Still busy!

I know I have been MIA lately, Mike and I have been working non-stop to get moved. It has been crazy. Either Mike or I have been at the house every night until 1-2 am working while the other one goes home, puts the kids to bed and packs there. Add in the apartment stuff that we still have to do (only one more week, yay!), Carter's birthday last Friday, Christmas, Young women's, and all this stupid snow I have to deal with, it has been a crazy month! I can't wait for this month to be over. Once we are in the new place it will be a lot easier to work on things after the kids are in bed. We are starting to see progress, though! I have 2 rooms all painted, ours and Samantha's. Carter's is almost finished, I just have to do the baseboards. We installed our new range today and brought the fridge back into the kitchen (it was living in the living room while we did the kitchen floor). It is finally starting to seem more like a house than a construction zone. The kitchen floor looks great. We did a vinyl tile, so it was easier to install than regular tile, but they have grooves for grout in between them. It was so hard grouting it, but it really looks good, I am excited to finish the rest of the flooring. There are so many more projects; someday we will be done, but not anytime soon. Hard work is good for you, right?

Anyways, I hope that everyone has a great Christmas! We will be celebrating in our new house, and I am really excited. This is the first year that Carter really gets Santa Claus and I really think he will love everything he gets. Christmas is so much fun with kids! I will try to write more later, but it may be a while. We are moving everything else this week, so I am sure to be busy!

Cookie Recipes

How rude of me to rave about these cookies and not share the recipes! Here you go, courtesy of Karen. Check out her blog for more delicious recipes. Enjoy!

Chocolate Chip Cookies:

1 C. butter
1 C. brown sugar
3/4 C. white sugar
2 eggs
3 C. flour
3/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. soda
1 tsp. vanilla
choc chips...whole bag

Bake at 350 for 8-10 min.

Key...is to have more brown sugar in your choc chip cookies. Don't over cook them! Take them out when they barely have a hint of brown around the edges.

Sugar Cookies

From the Lion House Cookbook

1 1/2 cups sugar

2/3 cup butter

2 eggs, beaten

2 Tbs milk

1 tsp vanilla

3 1/4 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs, milk, and vanilla. Mix in dry ingredients. Shape dough into a ball and chill for a couple of hours.On floured board, roll out dough (about 1/3 at a time), and cut shapes. Thicker dough will make softer cookies, thinner will make crispy ones. Bake at 400 on lightly greased cookie sheet for 8 minutes, or until light brown. Cool on a rack. Decorate.

I like my cookies soft, so I cut em thick. Don't let them get brown, either. Brown is bad. They will look like they aren't cooked, but they are. Trust me.

By the way, the cookie exchange went great! I had to reschedule due to the aforementioned crappy snow, but we had a good turnout and everyone brought fabulous treats! My favorite were the molasses crinkles. They are like very soft gingerbread cookies. Yum!

MOLASSES CRINKLES

Yields: 2-3 dozen

Ingredients

3/4 c. butter, softened (room temperature)

1 c. brown sugar

1 egg

1/4 c. molasses

2 1/4 c. flour

2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground cloves

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. ground ginger

Directions: In large bowl, mix butter, brown sugar, egg & molasses thoroughly with electric mixer. In medium bowl, combine flour, soda, salt & spices. Add flour mixture slowly to first mixture, combining well. Will become thick. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate dough for 1 to 2 hours. Roll dough into small (1") balls, dip one side in granulated sugar and place on cookie sheet with sugared side UP. Using a finger dipped in water, touch the sugared top of each cookie with a sprinkle of water. This will make the "crinkled" effect on the cookies. Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes, using care not to over bake or they will become crunchy. This is a soft, chewy cookie. These can be made ahead of time and frozen.

Angie also made the cutest reindeer cookies, peanut butter cookies with an M&M for the nose and little chocolate chips for the eyes and pretzels for the antlers. In all honesty, my blondies were probably the saddest cookie there. I don't know what went wrong, but I tried something new and it just didn't turn out very good. Maybe next time. Thanks to everyone who came and brought cookies!

Progress!

We got 3 rooms painted today! I still have the trim to do and I need to clean up the lines between the ceiling and the walls, but I finally feel like we are getting somewhere. Up until now, all I have really been able to do is prep for paint--tape, put down drop cloths, that kind of stuff. This is a great sense of accomplishment. I love the color that we picked. We wanted something neutral, so it's brown, but it's a little bit darker and I think it will look great with the white trim. We still have so much more to do, and the walls are soaking up more paint than we thought, but over all, I am very happy. Our goal tomorrow is to do the trim (me) and tile the kitchen floor (Mike) before our new range gets here on Tuesday. I can't believe how fast this month is going. We are nowhere even close to being ready to move, so it looks like we will be moving the last weekend of the month instead of this weekend as we had planned. Who knows, that will probably change again. We do need to be out of our place by the end of the year, so at least we have a deadline.

Now I am going to ride this wave of ambitiousness and go prepare a talk for church in 2 weeks. Like I don't already have enough going on in my life. Can't a girl get a break?

Crappy snow.

I hate snow. The stinky city just called and yelled at me about our sidewalks. We live in a freakin' frozen tundra. There is about 1/4 mile of 6-inch thick ice out there. We have dumped probably 400 lbs of salt on it. We haven't been above freezing for a week. This guy has the audacity to tell me at 10:00 tonight that they need to be cleared by tomorrow morning. Are you kidding me??? I told him it wouldn't happen and he gave me until Monday. So generous. Anybody want to earn some extra cash shoveling snow? It's supposed to snow all week, so there is plenty of shoveling! You know you want to...

We went down to Chicago today and saw Phantom of the Opera. It was great--I don't think it was really Broadway quality, but it was good. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but I still think I like Wicked more. I think part of it is that I have been listening to the soundtrack since I was little, so I was expecting it to sound just like the CD and it didn't, so it seemed kind of off. It was a great day though. Our great friends Mike and Jessica donated their Saturday to watch my kids. I was very concerned about Samantha, she was traumatized from earlier this week when I left her at a baby sitters house. I really thought she would be horrible and cry the entire day. Luckily, she was ok. She was pretty irate when Jessica went in to get her up from her nap, but after that, she did ok. Such a relief. It was very nice to get out with our good friends Derek and Laura before they move to Utah (booo), and fabulous to get out without the kids.

Mike is out with an old friend visiting from Utah. Who knows when he will be home. I need to get to bed and get some beauty rest so I can shovel in the morning. Did I mention that I hate snow?

I love cookies!

So I literally have a hundred things that I should be doing. My house is trashed, I have laundry to put away, I need to start packing, and I haven't even started anything even remotely Christmas-y. But alas, the things that I should be doing and the things that I want to do are not even close to coinciding. So here I sit vegged out in front of my computer. I am thinking of catching up on some Thursday night TV while I put away the laundry later. We'll see...


I have come to the conclusion that I will probably always carry an extra 5 pounds or so due to my new-found love of baking. Don't get me wrong, I have always loved cookies, but the cookies that I have made in the past have always just been ok. They were hard and really not that good. Soon after moving to Wisconsin, one of Mike's co-workers introduced him to the monster cookie. It has M&M's, chocolate chips, oatmeal and peanut butter. Cookie heaven! Then, my sister in law Holly introduced me to the Neiman Marcus cookie. Yum. I mastered that. I made them in mass quantities. At almost every point in the last year or so I have had a batch of dough frozen ready to go at a moment's notice. Some people freeze meals before they have babies, I froze Neiman Marcus cookie dough.

Then came the ever elusive sugar cookie. I have never had luck with the sugar cookie. I think a lot of people struggle with them, it is so hard to get them just right. My favorite cooking friend Karen found a fabulous recipe for sugar cookies that she was kind enough to share. These are the bomb (yes, I know that no one uses that word anymore). I made them when we had people over for a game one time. They raved..."these are better than store-bought!" Sometimes you try to be modest, find some little fault in them-they are a little overdone, whatever. All I could say is "I know, aren't they great?". The frosting is still store bought, but baby steps, right? Anyways, the reason for this whole cookie posting is that I have finally made a delicious chocolate chip cookie! Karen pulled through for me again and they were a definite success. A little bit crunchy on the outside, nice and soft inside. Fabulous. I am now on the hunt for the perfect peanut butter cookie. I am hosting a cookie exchange this next Tuesday and can't wait to try all the new recipes. I love cookies!!!

I hate Wisconsin.

Mostly, I just hate winter, and Wisconsin has a lot of it. It dumped 6 inches this past weekend. It wouldn't be so bad, except that we have to take care of the snow here and at our new place. We can hire people to shovel here, but nobody wanted the job. By the time that we got to the new place to shovel, everything had frozen solid, including the extra 6 inches that the plow trucks pushed in front of our driveway. I spent 2 hours digging through it. Not shoveling the driveway, just the entrance so we could get in at all. And when I say digging through it, I mean using a shovel as a pickax, breaking the ice into manageable chunks. Some kind soul shoveled our city walks for us. Bless their heart.

As I am writing this, it is snowing again. It's supposed to snow another 3-5 inches tonight and then every day for the rest of the week. Seriously, can't a sister get a break? All the time that we are supposed to be spending on the house is being spent on this crappy snow. I hate it. At this rate, we will never be done. And who wants to move in this weather? Not me (not that I really want to move in any weather, we move too much).

I know this all seems negative, but this is my life lately. It seems like it's just one thing after another. I need a long vacation.

On a positive note, Mike got the water upstairs working! We have a lot of friends who have also fixed up older homes, so we have quite a few people to offer advice. One of them suggested taking off the aerators. Thanks Grant! We also have 2 rooms all ready to paint and Mike has about half of that nasty Turquoise tile off in the upstairs bathroom. We are sad to see those go :). Now we just have to find the time to paint. As soon as this damn snow goes away...

What were we thinking?

So we may be in a little over our heads with our new house. We closed on Friday. I think it's a bad omen when you lose the keys to your new house within 1 hour of gaining ownership of it. Mike and I went from the closing to Sam's club to pick up a couple of things and by the time we left Sam's Club, no keys. We both went back to the closing agent's office separately and checked the parking lot and I went back to Sam's to look there. I retraced my steps, tore apart a lazy boy that I had sat in, thinking that they had fallen in there, and asked everyone I could think to ask. Still no keys. Mike went to the new place thinking we could call a locksmith, but what locksmith is going to let some guy into a house with a big "For Sale" sign out front and no proof of purchase (all the paperwork was in my car)? Anyways, Mike went back to Sam's Club on his way home just to check one more time and it turns out that 5 minutes after I had left, someone turned them in. Hallelujah! Mike was very understanding, but I could tell that he was pretty upset with me. Sorry.... So that was one day that we had planned on doing some work down the drain.
We tried again on Saturday. Right now we are just trying to get everything ready to paint. This includes taking down wallpaper from one room. That part actually went pretty well. It came off really easily and there was only one layer. In getting water to spray the wall with, we realized that the water upstairs had been turned off not only while no one was living there while the house was on the market like we thought, but probably for the last decade. We got a small trickle of water out of the kitchen faucet, but that was it. It looks like we will be calling the plumber.
Anyways, after the wallpaper the kids were cranky and ready to go. Plus, it was snowing and we had to get back here to take care of the snow here (Mike will take care of the snow there tomorrow after work). What a mess! We had planned to work all day there. Between apartment stuff, home improvement projects and church stuff, I kind of feel like crying. I really think I will never be caught up. Luckily, things will get better. I haven't been released from YW president yet, but I know they found my replacement today, so hopefully next week (good luck to you, you know who...). And, I did my last apartment check-out today, which means that I will be doing my last check-in tomorrow. Just a few more weeks! I can't wait to be done, but really don't want to actually go through the process of moving. Oh well. Someone wise once said, "you do what you have to do, so you can do what you want to do". That would be Denzel Washington on Oprah the other day. Wise and good looking. What a package :).