One week to go, Saturday from hell, the inside of my freezer, and obsession

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

What an absolutely exhausting weekend. Saturday, mostly, but Sunday has been the whipped cream on top. With less than one week until closing and moving, we are scrambling to prepare ourselves (because winter is coming... Game of Thrones starts tonight... I'm excited...)

Also... please forgive any prattling or glaring grammatical errors, I am very much the tired blogger right now.

So, I woke up bright and early at 8am on Saturday morning to this:

A lovely day to say the least. But pupman had his annual vet appointment so we had to go.

On our way, the weather made our drive so very pleasant (and Bo smell like roses and daisies... if by roses and daisies you would mean wet dog). I can't tell if Bo is more excited about the car ride himself or if he is just abuzz with anticipation at where the car ride is taking him. He is pretty much unstoppable if he believes there is a car in his future. And once in the car, he is really only few clicks down on the doggy freak out scale. But we got there and had a good visit and got home without much incident.

This gave me enough time to grab something to eat and put my feet up before we headed back out on the town. This time, my colorful companion was the one and only boyface!

We started by stopping at our realtor's office and signing some final papers. Yay we are so ready for closing it hurts!

Then we went to Salvation Army to try to find a dresser. We just got a new Salvation Army in our town and it is magnificently and frighteningly HU-MUNG-OUS!

It just went on and on! And there was so much stuff! And so, so very many people. They had about a million buffet hutches and a ton of couches, but no dressers (sad panda) so we trolled around in the randomness for a few minutes before heading back out into the pristine weather for a ride to Harris Teeter.

Where we focused on very important things. In reality, I did need quite a few things because I am making my WORLD FAMOUS baked ziti with my WORLD FAMOUS pasta sauce.

Famous in my world anyways. We got all we needed including a visit from a mustached man who let us taste and buy some of his local Italian sausage and watched him give out mustaches to little girls. Ha. Giggle.

Whew... it's a lot less exhausting writing about this then it was to do it all. But it is all very exhausting to write all this. That's all for halftime, let's keep going.

This is the guy with the sausage (giggle giggle) and the mustache (giggle giggle giggle). If you live in the DC metro area you should check it out though, pretty tastey.

And this guy with his mustache! We're only to the third game of the first round of the playoffs! This guy is gonna get a lot furrier... Lol let me tell you how thrilled I am... :) I love my guy and you know it!

A quick trip to check out the new ABC Store (and buy liquor) and off we were back home to make pasta sauce and pack our brains out!!

The pasta sauce is something that my mom taught me how to make. We are from upstate New York and although we are not Italian... it was basically a huge part of our diet before moving down here and is something my mom has stuck with. Making large vats of pasta sauce and freezing is a monthly project and we eat pasta a lot.


So here it is, a step by step of the not so secret and incredibly simple but fairly time consuming method of pasta sauce making that we subsist on in our house. You will never go back to simple sauce again.

I start with onions, garlic, ground beef, and ground Italian sausage (I usually go with mild and I prefer ground. I feel like hot is just an overwhelming flavor and I feel that sliced sausage doesn't meld as well when you're eating it. You either get a mouthful of beef or a mouthful of sausage, not a full taste of the whole thing.)

So here is my giant vat of very hot meat (that's what she said?):

I used a little bit of olive oil to cook the onions and garlic before adding the meat this time... but it doesn't really matter. The fat in the meats gives you all the lube you need to caramelize the onions and garlic. But any oils, fats, or liquids will all be mixed together anyway. (See how specific this recipe is?)

Then we have our tomatoes:

(Can I show brand names? do I care?) My mom will sometimes boil and skin tomatoes, but I am both lazy and short-ish (ha) on time so I just got some diced canned. Tomato paste to thicken it up a little. I don't really have any brand loyalty when it comes to any of these things. I try to buy a pasta sauce that is just a basic traditional or classic flavor, and whatever is on sale. I have used a lot of different sauces but because you're adding so much to it, they all ending up tasting the same. This is where personal preference and personal taste will come into play.

So these all get dumped unceremoniously on top of the meat. So unceremoniously, in fact, that you don't even take a picture for your blog.

You move on to the next step, which is to add what BF refers to infamously as THE LEAF!

Bay leaves. Do not eat them, they taste awful. But they add flavor when cooked into things. Kind of like onions.

I put these in with the tomato stuff because the longer they cook the more flavor they will impart into the sauce. BF did not find out the whole "don't eat them" thing until after he started eating my cooking. He says he always gets the leaf. I make sure to always save one just for his plate :).

Then I round up the usual suspects.

Rosemary (this is actually rosemary my mom grew and dried for me. awesome) Basil. Oregano. Parsley. The parsley isn't necessary, it adds more color than flavor. But I had it so I threw it in. I would say the Basil and Oregano are the most important pieces, but the rosemary is worth it. These go in by the handful and by taste. Remember that the longer the sauce cooks, the more the flavors will meld and come out. So I usually put some in and then taste it a few hours later, then see if it needs more. It's also good to have some garlic powder on hand in case the five cloves of garlic you put in at the beginning have not made it suitably non-vampiric. (I heart garlic)

And then it sits like this, simmering, for as long as possible. All day if you can stand to be stuck at home with it. You could theoretically do it in a crock pot I guess, we just never have and mine is packed. Besides, unless you have a giant crockpot it's not going to hold this amount. That's where the awesomeness of the above stockpot comes in. (Martha who?)

I want to say that I got the pasta sauce all mixed in and simmering, it was about mmm... 4ish. I ended up letting it cook until after 8. Not as long as I would have wanted, but good enough.

At this point my master list looked about like this:

Fairly satisfactory. The things that didn't get crossed off can get done in time. I needed to pack so I popped myself a beer and got moving.

Pictures of packing aren't very interesting, and probably would have just messed up my motivation. So I only stopped to take a picture of this.

How cool right? I wanted to light them but Hubs said we should save them and light them in the new place. We will christen our new house but light things on fire inside of it. Sounds like a plan...

So I put them where I wouldn't lose them in the next week.

Baha.

Any who, after packing up several boxes, drinking a few drinks, and flinging pasta sauce on the ceiling

It was time to tupperware it and freeze it.

See why stockpot trumps crockpot? It's a simple volume issue (that's volume right? you know what I mean!). This is probably more than a months worth of sauce, now that I have the stockpot and can make a full batch. And we also haven't been in a huge pasta roll recently... but now that we have so much sauce available we might be.

And this is now our freezer. You can tell a lot about a family by the innards of certain storage areas. I think the freezer is definitely one of them. I, like my mother, freeze pretty much everything and make it last. Note: several bags of ice, I use this in the summer to make sweet iced tea. This, I believe, is the left overs from daiquiri night... Bagels (top right hand corner) brought back home from New York from my mom. It's a treat we don't get down here very often in Virginia. They are just made different back home.

There isn't actually that much stuff in this freezer, it just looks tight because of the bags of ice... and the fact that the entire top layer of our wedding cake is sitting their hogging up the back corner awaiting our first anniversary. And haunting me.

And yes, we keep liquor in our freezer. Nothing better than ice cold vodka. And the constant reminder that you have it every time you go for an ice cube...

So that's it. That was all Saturday. And then Sunday... Sunday mom and I moved a million boxes into her garage. It seemed like a million anyway. I'm so tired of boxes and moving. And there still seems to be SO MUCH STUFF!!


My more immediate concern is getting in some relax time and counting down the T minus 47 minutes until the Game of Thrones premier!! So, I leave you with this:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

The Smooshy Simple Things

It feels like life hasn't really stopped for Hubs and me since the wedding day. We've been very popular on top of trying to find life somewhere amidst the post-nuptial chaos. And on top of that is now packing and moving and planning.

And although we do spend an awful lot of time together, it just never seems like enough. As we just passed our three month anniversary, I don't think that this is unusual or wrong. If we were already tired of each other, I think that might mean something was wrong.

So, I wanted to something together. Something simple and lovey and smooshy. So I got Rice Krispie's and marshmallows.

Ooey gooey and yummy! I could just eat this part... butter and warm marshmallow...

Mr. Man with his play off beard mixing some tastey madness.

*drool*

This is his concentration face. It makes me giggle.

Then we sat and watched the rest of the Flyers game. (The NY Rangers, my team, just barely squeaked into the Stanley Cup Playoffs today and the Philadelphia Flyers, BF's team, was first in their division.)

And then? We nom! (Wasn't sure how to make nom into past tense... but nomed didn't look right so I left it that way. I mean... if we we we so excited can work... I hate that song... And I sing it every Friday. It's terrible)

Anyway, NOMING!

Being a good sport and posing while enjoying the fruits of his labor. Good hubbers!

And myself :)

It's nice to do something together. Normally, my exploits in the kitchen are subject to some amazement from my better half so it was really nice to have him join me. Even though making rice krispie treats might be the easiest thing in the world... that's almost better because it's hard to screw up (which we are wont to do with our powers combined.)

Yay for tastey. And good night.

Leaving Apartmentville - Retrospective

Can it be a retrospective if I haven't left yet? Is retrospective really a word or am I misplacing it with another word? Oh well, this is my fantasy and I'll use whatever words I wanna use.

Fantasy = Blog... sounded more creative when I worded it that way.

Before I start, I want to point out that this post is in no way sad or regretful. We are moving into a place that is going to be so awesome... and I am so totally not going to miss this apartment or anything about it. But it was (is?) our first place. This is the place where we moved from our parents' houses and struggled to keep, where we brought our dog home for the first time and started creating "family" instead of "boyfriend and girlfriend."

 That is Bo's first collar! His neck used to be that tiny!! Now it won't even fit over his head! 

This is the place where we came after our wedding to eat taco bell and pack for our honeymoon. (Funny story, actually. After the wedding, we were both so hungry! We had eaten dinner at around 5:00 and had danced ourselves silly since then... we needed a fourth meal. And, to tell you the truth, it's kind of romantic in a very 'us' kind of way. Back in the day when we were living at home, our date nights would often comprise of going to Taco Bell, eating it in the car, and then hitting Best Buy. Sounds pretty crappy, but we were broke and young and it was our thing. So to sit down on our couch and chow down on some fast "Mexican" food with our wedding clothes piled in a corner (and yes, we had other clothes on... jeez) was a really good memory. It makes me smile.)

....

I was talking about... what? Oh! The apartment!

I have been taking a lot of pictures lately. It might be because I found the stupid charger for my camera and now have it back for the first time in months. But I also feel like... I want to remember this place.

It hasn't been the best place to live... and we didn't really keep it very homey. We let things get cluttered and piled in corners and on chairs. But look at my hutch and my pantry! Those things made this home.

My first kitchen! Way too small and not enough storage or counter space. But this was MY FIRST KITCHEN. This guy saw a lot of screw ups, a ton of messes, I once caught cupcakes on fire in the oven (I was broiling marshmallow topping, it was bound to happen...) and some pretty spectacular meals. I'll be glad to have a kitchen that I can create in again... but I will never forget the cramped mess that I cut my cooking teeth in.

A lesson in blending two very similar people with very different decorating styles. Although BF and I do enjoy a lot of the same things, I'm not a fan of putting everything I'm interested in on the walls, whereas he displays everything. We figured out a lot about each other and where we will go with the next house. Take a peak at that overstuffed closet - not even this could contain our stuff! I don't know what's going to happen in the new house... but damn we filled that thing up....

Speaking of my Hubs, here he is bagging and boarding some of his most prized possessions. Call it childish, but I love that he collects these things. Ok, maybe I just love him...

Bo standing in the GIANT HOLE he made in the carpet. Hubs and I went out to see a movie and we were testing the pup to see if we could start leaving him out. The answer is approximately greater than or equal to a $200 crate just for this guy. Expensive, yes, but if my dog has to be crated he's going to do it in something comfortable and sturdy (and that folds up and rolls for convenient moving... really don't miss the $200 as much as I miss the threshold of this door...) That thing is the bomb diggety. And I'm glad we learned that lesson here. Bo? He doesn't learn lessons...

The view out of our living room window. We got lucky when we moved in here and have a corner apartment that backs up onto common area with that pretty tree outside. Ah, spring!

The entertainment zone will no longer be in the living room. Hubs is getting a mancave. I always wondered why men ended up with a mancave and women the rest of the house. Now I know. That's another lesson this apartment taught us...

At the end of the day (lol I started writing that sentence and then saw the look on the dog's face... haven't stopped laughing yet...)

At the end of the day, as long as the three of us are together, we'll be happy. Being able to paint the walls and decorate and do what we want? That's just gravy.


Really, really, really awesome gravy.

Contemplation of Weighted Proportions

I have moved twice in my lifetime. When I was around 11, we moved from southern upstate New York to Northern Virginia. I don't really remember a lot of it, and really, I believe I wasn't even involved in most of it. We went from a three bedroom trailer to a four bedroom house with a living room, family room, dining room, office, and basement. Even though it was two adults and two kids worth of stuff, there was more than enough room to get everything in there. I don't really remember it being a problem.

Two years ago, Hubs (then really a bf) and I moved in together into the 740 square foot apartment. I left a lot of stuff at my mom's because they had a lot of space, and we stored a lot of stuff there, but somehow in the past 24 months we have found a way to fill that place to bursting. Moving in there, though, was a blur. I don't remember what it's like to be moving our stuff, and blending it together. ( Or to have an empty space to turn the front end loader into and DUMP). Now our stuff is just stuff and it has to be moved again.

And now we have a fuzzball who needs to be moved as well. Not a big deal, I'll just leave him crated at my mom's and then bring him over to christen the new place (probably by pooping on the floor, this is his MO when visiting new places for the first time... we call it ninja pooping because he usually does it in a room where everyone isn't and then prances around until someone finds it... and then unfortunately repeats...)

I am a little overwhelmed with the thought of how much stuff we have. A year ago now, I was starting to really get the ball rolling on planning the wedding... and as the year between the proposal and the wedding date rolled on, things just got crazier and crazier. We were just straight up busy and mentally unfocused... and we let everything pile up and get disorganized and didn't notice that we weren't really living in our place but out of it. I don't really remember what it was like before then.

I have to admit, we were pretty much apathetic about the way we lived in our apartment. We knew it wasn't permanent and that was how we carried out our day to do day lives, just kind of surviving until we get somewhere else. I really feel very strongly that this is not the way I want to do business in our new house. I want things clean and neat, marginally. I don't need a model house but I would like some sense of order. When we have people over, I don't want to grab armloads of SHIT and throw it into the bedroom and close the door. I want to feel like if they show up early, I won't be mortified because I haven't gotten to the other side of the room yet.

And if someone has to come into the house while we're at work (ie, mom coming to get the dog) I don't want to be wondering what my house looks like that I didn't consider while running out the door (late) for the office.

I guess these are just things that apartment life didn't really give us the option of. We have an entire other bedroom and an attic for storage. Our entire lives won't be in our living room.

And we have time. Glorious, freeing time. And stability. Because we are going to be there for awhile. And we know it. So there is a sense of dedication and of working toward something greater than we had before. Instead of it being temporary and something that was never really ours to begin with, we have something that we can own and be proud of.

In any case, I can't wait to get rid of all our shit.