Simply Monday #3

Well, I'm back - did you miss me? I missed all your lovely comments to keep me motivated. But it was a terribly busy week - and just a forewarning, the next couple of weeks will probably be just as busy. "They" shortened the length of the semesters here at BYU-Hawaii from 16 weeks to 12 weeks (this is the first short semester) and so we're at this weird, it's mid-semester, but there's only 5 weeks left, so that's end of the semester.... I'm just not feeling it at the moment, but it's all good. Hopefully I can plan ahead a little more.... wait - now I'm just getting ahead of myself! We'll come back to that thought in a minute (or 2 or 3).

First up - update on the microwave area. I've had 2 week to work on it, and I think it's actually worse right now. See for yourself.

I just want you to know that I did nothing to this area before the pic, obviously, or I would have moved that laundry basket full of - DIRTY DISHES! Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone! OK, so I really don't care that you all know. I was trying to clean up in a hurry last week (or was it the week before....) and I happened to have an empty laundry basket around (weird, I know) and so I used that to clear the clutter and just haven't managed to get around to finishing them off. I take things out of it as I need them. Maybe I should just get rid of all of it..... like the whole laundry thing. There's a thought. But I do want to point out that I finally took the Christmas cards down off the wall - OK, so I did that just today, but still, it's done.

Here is what I DID get done this week. I got the kids room totally clean - I fixed the dresser rails (we've had the parts for a while) so the kids can actually open and close them - nice. And I did weed out a little more laundry. Their room is so hard to take a picture of but I think you get the idea - the fact that you can see the floor is enough to make me shout for joy.

Behind the door there along the wall is a plastic shelf that holds the toys and the dresser that is now functional. They take up all the room from the door to the wall.

If you turn immediately left in the door this is what you see. And then just to the left of the big wheel is the cupboard under the stairs. Not too bad for a Monday night - and they've been inside most of the day since it's been cold (ok, like 60 degrees, but that's cold when you live in paradise) and rainy.

As for my future endeavours, well this week I'm hoping to work on organizing my school work. I'm always saving it for the last minute. And while I work really well under pressure, I'm just getting too old, and have too many responsibilities during the day-time to pull all-nighters. I did one last week and it just about killed me. Luckily Cameron took pity on me and let me crash right after I turned my assignment (and forced myself to stay at least in a delirious stupor during class - you should see my notes!) and let me sleep for a good 5 hours. He woke me up so that I would be able to get back to sleep that night, because I had to wake up the next morning for jogging class to make up the 5k I missed. OK, totally getting off track here. I'm going to try to work on the big projects (I have at least 3 more I can think of...) as I go so that I don't have to go through that again. Though I'll probably still have to stay up late the night before it's due, but I can handle that. Along those organizing lines - Cameron and I just upgraded our cell phones. We got a fabulous deal and both chose to get a PDA-type dealio. I'm sure I'll never use all the features on it, and it will take a little adjusting to get used to it in my pocket, but I think it will really help me to keep everything in one place. And the ones that we are getting run off a windows OS so it's easy to sync up with the computer. I'm excited. Though we have to be patient, it will be a couple of weeks until they get in.

Alright, I should go - oh wait, one last pic. Last week (or was it the week before?) Abby and I made soft pretzels for a school project she had to do on her ancestors. It was fun, though not as much as when the family is all together and grandpa does all the work! BUT I decided to skip the controversial lye step - my bro-in-law should appreciate this. The reasons are 3 fold: 1. I've always thought it was a little weird, and dangerous, to be dipping food in a caustic substance, no matter how diluted (but them I do drink Coke occasionally....hm), 2. I really didn't want to have to do this laborious step, I had enough on my plate for that day, and 3. my hardware store doesn't carry lye, so.... Well, I did a little research online and found that most pretzel recipes now-a-days (we were working off the old family recipe here) call for a bath in boiling water or baking soda and water - and some didn't even do the boiling part - so that's what I chose. And it worked great, as you can see. I think they look exactly like my dad's and I got to skip the whole bees wax on the pan thing - which I didn't really want to get into anyway (see reason #2 above).

(Sorry, I forgot to take the pic before I packed them all up.) I had some rising issues - mostly me being impatient and not wanting to have to roll out all the pretzels myself and then bake them in the middle of the night. But they still tasted so good. Made me wish I had a gallon of good apple cider to go with them. And though we rolled as many as we needed for Abby's class (I think we made 32 all together), we still had a little less than half the dough left, so I stuck it in the fridge and a couple days later used it for pizza dough. It was yummy that way, too.

OK, now I have to get the kiddos to bed and then re-read this to make sure it sounds alright and that I didn't use any horrible grammar, spell check it, you know the drill.....