June 2014 - Random

I have the cutest sleeping cat.

I made a wedding dress out of cupcakes for my friend.

M testing out our new deck. 

Powder relaxing under the chair. 

The road alongside Lichen Lake.  

May 2014 - Random

I bought a super cute Coach purse.

I got a bulge in my tire.  The tire that was only 10 months old that had to be replaced.  Stupid pot holes.

I love this man because he loves to have fun and will climb into a sculpture just so I can take the picture.

The salmon and cream cheese wrapped in English cucumbers just looked pretty.  This is my fancy version of pickles wrapped in ham or pastrami and cream cheese. 

Pretty cemetery picture from my dad's headstone.  I love cemeteries and have always been fascinated by them.  I call them gardens of stone.  

March 2014 - Random

My mom's debut at The Nook.  Soooooo good.  

Powder and his proper pose

Please, go ahead and make yourself comfortable

M and his decision to join the St. Patrick's Day Parade.  You can do whatever you want when you're unemployed.

Stuck in rush hour traffic while black smoke billows across the freeway

Neighborhood Activity

It was just around 1 am, technically Sunday, November 17th when I was getting off the couch and heading up to bed.  As I was getting up, I saw police lights outside the house flashing through the curtains.  This happens quite a bit as we live on a busy street and cops fly down the street to wherever their call is but last weekend was different.

I tried listening to my county's sheriff department on my phone's app, but I couldn't find out what was going on.  I also tried researching online what happened but it looks like it might be too early to be published.

Both M and I looked outside through our living room window to find that that there was a car pulled over directly in front of our house along with many county sheriff's pulled behind it.

Here's what we saw through our dirty windows throughout the house....lots of lights, guns drawn, sheriff dogs barking, sheriffs yelling and finally two surrendering male and female, both minutes apart.  What happened to lead up to that point, I don't know but I'll update this post when I find out.  Finally, a tow truck came and picked up the car.  My adrenaline was running a little high at that point to go to bed!

Click on each picture to enlarge. 

Sheriffs with guns drawn behind the door of their cars

Second suspect kneeling while they handcuff her with guns still drawn towards the car

Bye-bye car

Fall

The season is turning from fall to winter and I'm not ready! I just want to hang on to late September/early October weather forever.

What have you been doing this fall?  As for me, my weekends have been spent cleaning, watching football and baking.  I associate food with cooler weather.  I love to start pulling out the slow cookers for meals and soups and comfort food and I enjoy getting up on weekends and making breakfast for M when we have no place to go.

I've made pumpkin bread, pumpkin banana bread and apple cinnamon bread this season already and I can't wait to make more.  I can't eat them all myself so my coworker's are the recipients of a lot of my baked goods as well as my mom.

Soon I'll be starting to think about Christmas cookies and what will be in the lineup for this year.  To assist in my baking this year, I bought myself a new gift this week.  Taa Daaaaa!

I've wanted a Kitchenaid stand mixer for years and I finally bought one.  I found it for a pretty good deal being on sale for $100 off the price and then having an additional 30% off plus a rebate.  It's the same color as the box shows called Liquid Graphite.  If I didn't care about what it looked like in my kitchen, I would have chosen one of these colors!

My mom decided to give me a Christmas present early because of my new purchase.  She bought me these adorable mini loaf pans.  I love them!

I put apples in them for reference

Do you have a Kitchenaid mixer?  Do you love it?  Do you use it a lot?

What hobbies are you doing this fall that you enjoy?

Growl...er

The June/July issue of The Growler, a beer dabbler publication, was supposed to have a picture of mine featured in it but due to space constraints of the magazine, I was bumped.  

My photo, is however, on the Growler's website.  

Check it out, peeps!

Check me out, I'm famous!

It's always exciting getting these types of requests.  This is my second time my photo has been used commercially.  Pretty fun for an amateur like myself!

I'm Lazy

I'm lazy.  I'm tired.  I'm defeated.  I just get those feelings where the last thing I want to do is blog.  I'm in that mode right now.  I'm forcing myself to get out of it this weekend.  I feel the tiniest bit better just writing this. I'll post again soon.  Until then.  

I'm an Adult

When you're a full-blown adult, you get excited over household purchases, like a new vacuum.  I was pretty excited to get my new vacuum a couple of Tuesdays ago.  My favorite part is ordering it online from Amazon, not paying tax or shipping and having it come right to your door.  Oh, and cashing out some credit card points on Amazon so I got over $50 knocked off the price.  I opened it up and started vacuuming right away.  Being that I vacuumed a handful of days earlier, I didn't think I would suck up as much as I did but I knew my old vacuum just didn't work as well anymore.

Does anyone have this vacuum?  So far, so good.  What kind of vacuum do you have?  Do you get excited about household items like this too?

New Piece

The iron is out.

The cat is in.  MEOW!

http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/en_us/

Have you played Monopoly lately?  Me neither but I heard recently and it doesn't come with money anymore?  It uses debit cards now?!  I loved the money part.  I've never finished an entire game either.  Once houses and hotels got into the mix, we had already been playing for what seemed like 4 hours and we'd quit.  I'm not even sure how the houses and hotels work.

Read My Lips

Some of you may have seen Bad Lip Reading before.  I watched a few of them during the presidential debates but this one is for the NFL and it's so funny.  So many of these make me laugh but Adrian Peterson is the best.  Happy Friday!

No Real Plans

Saturday, November 17th started with a visitation/funeral as my great uncle, my grandpa's brother, passed away earlier that week from bladder cancer.  Rest in Peace, Joe. I thought I would be ok in that setting but realized very quickly that I wasn't.  Everything was still too fresh.  We only stayed for the visitation and then since the cemetery was very close, we visited my dad too as that was M's first time seeing the headstone.

I've blogged out of order in error talking about the Cherry Jones Tailgate Party and Fuzzer but this day was the beautiful weather day that came right before the chilly day for the tailgate party.

We headed to Grand Avenue and went to Golden Fig and then to the Happy Gnome for a beer and a quick appetizer.  Upon a heavy suggestion from the girl at the Golden Fig, I bought a coconut macaroon featured there that came from Salty Tart Bakery.  She said that Andrew Zimmern raved about this treat and it's one of his favorites.  After eating it later that night, holy wow.  Yes, it was a fantastic treat and I wish I had a box of them.  There is just something so delicious about the texture.

I just love the kind of Saturdays when there is nothing planned and you can do whatever you want.  I've definitely learned to have more of those in my life.

Week in Pictures

I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from this past week.


Last week I went out with a coworker one last time before his last day as he accepted a new job.  Here's the beautiful lunch I had.  If you get a chance, go to Good Earth and get the Planet Burger...it's so good!

I bought this cupcake from Whole Foods for my nephew Hunter for his birthday.  Isn't it cute?  They had both hot dogs and hamburger cupcakes to choose from.  And only $2.99.

I've discovered that I like Oktoberfest beers.  I didn't realize that Oktoberfest is a type of beer, which only comes out at this time of year.  M picked up 5 different types of Oktoberfest beers for me and so far, this one from Left Hand Brewing is the only one I've tried so far but I like it.

This photo is from the car wash on Monday.  We are in M's car and the Vikings sticker looked neat against the multicolored soap.

Finally, a picture of my baby Powder on Monday.  He's found a new chair and cushion and he's just...cute and fuzzy. 

Creepy TV

I've been meaning to share this story with you but I keep forgetting to write it.  I finally remembered while I was at the computer so here it goes:

Michael and I were watching the Olympics a few weeks back on a late Friday night and all of a sudden, a spider crawls across the TV screen.  I ask M to go get it and he grabs a piece of toilet paper from the bathroom and comes back and hits the screen but it just stays there and then starts crawling again.  He tries to get it again and then realizes...the spider is on the inside of the TV screen.  This just completely grosses me out but there's nothing we can do to get him.  Instead we continue to watch TV and he comes out and crawls across the screen a few more times throughout the night.  It's gross to see an illuminated spider which seems big crawling across the 50" TV.  

Fast forward to just this past weekend and watching TV again and now there are spider webs that are across the TV in the upper part of the screen on the inside.  There's no way to clean them out I would assume without taking apart the TV.  

Does anyone want to buy us a new TV?  I'll give you this one for free.  

Out With the Old...

I sold my kitchen table on Craiglist.  

What do you think of the new one?

Definitely more contemporary and smaller but not as high quality as the solid country/farm table I had for over 10 years.  It was time for a change.

A Hole in the Wall

There's a bar that is about a couple of miles from my house that, well, has a hole in the wall now...and it was caught on tape.  This video is amazing and what's even more amazing is that no one died.

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2012/05/pickup_crashes_through_gordies_bar_in_little_canada_pins_patrons_between_bar_and_truck_photos.php

Everyone Can Have One!

No more need to work out.  Developing your abs was never so easy.

Blog Love

I'm feeling a little....insecure.  I haven't had many blog comments for a while and I need my blog self-esteem boosted a bit.  I have a couple of people that are habitual commenters, which I super duper appreciate but do me a quick favor and leave a comment telling me hello so I know you're still reading.  Come out, lurkers.

Thank you!

Tattoos on the Radio

Over a year before I started blogging here, I blogged a little on MySpace.  I was looking through some of my old blogs and came across this one that I had forgotten about and thought it'd be fun to share.  This was originally written on April 18, 2007. Sorry for the format.

I woke up this morning from the phone ringing. It was Michael.  His first words were, "are you listening to KDWB"?  I wasn't because I was in bed still.  He told me that they were talking about me on the radio.  I was like, what???  Me, as in me...Dana.  Yep, they were! 

Dave Ryan and the rest of the morning show had someone in the studio who was there to read tattoos of people who had chinese/japanese kanji characters.  Apparently, 70% of these types of tattoos turn out to be a different meaning than what the tattooed person believed it to say or mean.  Unbeknownst to me, Michael took the initiative to submit a picture of my tattoos to have her decipher what my tramp stamp really means. 

They picked my picture (with a couple of comments about my butt crack) and it turns out that my tattoos pretty much in fact do say what I believed for them to say.  I picked my tattoos based on how I live my life, how I achieve to life my life throughout or what I constantly strive to become, with the center focus as me being a woman.  I did a lot of research before I got them so I hoped they were correct! It seems like it was hard to interpret word for word as it is with any conversion of languages but here is what she said about my tattoos. 

My interpretation of what my tattoos are:

1st-ambition

2nd-persistence/strength

3rd-female/woman

4th-loyalty

5th-discipline/self-discipline

Her interpretation of my tattoos:

1st-determination (same as ambition to me)

2nd-I can't exactly remember what she said but it was close

3rd-female

4th-passion for friends (same as loyalty to me in a small sense)

5th-she had a hard time interpreting this one and she really couldn't put it into words but she did say it was kinda like when the monks study.  I am going to interpret that as discipline/self-discipline. 

It could have been worse!  She could have said that my tats meant nothing or something obscure like elephant or something. 

Overall, I thought it was cute and funny that Michael did that.  His sister contacted him and asked if that was him that did that and I had a call on my way to work from someone who also heard it and knew that was me they were describing so it was fun that other people besides Michael and I that heard it.  Here is a picture of my tattoo close to the one that Michael sent in with a little hint of my coin slot. 

I'm Caught Up! (Almost)

If you recall from one of my posts recently, I had something like 130 posts to read in my Google Reader.  I'm happy to say that I'm (almost) all caught up!  Smart Ass Sara, you're the only one left I haven't read up on.  You have 16 posts I haven't read and that number was a little intimidating so I needed to save you for last.  Expect comments soon!  As for the others, you might have received an influx of comments or you may not have but either way, I'm up to date on all y'all. 

Every so often I just need a break from writing and reading.  And sometimes I get so involved with my own blog that I forget about all the other blogs out there.

I follow roughly 50 blogs but comment on only a handful of them.  I spend at least 1 hour a day but depending on the day, sometimes it's 3-4 hours.  Bloggers, how many blogs do you follow and how much time do you estimate being on the computer with something blog-related per day, whether it's your own or someone else's? 

100 Miles

Can you imagine running 100 miles?  Not in a period of days, weeks, months, years or even a lifetime, but in a period of 24 hours?  That's exactly what a friend of M's coworker did.  The Burning River 100 mile endurance run takes place in Ohio and it's for the elite runner.  This year there were roughly 270 runners of which about 55% of them finished the race.

Here are some statistics about M's coworker's friend and his journey:

• It took him 24:03:15 to run 102.1 miles
• He used three different pairs of shoes and two different pairs of socks throughout the race
• He estimates he burned 12,000-13,000 calories or about 500-550 calories per hour throughout the race
• In order to offset part of the calories burned and to stay at least minimally hydrated, here is what he ate and drank throughout the race: 

Ice water -- about 520 oz or 4 gallons
Coke -- about 20 oz
Ginger Ale -- about 20 oz
Gatorade (lemon-lime) -- 10 oz
Turkey and cheese sandwiches -- 3.5
Grilled cheese sandwiches -- 1/2 (tasted really good, but couldn't eat much at that point)
Watermelon -- hard to estimate, probably about 2 pounds
Hard-boiled eggs (whites only) -- 5 or 6
Pretzels (small) -- several dozen
Ramen noodles with broth -- 3 cups
Clif Shot Bloks (Black Cherry w/caffeine) -- about 16 servings of 3 bloks each (too many -- led to some stomach issues late in the race. Good lesson for next time -- this should not be a primary fuel source. Need a portable alternative).
Succeed S-Caps (electrolyte pills) – 15

Wow, isn't this amazing on so many levels?