Cooking ahead

Have you checked out my blog entry on my other blog "I'm Not Cheap I'm Thrifty"???? There is a post there about another blog I have started following called Mommy Making Money and she had the most fabulous ideas about preparing meat ahead of time and freezing it. I tried her idea with the boneless skinless chicken, and also I did her ground beef version only I used ground pork and turkey because I don't eat beef.

Saturday I made chili with the precooked meat. It was so easy to just dump the bag in and add all of my other ingredients, turn on the pot and GO!

Tuesday night I made tacos and enchiladas with the prepared shredded chicken and they was delicious! I just thawed the meat, wrapped the enchilada shells around it and threw it in the oven. Tasty and good! QUICK TOO!

Tonight is baked ziti with the prepared ground meat mix. It will be so easy! The meat is thawing, now all I have to do is boil noodles, open a jar of sauce and throw it all together. Put in the pan and throw cheese on top and pop it into the oven. Now that's the way I like it....quick, easy and GOOD!

I decided to compose a list of reasons why I like doing the meat ahead so much:
1. I only had to handle raw meat one time. This is a major ICK factor for me in cooking, and also the reason I keep rubber gloves on my microwave.
2. I only had to chop raw onion and cry once.
3. I could easily see how many meals I had enough meat for when I stacked it in my freezer.
4. The Ziploc bags of cooked meat take up much less room and store flatter that the bulky packages of meat.
5. The precooked meat makes it super quick and easy to throw together easy homecooked meals. It was quicker to put the tacos and enchiladas together than to order pizza.
6. The flexibility of the cooked meat makes trying new recipes easy and enticing again, even when I don't feel creative. :)

If you have not checked out the idea of cooking ahead, please give it a whirl. It took me about 2 hours to do both the chicken and the ground meat, and I have enough meat prepared now for about 12 meals.

Let me know what you think!!!!

Not Valentine's Day, but.......

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my husband? Not only is he a wonderful husband and an excellent father, but he is my very best friend. We have been married almost 13 years, and while I would like to say they have all been simply blissful, that is not the truth. We fuss and fight just like any other couple. In the early years, we would yell and scream and basically make fools of ourselves. Then came the pouting and the stomping around the house and the door slamming. Thankfully, now most disagreements are settled with only slightly raised voices and minor pouting :)

There was a time not so long ago however when I really didn't think we were gonna make it together. We were like sandpaper against each other...nothing made either of us happy...we spent a lot of time not really talking or spending time together. We sort of coexisted in the way that roommates do, but we were not really partners.

I am not sure what really changed things, although a near tragic situation that arose certainly didn't help. It wasn't a sudden change, more of a softening of hearts that occurred. I learned to be more tolerate, he learned to be more attentive,and all in all things began to improve. Fast forward a year to our Tres Dias weekends, when God totally melted our hearts and put everything in perspective for us both. That was a painful process but it was so worth the journey! I remember when I came home after my weekend, we just talked all night long, looking right into each others eyes. We cried, we laughed, and we discovered a love that had never been there before. It was an amazing thing that happened between us...

We discovered that putting GOD first and each other second really made all the difference in the world. I stopped putting him down, and he started listening to me more. It made me feel so unvalued when he would only half listen to me spilling my heart while he watched TV. He would be so hurt when I would make snide and hurtful comments about him to my friends....often in front of him.

We learned a lot about what God can do in a marriage IF YOU ALLOW HIM TO DO IT. It has been so much better for us. We are spouses....partners....friends...doing this crazy thing called life together and loving every precious moment we have.

Valentine's day is nice,and although we usually end up spending it apart due to his job, I prefer to think of every day as a day to celebrate out love and our friendship. I thank God for opening my eyes before I lost something very precious.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hello everyone...here is a big {HUG} for you on this special day! I saw on my niece's facebook page where this is sometimes referred to as 'Single Awareness Day" and that kinda cracked me up. I had never heard it called that.

I guess I am kinda single this year too, because Jamie left for the boat yesterday. He is working night shift, so I won't get to hear from him until after 8:00 tonight. Before he left we both bought each other valentine cards, and we are planning to go out to eat somewhere when he gets home for a late Valentine's Dinner.

This morning though I got up to find a box of chocolates and a card from my wonderful inlaws and that was a very nice surprise! I gave Marissa her goody bag from her Daddy and me....it had a teddy bear that we wrote messages on, a chocolate bear, a box of sweethearts, some Croc bits and a card. The card was very cool...it was a Hannah Montana card that allows you to record a 10 second message inside. After your message, a Hannah song plays. (We lucked up with this one because after she opened it I learned that this is her current favorite Hannah song. Of course I played it off like I had planned it that way)

We are getting ready to make some heart shaped sandwiches and some cookies for a special Valentine's lunch. Strawberries, cookies, and heart shaped sandwiches with red Kool Aid makes for a very nice treat on Valentine's day.

Hope your day is happy and filled with love...like mine has been. :)

Jacksonville

We went to Jacksonville this past weekend. With everything going on this past week we really needed a break and since Jamie had to go to the union hall and also have his physical done at the industrial medicine in Jacksonville anyway, we just made a long weekend of it.
Our first stop was the Budweiser plant on the north side of Jacksonville. It was a really neat tour!

We had a great time walking along the riverfront there on Jacksonville Landing. We shared a yummy snack of crawfish nachos at the American Cafe and sat outside on the deck. It was a beautiful night.



Sunday we walked around Treaty Oak. The tree is over 200 years old and the city has built a park around it. Since it is a live oak, it is green all year round and the branches swoop very low. It was a really neat place!




One of the highpoints of our trip was eating at our favorite restaurant there, a place called Jackie Lee's China Bistro. It was so delicious! Sorry there are no pictures to post of us inside--I was too busy enjoying the delicious spring rolls and honey chicken and the delightful tea that smells just like fresh honeysuckle. Mmmm...wish I had a pot of that now!

Thank you!

Thank you all so much for your support and prayers after the death of Jamie's mom. I wanted to share this picture with you of the sunset at the memorial service last night. It was so beautiful!

I would like to thank each one of you for your prayers during this difficult time. I had mentioned before that I would post details of the arrangements for my mother in law as soon as they became available. Although these plans are not final, they are what we are planning as of now.

We will be having a memorial service for her on Saturday at 2:00 at the Second
Baptist Church in Forest Park GA. As soon as her cremains are ready, we will bring them back to Savannah and scatter them at a place that holds special significance to our
family.

We are hoping to have a memorial service held at Westside Christian Church in
Bloomingdale on Monday or Tuesday. The day will depend on how soon her cremains
are released to us.

Thank you again for remembering us.

Clarifying.....

Just a quick note.....
The mother in law that passed away is my husbands biological mother.
The mother in law that lives with us is his step mom, Kathy, who has her disability blog posted on blogspot.
Sorry for any confusion!

Prayer request

I would like to ask all of my readers to remember my family in your prayers. My mother in law has passed away suddenly and my husband is traveling to make the arrangements for her. I will post the details when I know them.

Sorry Mr. President!

Don't forget to check out my mother in law's blog about her disability. Her last post about a "presidential" error is hilarious! She may even need a Presidential Pardon! LOL!
http://disabilitybs.blogspot.com/

Computer stuff

YAY! My computer is back and it is working like BRAND NEW thanks to my friend :) It moves so much faster and everything is just perfect. Looks like the bad power supply and all of the junk inside of the files was really making it work extra hard and slowed it down. I had not realized it had slowed down, I guess it was such a gradual thing that it took it getting fixed for me to remember how FAST it used to be! I am just zipping through stuff now!!!! YAY ME!

And I forget if I mentioned that the virus protection thingie that the Geeks wanted to charge me $150 is the one that my pal was installing for FREE???? And how about the geeks had already installed it before they decided to offer it to me and try to rip me off??

I am steadily compiling my pictures into folders and burning them to CDS. It is amazing how many I had on here just filed under "misc pics". Now I have to go back and try to decide roughly when they were taken! (Note to self...save self stress next time.....always always always label folders with date!!!!) I wonder if there is a way to set up like a shock collar thing if I try to label something else MISC?????

My baby is home!!!!!!!!!!!!

My computer arrived home this morning, safe and sound. Since I don't particularly excell at anything electronically, I am waiting on Jamie to get home tonight to hook it up for me. (This also lets me avoid crawling and squirming under the desk to connect the cables)

The report?

A bad power supply. Now fixed. :)

Now you might be wondering about the $150 program the Geeks tried to sell us....Funny thing is, they had already installed it before we picked it up. According to my friend, it is a very good virus protection, the same one in fact that he was going to put on my computer for me for free. He also installed a better spyware program than the one I had, and a better disk defragmenting program so he cleaned up a lot of space for me and said the computer runs about 100 times faster.

I am excited to get my computer back up and running. The biggest thing is that I want to get my pictures off before anything happens again. That really scared me....to realize how many pictures I had on the harddrive that would have been lost if my computer had indeed crashed. It was a VERy good reminder to me to GET THOSE PICS OFF NOW and store them either on an external memorty stick or disks or something!

So my question is....how do you organize and store YOUR digital pics? Do you have a system or a schedule to remove them? How do you file them? I am trying to come up with somethign better than waiting until there are so many that I can't find what I am looking for. Do you remove them monthly? Weekly? After you print what you want? After you scrapbook them? What is YOUR system? I need some advice so I can figure out the best way to handle mine. As a scrapbooker, I take tons and tons of pictures, hoping for a couple of good ones to turn up in the mix. :)
I am getting overrun by digital files.....

Any advice?

Computer update

I am still missing my baby. :(
My friend came and picked it up, and emailed me last night with what he found. The power supply WAS INDEED bad! He replaced that and said that it had been up and running all day. He did find several spyware thingies lurking, which I knew about because when I discovered them and tried to open the Spyware Doctor to remove them, the computer froze up and I had to shut it down. (That was when it wouldn't come back on the next day)

He removed the spyware and said it was working 100% better already. He said that he was going to install a virus program that he has used for years and see if anythign else needed cleaning up.

Then he sent another interesting note that simply said.... "Wait til I tell you about the program he wanted to charge you $150 for".

????????

Stay tuned for updates......I will let you know what he found when I know. :)

Stuff

Hello happy campers....
I am actually not so happy.
My Mom in law picked up the computer yesterday for me, and the guy at the shop really ticked me off. First off, when we took it in, we had a coupon for a free disgnostic. When he looked at it, he said it booted right up and he thought the issue was a bad pwer cord. Said he had extras, he would just give us one when we came to pick it up. Cool beans. The he asked if we had virus protection, and we said yes, we have McAfee that came with Comcast. (We also had Norton at one time but hated it so we deleted it.) He said he had a better program, would run $75. We said thanks, but not right now.

Ok, so when Kathy went in to get the computer, he tells her that while it was there he decided to run a virus scan on it and he found over 100 viruses. He tired to convince her to buy a virus removal thingie for $150. She said she was just picking it up, and that she knew we didn't want the other virus protection because she had already heard us talking about it the FIRST time he tried to sell it to us.
So the guy proceeds to tell her that he removed some of the viruses, but that some would only come off with his program. (???) He went on to say that he had removed McAfee.

Wait just a minute...did I authorize him to remove anything????

So again she tells him she is just picking up....and he tells her "Well that's fine, but they will eventually be back for me to remove those other viruses."

THE HECK YOU SAY!

What kind of customer service is this???? I did not ask for this. I did not authorize this. And the last time I checked, there are MANY computer repair places in town...and I am sure they are all adequately equipped to remove viruses. I do not think this guy has any special anti-virus powers.....oooo.....

Anyway, a good friend picked up my computer today and he is fixing whatever is wrong with it as a favor to me. Now that just rocks. My friends are just so good to me! ;)

In the meantime, I am still using Kathy's computer, so I cannot upload pics at this time, although even if I did I am not sure what they would be...all we have done is snuggle under blankets and watch TV lately because it has been cold enough to freeze our tail feathers!!!!

Computer issues...

Thursday morning after I got Riss on the bus I came to my trusty computer and sent a couple of emails. I tried to sign into my blog but the computer froze up and wouldn't do anything so I had to turn it off on the CPU as a last resort. Later, I tried to boot it back up and it wouldn't come on. Nothing. Nada. Zilcha.

I woke Jamie up and asked my hero and fixer of all things that I broke, and he was puzzled by the situation too. We tried everything we knew to do. Finally we took the CPU out of the desk and slid in my mom in law's instead. We trotted it over to Tweaks by Geeks and they ran the diagnostic.

Yesterday they called to say that it booted right up. They think it was a power cord issue. With the coupon we used, the diagnostic was free and they threw in a new power cord at no cost either. I am picking my baby up MOnday and hopefully everything will be ok. The worst part was that I had some pictures stored on my harddrive that I was very worried about not being able to get back, but now it looks like I worried for nothing.

This was a good reminder to me to get those pics off the harddrive before something major happens! Although most of them had been printed already, I still want to save the digital files.

I will update Monday once my baby is back!

The weird thing is my Mom in law's computer doesn't do spellcheck on my blog or on my email.....so there is no telling how many mistakes you all just caught! :)

UPDATE ON OUR CROP

Ladies,
It has come to my attention that our crop is about 3/4 full! If you are planning to come or think you may be able to come, please let me know so I can reserve you a a spot ASAP!

New blog

My mom in law has created a blog about her struggles getting the disability payments she is entitled to. Please go check out her blog and dish a little encouragement!

www.disabilitybs.blogspot.com

UPDATED******ATTENTION ALL SCRAPBOOKERS!

UPDATE~~WE ARE ALREADY ABOUT HALFWAY TO CAPACITY! RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY!

Ok ladies, ever since our beloved Savannah Scrapbooking closed it's doors last March, we have all missed each other and longed for a time to get together and crop! Well, ladies, here it is:

Jamie (of Sav. Scrapbooking, not my husband LOL) and I are putting together a crop on the westside of Savannah. That's right ladies, all of you in Pooler, Bloomingdale, Rincon, Statesboro, Guyton, Eden, Ellabell, etc.....a crop is coming to OUR SIDE OF THE WORLD!!!!

The crop is scheduled for February 28 in Bloomingdale. The cost will be $20 per person and will include a FULL DAY of cropping, lunch and some fantastic door prizes!

Please let me know if you want to sign up, as space is limited. Call your friends and come as a group! Let everyone know about this please! Email, call, text, send smoke signals, whatever you need to do to get the word out. Let's get together and get some pages done.....and eat some chocolate!

Contact update

I think I have the hang of this! The contacts are comfortable, and very freeing! I can see so much more clearly and everything looks so much better! I am so happy that I took this plunge!

Now my husband has decided that he wants to try them. Not sure if he can manage this, but he has an appointment at 3:00 Friday so we will see! :)

The only problem I had is that it was SUPER WINDY today and my eyes got kinda dry, but a few drops and I was back in the clear!

Thanks for the support! It means a lot!

Guess what I got?

No, it isn't a new car.....no, I didn't get pregnant over the holidays....no, I did not lose my mind an adopt another cat.

I got contacts!

I had wanted them for several years, but I never really thought I could put something in my eye. I decided that if I can give birth, I can put in a contact. So at my eye exam Monday, I discussed contacts with my doctor. He said "sure, why not give it a try?" So I did. He said that I put them in easier than anyone he had ever seen before. I came home excited about my newly found independence from glasses!

Then the headache came. It was in the back of my head, pounding. I laid down for a few minutes in a dark room. Didn't help. Took Motrin. Didn't help. Took a blood pressure pill, justifying that I had been out for a week so maybe that was it. Nope. Didn't help. I gave up. Took the contacts out.

Guess what? The headache stayed. At dinner I realized I had not had any caffeine all day, so I made some tea and drank it. Headache went away. (yay that it was gone, boo that I am dependent on caffeine)

So this morning I got up to try again. I told myself to drink something with caffeine in it, then insert the contacts. Right one in....no trouble. Left one....WHAT????? There was a chunk missing out of my left lens. Sigh.

I put the old lenses back in their case and trotted to my eye dr. (Luckily they are 2 blocks away) They gave me a new kind to try and I scampered off to pay some bills, then got home and popped in the news lenses.

Guess what? No headache so far. Easy insertion. Now my sight is a bit blurry but I was told to expect that as my eyes adjust. Say a prayer this works.....I kinda like this contact vision!

Happy New Year!

We went to the beach to stay with Mom and PaPa for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It was so much fun! We started the evening off with a Low Country boil. YUMMY! I was shocked to learn that my inlaws had never experienced this delicacy, but I guess it makes sense since they have not lived in the Low Country until now! I just feel bad that we have not exposed them to our culture before now, I mean, sheesh....it's been nearly 13 years........moving on......
Jamie helped Paul with the cooking and serving, and we all helped with the eating! Needless to say, it was delicious, just like every other time. Just spicy enough, big fat shrimp fresh from the boat that morning, what more could a girl want? (Of course I overindulged and later reeeeeeealy wanted an Alka-Seltzer, but that's another story...)





And of course Papa cooked his famous hush puppies!!!!

Later that night Riss and Daddy popped some snaps on the corner...did I mention it was about 32 degrees???? But nothing stops the fun!


After warming up, Riss helped Gram make the pigs in a blanket. It just isn't New Year's without pigs, according to Jamie and Riss!

After pigging out again (no pun intended) we watched the crazy men on TV doing stunts until midnight. Did anyone else see this? The crazy guy trying to get his pickup truck to do a 360 jump and the guy on the motorcycle going 10 stories up and then riding on top of a building before freefalling 5 stories back down onto a little ramp? NUTBALLS!!!!!!!Anyway, soon it was time for the fireworks. There is nothing like fireworks on the beach. No buildings in the way, no lights, it is just an awesome sight!




After the fireworks, we all went to bed. I checked on Riss about 2 minutes later, and this is what I found.

Happy New Year everybody!!!!!