Varied and Various

It’s been miserable lately – dark and drizzly and cold. God I can’t wait for winter to be over.

Normally I am a huge proponent of this season. I love watching the white stuff fall and bundling up in big sweaters and wearing soft leather gloves but this year (like last) has been seriously lacking in the snow department which is part of what makes winter so lovely. Why bother with all this cold and darkness if we can’t have at least ONE snow day? Oh, I know I’m romanticizing it but after such amazing warm weather in Vegas I’m having a hard time waiting for spring.

At the airport I told Husband that someday we would have to live in a city with at least 300 days of sun per year. He said he would get to pick it and that he’d make me move to California. Even though I’m generally against living in that state I would probably consider it if it meant I could sunbathe six months of the year. My body needs a sunny day.

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Things at work have been busy and things at home have been busy. This week I went grocery shopping with a PLAN for all our meals for the week and so I feel a great deal of pressure to make all of them.  The shortlist looked like this:

-          Butternut Squash and Pasta

-          Tacos

-          Soup and sandwiches

-          Fish and Rice

-          Sausage and foie gras (it was Husband’s birthday present from his mom)

Monday night’s dinner was a total failure because I started it late and the butternut squash didn’t cook all the way through and I used angel hair pasta which turned sticky. Is there some trick to angel hair that I don’t know? Tuesday however, was a flying success due mainly to this recipe that Sarah tweeted. I swear I will never make pulled pork any other way again. You know, because I make pulled pork so often.

Our Wednesday night dinner was sort of foiled by a bad bottle of wine. It was brown. I tried to convince Husband that maybe it was just cheap wine, but no, it was brown. A whole meal of foie gras and sausage just isn’t the same without a good red wine.

Tonight I make chicken soup. I am going to make an enormous vat of it so that we don’t have to worry about cooking anything for the rest of the weekend. Yes, I am ultimately lazy.

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This morning, on the radio, the news told a happy story about how the housing market is improving. YAY! Except not at all. Husband and I were really hoping that the market would stay in the hole for another year or so – you know, until we buy our house. No dice, kids, no dice. I don’t want to be a negative nancy but it seems less and less likely that we will be able to buy the house of our dreams and more and more like we’ll be able to buy the house of our reality. It won’t suck at all but it definitely probably won’t be in the neighborhood we want it to be.

Such is life.

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Do you ever add new blogs to your google reader and then get anxiety because you know you can’t read them all? No? Just me? Hrm.

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This morning I woke up with the travel bug. I knew it was only a matter of time before I got restless. “But you’ve been travelling!” You say. To which I respond, “IT’S NEVER ENOUGH, SILLIES.”

Sitting at a desk two hundred and thirtyish days a year is hard. I’ve never been great at it. I love my freedom, which is so juxtapositional because I also love security. I need a home base. I’ve said that I will never again sell everything I own start from scratch. However that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love to rent out my house for a year or two and live in Japan! As long as I have a place to ‘come home to’ I think I would be more than happy being a globe trotter.

Or at least working flex hours. At the starbuckers today I found myself wildly envious of the man sitting in the corner with his laptop, doing whatever it is you can do at 8 am on a Thursday that doesn’t involve being late to work because you stopped to get coffee. What I wouldn’t give to be a well paid, full time writer. Or a part-time writer, actually! But I suppose one has to write in order to be paid for it. Ha.

Anyway, I wanted so much to get on a plane today that I proposed to Husband we move to London. I would even take a year in his beloved Sweden! Wouldn’t that be amazing?!

I quickly followed this with a statement about how my mother would literally have a heart attack if we moved to another country right now. We can’t do it. But oh how my toes are tappin’…

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Is there a better way to end a blog than this?

Mr. Fitch, enjoying a nap in the 'ugly chair'.