Friday's Letters

Oh Friday, it's so nice to see you again!  Unlike last weekend, we have several plans this weekend that for sure include a wild game cookout (guess who's frying the fish), a dance competition, and the search for the perfect back door rug for the laundry room.  Wish me luck on that last one, because I think I might be the pickiest rug picker-outer this side of the Mississippi, maybe the whole country.

Let's get right to it shall we?

Dear Eric, I love love love love our laundry room makeover!  Thank you for being so handy.  I am glad you are such a go-getter when it comes to stuff like this because if it were up to me we would not have even started yet.  P.S. Thank you for putting up with my request to leave the door. I know you wanted to get rid of it, but I really like being able to shut the door while the washer is running. =)

Dear Hollow, It's time for you to be done with your remote chewing shenanigans.  You've eaten 4 in the last 3 weeks.  Although if your Dad could remember to put them up out of your reach when he leaves the house that would help tremendously.  Apparently my notes don't always solve the problem.  I thought we had a solution but you Dad says that you pulled it out of the vase yesterday.  I will be investing in a taller vase this afternoon.

Can you guess which remotes still work from this picture?  The note is right by the backdoor so he has not choice but to pass by it on his way out. 

Dear Day Light Savings, Sayonara Sucka!  I am SOOOOOO glad that you are on your way out on Sunday.  Yes I will lose and hour of sleep and it will be dark when I get up in the morning for a few weeks, but it will be so worth it to have light after 6pm again!

Dear Peanut Butter, I heart you, but I think our love affair is a bit of an obsession for me.  I was cleaning out my desk drawer this week and found 3 nearly empty jars.  I think I need an intervention.

I don't discriminate between creamy and crunchy. 

Dear Insanity, I know I said I was jumping back on the bandwagon when we got back from the mountains, but I don't really consider 2 days a week "back on the bandwagon." I promise I will do better this week!

Dear Puppy Dogs, I am so glad you guys are enjoying your daily walks. Honestly I am enjoying them as well.  I promise I will not try to wait more than 15 minutes after I get home to walk you guys again.  You made it abundantly clear that the walk happens right after I get home and get changed. Point Taken. You guys know I can't resist the excitement you guys have when I put on my tennis shoes because you KNOW what's about to happen. In our household shoes = walk.

Being sweet boys.  This is the opposite of how they act when the shoes go on.  

Have a great weekend!

If you were really guessing which remotes in the picture still work the answer is the silver one and the black one right next to it, although the black one bit the dust yesterday.  It's the one that Eric says Hallow pulled out of the vase.  If in fact he actually did pull it out I am impressed, and I am also wondering if Eric stuck it all the way down in the vase....hmmmmm.

Hey Ma! The Meatloaf!

That has to be one of the funniest and quotable lines from one of my all time favorite movies.....Wedding Crashers. It's certainly one of Will Ferrell's finest moments, along with his performance in Old School, and of course as a Spartan Cheerleader on SNL. Ok so I like his comedic chops.....you get the point. But this post has nothing to do with comedy, and everything to do with MEATLOAF!

I will be the first to admit that I was not much of a meatloaf fan growing up. I was (and still am) a my-food-shall-not-be-touching-or-mixed-if-I-can-help-it kinda girl. I know I'm weird. Ironically I my brother and dad were all about mixing some peas and corn and mashed potatoes on the plate before they ate them......gag me! Eric on the other hand apparently loves meatloaf, but until last night I had never made it for him, because I tend to only cook things I like in my kitchen....one of the things I do enjoy about being an adult and running my own household. =)

The other night we were in our normal Monday night routine, watching Biggest Loser, and Biingo's mom made him some meatloaf to get him to eat some veggies. (Biingo is one of the kids on the show this season, and yes he spells his name with 2 i's.) The episode aired a couple of weeks ago, and apparently got stuck in the back of the recipe book in my head. The other night I was racking my brain trying to come up with something to cook for dinner and for some reason meatloaf kept popping up, so I decided to give it a whirl.

One Pinterest search and Publix trip later, I had the few ingredients I needed and was ready to give it a try for dinner. I was really surprised how easy it was to make, and Eric gave it 2 giant thumbs up. What can I say, the boy loves meatloaf. I was a little anxious about using turkey in stead of ground beef, but it was delicious! I used this recipe, but decided instead of an actual loaf, I made them in muffin cups because #1 they would cook faster, and #2 I think everything tastes better when it is in cute individual servings!

Ingredients
1.3 lbs ground turkey (one package...who knew ground turkey came in 1.3lb packages)
1/2 cup chopped onion and green peppers (I bought the already chopped Trinity Mix from Publix that had onions, peppers, and tomatoes because I was feeling extra lazy)
1 large clove of garlic, minced
Olive oil
1 egg
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp Italian seasoning
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs
1/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (or any other kind of cheese)
Salt and pepper
Sauce:
1/2 cup ketchup
1 Tbsp mustard
1 Tbsp brown sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Sauté veggies in olive oil until tender. Add garlic and sauté until fragrant. Remove veggies from heat and set aside.
In a large bowl, mix turkey, veggies and egg. Add Worcestershire sauce, Italian seasoning, panko, mozzarella, salt and pepper and mix until completely combined.
Lightly grease 12 muffin tins. Place balls of meat mixture in muffin cups (do not overfill).
Bake in oven for 20 minutes.
While loaves are baking, combine ketchup, mustard, and brown sugar in a small bowl.
Remove loaves from the oven, place a dollop of sauce on each one, and put pan back in the oven to cook for another 5-7 minutes, or until internal temperature reaches 160 degrees.

Like I said this recipe got 2 thumbs up from Eric, which in my experience is always a good thing because he has no problems telling me whether or not a recipe was worth the trouble. I think my favorite part was that I had nearly everything for it already in my kitchen.  I am sure this will be popping up again our dinner rotation.....for Eric's sake. =)

Laundry Room Project #1: Key Holder

I have always been a fan of creative key holders. Maybe it comes from the J key holder that has always been in my parents' house. Maybe it's because I am REALLY good at losing my keys if I don't have a specific place to put them.  If I have to have something to help me keep up with my keys it might as well be cute, right?

Hang 'em here!

When I moved out on my own I found a super cute key shaped key holder that I used, which I still think is super cute, but with our laundry room makeover I decided it was time to get creative and make something new. Plus 4 key hooks were just not enough for us. Ridiculous? Yes, but apparently we have a lot of keys!

For whatever reason, I had visions of a brightly painted chevron key holder that would really pop against our dark bluish gray walls. I had a cheap wooden picture frame that I bought in the Michael's dollar bin years ago. It's a large frame but only holds a 3.5" square picture which makes it hardly worth using to frame a picture.

I scoured Pinterest for chevron painting tutorials, and came across this one. It's for walls, but I figured I could just pare it down a bit so that it would work on my frame. I opulled out my ruler and pencil and got to work. Once I had the lines drawn I started painting my chevrons. It took several coats and my lines are far from perfect, (I am not the best line drawer or painter by any means.) but I was very pleased with the result.

I have quite a few bottles of craft paint from other projects and ended up recycling the green from an old project.  The yellow came from Wally World...a whopping 65 cents.  When I finished painting I decided it needed something in the teeny tine picture hole.  I toyed with the idea of hanging a "C" in it, because I loves me a monogram, but when I was at Michael's I could not find a C that I liked. I came across the key charm in the jewelry section for $3 and decided that I had to have it.

My orginal idea...I found a sketch app for my ipad and have fallen in love it! It's turned me into a doodling fool!

If I had purchased all of my supplies new I MIGHT have spent $10, and that's only because I would have had to purchase an entire picture hanging kit and a paint brush. Since I had those things, I only spent $3.65.

I called in the expert when it came to putting the hooks, and picture hanger thingys on the back, but then again isn't that what husbands are for? He was happy to help, and we had it done pretty quickly! The only mess up we had was only putting one picture hanger on the first time. It looked great but when we hung the keys it tilted to the side, so he took that one out and it 2 on the back the second time.

Not sure why the wall looks green, it's more blue in real life.

So there's my latest DIY project.  I have several more up my sleeve that will hopefully involve chalkboard paint and giant safety pins!  Have I mentioned how much I like to decorate?!

A Weekend Recap Full of Unexpected Productivity

You know those weekends when you have absolutely nothing planned but end up doing more than you thought you would have accomplished in 2 or 3 weekends? Yeah that was our weekend. I felt like I was still trying to recover from our weekend in the mountains and was looking forward to getting some sleep.

1. Bangin' Good Shrimp for dinner Friday night
2. Ice cream and hot chocolate for dessert =)
3. The HC Lady Hawks, not only made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history, but also got just the 2nd NCAA postseason win for an HC team (besides gold because they're really good and win every year). They ended up losing in the second round but this team's accomplishment is HUGE!
4. Hawkey dog playing in the "snow." Peanut and Hollow spent the day curled up on blankets at home.
5. Our accumulation of white stuff!
6. Hallow watching White Fang with us. Every time they shoed White Fang on the screen Hallow ran up to the tv and barked like crazy!  We had to hold him for the majority of the movie so we could hear it.
7. I FINALLY beat Level 33 on Candy Crush.  I've only been stuck on that level for a week.  Yes I realize it's a pretty stupid game, but it's so addicting!
8. Eric touching up the trim in the laundry room next to our pretty new paint job!  Buh Bye yucky boring eggshell color!  

Friday night I came home with plans to make some bang bang shrimp for dinner and start a weekend of vegging by the fire because it was supposed to be COLD! When I got home Eric informed me that he'd spent his afternoon helping his mom move and that it would be nice if we could go help on Saturday morning, too. Ok no biggie. The only thing I had to do this weekend was clean the house and I will do just about anything to get out of that.

Saturday Eric was up at 6:30 ready to go. I told him he'd have to wait until at least after 7 before I was getting out of bed. Shortly after 7 he hollerd into the bedroom that he was going to pick out paint for the laundry room....wait paint?! I was out of bed, showered, and dressed in about 10 minutes. There was no way he was picking out paint by himself. Side note: we've been talking about redoing our laundry room for about a year and the process expedited itself unexpectedly this weekend.

After a quick trip to True Value, a gallon of Mackerel paint in our possession, and a trip to Hardee's because I told him I had to have some food if expected any work out of me, we were headed to his mom's house. While Eric installed her dishwasher, we made some real progress and managed to completely empty 2 of her rooms in about 4 hours in an Alabama snowstorm. Yes it snow flurried and sleeted on us all day while we were moving her and I don't think the temp got above 40 all day Saturday, in March, in Alabama. Global warming my foot.

Eric had his heart set on some seafood étouffée Saturday night so we came home that afternoon, cleaned up a little bit and he made some for dinner. I ate a corn dog since I barely eat seafood by itself, much less in a soup. Luckily we had some friends come help him polish off the soup.

Since I knew we were planning on working on the laundry room on Sunday I took it upon myself to clean out the laundry room Saturday night because that's the kind of crazy stuff you do on a Saturday night when you're married. =) I am so glad I did because it took a while and was much easier to do without Eric trying to throw everything away.

Sunday morning we were up and at 'em bright and early again. I went to early church so I could spend the rest of the day on the laundry room while Eric taped it off and took out the existing storage and washer and dryer. By the time I got home he had just started painting, so my timing was perfect! We put 2 coats on it before we went to his grandma's for lunch (and ate waaaay too much). When we got back Eric and his buddy got to work installing the cabinets, while I washed my car and made myself otherwise pretty scarce. My ultimate goal was to stay out of the way.

We  I finished putting everything up about 8 pm last night, and I am soooooo excited about how it turned out!!! I cannot wait to share some pictures! I have a bunch of before and after pics. It is really hard to believe that it is the same room. The paint and the cabinets make it look completely different. I have some major decorating projects to do in the near future. Since I was not anticipating tips room makeover happening for some time, I was not even thinking about how I wanted to decorate it, but now my mind (and my Pinterest boards) are moving a hundred miles per hour! Hopefully I will be able to accomplish the decorating this week! Now if I could just decide which projects I was to take on!

These are some of my favorites!

Chalkboard Frames                                 Giant Pins and Laundry Sign                                              Key Holder