Dork Jeans

Okay, really it should be Dork Genes, but everytime I say it, it sounds like I'm referring to pants constructed of blue denim. So I'll call them Dork Jeans.

My mom called me the other day to ask if I wanted to know where I got my Dork Jeans from. Well, I pretty much knew the answer to that (they're inherited), but I'm always up for a good DJ story! No, I'm not going to rat out my mom - she can start her own blog and tell her own tales of dorkiness. However, I can certainly tell all the dorky accounts of my own doing, should I be so inclined.

What cracks me up is that I'm really not that ditzy, dorky, etc. I'm a bit silly, for sure, but I still come up with some doozies.

DJ #1: A few years back, hubby installed a nice, new (FREE!) microwave-range hood above the stove. It's quite wide, but not as deep from front to back as the old (really old) microwave we'd had since 1987. I have a couple of those nifty little Micro-Cookers from P*mpered Ch*f that I just love. I put it on the center of the turntable in the microwave and realized that the handle hit the front or back of the microwave. I promptly complained mentioned to hubby that I would no longer be able to use this handy little product. He gave me a very funny look, walked over and moved the cooker so it was off-center on the turntable, and gave me a look of voilà! Good grief, guess I put the Dork Jeans on that morning!

DJ #2: I recently went to Mom's house, along with my cool new Super Scr*bble Deluxe to have some lexeme fun. The board folds in half (it's hard plastic) and when I opened it, her table cloth was caught in the middle. However, instead of saying that the board had pinched her table cloth, I said that I had pinched her clothes pin! Now where did that come from?!? Like I can't tell a clothes pin from a table cloth. Yep, wearing those Dork Jeans again!

As more of these stories creep back into my conscious brain, I'll share them (or not, when they're just downright TOO embarrassing). One good thing about having Dork Jeans is that I'm almost never at a loss for a good laugh, and it's usually at my own expense. Paid in full by my ancestral Dork Genes.

Blue

All my Friday morning pictures had a blue tinge to them and I wasn't sure why that was happening. I thought, maybe it had something to do with the morning light and the snow and . . . oh, I don't know, maybe the atmosphere. All right, it's not at all scientific - I was just making up stuff.

Saturday, I was shooting a few mountain pix and noticed that they also had a blue tinge. It was slow in coming, but the proverbial bulb finally lit up. MAYBE I had the lighting on my camera set incorrectly.

Sure enough - it was set for fluorescent lighting. The dork jeans strike again.

Gee, amazing what the correct setting will do for you!

PSA - Postage Increase

Apparently, I've been living under a rock. I think that sometime back I heard that postage rates would increase this spring, but figured I'd hear more about it later. I was just over at the US Postal Service site and discovered that first class postage on a 1-ounce or lighter envelope went up to 42 cents.


On May 12th.


A full THIRTEEN days ago.


Where was I?!?

While not a lot, I have mailed some things in that time. Will they be delivered? Will I get them back weeks later for lack of postage? Will our landlords think we're shirking our rent payment duties? Good grief.

Maybe the one other person on the planet who was unaware of this will read my blog and feel better informed. Maybe that person won't make the mistake of sending mail with the insufficient postage (hope they don't start charging NSF fees for postage blunders). If not, the rest of you can just chuckle as you witness yet another episode in the Dork Jeans series. Ha! Ha!

The House, Part 4

"I'll finish this up with Part 4. Sooner than Part 3 arrived. Really."

Did I actually say that?!? Like back in December of last year?! Hold on a moment while I get some salt & pepper for these words I'm about to eat.

I'll just blame it on colander brain. Or a lack of sleep. Or dork jeans. For anyone who wasn't around last year when I began this story, here's your chance to catch up. Go here for Part 1, here for Part 2, and here for Part 3.

After all the craziness of the previous nine years or so, we just went on with life, living somewhat contentedly (at least some of the time) in our little house. We switched rooms around, painted them, and brought all that stuff out of storage along the way.

Every year, hubby had to snake out the toilet plumbing two or three times. The pipes were clay/tile and ran somewhere underground. With numerous years of drought, the tree roots hunted for any possible moisture - including our plumbing. Not a great option when you only have one bathroom, but we managed (sometimes with the help of our sweet neighbors who let us use theirs).

Then came 2005. That spring, the back corner of our house dropped. It didn't just shift like it had in the past. Hubby also mentioned that the house was sitting down onto the duct work. While it wasn't a visible problem, how long would it be until the house dropped far enough to break the plumbing? Then we'd be responsible for raw sewage underground. To top it off, one of the main beams under the house was deteriorating and sagging. Unfortunately, the gas line coming into the house went through the center of the beam and it was pulling the gas meter in toward the house.

We called our utility company to check the line and ask if it was a danger, but since it was on our side of the meter, it wasn't something they would check or for which they'd have any responsibility.

So the List of Risks looked something like this:

• Possible broken gas line. Blow up the neighborhood. Ourselves. Friends.


• Crushed plumbing lines and raw sewage in the ground


• With the house dropping, even more significant damage to it

To top it all off, we had exactly no funds to fix any of these problems. We felt that just living there was a risk we didn't want for our family. With what we owed on the house (we'd refinanced a few times over the years) and the condition, we knew we couldn't sell it and get any profit. But we decided that we were willing to walk away with nothing, start over, and go rent somewhere. We tried talking to our mortgage company to see if we could work something out, but that was a no-go. We contacted anyone and everyone we could think of to try and sell the house, like contractors, people who buy old houses and fix them. Again, no such luck.

Conditions just got worse and we felt that we were keeping our family and neighbors at risk. So we reached a decision. Not one we really wanted to make, but we didn't see any other option. We filed bankruptcy so we could dump the house. Not because we couldn't pay our bills. Not because we were over-extended. But because we had to get rid of the house. If we just bailed on the mortgage without bankruptcy, they could come after us for the difference in our loan and what it could be auctioned for. We could well have ended up owing a bunch of money on the house that we couldn't have afforded. We didn't know what else to do.

So we filed in early September, found another house to rent, and moved out. Because this story has gone on so long, I'll wrap it up here. God did a lot of amazing things through the entire process, but that's not to say it was all easy. But it ended up being a wonderful blessing. We spent three years at that house and then bought our current house a year ago.

There you go. The somewhat long, yet condensed version of that crazy old house we had. We've come a long way.

Kudos to anyone who actually read this entire saga. Sorry there are no photos. I didn't have a digital camera in those days. Maybe I'll go take a couple just because.

Cooking in Bulk, part 1

They're everywhere - those cookbooks that tell you how to cook many meals at once, storing them in the freezer, so you're ready to roll when it comes time to serve up a delicious and nutritious dinner. The super-organized part of me loves this idea. The lazy, slacker part of me thinks she'd rather do something else with that prep time.

But lately, courtesy of my dork jeans, I've begun to perform Inadvertent Bulk Cooking (IBC).

It was a cold and snowy night. A soup night, if ever there was one. I decided to prepare a big pot of Chicken Enchilada Soup, a family favorite around here.

While I do make a lot of meals from scratch, this is one where I use a Homemade Gourmet mix. We can have piping hot, yummy soup in about half an hour. For those of you who aren't familiar with HG, some of their products come in a "pantry staple." That means a container with enough of the mix to make multiple batches. It's economic and efficient. We like that in our food . . . or food mixes.

So . . . back to the soup. I had already poured the tomatoes, milk, and water into a big pot. It was time to add the soup mix. I opened my pantry staple package. Seven tablespoons were to go into the pot; the remainder in the storage container. Small problem. I was talking on the phone (with my handy-dandy headset), and inadvertently dumped the ENTIRE PACKAGE of soup mix into the pan!!!!

Side note: there's enough mix in one of those pantry staples to make SEVEN BATCHES OF SOUP! Not just a "small, might-feed-four-people" batch of soup. A nice, big batch of soup.

Since scooping dry soup mix back out of a pot of tomatoes, milk, and water wasn't viable - particularly because I had NO idea how I'd be able to tell if I had left just 7 tablespoons in there . . . and it was mostly wet at this point anyway . . . I decided I'd have to fix ALL SEVEN BATCHES!

Only problem? I didn't have a pot big enough to handle seven large batches of soup (hmm, the bathtub might've been accomodating). Nor enough tomatoes . . . or milk. I did have enough water. Small consolation.

Okay, I did some quick calculations and decided to make condensed soup. With the calculator in the other room, the math didn't work so well with sevens, so I changed it to six batches. I added some more water, tomatoes and/or tomato sauce and/or tomato paste, and brought it to a boil. Then I carefully measured it out into six containers. One went back into the potn, along with some cooked chicken to become our tasty dinner. The other five cooled, were poured into freezer bags, and frozen - nice & flat so they store well. I also wrote appropriate instructions for what else would be added at a future cooking time. You know, in the off-chance that I couldn't remember the specific modified recipe information.

There we go - five batches of condensed chicken enchilada soup in my freezer, ready and willing to go, when called upon for a cold and snowy night's dinner. IBC meal #1.