Category: At Home

Working on a new Home Tour!

Today I’m cleaning cleaning cleaning in preparation for a slew of new photos on my Home Tour page. If I can get my paws on somebody’s fancy-pants camera. That’s what I want for Christmas. A DSLR to call my very own! Time to start researching models and saving my pennies.

Anyway, to get this post back on track, I’m hoping to today (or sometime this week) take about a million slammin’ photos of my place for a much more extensive home tour. And who knows, maybe I’ll submit them to an Apartment Therapy tour. Dare to dream…

I’ll be back with another post this afternoon, having to do with what I made for dinner last night! Yummy!

Perfect Summer Meal

“Perfect” is a very lofty claim to make about a meal. However, I’ll defend it by saying that this meal meets all of my qualifications for the “perfect” summer meal:

  1. Takes place indoors. That is, in air conditioning.
  2. Minimum effort required by yours truly.
  3. Delicious and cheap, thereby scoring excellently on the flavor/dollar ratio.

Clockwise from the top left, we have fruit salad (apples, bananas, raspberries and peaches), American cheese (wa wa), onion rolls, pulled beef, a veggie tray, and plates with festive napkins (fourth of July, you know).

The fruit and veggies play the healthy card, aside from being cold, crisp, fresh and delicious. The veggie tray and the pulled beef play the bargain card because both were snagged for half price (“use by” date approaching). The onion rolls pull the awesome card because they are delicious and possibly my favorite bread product of the moment. And as far as ease, the pulled beef was pre-cooked and everything. I just had to heat it up in the oven. All I really did for this meal was to cut up the fruit for the delicious fruit salad. Easy peasy!

Did you do anything delicious for the holiday weekend? I love grilling out–but sometimes you gotta have a great summer meal inside with the AC on like we did.

First World Problems

The kitchen sink is leaky. The tub needs new grout. The bathroom sink is barely a trickle. It’s hard to sleep in the hot bedroom. The floorboards in the dining room are warped. All the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen are dingy, and several of the drawers are hard to pull out and push in. The windows let the outdoor elements make their way into our bedroom. Last week I killed the biggest roach I’ve ever seen.

Yes, everyone has a gripe list about the place they live in, and being a renter it’s not easy to take the initiative to fix these things, although most if not all of them are pretty easy to wrap your mind around.

  • I was just pondering, well, some people have dirt floors in their homes or no home at all.
  • Our AC isn’t great but it’s below 85 in here and it’s 105 outside.
  • The windows may let the wind in but they keep the rain out.
  • I should be thankful to have clean running water at all (this week I had Doug test the water at work for heavy metals).
  • I should be glad I don’t have to turn on a propane tank to provide my bathroom with hot water (my host family did this in Morocco).
  • I may have killed a cockroach, but I don’t have to fear for mosquitoes or flies that transport malaria or yellow fever.
  • The drawers wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have any food or medicine to store in them. I’m thankful I have both.

Think about your gripe list and how it may pale in comparison to the extreme alterative, and take a moment to count your blessings.

Have a good weekend, everybody!