What a week!

In addition to the major time-waster below, I spent hours and hours working on an online tutorial for an online project I hope to do. I have a bit more to do before I have any news.

Tomorrow the Pick Up Fairy will deliver two and a half bags of things she picked up from the girls' bedroom over the past week and a half. If everything is put away before noon, the Pick Up Fairy will take her children bowling. There is an introductory bowling event tomorrow with free bowling, pizza, drinks, school supplies for prizes, and so forth. I'm sure the girls would enjoy it. Er . . . the Pick Up Fairy is sure the girls would enjoy it. But after noon, there won't be time to go, so it is to be hoped the girls will get things put away lickety split.

Speaking of pizza, we nearly always have pizza for dinner on Friday. None of that over-priced commercial pie here, no siree! 96% of the time I mix up some crust and let the kids mix it up with the toppings. I came across a recipe in Sunset magazine this week that I decided to try. The twist is that it was baked on the grill. It was awesomely good! The only thing I changed was I used well-oiled waxed paper instead of the oiled parchment paper because I had waxed paper and no parchment paper. It worked fine.

Hallyu has struck me

When I talk to a Korean in the evening it's not unusual for him/her to have been watching a drama. Well! I found out about those dramas! Here is the one I've been watching:

http://www.koreanmovie.com/Lovers_in_Paris_video101_1_1_6121/

I'm in the 12th episode. What a time-waster. What a GREAT time-waster!!

And hallyu?

To understand the phenomenon-termed Hallyu (The Korean Wave)-one has to go back to the 1980s says Frances Gateward, assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During the 1980s, South Korea relaxed its film-censorship laws allowing a new generation of young actors, directors and writers to draw heavily on current events and themes of urban alienation, making for more dynamic narratives. In the 1990s, increased investment improved in the industry's production values. Today, a host of Korean directors and producers who came of age during the 1980s are creating big-budget, outside-the-box entertainment. They're young: 70% of films in Korea are directed by people just out of film school, and major Korean directors are, on average, a dozen years younger than their American counterparts. According to Gateward, this gives Korean films a different sensibility than Hollywood releases-and an edge with Asian audiences.

http://www.koreasociety.org/contemporary_issues/contemporary_issues/hallyu_korean_pop_culture_sweeps_across_asia.html

Korea in Phoenix + IKEA

This weekend dh asked if I wanted to go to the huge IKEA store in Phoenix and I said yes, as long as we could go to a Korean restaurant while we were there. I've been to quite a few Korean restaurants . . . all in Korea. :-) I'd never been to one in the USA because our previous small town didn't have any.

We used our GPS to find a Korean restaurant and doing that is a little difficult. The GPS's data base isn't being updated anymore and restaurants come and go. IOW, we tend to run into closed restaurants. We found that out in Sierra Vista a few Saturdays ago while looking for a German restaurant. Eventually we found this Korean restaurant. I'll bet you would have known it was a Korean restaurant even if I hadn't told you. ;-)

A sign on the window said "Red Kimchi" so I assume that is what the Korean says out front. I hope one of my Korean friends will leave a comment to tell me if that is right.

It was kind of a Korean American restaurant. In Korea the table is set with a large spoon and metal chopsticks on a napkin on the right with a wet towelette of some kind (disposable or cloth, depending on how upscale the place is) on the left. Here we had a fork, large spoon, and Chinese bamboo chopsticks on the right and no towelette.

Being Americans, we ordered two kinds of bulgoggi, beef and chicken. In Korea you usually are brought a plate of the raw marinated meat and you cook your own on a gas-fired BBQ that attaches to your table. Our table had the plumbing for the BBQ but the meat was brought out to us completely ready to eat. No playing with fire.

Dinners such as ours always have side dishes that go with them and the side dishes are interesting and delicious.

I'm not a fish eater so I didn't try this, but dh said these little fish are spicy and salty and strongly flavored. Two of my Korean friends, Ji Hyung and Mrs. Na told me they are good for children because they have a lot of calcium in them. I'm guessing they are like sardines and since you eat the soft bones in them, you get a good bit of calcium. Behind the fish you can see the bowl of red kimchi. This is my favorite kind. The red is from red pepper paste and it's spicy and good.

I'm hoping one of my Korean friends can tell me what the dish on the left in the middle is. It was like chewy pasta and I'd never had anything like it. The potatoes on the upper right were our favorite of the six side dishes.

Here is C's take on the table:

And finally, the week's news that Kim Dae Jung (the second former president back) died:

After lunch we went to IKEA. The girls went to the playland for one hour, so dh and I hurried through the store. We needed three curtain rods and one set of curtains. We came out with those as well as these lights for the girls:

The picture above does absolutely nothing for the lamp. When it is lit is glows from the inside and you can see the veins on the petals and the dots in the center of the lamp. It's weird how much I like these lamps. We got one for each girl and dh put them on the wall next to each girl's bed.

So that was our Saturday. Once again, it was a great day.

P.S. Sorry not all the photos came out right. I couldn't get blogspot to upload after the first picture and had to host the others on photobucket. I love photobucket, but the picture sizes didn't come out well for this project.

How to bill like a lawyer without really being one

Become an appliance repairman. Yep, the washer is fixed and his hourly rate was what I paid my lawyer a decade ago. $150/hr. I realize most lawyers charge more than that now, but that is what I paid back then. Also, the part had a 100% markup vs. what I could have bought it for online from Sears. ~sigh~ I should have looked up online how to do it myself but I didn't feel like it this time.

Yogurt and school

A little shout out here--I got a free sample of this yogurt and it was very tasty. Here is the information they suggested I put on my blog ;-) -- Make snack time a treat for your taste buds and your waistline
50 calories + 0 grams of fat + 5 grams of fiber = zero guilt
Four delicious flavors — Strawberry, Vanilla, Peach, Key Lime Pie
I think even my old friend GWP might like it. Just wait, next I'm going to accept the incessant offers from Google to put ads on my blog. Keep waiting, I have no plans to do that. Unless I change my mind of course. :-)

It's been odd to have the house empty after the girls go out the door in the morning. After the sustained rush of getting them out the door I've:

• napped
• checked email
• applied for a job
• gone Visiting Teaching
• gone grocery shopping
• attended a religious study class
• gone to a pot luck luncheon
• done paperwork
• worked

I can see I'll get accustomed to this new life. The girls like school so far and I'm surprised that I like having C and E in the same class. I feel like I'm getting the real scoop on what's going on in the class when I get both girls' input. Homework is easier too, now that it's the same assignment for each girl. My friend Ann has been doing this with her twins (same age as mine) since the beginning and I'm thinking she was on to something early. They both like having the other in the class, so if by the end of the year the teacher agrees it was a good idea, I'll probably do it again. Of course, if we stay here it may be a moot point because the reason they are in the same class this year is because there is only one second grade class at the school!

How do you mend . . .

. . . a broken washer? la-la-la I had a mountain of clothes to wash today so I got started as soon as the girls went out the door to school. The third load rinsed and then it looks like the pump or something went out. There was a lot of water in the tub and it won't spin. It's a Kenmore Elite HE3 washer.

I just went in to unplug it to reset it. It might be working. It drained and is spinning right now . . . . Stay tuned.

The reason I have time to do laundry now is the girls went back to school yesterday. Well, I should say C & E went back and S went.

Can you tell who was just a little bit excited to be starting school? Actually, all three are delighted to be going. Their school is a small one and there is only one second grade classroom so C & E are together for the first time in elementary school. So far so good.

And so far so good on the washing machine front. I bravely put in a load of jeans and I'll see what happens. Those are going to be a bear to wring out manually if I have to do what I did with the load of colors. Crossing my fingers here.

edited to add: misplaced optimism above. Boohoo

A surprise and a musing

Dh was asked two weeks ago to speak in Church today. Last night I read a talk that was given by President Hinckley (our beloved prophet and church president who died about 18 months ago) that dh was using as a basis for his talk. Today when I got to church I picked up a copy of the program to see his name written. What I saw was my OWN name above his!! What????? No one asked me to speak! I checked to see if there was a mistake and there was--someone had forgotten to ask me to speak! I told them I would come up with something in 30 minutes.

I opened the hymn book and found a song that was on the topic I was asked to address. That gave me some other ideas and the talk started to take shape. I've never, ever given a talk in church off the cuff like that and it's not something I think I do well. However, with a little family introduction here and a few pieces of practical advice there and a bit of help from Heavenly Father, I managed to come up with about ten minutes of speaking time. I think it went fine, and I never mentioned my short prep time.

A musing . . . my last baby starts school tomorrow. My very last baby. I haven't anticipated this day with either happiness or sadness, but have just watched it march closer and closer. My first child started school in 1991, eighteen years ago. This is sure to be a new and exciting era in our family and for me personally.

A this 'n' that Saturday

I started off the day by taking Kevin to the airport. Boohoo. This summer was the first time I met him at the curb and dropped him off there as well. My baby, growing up! Hehe. It sure is easy to do it that way and nice that the airport is only about 20 minutes door to door.

On the way home from the airport I finished my bargain shopping for the week with visits to Walgreens and Albertson's. Here is my haul and my total out of pocket cost for it was . . .

$5.14. I had $20 in store coupons and gift cards I'd gotten for free in various ways plus a coupon for every Albertson's item I purchased. I love to stock up at those kinds of prices.

After lunch dh said he wanted to go look at some furniture. Our dining room table has seen better days and it's time to start thinking about replacing it. We went to a typical "Super Clearance" furniture store first. I thought the furniture prices were okay, but the styles were very pronounced and many of them were almost too modern. Like you'd be able to look at the table and chairs and say, "Oh, you must have bought them around 2010." Also, we were in the scratch-n-dent section and I was looking at a table that had a small corner knocked off. The table was nothing more than the thinnest wood veneer over particle board. Looked good, quality was crap.

Next stop was a "furniture in the raw" kind of place. We could get a table and chairs I liked in solid wood, stained and finished the way we want for . . . a lot. $1,300.

Next stop was Whole Foods. I've never been in one before but dh recently heard and likes the owner's policy on health insurance and he wanted to show his approval with his dollars. We enjoyed looking around and bought some cookies for the girls before leaving. The clientel of that place was waaaaay crunchy. I was probably the only woman there with shaved armpits.

Next stop--an oak furniture place. It was disappointing. The quality was only marginally better than than the first place and many of the styles were dated.

Dh would like to get something from the first place because it would look good (for awhile) and be at a fairly reasonable cost. I'd like to wait until we have more money saved and get something from the unfinished store (but have them do the finishing for us). We are not in a rush however, so we have plenty of time to save some money and decide.

Next we stopped off at the mall to see about redeeming a coupon at Christopher & Banks. They finally have a collection I can get excited about. I used to really like their things but they had changed their emphasis the past couple of seasons and nothing appealed to me. However . . . that particular mall didn't have a C&B. Too bad. The coupon expires today so I won't get to use it.

The girls played for half an hour at the kiddie play area at the mall. It's one of their favorite places to play. My three were the only white children there. Most of the rest were Hispanic.

On the way home we fought off the urge to stop for tacos by stopping at the grocery store instead for meat, lettuce, and tomatoes to make our own tacos at home. The nice hamburger was $3/lb and even the fattier stuff was $2.50/lb. The family pack of round steak was $1.37 so of course I took that package over to the butcher and asked him to grind it for me. Eem-poe-see-blay. The grinder was full of pork. Then I hit on the bright idea of grinding it myself at home with the attachment to the KitchenAid. I've never used it for that, but it seemed like a good idea.

Once we got home dh cut up the meat and I ground it. Worked like a charm. While I got things ready for dinner, dh walked over to the school with the girls. C told us she was worried about walking home from school the first day. I'm sure the other two aren't worried in the least because they know C will take charge and get them home safely. We walked it Thursday, but decided to walk it again tonight. We'll probably walk it again tomorrow as well. Unfortunately because of work I can't meet them and walk home the first day, but dh is going to try to get off work Monday to do that. I really do think they'll find their way home just fine with no problems. It is a very straight forward walk.

Kevin called to say he'd made it safely. He stayed up all night last night so he could sleep on the plane. Funny kid.

Done. Done!!

Here is part of my bounty. It took me all day. With what I saved, I figure my time was worth about $8/hr. today. That's not a huge wage, but considering I wasn't going to do anything else to make money today, that's okay. We'll sure enjoy these pears this winter.

Oh, a five year old using jar lifters to transfer dozens of raw pears from one box to another does not make for beautiful, easy-to-peel pears. 'Nuff said.

How many of these are you guilty of?

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/LearnToBudget/12NewNeedsThatDrainYourCash_Slides.aspx?ocid=twmsnmon

Here are 12 new "essentials." How many are in your life?