Another Amazing Bridal Giveaway!

Brides-to-be: head over to Style Me Pretty today and check out the unbelievable giveaway.  $4,500 in custom wedding jewelry by Lella Foster just for leaving a comment about the type of jewelry you envision yourself wearing on your wedding day!  And if you win you won’t have to make your husband pretend that the jewelry he gave you for your birthday, Christmas and your wedding day was his idea and not something you picked out/bought and made him reimburse you for.  Or was that just me?

Good luck brides!

I love this gown too!

Blizzzzzzard!

Between noon today and Saturday night they are predicting 18″-24″ of snow for the Washington, DC area.  I know I said it before, but seriously, what is up with this?  I guess I’ll be snowed in all weekend which really I’m not too upset about.  I plan to do a lot of cleaning, cook book browsing, blogging and sleeping, all while snuggled up with Mattie.  I also hope to go through our billion proofs from the wedding and figure out a plan for our albums.  We got married 9 months ago so, yah, it’s probably about time we did that.

You know when you read a book and it describes something as being “pregnant with …” when they aren’t referring to anything having to do with a mother and baby?  Well if you were looking out my window at work right now you’d see a great example of that.  The clouds are definitely pregnant with precipitation right now.  Maybe I’ll throw some spicy food at it to get things moving?  Then maybe I can go home from work early?  Hmmm?

Have a great weekend everyone.  And if you are in the DC/VA/MD/PA area … be safe and stay inside!

After Work Meal

All of my dreams and aspirations summed up in a single picture

I know it’s hard to come home, after a long day, and cook.  Believe me, I don’t do it every night and sometimes I will go five whole work days without making dinner (gasp!).  In an ideal world I would have every weekend free and would spend Saturday or Sunday pouring over my cookbooks, tabbing recipes that I like, grocery shopping at a leisurely pace, and then preparing meals for the week.  Yes, seriously, in my ideal world that’s actually how I would want to spend my weekend.  But the world is not ideal and I spend almost every weekend traveling late into Sunday.  I don’t get to do any grocery shopping over the weekend.  So instead, at the end of my work day I pick a recipe from the Food Network (usually by seraching for “chicken and pasta”) and send a quick list to my husband of things to pick up on his way home.  Or I do the grocery shopping myself at the midpoint of my one-hour commute home.  The latter usually gets me home around 9:00 at which point I have to start cooking and we end up sitting down to eat around 10:00 pm.  This pretty much sums up why I’m always exhausted at work.  Who has the time to do this every night with a full-time job while also spending quality time with their family and waking up to a 6:30 am alarm?!

Lost in the Snow

What is up with DC these days?  I have been here for 3 winters (and lived in Baltimore for 4, which is basically the same thing) and have never seen so much snow.  And why is it so damn cold?  Aren’t we supposed to be ”in the South?”  If I have to deal with people moving at a snail’s pace at all times I should at least get some nicer weather in return!  I am also really happy that the biggest snow storms keep coming on weekends and the roads are only “cleared” by Monday, just in time for work, but the weekend itself is ruined.  Yay.  On the positive side, the city looked beautiful this morning.  The tree-lined street of row houses parallel to ours, where I walked Mattie this morning, was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.  Certainly there are worse things to wake up to!

The view from my window at work

Another Weeknight Meal

I’m in Puerto Rico right now!  Hopefully I figured out how to set this correctly so the post will appear on Friday.  While you ponder this dish for a weeknight meal at home, bundled up on your couch or at your desk because it’s too cold to go outside, think of me lying on the beach with a daquiri in my hand.

Walnut Crusted Chicken

Again this is not from a recipe so it’s guesstimated … and delicious!

Weeknight Dinner

Here’s an idea for a weeknight dinner that’s quick and delicious (and healthy … I think).  You can also set aside some of the pesto that you make during the week and use it to make an appetizer for guests that weekend (read on!).

Wheat Pasta with Sun Dried Tomato Pesto

Things Around the Internets

How about a quick post this morning to insure that you don’t completely give up on me?  I’ve said before that I spend a good part of my morning, after I arrive at my desk, checking my blogroll for new and interesting posts (or even if not interesting, at least new).  This is after checking my gmail, hotmail, facebook (for the first of a dozen times) and bank accounts.  Rinse and repeat.

Since I waste so much time doing this I feel guilty wasting more time creating my own, new blog post and that is how it comes to be that I don’t add any new material for weeks (despite the fact that I’ve had several ideas and things to share lined up for months).  So today I will just point out some of the things I found this week on the internet that I think you might enjoy.

Like this guy:

Valentine's Day is coming soon. Tell your sweetheart how you really feel.

Irony

I have a roll of blogs (fittingly listed on my blogroll) that I check every morning and some that I read multiple times a day.  I get very disappointed, sad and a little bit angry when I visit these blogs and find no new posts over several days.  Don’t the writers know how bored I am?  Can’t they understand how desperately I need to be entertained by their witty comments and appropriate pictures??

The irony, of course, is that I’ve been a terrible blogger over the last couple of months and I hope I am not ruining anyone else’s day when they log on to find the same post from two weeks ago.  I really do have a lot more LeGeytimate Thoughts and once I have a weekend of nothing to do (or a night that my husband comes home late) I plan to post many updates.  So hang in there!  And if you have a blog that I read … c’mon.  Don’t leave me hanging.

A Collision Course for the New Year

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

January 6, 2010: the day my Carfax report got interesting

Or at least there was.  For a whole 6 days I was excited about 2010 and all of its possibilities.  Everyone has been saying good riddance to 2009 but really, it wasn’t that terrible for me.  True, I did get laid off in January and remained unemployed for 6 whole months and my grandmother passed away (though I wasn’t all that close to her anyway).  But I also got married, went on an incredible 2-week honeymoon in Greece and Turkey and beautified our house exactly the way I’ve wanted to for the two years we’ve lived there.  I’m in good health, as are the rest of my family and all of our close friends, and so is our dog (yay, Mattie).  It had its ups and downs like any other year (pretty major ups and pretty major downs, but that’s life).

Picture Perfect Christmas

Last night my husband and I did our Christmas gift exchange.  It was his idea and he said it would make sense to open our gifts before heading home for the holidays.  I didn’t really get it at the time but now that I know that his gift was a super-fancy new camera, it all makes sense!  He wanted me to be able to figure out how to use it before Christmas morning so I can take pictures of all the family fun.  I am SO excited to have a camera that will take really great pictures (it has nothing to do with the photographer … right?) and I probably mentioned wanting one about 50 million times but I thought it was a little steep for a Christmas present.  Luckily for me, I’m very spoiled :)  Hopefully I can learn how to take pictures with this contraption soon.  I’m not gonna lie, I was a little overwhelmed/scared at the complexity of this camera.  So I did what I always do when life presents me with a difficult task that I think is too great to overcome.  I pushed it aside and fell asleep.  Tomorrow is another day with plenty of time for reading the instructions!

Stay tuned for a higher quality blog now that my pictures will be clear and fancy-looking (that’s photography-speak, I wouldn’t expect you to understand).