Friday

I love Fridays. It's the last day of the work week for Jake so I know I get two uninterrupted days with him. We actually have some plans for this weekend, nothing too exciting but it feels good to have plans that don't consist of getting all the chores done so we can play MMOs all weekend. We bought the game Wipeout for Wii that we're planning on trying. It's Jake's favorite TV show so I figured it was worth getting! We have a bunch of yard work to do, if we can squeeze it in in between the rain. And maybe a walk or two!

Last Sunday there was a pretty intense thunderstorm here. We lost electricity for a few hours, and we were able to watch the electric company mess with some of the wires from our bedroom wire. A few cars went down that way, stopped, then eventually turned around. We checked the day after and there was a huge tree that fell over in a neighbor's yard. It knocked down a pole, which was blocking the road, which explains why no one could get through that way! The tree is massive though, and the guy is lucky that it didn't land on his house. I wonder if you have to pay for replacing the line if a tree in your yard falls over? I'd hope not, you can't really control it! I should have taken pictures of it but it didn't really occur to me until I started typing about it! Plus I wouldn't really want people taking pictures of my house and posting them online haha.

I've been taking Reeses on a short walk every other day. I think I might start doing every day soon though, and increasing the distance slowly. I'm trying to increase his mobility in his back leg. When we were too busy playing WoW I liked to pretend that we were great pet owners. But although we made sure they were fed and such we didn't give them the attention they deserved. One of my biggest regrets is that we didn't do enough to help with Reeses' leg problem. I should have been walking him every day since we found out about it. Instead, I just played WoW and ignored the problem. That's not fair to him, nor is it fair to our other pets to be ignored most of the time. It just makes me sad to think it came to that, I love our pets and they deserved better. I intend to do my best to make sure they get it from now on.

I made lasagna today. I used fresh onion and garlic, which I usually don't. In fact, I've never chopped an onion before today. I used to think it was silly when people talk about how onions make you cry. Yeah, it's definitely not silly. It's so not very fun, and I think I've discovered that I wasn't meant to be a chef! I did a pretty terrible job of chopping the onions, but the lasagna tastes amazing. A tip I learned from looking up how to modify my recipes to include fresh onions and garlic instead of minced: while cooking the sauce for the last 1/2 hr stick the uncooked noodles in a pan of very hot water. It's much easier to work with the noodles like that than cooked ones, and they finish cooking in the oven. Plus boiling lasagna noodles is always a headache, they're huge and you have to be careful not to break them.

I bought a paint by number kit the other day. Sounds silly, but my sister used to do them all the time when we were younger. I never really tried them, and I was hoping doing so would spark my passion for painting again. I was never really that great at painting, but there's something so amazing about the feel of a brush across canvas. I used to use oil paints, but now I kind of want to try acrylic as well. Either way I'm definitely going to buy some canvas at some point and hope I come up with something half way decent! I also kind of want to try my hand at a mosaic again. When I was in HS I made a faux glass window type mosaic, using those colored pebbles used for fake plants on a large sheet of Plexiglas. It didn't turn out as good as I wanted it to, but it was really fun designing it and working on it. I feel a lot more creative now that I've quit MMOs. Sort of like the old me coming back to life again.