The Frank Funny Farm

seriously! it's 10 degrees outside right now. it "feels like" 0! where am i? i gotta say, these last couple of days that case for global warming is looking a little iffy. our low last night was supposed to be 6. and since we're in nashville and all, they closed metro schools for today. they announced this yesterday. BECAUSE IT'S COLD. it seems they were all concerned for kids who have to walk to school or wait at bus stops. ben brought up the very valid point that in plenty of places in this country it's routintely this cold or colder. he asked if they're a different species in minnesota or michigan. i said yes, they're the species that can drive their cars in the snow and can hear predictions of cold or flurries without instantly speeding to a grocery store to purchase all of its beer, milk and bottled water in some sort of frothy we're-gonna-die-due-to-potential-miniscule-precipitation! frenzy. bah.

unfortunately for me and the dogs, i had to go to the dentist yesterday since that whole being sickly thing last week forced me to reschedule it. then i had to go visit trader joe and ask him for fruit and milk and aslo potatoes and cheese and a half-baguette because i decided to make broccoli potato soup. it kind of ended up being broccoli potato garlic soup, but it was yum. i was going off of a couple of recipes because (naturally) i couldn't find one exactly too my liking, and i just wanted to throw it in the crock pot. one of these recipes said one clove of garlic, the other said two; we like garlic, so i put two. however, i guess the blendering made it a bit more garlic-punching-you-in-the-face than i wanted. i just put more cheese it. still to garlicky, but ok i thought.

trader joe also had fingerling sweet potatoes, which of course fascinated me so i bought a bag. yes, i realize they're just baby sweet potatoes, but a) that makes them adorable, and b) i'd never seen them before. and they'll be yummy roasted. since today's high is supposed to be the same as yesterday - 21 if you're wondering - we've decided we're definitely spending friday night in. it would be too mean to leave the dogs outside, and since neither of them is trustworthy alone in the house for more than an hour (even that's pushing it) and i aim to clean today, we'll stay in and warm and toasty thankyouverymuch. we're going to make a deep dish stuffed pizza because larry posted a link to a recipe / how to thing and ben is very excited. it looks tasty and since it's all deep it has many possibilities for stuffing it with yummy goodness. apparently this is my 'food' blog. i guess i should say i'm thinking about making cookies later to make it complete. only if i have time though. i have the aforementioned cleaning to do and i have to go to the bookstore after i get chiropracted to buy books for the one class that has a booklist. i do now know that the children's lit directed study class will be on wednesdays, but that's all i know. oh, and it will commence between the hours of 5 and 6 pm. sometimes my obsessive need to organize really makes me twitchy when the things i need to organize are controlled by the opposite type of person. sigh.

i should probably get to a bit of that cleaning i was talking about. a couple of days this week i've thought i could clean things, but only managed to get a bunch of stuff done that had to be done in order to clean - folding a mountain of laundry, unloading the dishwasher so as to reload it, etc. yesterday i actually cleaned my office. i found my desk and everthing! it had become so piled and so nightmarish that i don't think i actually used it for most of december. i just sat on the couch with books piled awkardly around me, balanced on pillows and hayley or whatever was handy. i'm sure ben was more than tired of the couch and coffee table and occasionally a chair being swallowed by books and papers. i think that desk thing will work out well. i had to do the semesterly integration of books onto my (much too) tiny bookcase. that was fun. i have a bunch of those white cube shelves behing my desk, holding an assortment of random things and and increasing number of books. but i'm me, so the books that are there are still relatively categorized: all my c.s. lewis books are in one, shel silverstein has one, the harry potters are in one b/c i have them all in hardback, i have a norton anthology one (with a couple non-nortons also) and a random how-to type book cube, and now i have a beatles one since i have a small collection of beatles books thanks to the undergrad thesis. i also cast out about 6 books that i either hated or had given to me but have no intent of ever reading and/or books that are simply not good enough to live with me. i thought of taking these to the used book store since they were all in pretty good condition, but then i took a moment to weigh the odds of that actually happening verses those books being around in a stack somewhere in the way for months until i snap and recycle them. so i put them in the recycling bin. i have no idea what will happen at the end of this semester, because there is barely breathing room on the bookcase. i could fit a few more lil poetry collections in there probably, but not the big fat comprehensive ones. me and my first-world tragedies.

right, so i was going to stop blogging and clean, but instead i wrote another paragraph... clicking. 'publish.' now.

Tags: books books books!, cleaning and organization are glorious, it's COLD!, reallyreallyCOLD, soup is yummy, stuffed pizza is yummy

twas not a good weekend for my sports teams of choice. at least the steelers remembered how to play football. i'm actually thinking of cheering against them from here on out, so as not to curse them in any way. i don't want them to suddenly forget how to play football like the stupid titans did. then caronlina's basketball team had to look like a bunch of 17 year old kids who'd never seen each other before, nevermind a basketball or that nifty thing hanging from the ceiling with that crazy hoop with the net dangling from it. all this and i was sickly too! me was very woe.

the whole sickly thing ruined my weekend, the two days preceding it, and parts of this week as well. i was completely useless thursday and friday, which was truly unfornate as those days were scheduled for house-cleaning (it's so gross!), cavity-filling, bang trimming and even some french studying. so i had to push the dentist till this thursday, my long-overdue bang trim was rescheduled for this friday at 7:45. (i'm gonna have a raucous friday night, i can tell). at this point, i really should just wait until next week and get a haircut, but those is expensive and time-consuming. no houses were cleaned, no frenches were translated. saturday i was slightly less useless, but didn't do anything, including go over to keith & larry's to watch the titans debacle and then have game night. i missed game night! wah! ben went and reported that it was fun (stupid football aside) and that the new cranium games have new, um, tasks? challenges? activities? you know what i mean. apparently there's a puppet one, where one person is the puppet, and a person stands behind them and sort of forces them to charade something. the marionet doesn't even know the answer, so everyone's confused. wanna play! if ben ever remembered that this is his blog too and that he could sometimes post here, he might tell you about it. i wouldn't hold my breath it i were you. unless something smells bad in your particular vicinity, then it might be a good idea.

yesterday i determined to be better and we went to church and kept our monthly meal/bonding time with cara & dave (yay!). today i'm pretty ok except for the larger-and-stuffier-than-normal head and the occasional hacking sound. i'm trying to be a hands-off nanny today, we'll see how that works out.

in other news, it's freaking COLD and only getting colder this week. i'd like to move now. there was a really think layer of frost on everything this morning - my contactless eyeballs had me wondering if it wasn't snow. i even had to dig out the ice scraper for the car. horrors. and poor lil hayley dog outside all day. at least she has her nifty jacket and can get in her house.

hilarious side note: the wee one has the hiccups and is laughing whilst walking herself around the baby cage holding on to the sides to come n get me. laughing hiccups are awesome.

hmm. what else can i regale you with? ooh! we got our new bed thursday, in time for some nice sickly late sleeping. i can't really overstate the wonderfulnessosity of a really supportive comfy bed after you've been sleeping on one that was neither of those. also, our new bed is flat. flat! whoda thunk? the middle and the sides, all the same height! as much as i enjoy snuggling with the ben, i gotta say that whole sleeping in a pile at some weird angle was really unpleasant.  my 100-year-old spine didn't like it either.

i suppose i should get back to that french book for a bit. i'm taking the class, and so far it's been pretty easy, for two reasons. one, it starts with the assumption that one knows no french, and as it turns out, i actually know quite a bit (who knew?). two, it's designed for non-french majors to learn to READ french, so it's not as bogged down with those endless pesky articles. it just wants me to be able to read french and understand it, not translate english in to french, which is much more of a problem pour moi.

as for my english learnings, well, classes belmont-wide start on wednesday. when they start for me, i don't yet know, which i must admit is making me a lil nervous. hopefully i'll know something today, as all the professors are back, including dr. c, who will hopefully still be down with the idea and stuff. nothing was nailed down before the break because it took so bloody long for dr. dept chair to just meet with me. ug! anyway, i'm trying to maintian that whole, no worries, God's got it under control thing i am sometimes good at, but dagnabit i'm slightly worried. *breathing breathing breathing* zen face. k. so anyway, i am going to end my rambles and read some frenches before the hour of baby food arrives. i don't want her getting all giant and turning green on me. she's much too cute for that.

Tags: have patience!, man i'm whiny, school, sick is suck, stupid carolina, stupid titans, yay steelers!

so i got ben a smoker for christmas, one of the little bullet-looking ones. to go with it, i ordered two probe thermometer/timers - one for the meat, one for the ambient - so that he could know the temp without opening the door and letting all the smoke out. i used dan as my personal smoker guru and he told me to buy these pyrex ones, and since he's gone through a million different varieties of timer and currently owns 4 of these, i figured he might be right. i found them cheapest online at bed, bath & beyond and in hopes of avoiding shipping costs went to the store. no luck, of course, so order them i did. ups brought the box on the 16th (maybe - the week before christmas anyway), i opened it to find two oneida thermometer/timers staring at me. UG. i called customer service and the lady said that they couldn't ship the right item until they had those back, so it would be speedier for me to return them to the store. alright. so that thursday (before we're leaving on friday, my first day with nothing to do all semester) i get to go out amongst the shoppers. i was in the store for probably an hour, and honestly, i'm not even sure why. you would think no one had ever returned anything ever, let alone someone who'd ordered online (what? the interwebs? huh?) and needed a new item shipped. anyway, eventually it got sorted and the order was placed for the correct timers (again).

skip to our eventual return from holiday festivities and new car innards and we once again have a bed, bath, and beyond box. ben is all excited cuz now he can smoke something (i had to wrap up pictures of the freaking things for him. lame.). except that we open the box and -you guessed it!- oneida thermometers. my head almost exploded. but it was new year's eve, so calling was futile, so i waited until friday. this oh so charming woman didn't seem to think it was at all strange that this had occurred. she said she emailed the warehouse to make sure they check the box and make sure they're pyrex. shouldn't they do that in the first place as, you know, a basic part of their jobs??? then she wanted to make it very clear to me that i needed to get the crappy thermometers back to them, otherwise i'd be charged. she did at least clear the shipment of the thermometers i ordered before they get the wrong ones back. wench. so anyway, they have mailed something to me again, so i guess we'll see. but i certainly don't plan to order anything online from them again. third time's a charm, right?

Tags: bed bath & beyond is boo, mmmeat thermometer, online ordering, sorry you may never get your present

so we finally made it home. on new year's eve at around 6ish central time. our new transmission didn't arrive on the tuesday morning parts truck; apparently it wanted to take a nice leisurely trip and come with the afternoon delivery. so we did, in fact, lunch at that place we spied. it's called hybread, and the whole idea of the place is that everything is organic, local, sustainable and generally environmentally/dirty hippie/people who likes tasty food friendly. it was so tasty that we decided we should return the next day to sample the breakfast offerings if us franks were still in hickory. we were, so we did. we also got a good chance to cute boy shop for erin, who apparently returned for lunch with a co-worker today, so she is decidedly a stalker. those boys should be so lucky. anyway, so we had a nice lazy visit and vacation and stuff but were so very happy to see our house. so happy that we stopped by kroger before coming home to collect salad makings, came home, unloaded the car, made and ate said salads and left again for the new year's festivities at dan's. but we returned a bit after 4 to sleep in our very own bed. our very own crappy bed whose days are numbered. we bought a shiny new awesome slightly-more-expensiver-than-we-meant bed today. most unfortunately it wasn't in stock so we can't have it till thursday. i fear our bed will seem so much more wretched in the next few days. speaking of beds, ben fell out of the air-filled one we slept on at erin's. i took pictures, so if you haven't yet viewed them on his facebook page, you should. hi-larious.

anyhoo, it sounds like he might be reappearing in the front half of the house soon, so i suppose i'll wrap up the babble. i'm too tired for any deep-type thoughts (cuz normally i'm so full of those...) so i shall just say this: merry new year. do sumthin brilliant with it. i pray we can, too. but seriously, that freaking awesome, supportive and even flat bed we just bought is pretty freakin brilliant. so even if we crap out the rest of the year, we already did something great. starting with a bang and all that. oooh. dirty.

Tags: erin is neato, finally home!, merry new year, new beds rule