Fill in the blank

I've stolen post ideas from everyone and still can't think of my own thing to write. YOU be creative here.



"If I opened my front door and saw this standing there, I would ________________"

Shameless Copycat

I just cannot seem
to think up good blog topics
myself. Copycat.

When I did my 2007 blog year in review post a few days ago, I noticed that my blog has really undergone a turnaround. I used to blog much more about news and other things external to me. But for at least the last half of 2007, my blog really became more about me. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that - it must be that I'm way more interesting than the news. (hahaha) Just an observation - I don't know that I'm going to change anything.

Anyway, here's what I made for dinner last night. It was fantastic. I'll put up a picture with weekly winners.

Ingredients
3 cloves garlic, minced
7 oz fresh baby spinach
1/4 cup cream cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp basil
1/2 tsp oregano
salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp white wine
1 tsp lemon juice
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts - butterflied and pounded to 1/4 inch thickness
6 slices bacon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Saute garlic and spinach in olive oil until spinach is wilted.
Combine cheeses, spices, and liquids with spinach and garlic.
Distribute evenly among breasts.
Roll up breasts like a burrito.
Wrap bacon around breasts, crossing in the middle, secure with toothpicks.
Place stuffed chicken on a wire rack in a 13x9 pan.
Bake for 45 - 60 minutes until bacon is crispy and chicken is cooked through.

This worked out really well, but I might make some changes. I will substitute mascarpone for cream cheese....or maybe ricotta. I will also wilt fresh basil with the spinach - I didn't do it because I was out of fresh. I might also try substituting balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice. Adding diced mushrooms might be yummy too. Really I think you could use any ingredients in the filling. I just tried to use up some things I had on hand. Pictures Sunday.

Copycat

I guess quite a few people do something called Thursday Thirteen. (Do comments like that just make me scream newbie in an embarrassing way?) Here are thirteen reasons why I'm glad I quit smoking:

1. I have a cold right now and it's barely doing anything to me. I do little tiny coughs and then they go away. This is so unusual for me.

2. Money. Those poisonous little suckers are SPENDY!

3 & 4. Dylan and Noah.

5. Smell - me and my house and my clothes and my kids and my cats and my car don't stink anymore. Well - we don't stink like smoke anyway.

6. Freedom - it's nice to be able to pick up and go without worrying about "Do I have my cigarettes? Does this lighter work? Can I smoke when I get there? How many chances will I get for a smoke break?"

7. Winter - it's freakin' cold in South Dakota....standing outside to smoke is INSANE.

8. Food - tastes WAY better. This will likely not help my diet.

9. Did I mention MONEY??? No more smoker penalty on my health insurance.

10. Singing - I did a whole post about how I can take big deep breaths and sing loud and long. This is not necessarily a benefit to people who have to hear me sing.

11. Stairs. hahahahah. Ok. I can't walk stairs. But that's because I'm CLUMSY, not because my lungs were screaming and I had to stop half-way.

12. Did I mention Dylan and Noah?

13. Nee-ner-nee-ner. No one thought I could actually do it. Here's a great big *********** to those people. I can do ANYTHING!




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How original

Gee - I think I'm the only person who has decided to blog about needing to lose weight. I know none of you have read about this on any other blogs.

I really do hate the way I look. That picture off to the left is about 7 years old - and I was chunky then. Pop and sweets and I don't do a damn thing physical. That's why I'm like this. I've eliminated the cigarettes so now it's time to eliminate the junk in my diet. What's the point of getting rid of the #1 preventable killer if I'm still doing the #2 preventable killer. Or have they swapped by now?

This is going to be really hard. I love food. I LOVE LOVE LOVE sweets and pop. Pasta is my best friend.
*beginning to sniffle*
So far I have quit the pop. That stuff is just pure garbage. If I MUST have a pop I have to drink Diet.
*beginning to tear up*
My main goal right now is to eliminate the pop and to cut WAAAAAAAAAY back on the sweets. Pasta and other carb evils will be limited to a small portion of one meal a day.
*doing that little chest-hitch/hiccup thing that little kids do right before or after a huge melt down*
My physical therapy for my knee injury starts on Friday so I am now on doctor-mandated exercise. I obviously can't do anything too strenuous right now, but that will increase as I heal up.
*shoulders shaking*

Do any of you feel like I do? Here's some help. Notice all the packaged crap the American family has. Do some simple math and figure out how many WEEKS you could feed the last family on what the American family spends. Look at all the fresh fruits and vegetables some cultures eat. Look how much feeds X number of people from picture to picture. I have NOTHING to cry about.

Ok the pictures quit working - I don't know why. Click the links.

The book is Hungry Planet: what the world eats. by Peter menzel.

http://www.menzelphoto.com/hungryplanet/

Here are some more links about this work (that actually give credit to the ones due):

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5005952

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1645016,00.html

Blogging 2007 Style

I was clicking around and stumbled on Karla's blog. She did an interesting thing for her year in review, which was to link to one previous post from each month of 2007. I think it's fun to go back and read through old posts to see where you were and what was important back then.

Before I list my posts, let me say this - 2007 was kind of a hard year for my family. We had some good ups, but we also had a lot of shocking downs. Many of these I have not blogged about because they were really too personal to other people to mention to the world. Also, I think I kind of used blogging about silly news stories and my crazy kids as kind of way to keep sane in the midst of all our crises. If you can't find something to laugh about and make you happy - well what's the point??? Suffice it to say that we all fervently hope that 2008 will be really uneventful.

Enough of that. Here's my list:

January - "A Great Big Long Rant"
Me ranting?? No way!! This is about a documentary I saw about the MPAA - the people who stick PG or R on movies.

February - "Carbon Neutral, But Chock Full O'Methane"
Surprise, surprise - another rant. If you're super-green you'll hate this one. Go plant a tree instead of reading this.

March - "Tasina Appleseed....or how I learned to hug a tree"
Ha ha! This post is the culmination of an argument that began with the February post. I had a mostly fun/kinda serious back-and-forth going with my aunt (via MySpace) and this was my last word on the subject.

April - "Strange News, Good News, and Really Weird Views."
I must be doing something wrong when I link to news articles because all these links are broken? Or is it that they (the news folk) only keep them active for so long? Anyway, I mostly put this one up because it's one of the few times I blogged about Jeff (hubby) - just skip down to the parts about him.

May - "Um"
The picture still cracks me up - click to see.

June - "Beautiful Video"
Wow only 5 posts in June. Bad blogger.

July - "Chantix - Day 1" and "Chantix - Day 8"
I'm including two here just so you can see how far I've come now. I don't even really think about smoking all that much anymore. The smell of smoke on people just makes me want to gag too. Wow. I can't believe this was just back in July.

August - "Sing!!!!"
This is about 3 weeks smoke-free and was a happy side-effect of quitting.

September - "One last post"
Another rant. I'm starting to feel like kind of a brat.

October - "Never a dull moment"
Tasina - 0, Stairs - 1

November - "Hey Ya!"
What really happened with the stairs.

December - "Nice try though"
Sigh - another tantrum. I guess I know what my resolution should be for this year.......NOT.

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!!!

Weeping Meatloaf

I hate meatloaf. It's just never really impressed me in any way. But I was watching Good Eats with Alton Brown and he did a meatloaf that I thought looked really good. (Maggie calls the food shows "food porn" which never fails to crack me up.) The basic premise of Alton's meatloaf is that you don't cook it in the loaf pan - you turn it out on a cookie sheet so that you have more surface area for the yummy glaze. This seemed to make all kinds of sense to me and I think it is valid logic. The problem is that the REST of the recipe was kinda yucky. I have named this recipe Weeping Meatloaf (and I hope Mr. Brown doesn't sue me) for three reasons.

1. 1/2 onion and 1/2 a red bell pepper go into this thing. My eyes were just streaming tears.
2. When it finally came out of the oven, there was a pool of really nasty looking grease weeping out of it and pooling around the base. Not yummy.
3. Spending this much time, effort, money on new gadgets, and tears on this thing makes me cry even more.

Furthermore, I found the recipe to be annoying. I'm not the world's most precise cook - I usually just throw things together. But if I give a recipe to someone else, I try to figure out measurements that will be meaningful to the other person. Weeping Meatloaf calls for really imprecise things like 1/2 onion (size? color?), 1 carrot, 1/2 red bell pepper, 3 cloves garlic, dash of this, dash of that, etc. Not super helpful.

In any event, this thing wound up tasting like a big greasy baked vaguely loaf shaped lump of taco meat. Whoopee.

Here's the link in case you have to serve a meal to people you don't really like.

Weekly Winners 12.30.07

Idea, organization, and all-around coolness the brainchild of Lotus.

I'm so new to this. Please click pictures to view fuller. If you have any tips on how to put these on here in a more interesting way (MAGGIE HELP ME), please let me know.

LOLCAT

LOLKID

I'm really going to regret this at bedtime.

This is so naughty that it makes me want to hyperventilate.

I'm peenching ur head.

GASP for real

I think I just hyperventilated.

Really.

Dylan was vacuuming the living room (because of the styrofoam - pictures tomorrow) and Noah threw a sock at him. Dylan then accidentally vacuumed up the sock. This alone was funny but when you add in the look of horror and panic on Dylan's face when he saw the sock spinning around in the little collection basket thingy it became unbelievably freakin' hilarious. I started laughing....this gets so confused....I like blacked out for a second or two....and then my hands and face were all tingly....and my head felt like it was shaking back and forth but it actually wasn't.....then I felt all dizzy. A couple minutes later I felt perfectly fine.

Weird. Dylan says that kind of in the middle of laughing I took this huge, deep breath before the weirdness happened. Maybe I'm making too big a deal of this but it just felt so weird. I'm assuming I didn't do something really scary like have a quasi cerebral hemorrhage or a mini-stroke.

If you've ever hyperventilated (or had a quasi cerebral hemorrhage or mini-stroke) and any of this sounds familiar, please let me know. No more crazy laughing for me for a while. I think I'll be morose for the rest of the weekend. :-\

GASP

Just got my bill from the ambulance company. I'm really glad the billing department is not running the dispatch department - this accident happened two months ago. Here's the breakdown:

BLS Emergency - $369.36 I have no idea what "BLS" is. Maybe...."Blubbering Lug Slipped?" Does this charge differ based on emergency? Is this the "clumsy fool Aunt Bunny-ed down the steps" charge. (10,000 bonus points if you get the Aunt Bunny reference.) Is there a "moronic idiot with a power drill" emergency charge that costs more?

BLS Mileage - $9.17. The hospital is, at most, 3 miles from my house. I guess they're figuring about $3.00/gallon for gas?? Who knows?

Decontamination - $39.87. WTH???? No one sprayed me with Lysol or Clorox that I can remember. I know my basement steps needed to be vacuumed, but I don't think I needed to be decontaminated after touching them. Sheesh.

BLS Pers Care Supply - $20.48. Again, no clue. "Personal Care Supply"???? No one gave me Kleenex or wet wipes. Maybe this is for the gloves that the paramedic had to wear to protect herself from my contaminated filth.

BLS Disposable Sup - $0.00. Ok, no argument from me on this one. I'll pay it.

Pulse Ox Probe - $37.55. This is either that thing they stick on your finger to measure your blood oxygen or someone made a side trip to perform veterinary services on a farm animal and are trying to pass the charges off on me.

All I can say is I LOVE AFLAC. I submitted this bill to my AFLAC rep today and it takes less than a week (generally) to get a check from them. Quack quack. I'm sold on them for life.

Finally, some pictures!!

Happy Brothers
Perfect Christmas Portrait
Lying to Santa
That's way too much flash lady!
Bye bye ghetto camera

Tagged!

I'm such a newbie at this. I only learned what a meme was like a month or so ago. Well I have now been tagged so here it goes:

Name Game Meme

Tagged by: Lotus

Using the first letter of your name, answer these questions. They have to be real answers, nothing made up, and you can’t use your own name as an answer.

1. Famous singer: Tony Bennett

2. Four letter word: Tail

3. Street: Tenth

4. Color: Taupe

5. Gifts/presents: Tableware

6. Vehicle: Toyota

7. Things in a souvenir shop: T-shirts

8. Boy name: Tim

9. Girl name: Tina

10. Movie title: Tango & Cash

11. Drink: Tea

12. Occupation: Teacher

13. Celebrity: Tom Cruise

14. Magazine: Time

15. U.S. city: Tallahassee

16. Pro sports: Tennis

17. Fruit: Tangerine

18. Reason for being late for work: Taking a nap

19. Something you throw away: Trash

20. Something you shout: Tag me with a meme again and I'll kill you!!!

I’m tagging: Julie and Kathleen (I'm not sure how to link to a MySpace blog and she might not want me to anyway.) I'm tagging these two because 1. I'm a dork with not many blog friends and 2. J and K are going to be REALLY hard!! :)

Pictures this weekend - I swear!

Excuses, excuses, and love

Ok. I know I promised Christmas tree pictures. I'm a horrible tease. You certainly won't get them now because we are at my mom's. BUT!!!! I have something like an excuse. I have a cousin that has always been more like a niece to me. I love this girl with all my heart. She was very ill and I was beside myself with worry. I am thrilled to announce that she is now ok AND that I am a proud new great-"aunt" to her gorgeous little boy who was born yesterday. Woohoo! Mom and baby are doing well and I'm going to pester her mercilessly until she brings him home for a visit so that I can plant kisses all over him.

Further happy news - apparently someone heard/read my temper tantrum from a few days ago and magically dropped a $300+ insurance check in my mail. In the interest of good pictures (and, I'm sure, shutting me up), dear sweet hubby went out and bought me a fancy schmancy new digital camera. So I PROMISE that I will put up pictures (nice ones) before the end of the year.

I don't know that I'll post again before Christmas so......

To all the Chantix/Quit Smoking bloggers - I'm so glad we all gave ourselves such a wondeful present this year. Not only did we quit smoking, we also found some of the coolest, funniest, most honest, and most supportive people on-line.

To all the Mom Bloggers - I hope the little brats appreciate all the money we spent. Uh, I mean, I hope you and your families have a nice holiday. It's nice to know I'm not the only mommy quietly going nuts in front of my computer.

To all my other readers and blog friends - thank you for all the comments and gems that made me think, laugh, gasp, and roll my eyes.

Also thanks to everyone who left such nice comments about my knee injury and didn't once tell me to quit complaining, get over it, and learn to walk the dang stairs already.

Ok ok, I'm a jerk

LOL. The Thanksgiving pictures are, indeed, on the laptop. So most of that tantrum from yesterday was for no good reason at all. Of course now the tree pictures are downstairs on the PC. So I think what I'll do is give you a turkey picture and put up the tree pictures later tonight when I finally get downstairs.

Interruption. The doorbell just rang. I received something I ordered from Amazon. Also, someone sent me a package of really nice cheeses. Cheeses are as good as (maybe better than) hot chocolate for making me a happy camper. Thank you from the bottom of my heart cheese sender person.

Here's the turkey...I need to find some crackers and a knife:

Nice try though

Introduction.
So I was all set to be a better blogger. I was going to put up my Thanksgiving pictures, my decorating the tree pictures, and even offer to email any (weirdly) interested parties the pictures of my Franken-knee. I swear I was going to do all these things. But then it all just started to go downhill.

1. Ghetto camera.
I got my digital camera free when I bought my laptop. (Lucky for me or you'd still be looking at bad scans of crappy Polaroids.) Well at some point the digital camera got dropped and the spring loaded battery compartment door broke. This causes the batteries to be loose and the camera won't work. Normal people might buy a new camera. Not El Cheapo. I just slapped a rubberband around it and called it good (nevermind the fact that the rubberband doesn't really hold and I'm going through batteries like a....LOL....all my similes are nasty...forget it). So anyway, I sat down here with ghetto camera, the batteries are dead, and now I'm already cranky about the whole operation. (If you find "ghetto camera" to be racist in some way, just switch it to "rez camera" and back off.)

2. Idiot me.
After I FINALLY get ghetto camera working I realize that I deleted all the pictures from Thanksgiving without downloading them. Moron. Somehow I managed to do this without deleting the Franken-knee pictures. I'm not sure how this happened. But it was almost surely I who did it. Luckily my dad was also taking pictures at Thanksgiving, but those pictures are sitting 50 miles away on his computer instead of RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF ME THIS INSTANT LIKE I WANT THEM TO BE!!!

Sorry. I didn't even do a tantrum alert.

3. Possible further idiot and most certainly lazy me.
There is a teeny tiny chance that the Thanksgiving pictures DID get downloaded and are, in fact, upstairs on the laptop. I have a Vicodin-hazy memory of Jeff downloading some pictures at my request. Why not go check? Because the laptop is upstairs and I am downstairs. Everyone remembers about me and stairs, right???? Furthermore, Jeff is gone, Noah is sleeping, and Dylan probably isn't speaking to me (for a whole host of other making-Tasina-cranky reasons). I am WAAAAAAY too chicken to try the stairs alone. Plucka-plucka. And I'm also WAAAAAY too pessimistic (at this point) to believe that dragging my lame ass up there will result in there actually being pictures on the laptop. I think that they WILL NOT be there and I will just be more mad....and having to navigate the stairs again.

In conclusion.
I'm very sorry that you came here to my blog expecting maybe a pleasant little snippet or (how hopeful of you) maybe even some pictures and INSTEAD got me having a tantrum and being kind of a brat.

P.S. At least I'm not smoking. That's good.

P.P.S. Remember a couple of posts ago when I was so happy that the $40 monthly smoker fee is coming off my insurance? We found out today that Jeff's insurance (which covers him and the boys) is going up $40 a month. :-/

P.P.P.S. I promise to try very hard to NOT be like this tomorrow.

P.P.P.P.S. Maybe.

P.P.P.P.P.S. What I really need is some hot chocolate. But that's upstairs too. :(

For the mice

Julie thought that maybe glow in the dark cats would be good for mice. But according to this article, I think the mice are going to be just fine.

I was kind of gently reminded that I have been a bad blogger lately. Sorry. I guess NaBloPoMo wore me out.

I have been back to work. I still have some swelling in the evenings, but I'm not using the evil evil cryo cuff anymore. No thanks. I also am having a really weird pain that is very hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. OK - this surgery cannot avoid some amount of nerve damage to the front of the leg. So from right below my knee to my ankle I have numb spots. They are very superficial - it's just the skin that's numb....I can feel pressure. Well anyway, I get this shooting, burning pain that goes up and down the front of my leg. It's pretty bad. Have you ever gotten your hands or your feet REALLY cold? Like just-this-side-of-frostbite cold? And then when you start to warm back up it's unbearably painful? That's what this feels like. It seems to happen only at night. I don't know if it's because I'm in a physically different position (lying down or whatever) or because of the stress on the leg during the day. It's really not fun. Also, today was the last day of the crutches. I have been trying to hobble around the house for the past couple of nights. It's very scary. The whole leg is very weak because it hasn't been used. It's almost like I've forgotten how to walk - I can't remember how to make the motion....I feel like I look stupid too. *sigh*

Sorry - I didn't mean to go off on a long pout. It just seems very weird to me to not have any pain at all in either the area of the original injury or the hamstring (from where the new ligament was harvested). I get a little tiny bit sore in the middle of the knee....but not horrible pain like this nerve thing.

Ok - Jeff just brought me a mug of hot chocolate. I am a happy camper now. Leg schmeg. I have warm chocolate liquid and marshmallows. Woo hoo!!

So many kinds of wrong

Glow-in-the-dark cloned cats (not Kats).

What a horrible thing to do to living creatures. I'm not 100% against cloning - I think there could be real medical reasons to do it. But to make a designer glow-in-the-dark kitty????? No.

We're moving

Cougars. 'Nuff said.

(Ok, Deadwood is a couple hundred miles from here - but it's a SMALL STATE!)

Weekly Non-participant

I see a bunch of my blog friends have been doing something called Weekly Winners. They pick their favorite photos from the last week and post them. It's been neat looking at all the pictures. I go through cycles with my picture taking. Sometimes the camera is glued to my head for weeks on end and at other times I just can't seem to remember to take pictures. Somewhere in the middle is where I am now. I've only been taking pictures of "big" occasions - Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. Then it takes me forever to remember to get the pics off the camera. (Hey - part of that is due to the injury. All the camera software is on the PC which is downstairs. I've been blogging and doing almost everything from the laptop since the big fall. Furthermore, there are only so many good pictures that one can take from the couch - I've been sitting in this spot for a month and am completely sick of it and the view.) Anyway, I've really been enjoying all your photos and maybe will join the game.....sometime.

We're going to put up the tree today. That's picture worthy. I love having the Christmas tree up. It's a pain in the butt with the cats and world's tiniest living room, but it still looks so pretty. It will help the view from the couch immensely!

Noah and I were eating baby carrots yesterday and talking about what different animals eat. Here was his contribution:

"Blueberry dogs eat blueberries and they live in a blueberry world."

Maybe not exactly true, but it makes a wonderful mental image.

Four Months!!!

Four months smoke free is a very important marker for me. After being smoke-free for four months, I get to remove the smoker penalty from my health insurance. I am now saving an extra $40/month on top of the other savings from quitting. Yippee!!

Random

Got the staples out today. Didn't get a chance to save one for Noah. I did, however, get a set of pictures of the inside of my knee. I'm thinking about using the images for our holiday cards this year. They don't really look like anything. I found myself politely nodding at what the doctor was showing me just like you do when someone tries to point things out on an ultrasound picture. I thought about posting the pictures up here, but that seems really grisly.

So I did finish "The Time Traveler's Wife." It was pretty good. A keeper. One I'll likely read again. There are still some free will issues that bother me. I just don't think the wife had many options but to marry the guy. It borders on creepy that he seemed to kind of groom her to be his wife. It got me on a line of thought that could lead to crazy-ville. There seems to be a certain percentage of life that is governed purely by randomness. No matter how many plans you make or how careful you are or what you do, things will happen to you just because. Like....falling down the steps or whatever. How much of the rest of my life is changed because of what happened on those steps? What would be different right this instance if it had never happened? Or....what if Noah was a girl? Would something more fundamental than my floor being covered with Barbies rather than Hot Wheels happen? Or that horrible mall shooting on the news today. Things like that really drive me nuts. What if one of those people decided to go shopping yesterday instead of today? I really can't let myself go down these paths very far. I have to believe that the percentage of our lives that are ruled by chaos is so tiny that the chance of major changes is very small. Maybe that's being completely naive, but if life were HUGELY random, then what would ultimately be the point of planning anything?

There was one other part of the book that bothered me. One of the characters voices the opinion that adopting a child is "cheating" and that they must have a "real" child. The character who says this is otherwise an appealing character - it's not a "bad" character who says/does other "bad" things. I find that viewpoint to be really offensive. Certainly adoption isn't for everyone, but why paint it in such an unflattering light? That attitude makes it seem like the love that adoptive families feel for each other is also not "real" and that it's just a sad substitute for a "real" family. I would hope the author didn't intend to come across this way, but she did.