I miss my weekend

First of all, check out our dinner from last night:


Pizza with roasted red peppers, sauteed onions, and feta cheese on a honey wheat crust. Darn tasty. I love being able to pull a meal out of our asses when we haven't been shopping in weeks.

We had kind of a weird weekend. We were house sitting until Sunday morning, so we didn't even get home until about noon on Sunday. I kind of miss my house. It is nice not having to spend my whole salary on gas, though. Last week we probably only spent half.

Friday night we went out to eat with a couple of friends of ours, Lucy and Phil. We had pizza and beer, which of course led to a power (almost) hour (we did about 15 minutes, then took a break for another 15 minutes, then did another 30-45 minutes or so. Honestly, I lost track). That's like Alfred's favorite game these days. Afterwards we went back to the house we were sitting and sat outside and enjoyed the view. It was nice, I could get used to the whole hanging-out-with-friends-cause-we-don't-live-so-damn-far-away thing. Oh, and the picture is from when we went to Disney with them last year. Yes, they wore the ears the entire day. And I was pretty hung over. The car ride sucked.

Now the really exciting news: I bought a suit. Yup, I'm a real live grown up. Hopefully they're so dazzled by my professional appearance at the fair I'm going to on Thursday that they'll give me a job on the spot.

I almost forgot

I meant to post this yesterday.

We had dinner with Alfred's parents on Thursday night. When we were driving from their house to our temporary housing at 10pm, we started noticing that there was an awful lot of traffic for that late on a Thursday, and we were really starting to slow down. A minute later we were at a crawl. As we went around a curve we saw some flashing lights, and what looked like a plane. We were all, what the hell? So Alfred pulls into a parking lot, speeds up to the flashing lights, and it IS a freaking plane!



Now, if I was one of my brothers, I could identify this plane for you, and tell you what it does and all sorts of interesting shit. But, I'm not. So I can't. I can guess that it's a navy plane, since we were right by the navy base. But that's it. It's still cool though!

Like Alfred said last night, we need to come up with a joke that has the punchline: "because the jet made a left turn on red!" Any ideas?

roaches and teaching and house sitting, oh my!

First off, I would like to thank Katie for her oh so traumatic contribution to roach stories (she left a comment after my last post, if you're interested.) I didn't say that was my worst roach story, he was just a rather scholarly roach. If you want to hear a bad roach story... a couple of years ago I was getting ready for work one morning and went to put my boot on. A roach came running out of my boot and skittered across my arm. That's right, it ran on me. Out of my shoe. Which was in my closet. ONTO ME. I was afraid to put on shoes for weeks. Beat that. :)

I just got back from lunch, I met a girl from my book club. (I posted this picture because a) certain people get upset if there's no picture in a post, and b) I passed the restaurant this picture was taken at on my way to lunch. Well, and c) it's funny.) She's a teacher and has worked in a couple of counties around here, so she gave me a bunch of advice about interviewing and what key words to say, and some tips about job searching. It was very helpful to hear from someone who knows what she's talking about and has so much experience. She had emailed a principal who was hiring a kindergarten teacher about me, but unfortunately she already filled the position with another teacher at the school. But, she did say that some other positions would probably open up in 1st and 2nd grade, so that could be good. I'm really kind of starting to freak out about finding a job. There are budget cuts this year, so a lot of districts are increasing class sizes and not hiring as many teachers. Plus, I have no real classroom experience, and only have a temporary teaching certificate. I'm really hoping I get something at the recruitment fair I'm going to next week, but honestly, I'm not feeling too hopeful.

If teaching doesn't work out though, maybe I can start a house sitting service. We're double booked this weekend, with Ilya and Mercedes' house and the big house we were at last weekend. So we're sleeping at one house and going to check on the cats at the other. The only bad thing is we can't go home until Sunday. When will I bake??

Alfred to the rescue

We had an invader in the house this morning. I got up at 6, went into the bathroom, and there's a giant freaking COCKROACH on the back of the toilet! That woke me up pretty damn quick, let me tell you. Now, I don't want to overstate this or anything, but I hate roaches with a passion like the fiery pits of hell. They just freak me out, they're so hard to kill and are so damn fast and dirty. I hate going anywhere near them. I even hate killing them because I have to go close to them, and half the time when you go to kill them they run like hell and you miss and then you have to jump around and shriek like a little girl because it moved. I hate roaches almost as much as I hated the centipedes I used to have to kill in the basement of my parents' house. Ugh. Those little fuckers are just nasty, nothing should have that many legs. They'd just be chillin' on the wall when I walked by, then try to bolt before I smeared them across the wall with a shoe. Then I'd have to leave the smear there, cause the wall was too hard to clean because of the texture. But I digress.

So I go into the bathroom and the roach is on the back of the toilet. I go grab a flip flop and get ready for action, but the little bastard is too smart. There's a library book on the back of the toilet, and of course he crawls up on top of that so I can't kill him. He just strolls back and forth, checking everything out, crawls down the side of the book, investigates the binding. Usually roaches are either standing still or running like mad, but not him. Just walking around, taking his time, as casual as can be. Meanwhile I'm standing there in my pjs with a flip flop raised for attack, waiting for him to get off the damn book so I can smash him, and giving a running commentary for Alfred, who's in bed trying to go back to sleep. Nope, no sleep when there's evil afoot. He tells me to ignore it and just use the bathroom and he'll kill it when he gets up. Clearly, there's no way on God's green earth I'm using a toilet with a roach on it. So finally I give up and go downstairs. Five minutes later, after dismantling half the toilet in his quest, Alfred and the Toilet Paper of Death have splattered the roach across the bathroom. He then threw it in the toilet and peed on it. My hero. (You're supposed to flush them because if it's a female and has eggs, they can still hatch after she's dead. Freaking disgusting creatures.) It smelled like dead roach for awhile afterwards, but it's better than a live roach lurking in our house.

our creative meal

Have you ever heard of "chicken and waffles?" I mean obviously you've heard of those individual components, but as a meal? Apparently it's a thing. It's also fun to say. I don't know if it's a southern thing or what, but I've seen it on the food network and I think Alfred has heard of it in real life. Well one night a few months ago while making dinner we decided to make our own unique meat-and-breakfast-food combination. Alfred says that Snoop Dogg's reality show was the inspiration. And no, we were not sober.

It all started because we had bought a giant package of apples from costco and needed a way to use them up. So I decided to cook them. I thought it would be good to eat with some pancakes. Pancakes and warm apples for dinner, pretty normal, right? I think Alfred brought up chicken and waffles, and then got some leftover pulled pork out of the fridge. Yeah, that sounds good, I'll blame him. So we constructed our towers of weird deliciousness: a pancake, topped with apples, topped with pork, topped with some BBQ sauce. I think I added another pancake to my stack and ate it like a sandwich. It was really, really good. We've had it twice since then, including last night, when this photo was taken. Amazingly, it's still good sober. Last night we used the applesauce we made a few weeks ago. Deee-licious.

cool house pictures

(Ok, it took me like 10 minutes to make this slideshow, 5 minutes to
write the post, and like 20 to fix the text so it didn't run off the side of
the page and disappear. Stupid slideshow. Ah well, on with the
program!)

Well, our first house sitting gig of the week is over. But, as promised, I
did take a bunch of pictures last night. I had to edit myself a bit,
because apparently photo bucket will only let you put 30 pictures in a
slideshow, but that's ok.

So there's a main part of the house and an addition they built on,
which is a garage and a guest suite. It's nice. I actually really love the
layout of the main part of the house, I wouldn't even need the
addition. But what do I know. It's on the river, too. We counted 6
bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 4 living room/sitting room areas, 6
fireplaces, 2 staircases, 1 elevator, 9 security cameras outside (I think),
and 0 tvs. Oh, and slavery themed furniture/decorations in
2 rooms. Enjoy! (If you want to pause the slideshow, put the mouse
over it and a little stop button will appear. I think I need to find a
new slideshow program to use. This one kind of annoys me.)

Lindsay's birthday, and our date

First of all, happy (belated) birthday to Lindsay! Her birthday was actually Saturday, but I got the dates mixed up and then didn't post yesterday. (I tried posting a picture, but blogger won't let me. Come back later.) She's taking her vacation the next couple of weeks, so hopefully we'll be able to hang out sometime. We used to work together, I miss seeing her every day! EDIT: We have pictures! The first one is us with Lindsay and Jeff at our work picnic last year. I do believe it's the only picture I have of Lindsay and I together. Then I had to add the one of them with Xyla cause she's just so damn cute!

So we had some plans that fell through last night, which left us all gussied up with nowhere to go, so Alfred and I went on a date! We went to see Baby Mama (which was good, definitely some funny parts but I thought the ending was a little... weird) and then out to dinner at Outback. (That's the only big chain restaurant where we live, so we got a few gift cards for there for Christmas. We finally got to use a couple!) We were out late too, didn't get back to the house we're sitting at until maybe 10:30 or so. Party animals.

I'm going to take some pictures of this house tonight, probably post some tomorrow. This house is kind of crazy. It's really big, and on the river, and decorated with lots of antiques. Very impressive, and nice to look at, but not very cozy. I do love the layout of the main part of the house, though. We're going to try to get some inspiration for our own house from them.