As 2009 Comes to a Close (part one)...

I can't help but look back at the kind of year it's been.  I'd say a good one!  I'll try to briefly recap each month, maybe include a few pictures.

January:  Nothing too exciting happened, except that we decided to start looking for a house to buy.  We met with Greg our Real estate agent, and looked at a few houses.  One house we looked at we had put an offer on it, but our offer got rejected by the bank... here's why I loved the house:

Now when we drive by the house, we tell people it's our "Almost House"!

February: Ruthe turned one on February 9th!  It was an amazing first year with her, and we had her birthday party at my inlaw's house.  And in one year, she went from looking like this:

To this:

Nothing changed too much, except that her hair grew in lighter, she got bigger and got teeth.  I love her nose.. it's so cute and reminds me of a button mushroom, which looks like this:

See what I mean!?

Ruthie's first birthday marked the last party we'll ever have at my inlaws' because five days before her birthday, we found our house! We saw the house on February 4th and fell in love.  The seller had the house listed for $175k, and the next day we put in an offer of $165k and the seller pays closing, and he countered with $167k and he'll pay closing.  We got a FANTASTIC DEAL!  We had our house inspection on February 11th, and that went well.  Here's my favorite picture from the inspection:

I'm such a spider monkey sometimes.  Zoe of course was screaming on the ground thinking I was going to get hurt or something.

March: The appraisal was done on the house on March 3rd, and our house was appraised at $175k.  We signed closing papers on March 12th, changed the locks on March 13th by Jeff's dad who's a locksmith.. and good thing we did!  The locks on the back door did not work properly and the measurements were off, so the door didn't really even shut properly.  Then we moved in on March 14th!

April:  Nothing much happened in April, except Easter.  Zoe and I did color Easter eggs, and that's something that'll become a tradition I think.

Here's a digital layout I did for Easter.  Cute eh?  The Easter Bunny left behind baskets for the girls by their bedroom doors.

May:  Again, nothing too exciting happened, except for the first Mother's Day ever, Jeff cooked me Mother's Day breakfast!  It was quite nice, and we even got an extra yolk in one of our eggs!

I think it's a bit creepy knowing that the egg, if it was allowed to hatch would have had conjoined twin chicks.. or something like that.

June:  That was a month of crazy stuff... on June 8th, I suffered a corneal scratch.  I knew as soon as Ruthie's nail came up and hit me in the eye it was NOT a poke.  Jeff initially did not want to take me to the doctor, but when he came home from work that day, my one eyed squinty glare at him forced him to cave in.  We found out that in fact, there WAS something more than just a poke, and that I couldn't just 'walk it off'.  I ended up getting put on loratab for the pain, plus antibiotic drops as well as local drops for pain control.  My eye ended up swelling up badly enough that the rest of the top layer of my cornea sloughed off.  Eventually it healed, and now my eye's back to normal.

Well, that's it for now... I'll post the later half of the year later, as well as post pictures from Zoe's birthday and Christmas!

Farm Life in the 'Burbs

Okay, I do have to admit, I've done some 'farmin' in my time since buying our house.  I did have a garden that overall was successful this past year.  But I never expected to have to skin my own dinner!

We bought a bone-in pork roast last week, and Jeff said that's what he wanted for dinner tonight.  So like the good wife that I am, I went up in the kitchen to start dinner, and I noticed that it had quite a bit of fat, so I decided before putting in the roast pan to trim some of the fat off.. we try to eat healthy around here!  I noticed that there was quite a bit of what I thought was fat on the bottom of the roast, and so I picked it up to trim off the fat.. and it wasn't fat but SKIN!

Now, I do have to have to admit, I'm not ignorant enough to assume the grocery stores get the meat all cutely packaged and ready for consumers.  I know they get their meat products pretty much the same way it comes out of the slaughterhouse.. and in this case I'm sure they get the whole side of pig with the skin on it and then their butchers divide the meat up, skin it, debone it.. etc.. except this time they forgot to skin the pig.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure how I"m supposed to react here.  I'm a bit grossed out because it looks like people skin, but at the same time, I'm quite... adventurous and I'm up for doing pretty much anything that other people would NOT do under any circumstances as long as it's not going to land me in jail.  But on the other hand, someone at the grocery store did NOT do their job properly and we PAID for this... and meat isn't exactly cheap so there's half a pound of what should have been meat thrown in the trash.  Granted though, we did waste some money on the bone.. but we knew it was bone in roast so that's not a big deal.

Of course, I'm sure that I could have cooked it up into cracklins or chicharones, but we don't have enough oil to fry that up.  And I don't have the know-how either.  And on the other hand, I'm a bit thrilled because now I can say that I've skinned a pig.

Or at least a portion of it.