Another Milestone

This is one of the larger recent milestones (to me) in unpacking the house. I have graduated from being on the floor/Tupperware bin to my desk. A real solid honest to goodness desk with a chair. I am very excited. I feel like a grown up.

Oatmeal Blues

For about the past two years I have started about 90% of my mornings at work with a bowl of oatmeal. The same oatmeal. It's delicious and sweet and healthy. On the odd occasion I am out, I turn to donuts or pop tarts to substitute, but otherwise, the oatmeal has been good to me. And it's been good to my co-workers who I have trained not to bother me until this has been consumed in the morning. This may sound rude to you, but people don't bother me when I am not ready to deal with them and they don't get a snippy or grouchy me. I think it's fair.


On my last grocery trip to the store (featured here) I was at a loss. My box of oatmeal was not there. It wasn't out of stock, it was as if it never had a space on the shelf. Out of 20 some varieties of oatmeal, I pick the one it appears, they started to discontinue. I was eating Quaker Oatmeal, Nutrition for Women, Vanilla Cinnamon flavor. It's delicious and the specified "Nutrition for Women" made me feel like I was at least getting something right.

I went to the Quaker Oatmeal website and found a store that still carries it nearby, but I have a feeling I will eventually face the extinction of this wonderful tasty morning product. They have a new brand the labeled at Vanilla Cinnamon, but not Nutrition for Women. I am really hoping it's the same thing in a new package.

Travels Bring Surprises

Most of the time, this means, "Surprise! We lost your bag", "Surprise! You are now delayed 3 hours", "Surprise! Bad weather at your destination". However on the rare occasion, something neat happens and you get to tell everyone about it and they also think, Neat!

I had to travel for work Wednesday afternoon for a day trip to Dayton, OH (hopping Metropolis it is). This means heading to the famous overly busy Atlanta airport. My boss and I car pooled together (go environment) and proceeded through security without too much trouble. This was my first time giving carry-on only luggage a go. Thankfully I succeeded, but that's not where the story is.

In the security line, I was about 3 people behind a man that I thought looked rather out of place for airport travel. He had about 3 plastic bags full of stuff. And stuff exactly. I could tell he had disposable pie tins and some other odd assortments. He was an older man, blading, with hair sticking out like Einstein, and I just wrote him off as kind of odd.

Later my boss and I are on the tram heading to our terminal on the other side of the airport and after the first stop, he says to me, "Do you know who that is?" and points to the odd man I described above. I say no, to which he replies, "Do you know who Gallagher is?" "Oh the man who smashes stuff?" "Yup, that's him."

Admittedly I got a little star struck, here I am sharing a tram with a somewhat famous person. It's no Johnny Deep, but hey, I take what I can get. We got off at the same stop and head to the escalator. He steps on right before me and now I am about a foot away from him. He looks around and tells me "You go on up the ladies department" and turns back down the escalator to continue some joke with the guy from the tram which my boss is standing next to.

We get off and head towards the gate and he sees my boss walking with me and says "Oh she's with you, I didn't want to be telling inappropriate things in front of the lady." My boss continued to have a conversation with him as we walked and at his terminal stop he said, "Ok this is me, bye."

So that's my neat news. There was also the "Surprise! Your flight has been delayed 5 hours" fun too, but this was better of a story to share. :)

Dinner for Two

We just have none stop fun here. That's right, we are going to hit up the grocery store together today. Wild and crazy things happen in Atlanta, I am just here to tell you about them. Again I say, lucky you.

This marks our first trip together while living under one roof. No more buying two gallons of milk (unless it turns out we are milk fiends) or loaves of bread or other such things. As it stands now, our refrigerator is mostly full of beer and condiments. Kind of a throw back to college days.

This also means planning dinners got slightly easier. We have been cooking for two but in two different places, which you may say, what's the difference? Well, normally by Thursday it was "I had the two meals planned we ate and I thawed some stuff, but could make pasta, so umm, now what?" Never quite compared notes on those kinds of things. That's about to change.

Between the two of us, we have approximately a ton of cookbooks. We are trying to reference them as we go forward to find new recipes. This week we are trying Herbed Pork Chops with Wild Mushrooms, Tequila Shrimp, and Asian BBQ chicken in additional to some classics.

I may have to adopt the side bar Meredith keeps on her blog, "Project In My Fridge" to show the latest creation, but we will see. That may need to wait until things have settled here a bit. This should be interesting. :)

Moved and Mostly, Kind of, Maybe Settled...

It's been one week since the move. There's been a LOT of change in that one week. We started with the "Box Forest", aka, the entire apartment. I don't think we could have fit anything else in this place. Since then, we have started to find homes for what we can get to. There is, of course, a large portion that hasn't been put away either because it's not staying here or we can't get to that box yet.

Many many many thanks to Rob's dad who happen to stay Sunday night due to some flight delays. He helped clear out the old apartments and place things in this one. I know we would have had a LOT more work to do without his help.

My bedroom furniture has finally been squared away. For a large part of the week, I had to shuffle around some things to get to the bathroom and closet. Fun! We found the dining room table and actually had a real dinner at it last night. It's still surrounded by a lot of boxes, but it's taking shape. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow we will find the living room! One can only hope.

We unpacked our pantry food today. We found out that between the two of us, we have copious amounts of pasta (among many other household objects). The good news, it all fit on the shelf we had designated as the "food area". A trip to IKEA today (can we say zoo?!) solved some storage on that shelf and below it. We made it appear a little more organized. Tricks of baskets and buckets. Shhh... :)

And let's not forget my fuzz faces. I was a little worried about moving them again. The last time I moved, it involved a 10 hour car ride for them and a lot of strange one or two night stays in different places. Thankfully they seem to settling in well. I am sure the rest of the place will follow in due time.

I <3 Craigslist

Thank you to the inventors of Craigslist! The best online tool for communities to buy or sell each other their stuff. You of course can do other things there as well, but I mainly use it to buy/sell household stuff.

Back in 2004 shortly after I moved to Virginia with little to no furniture I decided to spending my days waiting for my real job to start surfing Craigslist for a couch. I wanted to upgrade from my one lousy chair I had. I had found my perfect match being sold for $100 in Georgetown. I just had to pick it up. Deal! I made the trek with my sister and new colleague to pick it up during rush hour traffic. What an experience. But after some struggle, I managed to get it into the cars and into my home.

I have had that couch now for about 3.5 years. Tuesday I posted it for sale back to Craigslist. Within an hour someone had said, "Hey, can I buy that?" Why yes you can! They came and picked it up tonight and I watched my couch go out the door and into a moving van. It was a good little couch. I will miss it.

I managed to still get $75 for it after all my use and my kitties scratching. I probably could have sold it for the $100 I paid, but hey, let's not get greedy. Here's to Craigslist for finding good homes for my couch!

Why Do I Still Have This?

Next week I am moving in with Rob, so of course, that means amongst other things, packing. We have been spending some time going through obvious duplicates of stuff (anyone need a couch?) and trying to sell/get rid of them BEFORE moving.

I have a closet full of seasonal stuff that I barely open because, well, it's seasonal. I forgot that I also packed away boxes I knew I wouldn't open but wanted to keep. I have decided since I am moving in with another person, I shouldn't be a space hog. So I opened all those "wanted to keep boxes". Umm.. wow.

I have found lots of stuff. Sadly, only some of its what I would label "worth keeping" and now wonder what was I thinking when I packed it into the box to begin with. For instance, I found a meal ticket from a rifle competition I was in back in 1998. Seriously? I suppose at one time it meant something to me and until today, I haven't reevaluated it's sentimental value. I have shredded an entire trash bag worth of old records that mean absolutely nothing anymore. Bills from RIT? Yeah, they have been all condensed to monthly student loan payments.

I am not getting rid of everything . I am trying to keep what really means something to me, and letting go of graded papers from college and old parking passes for Anheuser-Busch. And now, back to packing.