June 26th, 2011

Never have been one to count my eggs before they have fully hatched, but in the case of my house I'm pretty sure I can put all of them in one basket.  (That was painful to write that many cliches in one sentence. )

Used my lovely Sunday afternoon to wonder aimlessly about Ikea to get ideas for what I would want in my house.  Got some good ideas as far as furniture for my living room and second bed room.  Probably won't fork out the dough for Ikea furniture but at least I can start visualizing what I'd like to have.

For a couch I would probably want something similar to this. The link for this couch is:  http://www.roomstogo.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=showItem&ipac_id=36886  One of the things I have come to discover I am a big fan of is a Chaise.  They work nicely when you can connect them onto a couch like the picture above.  Most versions of the chaise/couch combination at Ikea that I saw had the ability to switch sides or be free standing, and I really like that idea.

That couch also has a pull out sleeper inside the couch.  I'm think of getting just a small sleeper sofa for the second bedroom for guests to use when they come over.  Then I can still have the guest room to use as an 'office' but also a place to keep quests.  Plus if I had a big couch like the one above in the living room people could sleep on that too!

Who knew having a house could make one so excited about buying furniture!

June 25th, 2011

Good news!!! Excellent news! Probably the best darn news I can get...well me winning the lottery would be better, but this is pretty close.

Today was the day I found out my offer on the house was accepted!  Here I was thinking it was going to take until next week before we could even start to haggle with them, but they must be eager to sell because they got back to us over the weekend.

Now I have a place to rest my head after my lease is up.  There are plenty of things I will need to be figuring out now that I have a house!  Technically first I'll have an inspection done and then wait for all the paper work to do what it has to do.  Originally I was going to move end of August but the seller wants to move the closing date up to the end of July.  So, I will most likely have a whole month to move into my home.  That is crazy!

Still think I'm in a bit of a shock from having it go so well.  Please hope and pray that the inspection doesn't find something terribly wrong with the place.  Definitely don't want to look for houses yet again.  Plus I think I got the place for a pretty good price. : )

My house!  I'm so excited to be working towards owning a place instead of renting.  Lets just say the 'block' party our apartment place had while I was trying to sleep today was more than annoying and solidified my choice to get a house even more!

June 24th, 2011

Sometimes your body doesn't like to make plans.  Today was one of those days.  My morning plans went through without a hitch, it was what I had to do in the afternoon that got a wrench thrown in it.

My morning was filled with paperwork to make an offer on a house.  The papers probably won't be seen by the seller until monday.  Not really looking forward to waiting, but that is part of the game.  Despite the intial money I will have to spend on the house I can't help but look forward to the smaller monthly payments.  Need to be careful though...don't want to get my hopes up and have this get shatter.  Really, really, reaalllllly hoping that does not happen.  High hopes for all of this.

As for the rest of my day; did some picking up around the apartment because they apartment people wanted to show our place to a perspective renter.  Since the showing was at 5:30 I needed to get some sleep before hand because I had worked the night before.  Thinking I would get up an hour beforehand and scooch on out before they got there was my plan.  

Sadly that didn't happen.  My phone kept ringing while I was trying to sleep and kept me jerking in and out of sleep.  This ended up causing me to sleep through my alarm later and be woken up when I hear someone opening my room's door.  There was no panic or screaming "Omg who are you??!!?!"  Somehow I remembered they were showing it and laid still and the person mentioned something about someone sleeping and left me alone.  

Oops?  Guess I can't really feel too bad about it.  They got to see the rest of the apartment....just not my bedroom.  Not like they are judging my room, it's the place itself they want to judge.

Oh, one more thing about this viewing.  They told me that they would give us at least a day advance warning if they wanted to bring someone in and they had tried to schedule the viewing the same day they called.  Come on people, if you are going to say something please try to keep to your word.

P.s. Flower pots have their first bloom!  I can't remember what all is in there, but if you can tell me what it is you get a high five.

June 23rd, 2011

Today was a day for firsts.  Never have I ever cooked with eggplant before and for some reason this was the week to do so.  Admittedly, I should have read up more on the technique to get it to cook correctly before I jumped into the recipe but I was hungry!  Hind site; never cook when you are very hungry or you'll make too much or do something wrong.  It is kind of like how you should never shop while hungry, expect entirely different.

When I bought the eggplant I did at least look up how to find one that was ripe and I think I succeeded at least in that.  The recipe I found was eggplant parmigiana.  Basically it is just like chicken parmigiana except with eggplant in place of chicken (imagine that).

Some of the ingredients listed were not in my cupboards or I had forgotten to get them at the store, but I made due.  The only things I think I changed were crackers instead of bread crumbs.  After having made them I'm almost sure bread crumbs would have worked better.

The recipe in a nut shell: eggplant, crackers, egg whites, Italian seasoning, garlic powder, pasta sauce, and mozzarella cheese.  The eggplant is put in the egg whites and then dipped into the crackers, Italian seasoning, and garlic powder mix.  Then it is baked, flipping them once.

After they baked on the sheet you lay them in a pan and slather on the pasta sauce and cheese in layers, and then baked it again!  Some how with all this time in the oven I'm pretty sure I still managed to some how under cook them because they seemed far to crunchy and chewy.  Then again I haven't ever cooked them so I'm not really sure how they should taste.

All I can say about it is, I doubt I'll probably make it again.  Definitely not added to my favorites.

June 22nd, 2011

So I decided to finally risk the grey skies today and ride my bike.  It didn't look like it was going to pour rain or anything so I took it as a challenge.  Well, sort of... 

Having not had a bagel from Bruegger's Bagels in far too long I decided that should be my destination.  There was more uphill parts of the path than I expected.  Guess I never really noticed while driving.  About half way there I walked next to my bike; I'll admit partly because my legs were not used to hills and partly because I had to answer the phone and make some other phone calls as well.  

I made it to Bruegger's Bagels without any rain.  Did I really succeed so easily?! Nope.  While I enjoyed one of their new skinny bagel options (egg white patty, turkey sausage, and some tomato tasty spread on a sesame seed bagel) outside in the cool morning air I got a phone call and moved back into the building.  

Shortly after I was on the phone it started to mist rain outside.  Bah!  I ended up having to ride part way home in the misting rain.  Luckily it was only the annoying mist kind and not heavy drops or I would have probably had to stay at Bruegger's until it let up...which probably would have led to me eating more bagels which would be oh so bad for the diet.

My reaction to having to ride in the rain.  I had to carry my purse under my light jacket to keep it safe from rain and I decided that I kind of looked like a pregnant lady on a bicycle.  I wonder how many people passing on the road thought I was.

June 21st, 2011

This whole rain a lot thing is making me sad.  I want to be able to ride my bike more often!  It seems like the rain happens when I'm awake and want to ride my bike. : (  Then when I'm asleep it isn't raining.  Just mean!

Besides being sad about not getting to ride my bike I have had the chance to revisit a home that I visited last week.  I'm going to be making an offer on this home and I'm pretty excited about it.  I'm also extremely nervous that they won't accept my offer and I won't end up getting the house.

I'm way sick of apartment life.  The sound of children screaming in the courtyard or babies crying in the apartments near you, or neighbors making 'noises'.  I'm way over that.  I'm ready for my own place, and a yard. Maybe some day I can afford a puppy or a kitty.  I have been considering adopting a pet as well, but that won't be till much farther in the future...like next year. Haha.  Right now my gerbil is the only one for me!

Keeping my hopes up on the house and that everything will work out!

P.S. I need to trim my bangs, stat!

June 16th-20th, 2011

I seriously hate when I get behind on my blog like this and I'm not really sure why I didn't do it over the weekend.  I had one of those extremely lazy streaks come over me.  Now the challenge is trying to remember what I did during the days I missed.

I went to the movie Super 8 and that was pretty good.  I've heard it described as the modern day ET and I guess you could kind of say that.  I would have to agree with some that the mystery with seeing the alien for so long doesn't let you get time to truly connect and care about the alien.  I wish that there could have been a moment where we could become to understand what it wanted more.  Ah well.  Still good anyway.

On Friday, I believe, I went to some houses.  Well, I finally got to see the inside of a few houses.  This house search is kind of annoying but I have a feeling that apartment searching would be just as annoying.  I'm hoping to get the whole housing situation figured out soon.  There are a few hopefuls as far as a place to live, but we shall see how that goes.

Weekend was extremely boring.  I wanted to make something that needed some brown sugar...which brought to my attention that someone had thrown out my brown sugar..soooo I didn't make it. I made rice crispy treats instead!  Totally worth the 3 weight watcher points for each piece.

Speaking of weight watchers, lately I seem to be magically eating my exact amount of points without using my points calculator like a nazi.  I think I'm finally start to memorize what certain things count as and getting better at mentally figuring it out.  Which is helpful because my mobile app isn't working.  Apparently I don't have enough room on my phone...again...Bah.

Lastly, my garden is doing wonderfully!  Just check out my lettuce!

(Part of the reason I'm excited for a house is that I can finally have a real garden!)

Oh yeah and I forgot that sometime during this stretch of me being a lame face and not posting this happened. I opened an egg and it had two yolks...I'm not sure if that is supposed to happen...I think the second egg I cracked open did the same thing.  Is that what happens when eggs get old?  I was kind of concerned after that and threw them away a few days later just in case.  I mean I did eat the ones I cracked and I'm not dead now, but it just seems odd.