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fantasyecho found this amazing sculpture on this page--it's a moebius tall ship! She also has tons of other interesting links on her LJ today.

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Fat free cream cheese absolutely sucks. It has a weird gelatin consistency that feels horrible in my mouth.

meal plans and planning

For the hell of it, I made a menu last week, because I didn't want to go back to the grocery store except perhaps once more during the week. We've had a lot of bills come in, and I'm trying to stay within the budget.

When I've made up menus in the past, they never worked out, because I'd make the list, buy the ingredients for the recipes, and end up with food wasted because no one liked what I made. That was by following the menu plan I used to buy from an online company--you subscribed to the service, and you'd get a weeks' worth of recipes AND (joy!) an already made-up grocery list to go with it!  Or even when I made up my own.

Getting back to it; this past week, I asked both kids what they'd like for dinner. They each got to choose one dinner. The Guy got to choose another one, and for the rest, I picked out old tried and true recipes. It turned out pretty well. I didn't get anxious about what the heck I was going to serve each night. I had leftovers for some of the nights as well, and on those nights, we'd (or the Guy) would eat that when he got home. The main thing is to KISS it. Mermaid chose bacon burgers. Tall Boy chose Trader Joe's Orange Chicken with rice and broccoli. Another night was Trader Joe's minimeat balls in spaghetti sauce and pasta. Last night was Freschetta's pizza night. So, I didn't totally cook from scratch on two of the nights, but at least everyone got something they liked, and would EAT, and that wasn't overly involved.

I'm finding that I really like that $7 a Meal cookbook that I mentioned before. The recipes in it are pretty simple, use common ingredients, and are usually pretty tasty and aren't full of unnecessary fats--enough for the recipes to taste good, but not enough to make you fat eating the food!

Buh-buh, family, you go see Alice in Wonderland--there you go

Oye vay, thank heavens, thank you Lord of the Movies---my family FINALLY went WITHOUT ME to go see the 3-D version of Alice In Wonderland.
 
No, I'm not interested in seeing it. Frankly, between Johnny Depp and that director (Edward Scissorhands? What's his name?) I absolutely do NOT want to see it.

Yes, I want some garshdarned home ALONE time without it being ME having to keep track of the kids. I'd already told The Guy that I didn't want to go, several times today. At least twice. The movie time is for 7pm, but we all know there's a half hour of horrible commercials and movies promo shorts before the actual movie...so I'm hoping they'll be gone until 9:30pm at the least. That gives me about three hours of heavenly quiet time in the house. No Xbox games shooting it up in the background.

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Now what am I going to do? I have no idea what to do, now that there's noone home. Except the farting dog, and he doesn't quite count, not that way.