I’ve decided to shake things up in the old daybook. I feel like my entries here have gotten stale and predictable. I love the concept of the daybook but sometimes I feel like I’m doing these entries out of habit and getting very little out of them. I don’t want them to become an excuse for lazy posting, taking the place of better written content – I want them to BE well written, but also organized and I want the post to become a more realistic “snapshot” of my days as I’m seeing and living them. To begin with, I’m going to start including more pictures just to make the posts more visually appealing to me at least. I hope you enjoy them more also.

Today…

If you looked outside my window: you’d see trees painted in a delicate coating of white snow. I noticed as we were driving through town yesterday how absolutely breath taking they all looked. In New England our snow was heavier and wetter – we frequently had icicle covered branches or a huge pile of wet, heavy snow on a pine tree or the like, but this? We didn’t have much of this. I’ll have to try to take a picture in the coming days to better illustrate it. One big plus to the very, very cold days is the lighter, friendlier snow we get and a lot less slush.

I am hearing: the usual mixture of jingles from my kids’ toys, one of MM’s latest “favorite shows” on tv, and of course the sounds of the kids themselves as you know they are never really quiet.

I am thinking: that while we’ve done a great job of cutting our expenses lately, thanks to our cash budget, that we can do better. I am also thinking that we ran out of soy milk this morning and we are almost out of bread and milk also. I wish I’d just picked them up this weekend so I wouldn’t have to go out during the week. I don’t like buying some groceries too soon because they take up valuable fridge space and normally, I’d just ask Dan to pick up said food staples on his way home at night but … he’s out of town. ::sniff:: And I don’t feel like waiting until Thursday to drink milk again so I’ll probably have to venture outdoors.

I am reading: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See – I think the word “finally” should come next as it’s taken me way, way too long to read this book and not for any good reason. It’s been on my bookshelf for a very long time and I’ve almost read it about a dozen times at least in the past year. And it’s really, really good. I think it took a couple chapters to really pick up speed for me but now I have a hard time putting it down at night, hence the circles under my eyes.

Last night I enjoyed: the homemade pizza Dan made. I always love when he makes me pizza and a few of you have asked for pictures. I’m not sure if these really do the deliciousness justice, and it was an exceptionally no frills / kid friendly pizza for us, just cheese and tomatoes really, but here goes nothing…

Here’s a picture of the pizza before he put it in the oven. Lately we’ve been cooking all our pizzas in this cast iron skillet. It’s just the right size for our little family and we love the big puffy deep dish style crust we get. And after cooking…

I have been meaning to tell you about: bunco night! Last week, I went to my first “adult” meetup with the little meetup group I joined awhile back. That’s right, I got dressed, went out and socialized. Despite some reservations about how she’d behave, I took BB with me since she’s pretty attached to me as her main source of food. Of course I didn’t have to feed her the entire time we were there, but you know if I’d left her at home all hell probably would have broken loose and let me tell you guys, she was the perfect baby. She cooed at everyone who spoke to her, had no reservations about being passed around and barely made a fuss the whole time we were there.

Meanwhile I got to meet new people, play a fun new game and spend a few hours not being the completely exhausted mother of two who never goes anywhere. It was heavenly and I think I even made a couple friends! This was my first time playing bunco and for anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s a “parlor game” played in groups with three dice. The game varies depending on the house rules of where you play but the general gist (where I played) was that you sit in groups of four – so our twenty ladies made up five tables. Your goal is to roll a certain number (1-6) depending on the round and each team earns a point when that number is rolled (if you roll two 1’s on a 1 round then you get two points, and so on). Once a team at the designated head table has 21 points, the round is over and (in our group) the teams who won moved on to the next table. The next round you would roll for 2’s…

It sounds a little complicated but it’s actually very easy to play. It is perfect for large groups and a really easy way to meet everyone at a big event because by the end of the night you are likely to sit at the table with everyone. There were roughly twenty women there, several of us new to the group and now I feel like I had a chance to chat with everyone there. I cannot wait to play again next month.

In the kitchen: I’ll be taking it easy while Dan is gone with dishes that are quick to throw together and three year old approved. When he gets back we’ll celebrate with one of our favorite dishes and then try something new on Friday.

• Monday: spaghetti with marinara sauce and texas toast
• Tuesday: mac and cheese (blue box)
• Wednesday: waffles
• Thursday: eggplant parmesan
• Friday: Japanese Style Deep Fried Shrimp with Couscous and Mixed Veggies

Noteworthy et cetera: I know some of you might be wondering about the house we went to look at this weekend. It caught my eye last week because the price seemed awfully low and while my gut instinct told me it seemed too inexpensive (i.e. something had to be wrong with it) the pictures did it extraordinary justice and my curiosity begged me to look into it further. Well, my gut instinct was right, the house needed a lot of work and besides that it was small, on a busy street and had a very short driveway on a steep hill.

It simply had way too many things about it that I did not like and only a few kind of silly things about it that I did like (like the front door… seriously, it was a cute door but not enough to sell a house). We did like the real estate agent that we met and we plan to keep in touch with him but for now we are planning to continue waiting and saving so that we can get the kind of house we really want when we can sensibly afford it instead of throwing caution to the wind for a cheap deal. Smart, right?

We’re going to keep “window shopping” and seriously consider buying next year, depending on how much we’ve managed to save after a year of hopefully frugal living thanks to our “cash only” envelope system which I think is working pretty well so far. Okay, I’ll leave you guys with a cute picture of the baby as a bonus shot for your patience reading what turned out to be a pretty wordy entry.