Meal Plan Sunday

Monday:  Spanish eggplant (from the freezer) over rice

Tuesday:  Egg and potato "breakfast" casserole

Wednesday:  Whole wheat carrot cake pancakes

Thursday:  Impossibly Easy Mini Buffalo Chicken Pies

Friday:  Pizza

Happy Father's Day!

Bill got the day off today!  The girls made lunch, he bbq'd the ribs while I did everything else for the dinner, and he received calls from all of his children and one of mine.

After dinner we took a walk around the neighborhood with the children, then came back for blackberry cobbler and ice cream.

 Dh got some goodies made by Caroline and some shorts and shirts for summer.

Bill is a wonderful father, and in fact, it was his excellent father-ness that made me decide I wanted more children after we married.  That turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made.

Funny weather II

Yesterday I posted a[n unreadable] 5 day forecast for my area.  Highs around 107F (42C) and clear.

 Yeah.

Funny weather

When I got up this morning early, there was an uncharacteristic mist between the mountains and me.

The first two pictures were taken in the very early and early morning.  The third was taken in the afternoon.

Here is the forecast for the next five days:

[I'm very annoyed because I can't figure out how to cut and paste that screen print and make it a size you can actually see.  The forecast is 104 to 111F (40-44C).  Yikes.  And it's been that way since the middle of May except for a few days a couple weeks ago.]

One Drop

I always like to read biographies, whether or not I've ever heard of the subject, just because I find people's lives and experiences to be very interesting.  Anatole Broyard was a literary critic (although I've never heard of him) who died in 1990.  Shortly before he died, his children were told their father was bi-racial, a fact he'd hidden from them all their lives.

Bliss Broyard, his daughter, wanted to find out about her family's history and the story of whiteness and blackness in her ancestry, and perhaps understand why her father denied his African roots and presented himself and his family as white.  As an interested genealogist, I liked that part of the story.  In addition, my husband's step-grandfather was of mixed race and as I've looked at documents marking his life, I see he called himself both Colored and White at various times.  One Drop takes a hard look at "passing" and why it was done in a historical context, as well as why her father's family passed.

I'm almost done with the book and hope the author discusses her own feelings of finding out she is bi-racial.

A friend's visit to Holland

Today at our book club it came up that one of the young adults had just gotten back from a trip to Germany and the Netherlands.  One of the elderly members is a Dutch immigrant who really misses Holland.

She eagerly asked the younger woman where she had visited.  The younger named two places.  The older asked if the younger had had any pastries, cookies, or other Dutch goodies.  No, not really.

source

I was frustrated!  This elderly woman was eager to relive a bit of her past years by listening to the younger tell about what she had experienced, but the information wasn't forthcoming. 

 I have to remember some folks are good with a few words.  I love a torrent of them.



An advantage of living in a hot climate

You can go to work dressed like this!

This is my entire shopping trip for this week's dinners

Number 1 This is all I had to buy to make our menu dinners this week.  I have everything else in the pantry or freezer.  I love to be prepared.

 And speakig of being prepared, I love that I now have everything I need for the week and don't have to stress about running to the store for one missing ingredient.  The store is close (one mile), but it still puts a hole in my day when I'm rushing to make dinner after work.

I picked up a cantaloupe and some bananas in addition to the necessaries and my total was still under $15.

What do you think this service project is?

Every six weeks on a Thursday evening dh and I go to the local LDS Home Storage Center and pack food for the regional food bank.

As you can imagine, it's cheaper for the food bank to purchase beans and rice in 50 pound bags than in 1 pound bags.  As you can also guess, they want to give families 1 pound bags, not 50 pound bags!

The solution is to buy 50 pound bags of beans/rice and thousands of clear plastic bags like the ones newspapers are delivered in, then have volunteers repackage the commodities into 1 pound packages to be given away.  The food bank recently asked for more packages, so the shift increased from one hour to one and a quarter hours.  That's it! 

Last time I went there were a lot of volunteers from both my ward (congregation) and the singles ward, enough that we had 5 lines going and we repackaged 2.5 tons of pinto beans into ~5,000 packages.  We still had 15 minutes to go and could have done more . . . but ran out of plastic bags.


It all sounds like date night to Bill and me, so we usually stop on the way home at our favorite ice cream place, Culver's.

That's all!

Meal Plan Sunday

Monday:  Chicken, pineapple, pepper kebabs

[this was a hit--a little tedious to make though]

Tuesday:  Spaghetti and meatballs

Wednesday:  Grilled Picnic Taco Nachos

[this was really easy and everyone like it]

Thursday:  Pineapple Ginger Flank Steak

Friday:  Pizza