HJ Waxing Moon

Mr. Moon's party was a blast! The cheesesteak sloppy joes were a real hit, we got to meet some new friends, and had a nice evening around the campfire. His new job is going well, too. Everyone seems to love him there; bosses, coworkers, and guests alike. Not paying income tax is a nice little pay raise too. I'm working on a garden update for later this week. Sadly, there isn't much good news in it. But we will get to that. Getting back to menu planning has definitely been met with relief from both of us, but some kinks need to be worked out on our to-do list system being separate from the menu board. Food isn't getting thawed in appropriate timing and it then either requires running water (wasteful) or using the microwave (which I don't like) to keep to our plans. These two evening shifts each week are clearly going to be a source of temptation for us to scrap our cooking plans and go out to eat, or end up eating junk food whether we plan to or not, so some ne...

Glad my love made it to 31 years of life. We're having a fire pit party tonight to celebrate and wish him 31 more! I chickened out on baking a cake. Picked up a chocolate fudge cake from our favorite natural foods store, instead. Less stressful that way. Hope everyone has a weekend as blessed with friends and joy as our certainly will be!

The 'Rents come back from their vacation today, so it's back to the usual routine, hopefully with some improvements. We took a week off of menu planning, then the next week ended up being a completely moot point as it was scrapped almost as soon as we'd finished it. Oops. But this week, well, this week we will do better. Clean slate! The last two weeks of focusing on using up and doing without have been good for us and a nice change of pace, but it's hell to plan a menu that way. This week we are back to planning ahead, with perfect timing since Mr. Moon's new job just gave him his set schedule. It's nice to be able to plan things a little further than 5 days out! What's on the menu? Breakfasts:  Eggs & Toast; Polenta & Eggs; Yogurt & Granola; Smoothies. Lunches:  Bagel Pizza; Bacon, Cucumber, Tomato sandwiches/wraps; Leftover greek dinner. Snacks:  HB Eggs, yogurt, cheese and crackers, fresh fruit. Dinners: Monday:  Mr. Moon works...

A couple years ago it must be now, I realized I could use wet and dry erase markers on glass. I saw a suggestion somewhere to put pretty fabric in a frame and use it like a white board. An idea was born. Months later, I found myself building a home office, and I needed a dry erase board to keep track of my project list for the business. I went to the thrift store and bought a frame, but since there were three more to match it, I bought them all in case I wanted more space for some reason. Boy, am I glad I did! This blog has featured my white board A LOT. I've wanted to upgrade to something nicer, but without a safe space to hang something with glass in it (since the white board lives on the pantry door), I hadn't done it yet. This week we moved our To Do list into our bedroom, right next to Mr. Moon's side of the bed. The 'Rents weren't using it, it allows more space for the menu AND for each day, and it allowed me to put some more personal notations on it that ...

The wedding we went to last week was lovely. Just my luck, lack of sleep and allergies combined to make me absolutely miserable, and we almost didn't stay past the grand entrance. But by the time we'd said our goodbyes, the toasts were starting so we stuck around for that and the first dance. But we made it home safe and sound, no sleeping on the freeway, and got home to rest. With our new lounge area up and running, we've had to set some ground rules. Such as "no video games after 10pm," or else we just end up staying up all night. We may need to set a rule of "no screen time" after 10pm, instead, but we will see how this goes for now. As counterintuitive as it sounds, and contrary to our meal plan, we've been eating through some of our junk food last week so that this week we can focus again on better eating habits. The problem with me driving Mr. Moon around on his job hunt is that even if the job hunting takes only as much time as any job he co...