Well hello and happy Tuesday. Not sure I’m thrilled to be charging into another insanely busy work week, but what can you do? This weekend flew by with so much going on and I have an excuse for my absence over the last few days – I reloaded Windows on my new laptop. Love Dell, but my laptop came with tons of pre-installed software running in the background that I just don’t need or want like Dell’s data backup service, support software, McAfee, trial version of Office, etc. I guess I’m an anal geek because if I get a smoking new laptop, I want clean performance! So I wiped the drive and did a clean install of Windows 7 and have been restoring and configuring it for the last day. Now I have tons of reading catchup from my PC being down, my Google Reader is pretty ugly. Plus there has been a lot going on this week with my and hubby’s crazy work loads.
Saturday a quick trip to my sister’s house to deliver and set up my old laptop for her turned into long family dinner since my dad also stopped by and my mom decided to come with me. I had to raid my fridge and garden to throw a couple of dishes together – a monster salad with guacamole dressing and mint watermelon dessert salad.
But we ended up having a huge veggie feast since my dad brought squashes from his garden too, we stuffed ourselves on grilled yellow squash and zucchini, steamed spaghetti squash, my salad, a cold veggie tray and my watermelon dessert – a surprisingly high veggie dinner for our family gatherings, maybe I’m starting to rub off on them. There was also steak which I avoided and surprisingly a lot of that left over considering my dad is a pretty big carnivore. It was a great evening even though I ended up spending a lot of it chasing spyware on my sister’s other computer.
And there were plenty of salad leftovers for my lunch the next day.
Which I added sauerkraut, hemp seeds and nutritional yeast to – yum.
My dad also loaded me with more spaghetti squashes from his garden.
He said the center one is green because the plant is located next to a zucchini plant and the bee probably pollinated the wrong flower. Sweet, wonder if it’ll taste like a squash hybrid.
I did have a bit of road drama while getting to her house. While exiting I-5, someone dumped a bunch of fire wood on the off-ramp which the car in front of my didn’t see until the last second, nearly swerved off the ramp and still hit a bunch of the wood sending it flying in different directions for me. Rather than swerve, I just stayed on the ramp and ended up hitting a piece pretty hard on the front driver’s wheel. I noticed a slight shimmy in that wheel afterward and took it to a tire place Sunday to check out the tires, alignment, etc. Luckily all was okay, but ended up getting an $80 new engine belt because the original 9-year-old one was starting to crack.
I absolutely hate taking my car in for any type of service, years of bad experiences have made me very paranoid to have anyone touch it. More times than not, something else has been screwed up on my car when I take it in for anything. One dealer didn’t reconnect the O2 sensor during an oil change causing the check engine light to come on a week later, another didn’t connect an air hose in tightly enough after an oil change causing the check engine light to come a day later and another trip back to fix. When I had my last car appraised at a dealership for possible trade in that didn’t happen, they didn’t tighten all the lug nuts back on wheels before putting the wheel covers back on, so I was driving around with them rattling around inside my wheels for a few days before we figured out what the noises were and fixed it. I hate to think how disastrous that could have been. When I had new tires and a battery replaced, the tire place didn’t replace the battery and still charged me for it. More hours of my time proving what had happened and waiting for them to correct it. Another tire place put the wrong sized wheels on my last car causing them to grind into the break making a gawd awful noise when I started driving out of the parking lot, you’d think they’d notice these things if they’d actually drove the car to test the work?!? I paid through my nose to have an oil leak repaired on my last out-of-warranty car by the dealership and a few weeks later I noticed more oil leaks. The dealer, even though guaranteeing the repair, wouldn’t fix because they were “separate issues” that would cost more to repair. Ugh, the list could go on and on and most of these incidents have happened at different dealerships, tire places and repair shops. Currently I have hubby do my oil changes and try to take it in for service as little as possible.
Anyway, I’ll be driving my car paranoid this week looking for any new problems and am already preparing myself to have to run it back if any new issue pops up. But all my bad car repair experiences have given me drive to do my own job well.
While I was at Target this weekend, I found Larabars in the energy bar section of the pharmacy.
I snatched a box up for quick breakfasts for hubby and, being a peanut butter fan, he’s happy with this flavor. I’m happy with the simple list of two ingredients.
Sunday my mom went on an all day road trip with my sister leaving her chihuahua with me for the day.
Luckily he gets along great with mine, but they’re very competitive for attention when they’re together, following me all over the house trying to climb my ankles and seeing who can jump into my lap as soon as I sit down. When they’re not climbing my ankles, they’re usually playing and chasing each other sliding all over our laminate floors.
I am a huge watermelon fan, nothing says summer to me more than tons of it. I usually buy two at a time because I go through so much. But I haven’t been very successful at growing it – last year it got so hot that the ones in my garden burst before maturing and this year the crop was squashed out by a tomato plant that took over the planter box. But, a few weeks ago I noticed a weed growing in the hard clay dirt next to one of my planter beds and realized it was a watermelon vine just before yanking it out of the ground. I guess a seed must have landed there from the compost bin and I decided to leave it and see how far it gets.
Currently it has 4 little watermelons on it and getting larger everyday with new vines running all around the planter beds. These cuties might have a chance since it’s nowhere near as hot as last year, I’m keeping my fingers crossed even though I’m not sure what variety they are.
Yesterday was sort of a crazy lunch of leftovers with my mom.
We finished off more left over salad, a steamed artichoke, fresh guacamole and cucumber sticks – very filling! And I felt very energized for the second half of my work day after this, great for the multitasking madness that seems to be a trend for this week!
Keeping with the manic theme for this week, my iPod decided to lock up while driving to work this morning limiting my listening options to a generic morning show on terrestrial radio. The hot topic was more states issuing handicap parking permits to the obese. The bit I listened to was pretty weak because the female host didn’t have the guts to say what she really felt about it and was trying to skirt the issue meekly saying maybe they could benefit from the extra walking, blah, blah. Finally the male host just cut her off and blurted that it’s making it too easy to be obese which seems sadly true to me. What do you think?
Karin says
Mmm all that amazing food makes me drool!
I’m not a huge fan of driving cars because something can happen so fast.. Good to hear that you didn’t get into an accident though.
I bought the exact same box of Lärabars the other day. Love!
kalli@fitandfortysomething says
gosh you have alot going on for sure….new computer-i agree with all the crap dell puts on it…..car issue-my goodness thank goodness you did not get hurt…..hope the week settles down for you a bit!
Sarah (GF vegan) says
All your food looks so good!
I’m sorry to hear that things have been/are crazy for you. Hope you get some down time soon xx