GlossyVeneer

On Friday night we went out to dinner with this girl Kevin works with (and recently graduated with) and her husband. We went to PF Chang’s, the first time I’ve ever been there. It was pretty good. We ordered several different items to pass around. The kung pao shrimp was probably the best thing on the table. During the meal, the gal’s husband asked me if I went to a certain high school. I answered in the affirmative. He said, “I thought so. I graduated with your younger brother.” My hubby and I are 29 and 27 and this couple was 25 and 22. They started teasing us about how “old” we are and how we’ve been together for “so long” and we don’t even have a pet yet.

On Saturday we went over to this same couple’s house to watch the stupid BYU football game. There were several people that came and the good part was we got to grill hamburgers for lunch. The bad part was that we had to watch the game. We all knew Notre Dame was going to win. This was confirmed by the second quarter, yet everybody insisted that you have to watch the game to the very end. At least by watching the game at someone else’s house, I had their puppy to play with and other couple’s kids to entertain me.

I also attempted to make apple butter this weekend. That was an interesting process. I don’t own a pressure canner so I had to can items using the old-fashioned boiling water method. I was scared about that part not working, but it actually worked fine. It was the damn apple butter itself… I cooked that stuff and cooked it and cooked it and burned myself and cooked it and cooked it and covered my kitchen in stickiness and cooked it. The stuff took forever to get thick. I still don’t think it is thick enough, but I was sick of it and finally dumped it into jars and processed them. We’ll see when I open a jar sometime this week.

Today is a vacation day from work. The official title is “Harvest Holiday”, but the unofficial title is “Deer Hunt”. In fact, when I was a kid in Utah we even got a day off of school for the “Deer Hunt”. Now the state is a little more PC and the holiday is thinly-veiled in the “Harvest Holiday” title. Whatever the title, I get a day off and I have been bumming around the house all day. I was planning on pruning the vines in the backyard some more since I spent about two hours yesterday working on it and didn’t finish, but I kind of blew it off. Now I should be working on a freelance project and I’m having a very hard time getting motivated. I’m terrible. Don’t worry, I won’t bill the client for this blabbing.

Another thing I did today was watch Martha Stewart’s daytime talk show. Hadn’t seen it before, it was there and available on the TV so I watched. It was kind of boring, but she featured this author who wrote a book about the Average American. This guy’s list of requirements to be considered “average” is so extensive that very few American’s even meet the qualifications. I thought that was kind of odd, but it did say that if I don’t have a pet, I’m not an Average American. I guess our friends were right on Friday night, we do need a pet.

Of course, I would still be far from “average”.

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