What I’m Reading Right Now

I am actually reading a BOOK right now. Shocker, I know, since I have been so hooked on Beatrice (the Nook) lately. But I had purchased a few books right before Beatrice entered our lives and I felt like I really should go back and read those before purchasing any more books on the B&N website.

That is the only downside I have found with my Nook. It makes quite a dent in my “disposable income” budget without me even realizing it. I see a book on there that I want, I press “purchase” and blam! it’s there on Beatrice. Painless and quick. Until I look at my bank statement. (eep!)

Anyway.

Here’s what I’m reading right now… I purchased it at a discount at the drug store – they had a big bin of hardbacks marked down to $5 each and I couldn’t resist. I bought this one and a couple others which I haven’t read yet (but plan to read soon)

And, as I just downloaded the image from the Barnes and Noble website, I see that it is Book #2 in a Trilogy! Egads! Now I’m going to have to download Book #1!! (Labyrinth is the title)

The book, so far, is engrossing, although I haven’t quite figured out the plot yet. However, now that I know that I am really starting in the middle of the story, that might explain a few things – like why I can’t figure out the plot yet! (note to self – look for Labyrinth on the Nook tonight)

Here’s what Barnes & Noble had to say about Sepulchre:

In 1891, young Leonie Vernier and her brother Anatole arrive in the beautiful town of Rennes-les-Bains, in the Pyrenees of southwest France. Born and raised in Paris, they've come at the invitation of their widowed aunt, whose mountain estate, Domain de la Cade, is famous in the region. But it soon becomes clear that their aunt—and the Domain—are not what Leonie had imagined. For starters, Tante Isolde is no graying dowager—she is young, willowy, and beautiful, but with a melancholy air that suits the strange, slightly sinister Domain de la Cade. Leonie discovers that the house has long been the subject of local superstition. The villager claim that the Devil walks in the forests of the Domain, and that Isolde's late husband died after summoning a demon from the old Visigoth sepulchre high on the mountainside. A book from the Domain's cavernous library describes not only the spell used to bring forth the demon, but the strange Tarot pack that is part of the ritual, a set of…

I am not even 100 pages into the book yet – can’t tell you much other than I am looking forward to reading more. I am enjoying the writing style and have already been sucked in to the story – I want to know what is going on – and I want to know what is going to happen to Loenie and Anatole. Anatole seems (on the surface) to be somewhat shallow, but I am reading hints of more depth to the character and to his story.

I’ll keep you posted as I read through it – It’s a big book (~600 pages) so it will probably take me a week or two to finish.

What are you reading?

I love new book suggestions – got any to share?

Conspiracy Theories

I am convinced there is a conspiracy. This conspiracy has been going on for a long time and appears to be recruiting participants as time goes by. If you are a mom, you may even be affected by this same conspiracy.

It may be somewhat of a delicate subject, but I'll dive in…

Here's what I'm talking about: It seems that 85-90% of the time when I enter a restroom there is no toilet paper. It happens often enough that I'm beginning to wonder if I have become the universe's appointed toilet-paper-changer person.

At home, we have three bathrooms. And four people.

And I promise you, on any given day, whichever bathroom I choose to use will have an empty toilet paper roll sitting there. Now, it's not that we haven't undergone rigorous training around here.

Everyone has been carefully schooled in the fine art of taking the empty roll off (and placing in the wastebasket) and replacing with a clean, fresh roll. I even make sure we are well-stocked in the lavatory – keeping 3-4 rolls on hand in the event of a major situation in which we need copious amounts of TP.

However, it never fails. I am greeted with the sad straggler of the abandoned roll; waiting to be decommissioned and reassigned to the recycling. I'm sure you've encountered this before yourself. Am I right?

I often wonder – do they do this on purpose?

Or is it just lucky coincidence?

I have even left the empty roll on there just to see what others will do. Usually… nothing. However, I do recall one time a few years back when my oldest decided to be helpful and "fix" the TP.

Now we have a reinforced holder covering the hole in the wall that was a result of her struggle to remove the roll from the holder. (poor thing was really upset!)

After that incident, I was actually glad she quit wanting to "help" and happily changed out the rolls myself.

It's not that I mind changing out the rolls. I don't. I just marvel at how quickly they seem to need changing. And how it always seems to be when it's my turn in the facilities. Like there is a cosmic timeline and the timer goes off when I step in the bathroom "bing! time to change the roll!"

I have noticed, too, that I seem to be the lucky one to find the empty rolls in other places, too. When I am visiting a friend, for example. And then I'm always struck with the dilemma. What do I do? Rummage in their powder room for a replacement roll? Leave the empty roll dangling and use tissues? (if there are any) I usually opt to refill the roll, hoping that my hostess will be more glad I restocked than she is perturbed by my rummaging.

And let's don't even get started on the whole "over" or "under" debate…

Wondering on Wednesday: Whatever happened to Customer Service?

I have been experiencing a spell of bad customer service lately.

You know, the kind where you walk away shaking your head and thinking “Really? Did I really just pay money for THAT?”

Case in point.

Grocery shopping. I am a loyal Publix shopper. I love their customer service, am quite happy with their selection and love the fact that they know me as a regular patron and treat me like a queen when I’m there.

Last week, on the way home from school and a quick stop at the chiropractor, I needed to pick up a few things. Publix was all the way on the other side of town, so I decided to stop at the grocery store that was right across the street from the chiropractor.

This store (whose name begins with K) is not one I frequent regularly, although I used to go there weekly before Publix came to town. I don’t know the layout very well, since I don’t go too often, and it took me a little longer than normal to pick up the items I need. The monkeys were with me, so, of course, we ended up with way more than I had originally planned to pick up. They had some in-store specials we took advantage of and I was thinking to myself as we walked to the checkout that I might need to make this a regular stop (maybe once a month) to check out the deals that they might have that other stores don’t.

And then it happened.

We were ready to pay. I wrote a check – yes, I know, no one writes checks anymore these days. I do, because it’s all too easy to mess up your budget when you slap down that debit card and don’t pay attention to the total bill. (but that is another blog post for another day)

Anyway.

I wrote a check. Handed it to the cashier with my ID. She entered all the information and her register beeped at her. She looked perplexed and I explained (because I remembered, too late, why I don’t write checks at the K store) that every time I write a check they have to get the Customer Service manager to come down to sign the check because some glitch in their system doesn’t recognize me as a customer. (In spite of having a loyalty card)

So, she calls the Customer Service manager down to approve my check. The Customer Service manager comes down and I explain to her the same thing. She looks at me and says (and I’m not joking)

“Well, if you shopped here more often you wouldn’t have this problem.”

Seriously.

I’m standing there, with over $200 of groceries and I just could not believe she said that to me. And, no, she was not trying to be cute. It was said very snippily.

I just looked at her and said, “Well, if I didn’t get treated like this every time I came in here, I might come in more often.”

And I asked her if she was going to accept my check or not. She said that she wouldn’t. (are you kidding?) So, I asked what she proposed I do if I didn’t have an alternative form of payment.

“We’ll just take your groceries back and you can go somewhere else,” she said.

At this point, I was BOILING mad. But, I had the monkeys with me and I didn’t want to cause a scene and demonstrate to them how not to behave when people are rude and hateful to you.

So, I quietly pulled out my debit card and paid my grocery bill.

But I can promise you. I won’t be setting foot in that store (that begins with a K) again.

But, this is just one example of the terrible customer service I’ve received lately.

Whatever happened to people taking pride in their jobs? To people truly providing Customer SERVICE to the people that it is their job to serve? When did it become OK to do the very minimum (at best) and then walk away, not caring that you could’ve done more to serve your customer?

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When I grow up…

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I am sure there were lots of things I wanted to be, but the one thing I can remember wanting to be for a very, very long time is a teacher.

I remember holding my brother hostage in the summertime to play school with me. We would be staying at my grandmother’s while Mom was at work and I would turn the coffee table into my schoolroom and a barstool into my desk. I would give my brother ridiculous assignments (like multiplication problems that even I couldn’t solve) and then sit at my “desk” and “grade” papers while he was supposed to be doing his work.

Of course, he was much more interested in playing UNDER the table with his Hot Wheels than he was in being my student. I would then have to send him to the “office” (also known as Grandma’s kitchen) for being a disruptive student.

Now that I’m a mom I marvel at my grandma’s patience with me as I played this game over and over. And at the fact that my brother didn’t kill me for making him be my student. (maybe it was because he couldn’t be bothered to spend that energy on killing me when the world needed saving by GI Joe?)

My love of teaching never seemed to wane, though.

Even in high school, I was looking for opportunities to mentor other students and loved the opportunities I found working in the office of the Lower (elementary) School so that I could “teach” the kids down there and they could benefit from the eons of experience I had (at age 15).

Once I was in college, I worked on campus in the English department as a tutor (among the many part-time jobs I had, at the same time, while I was in college). I would help the students who couldn’t tell their alliterations from their allegories. I would counsel them on the need for proper punctuation and cleverly crafted essays. I would edit, coach and tweak until their works were ready to be turned in to the professors.

I even contemplated taking some classes to become a school teacher – but that lasted all of five minutes when I realized that some of the things they cared about (like having perfect handwriting) were really kind of stupid (to me) and I went back to studying computers instead.

Ironically, once I was out in the “real” world, I ended up teaching. My first full-time job was working as a programmer for the local power company. I was the only one who knew (what was then a new programming language – I’m old, people, old) C and C++ and I was hired to work on a new software system that was written in C. Everyone else there were Cobol programmers (are there even any Cobol programmers still around these days?) and I was supposed to teach them C and C++. Me, 18 year old punk that I was – I was supposed to teach these GROWN UPS how to program in C. Well, yeah, that didn’t happen.

Then I moved to the big city and went to work for a company that was implementing some new software. I was hired to manage the end-user training of the implementation and I got to teach everyone how to use the new system. Way cool. Except my boss was stinky (literally) and his boss was a raving nut job.

Moving on

I next moved to the company who wrote the software that we’d implemented. They had approached me and offered me a position to be an instructor. I spent the next eight or so years traveling around the world teaching other people how to use their software. It was a dream come true. (and no one cared about my penmanship!)

Today, I’m a teacher in a different sense of the word. But, I think it’s the best kind of teaching job I could possibly have.

I’m a teacher to my girls.

And the things I’m teaching them are way more important than “Reading, Writing and ‘rithmetic”

I’m teaching them how to grow into responsible, mature, caring young women.

It’s a daunting, thankless task. One that is never-ending, mind-numbing, exhausting and that no one has written a lesson plan for. But it is the best, most perfect, teaching job I’ve ever had.

Little did I know, when I was that small girl playing school at my grandma’s house, that I would really grow up to be a teacher. In so many senses of the word. Both in my career and in my personal life.

How awesome is that? I really did grow up to be exactly what I wanted to be.

Quick and Easy Dessert

I wanted to share a super-quick and super-yummy dessert idea with you.

My friend Cindy is quickly becoming famous amongst our newest circle of friends for her amazing recipes – all of which are so simple and easy to make that it is amazing how good they are. Something that easy can’t be that good!

But, Cindy is the master of quick, easy and yummy recipes. I think it is because she is a mom to three big, strapping boys and has had to be very creative with her food budget and cooking to feed those growing boys. (and they are BIG boys… football, weight-lifters, etc.)

Cindy prepared this for us for dessert one night when she hosted dinner at her house. It was gobbled up quickly and we were all begging for more – and the recipe!

I haven’t tried to make this sugar-free or WLS friendly, but I think I am going to try this weekend. Maybe substitute the “real” ingredients for sugar-free varieties. I will let you know how it turns out.

This version, though, is to die for.

Oreo Cookie Ice Cream

1 (large) tub of Cool Whip whipped topping
1 1/2 gallon container of vanilla ice cream (slightly melted)
1 package Oreo cookies

Crush Oreos in a food processor (or put them in a ziplock bag and let your kids whack them with a mallet to crush them)
In a LARGE bowl, mix the crushed Oreos, ice cream, and cool whip.
Freeze 4-5 hours
Serve

Print the recipe

This is a great treat to share with friends – and if you do there won’t be any left!

Bachelor Pad: I think I need a prophylactic

For those of you who were following the Bachelorette last season –

I have to ask: are you following the new show, Bachelor Pad?

I watched a little bit of the show the other night.

All I can say is…

EEEEWWWW

Just the little bit I watched made me feel like I needed to get up and take a shower.

I felt contaminated, covered in a slime of skankiness.

I mean, really? This is what they want us to watch while we wait for the next installment of the Bachelor?

Going forward, I think I may be watching reruns of The Closer or Criminal Minds.
There may be gruesome murders on those shows, but at least I don’t feel like I need to be decontaminated after watching.

I’ll have to be completely honest. I didn’t watch the entire show.

I couldn’t.

I watched about fifteen minutes (or maybe a little more) and felt like I had to run – far, far away.

The parts that I did see showed me that these “characters” on the show are all just a wee bit shy of the full order of fries in their Happy Meals. Did you see Elizabeth toying with Jesse K? She is just a sick, sick girl. I think she must enjoy the Black Widow routine.

Dying her hair blonde doesn't disguise this fact.

She reels ‘em in, gets ‘em hooked and then WHAM! before they know it they’re dealing with a whacko girlfriend. I couldn’t believe she was blackmailing poor Jesse into showing her affection and remaining her “boyfriend.”

''There are girls here who like me…. If you treat me poorly it can have negative consequences on you.''

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that maybe this is why she is still single. She may be beautiful, but she is nuts.

And speaking of nuts…

Michelle Kujawa We had the meltdown from hell (heard from inside the bathroom) from ex-Bachelor resident Michelle. She decided that sweet little Kenley needed to be confronted for some supposed rumor she started about Michelle and Craig. In typical Michelle fashion, (or what I am assuming is her typical fashion given what we’ve seen of her in previous Bachelor shows) she sneak-attacks Kenley in the bathroom and proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of her.

I think poor Tenley was probably saying some Hail Marys and hoping she could escape that bathroom by wiggling her nose a-la Samantha from Bewitched. I can’t imagine being blindsided like that.

And then we see Poor Tenley (which is how I think we should begin to refer to her) being comforted by Elizabeth.

Oh.my.goodness. Does the girl attract the crazies? I just wanted to shout at the TV, “Run, Tenley, run! There’s another one! Run for your life!” She had no idea she was being comforted by the Black Widow herself.

After watching those two scenes, I decided I’d had enough. I turned the channel and watched some psychopathic serial killer on Criminal Minds. Much safer television viewing, I’m sure.

So, what do you think of the Bachelor Pad?

Are you going to watch?

The jury is still out for me.

You aren’t going to believe this

But I actually scrapbooked this past weekend!

I know!

Big shock!

I haven’t done it in months and months. I had grand plans at the beginning of summer but they were washed away in a sea of other activities.

My girlfriend came over Saturday night and we hid out in the basement and scrapped and caught up on each other’s lives. It was so great. I really miss that time with my friends and the creative time.

I’m hoping I get to do more of that this fall once we get the school and activity schedules nailed down.

I have been challenging myself to do two things:

Work only from my stash. No shopping trips allowed.
Use some of the many inspiration page layouts I have filed away.

Here are some of the pages I worked on: (along with their inspiration pages)

Here is the inspiration page:

I need to go back and add my journaling to this one. I want to list all the books I’ve read this summer.

And the inspiration page:

Again, needs more journaling. The medicine I’m taking is making me a bit loopy, so I decided to wait and write when my head was more clear.

Inspiration page:

This was my own invention. 🙂 This two-page spread I tried just fiddling with some of the design principles I’ve learned in the past few classes I’ve taken.

This one is still a work in progress. Nothing is even glued down yet, but I love how it’s going so far.

Here is the inspiration page:

I can’t believe all these pictures are from LAST YEAR at this same time! The girls have grown so much. I’ll have new first-day-of-school pictures tomorrow that will quickly go in my pile to scrap.

And so it begins

School started today.

The girls were so excited, bounding out of bed without any moans or groans
(I know it won’t last, but I’m enjoying it while it does)

Warm biscuits for breakfast, chased down with some chocolate milk, and we were out the door.

Well, after a little photo session, that is.

They wanted me to walk them in to their classrooms. I was only to happy to do so… glad they still want me to be a part of that part of their first day.

BUT

Once inside the halls of school, they walked ahead of me, chatting and laughing with their friends. I was just the pack-horse-mom carrying the 85 tons of school supplies to their classroom.

Still, it was fun to watch them happily reconnect with their friends. I’m so glad they like their school and feel at home there.

I can’t wait to pick them up this afternoon and hear all about the day.

Of course, I know I’m going to get extremely detailed answers to my query of “How was your day?”

Things like “good” and “great” or even “okay”

and that will be it.

sigh.

I’ll have to fill in the blanks in my imagination.

I love parenting.

Menu Plan Monday – 9 Aug

Monday is the start of school for my kids. So, planning out the week’s menu is especially important because we’ll have enough adjusting to do with the new school routine. I don’t want to have to worry about what is for dinner.

I sat down this weekend and planned out some menu ideas:

Spaghetti (Tuesday night – we’re having a very special friend for dinner)
Low Country Boil (probably Friday night)
Beef Vegetable Stew (crock pot)
Grilled Chicken with Saffron Rice & veggies
Chicken Quesadillas (with leftovers from the grilled chicken)
Baked Potato & Salad
Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo
Brunswick Stew (made with the leftover pork roast)

What are you having for dinner this week?

Join in on the fun over at OrgJunkie.com. She posts a linky every week – it’s fun to see what other people are serving their families.

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