a look at it.  He took the tank apart and studied the seal, which looked fine.  And at first he didn't see what the problem was, no leaking.  But finally it did leak (I AM VINDICATED!  I felt like I'd just taken my car to the mechanic and he said "What noise?").  He couldn't figure out where the leak was coming from and he said it didn't make any sense since the toilet was only a year old.  He said perhaps the tank was jarred which moved the seal.  Whatever, the bathroom is hardly used since it's the master bath, and we certainly don't use it as a mosh pit.

No, we use the living room for that!  Kidding.  We don't mosh.

So today he came back over with parts and fixed the toilet.

And our dripping shower.

Remember when I said we had fantastic landlords?  I wasn't kidding.  We are blessed.

OCD Moment:  When I was processing this photo, I started to reach out to my screen to rub the water spots out and make the chrome shine.