7:00 am – wake up - ish. I remember its Saturday so I go back to sorta sleep
7:30 am – finally get up after Cornelius decided to snuggle in the middle of the two of us using half my pillow as his own.
8:00 am – breakfast of toast, butter, peanut butter & blueberry jelly. Tony makes extra dark coffee with his new coffee maker (old one died) and starbucks tribute coffee. They were having a buy one get one free offer on whole bean tribute bags a week or 2 ago. He had a $10 gift card, I had a $5 one (thanks bake sale @ work)… but back to breakfast. I drink my half cup of coffee with chocolate almond milk. Delish! We sit down and watch one episode of arrested development together while eating in the living room. We’ve been watching them in preparation for next week's reveal – in reverse. Like we started at the finale and are working our way backwards on netflix. Its epic. You should try it. So. many. jokes.
8:45 am – get dressed and decide to drive to short pump for some errands. This is a 25 minute drive abouts. We make sure to remember our reusable bags and the screw that broke off the lawnmower to replace.
8:46 am – After cursing our upstairs neighbor for whatever sound she’s been making for the past 12+ hours (vacuuming? fan? sharpening knives on a mill?) Tony flushes our toilet and the noise stops momentarily… and he has an epiphany. We left the outside hose on yesterday. Oops! it leads to this:
9:15 am – we arrive at Helzberg Diamond to get my ring cleaned. I get it done twice yearly (November & May) per the lifetime warranty. They try and sell us something but we politely decline. Then we realize that there is no Sears in short pump and decide to drive to the closest one to get the lawn mower part before getting groceries.
9:45 am – after a very efficient trip to the parts department where they had exactly what we needed and quickly too we head back to short pump to get groceries at trader joes.
10:30 (?) am – we check out with $183 worth of trader joes food. Holy cow!
We hadn’t been to trader joes in about a month and were in withdrawals. Oh the things we got! Frozen stuff, cheese, more cheese, sparkling wine, goat cheese, fancy goat cheese, brussel sprouts, and yum things. Sticker shock makes us work out a menu and hard grocery planning on the drive home.
We see riverrock festival from the road on the way back but think we may not go since the weathers not good.
11:00 am – I do my favorite chore around the house – putting away the groceries! I love it! It’s hardly a chore. It’s weirdly fun to me. Tony puts the menu on the board. Note – the meats on the menu are fake, aka chik’n and 'beef’ tips. The brussel sprouts are very real and so good in balsamic! I must post about our fav fake meats soon…
11:30 am – I find it weird that we’ve done so many things so early in the morning. Normally we don’t make it out of the house before 11 on Saturdays. We eat salad lunches that we picked up at trader joes. Mine is amazing! Its lettuce, some red lettuce, corn, israeli cous cous, walnuts, raisins?, chicken & sweet basil dressing. Must recreate! Tony’s is similar but I can’t rave about it since I didn’t try it. Again, we eat this while watching an episode of Arrested Development. Motherboy XXX.
noon – I start working on the bread. The no kneed bread needs to be taken out of the bowl and set to its’ second rise on parchment paper on the counter. For this amazing recipe see - http://www.frugallivingnw.com/frugal-homemaking/amazing-no-knead-bread-step-by-step-recipe/. I highly recommend it. Even if you don’t think you can bake bread well, or at all, or can’t bake, or can’t cook. This recipe is that easy!
I had started the bread the night before. I mixed the 4 ingredients and set in a bowl with plastic wrap. Around noon it had been 16 hours and the bubbles were exactly like the blog photo showed. I wrapped this dough in flour & parchment paper and set the timer for 2 hours.
12:45 – after the bread and general kitchen cleaning I start on the homemade laundry detergent. We’d run out of my last big batch I made 6 (?) months ago and I wanted to try something slightly different. This time I googled around, found this (http://www.diynatural.com/homemade-laundry-detergent-soap/) and decide to give the powder kind a try versus the normal liquid which we’ve used for the last 2 years. It helps that I only have half a zote bar in the house so I make half a batch.
After wrestling with the food processor and the box grater I manage to get pretty much all of the bar of Zote
soap grated with all my finger tips intact. It’s basically 1/2 a bar of any soap, 1/2 a cup of borax & 1/2 cup of washing soda mixed together. I found an old spaghetti sauce jar to hold it in. This is good for 30 loads of laundry!!!
1:15 – 2:00 pm – lost minutes. Was I cleaning? iphoneing? On pinterest? Who knows. I think probably lots of those, plus Cornelius cuddling and some laundry thrown in to try my new detergent. I started with a fleece blanket to test. At 1:30 pm I did preheat the oven and put in the dutch oven in prep for 2pm. Also I seem to remember getting the mail that had come and reading Better Homes & Gardens plus the latest Time magazine on Angelina Jolie.
2:00 pm – its time to finally bake this bread!
It took flipping the dough upside down into the 425 degree dutch oven without burning anything. Then baking for 30 minutes & then 20 more with the lid off.
2:50 pm – I take the bread out of the oven. Besides smelling like a Subway in our house it actually looks like I followed the directions correctly! I make some comment about how the blog said it would crackle and not to cut it open until that’s done. No sooner and I uttered those words then we heard it! turn your sound up to see this video…
3:00 pm – We drive to get a redbox movie for later that night. Spur of the moment thing since Tony’s been working all day while I make fun things. We rent Life at forty and buy 9V batteries at CVS since a smoke detector one died this week. I get great 20% of coupons with my cvs card and I contemplate buying razors.
Then we decide to walk over to the library since its next door. I get 1 vegetarian cookbook (that only looks so so), 1 workout video and 2 audiobooks on CD. Good haul.
3:45 pm – take silly photos & more bread photos. Yes that is a red paper mache rhino head. We finished it last week and are currently trying to decide how to mount it on the wooden board. Any ideas??? please!
4:00 pm – Tony starts dinner and cutting the bread. Normally we eat much later but today we go with it. We decide to not go by what’s on the menu and make grilled cheese on with soup. Its not raining so we can grill them outside on the grill. He makes the dinner while I clean up the rest of the kitchen and review my new cookbook. Again its not the best book but find a couple things that could be good to try one day.
The bread is the highlight of the day. Its soo good! Crusty outside, soft bubbly inside. This also was a half recipe! I still can't believe I made something this good. Baking bread has never been a particular strong suit for me. Until today.
5:00 pm – after the 3rd episode of Arrested Development of the day I clean up and do some blogging while playing a new game Geo Guessr (http://geoguessr.com/) and general online facebooking etc. I also grab a great video of Cornelius doing his tricks. He’s really coming along! His latest trick is high five.
8:00 pm – we go on a neighborhood walk. It’s pretty much dark out but we go anyway. We just casually walk the streets of our neighborhood and talk.
8:45 pm – we're back! I shower since its hot and humid out then its movie night. The movie was only so so but we had a little snack of raisin rosemary crisps with herb goat cheese so that made it good.
bed.
the end.
