It’s Sad How Fast a Tan Fades

So we are back and clothes are washed and mostly put away. We put the suit cases away. The cats no longer feel abandoned but ironically still stick pretty close. We have gone through pics and relived stories and feel a sadness for the finality of the event.

We are getting back into the swing of things. We spent some serious time on the house this past weekend. Matt’s guiding was cancelled and I suddenly had a helper to work on some house projects! Here’s a list of things that were accomplished:

• Leaves picked up on the patio (Much to TonyDanza’s dismay, who loved watching them through the sliding glass door)
• Yard cleaned up including flower beds, and some basic pruning. We started talking plans for Matt’s landscape renovation for next year but then he found out that they put 3” of gravel down. He was pretty disappointed.
• My car worked on….because of my battery “situation” Matt put a maintainer on and also repaired my headlight, which had gone out. We may start shopping for cars later this fall, but who really wants a payment!
• The guest bedroom painted. When we did the big renovation…we finally stopped when we got our heads above water and got the primer up in the room. It’s finally painted. It looks so nice. We did two tone it and we officially took the painters tape off the walls on Sunday.
• Hung pics in the guest room. I’m not in love with 1 wall but the others look so nice. It’s actually looking like a real room. We do have to paint the closet and it can get finalized even more…but we’ll take what we can get, maybe that will happen later this month.
• Laundry…boring…but this necessary evil.
• Brushed the cats. Only Lola was the non-naughty one.
• Made jerky. With the big deer hunt coming up…we decided to make some snacks to share at the event and also prep our freezer for the next one.

We were feeling pretty accomplished with all that had happened! But a highlight of the weekend was what Matt bought before coming home. Crabs. From the back of a truck. In the Dickinson Tire Parking lot. From a guy! When he showed me them, they were still moving. So we took them home (in a Menard’s bucket) and cleaned them up with a sink brush.One of them grabbed on and wouldn’t let go. Nike was scared of them...wouldn't go near the bucket. We then let them take a slight nap in the freezer, prepped our love pot (which was a wedding gift) and when we had a good boil on, slipped them in for a good steam. They came out looking so good. We sat down, with a cutting board and our cracker set and gorged ourselves on crab.

That wasn’t our only good meal of the weekend, we had our first batch of the tomato soup that I made. I was so happy with it. I will do something a bit different next year but for the most part they turned out better than I planned. Both Matt and I enjoyed it. We also had the last of our steaks for this beef. We still have other odds and ends that will need to be used before we can have the next beef but the steaks were huge and so good.

ALR: (sleeves rolled up) Here I thought I had the best meal of the week for the blog before tonight.
MJR: (whole crab in his hand): What?
ALR: I love the fish from earlier with the spices that we bought in the market.
MJR: (half a crab in his hand): Yeah, that was a good meal.
ALR: (sucking the meat out of the leg): But 8 pounds of crab is WAY better.
an hour later
ALR: 8 Pounds is TOO much crab…too much…I don’t want to move!
MJR: I want Pie.
ALR: serious?