Blessings

I seriously wish I could take the Thanksgiving that Darrell and I shared and relive it everyday--like the classic movie Groundhog Day. It was so wonderful to just be together and relax. And let me tell you, after the three-day Thanksgiving marathon that my family celebrated, I could use another full day of relaxation. But alas, another work week has begun, and it is quickly spinning into the chaotic holiday season, so for now I will just hold onto that memory and dream of more days like it to come.


Before this holiday season gets totally out of control, though, I do want to list a few things that I am thankful for. I know I don't always cherish these things as much as I should, but hopefully when life gets a little too crazy and I start to throw a pity party for myself I can always look back on this and remember how great I really do have it.

• My wonderful husband, who cooks and cleans and does all the other things I should be better about doing myself (or at least helping with). He is also eternally patient with me, and I can honestly say he's made me a better person (who knew red peppers were actually delicious??)
• My family, who, despite their craziness and ability to turn Thanksgiving into a three-day affair, are always supportive. I heard a co-worker say today that every year around the holidays she pledges to patch things up with her brother, but never quite gets around to it. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that
• My in-laws, who have treated me like a daughter and a sister since I first met them. I always get annoyed when people make the general assumption that "no one" likes their in-laws because I love mine dearly 
• My friends, many of whom have been there for all of my major life events, from the first day of kindergarten to my wedding. It's so wonderful to still be close with a group of girls after so many years. And of course, there is nothing like new friends who will allow you to borrow a car for a week while yours is (still!) stuck in the shop, for the mere exchange of a plate of cookies
• Our house, which despite being located in freezing SD (winter weather advisory today, joy), is absolutely wonderful and so perfect for Darrell and I. I also feel incredibly blessed that we were able to purchase a house at a fairly young age (we closed just over a year ago), and a lot of that is due to great support on college loans that allowed us to graduate debt-free
• Our jobs, which we are both happy with and where we have pretty solid job security. And truthfully, even though both of us working two jobs isn't completely necessary financially, our part-time jobs are at such an incredible organization that we don't really want to give up being a part of it

I know there are more, but that covers all the major ones. Even though I know I will inevitably complain about each and every one of these, deep down I do truly know they are a blessing. And I promise, there will be less sentimentality next post; this whole sappiness thing just isn't really my style

Our Thanksgiving

Happy Belated Thanksgiving! Hopefully sometime later this weekend, or Monday at the latest, I'll have a chance to blog about some of the things I'm most thankful for this year. But we're leaving soon to go visit my grandparents, so all I'll mention right now is being thankful for this:

Darrell and I both had the day off yesterday, and no family commitments, so we spent the entire day relaxing and preparing our own "mini" Thanksgiving feast. We had spinach salad with cranberries and raspberry vinegrite dressing, garlic cheddar biscuits, sweet potato casserole (had to have at least one traditional dish!), and Moroccan-style lamb. Everything was fantastic, and it was so wonderful to be able to spend the whole day together with nothing to do. Here's to hoping for many more of those days in the months to come!

Junk Mail

Dear Chase:
Please stop sending Darrell credit card applications and special offers and all the other garbage that you are filling our mailbox with. We got three (that's right, three!) pieces of mail from you yesterday, all which promptly got torn in half and recycled. While we appreciate you adding to our recycling, and thereby increasing our RecycleBank points, it has become excessive. It would be much better for the environment, your company's profit margin, and our sanity if you JUST. STOPPED. We have never gotten, and will never get, a credit card from you.
That is all.
Love, Jess and Darrell

Crock Pot to the Rescue!

So an unfortunate side effect of my not having a car is that our dinner schedule gets thrown all out of whack. You see, both Darrell and I work two jobs (a full-time one in the day, and a part-time one a few hours a week in the evening), and we have it pretty well coordinated so that one of us is always home to make dinner. I was a product of "boxed" dinners growing up (and I blame those on my lack of diverse taste buds during my adolescence--some might call it being finicky), but when Darrell and I first started dating and he began cooking for me, my taste buds exploded. I now eat mushrooms and peppers and strawberries and just about everything else under the sun. But I diverge.

As I was saying, we always try to cook something fresh for dinner, nothing boxed or frozen. But when a busted transmission leaves me car-less and Darrell has to stay in town until I get off work at 7, it's rather late for us to go home, roll up our sleeves, and get dinner going. Enter crock pot. To whomever got this for us as a wedding gift, we thank you again and again. Yesterday morning before we left we threw some meat, onions, salsa, peppers, and a few seasonings into the pot, set it to cook on low for eight hours, and came home to a wonderful meal of fajitas. No additional work necessary. It was marvelous. And definitely my type of cooking--throw it together and let it go. Darrell is much more the slave over the stove kind of chef in our house. 

And to reward myself for all the time I saved by not having to cook dinner I decided to make cookies. That's right, the holiday madness has begun. I am a cookie (well, really, any kind of dessert) fiend. I fully plan to utilize my day off on Friday by filling our house with all sorts of sugary goodness. Might have to schedule a few extra gym visits in December, but it will totally be worth it. Totally. 

A Little Unexpected Adventure

I'm not even sure where to begin with our weekend recap. On paper we had a pretty simple weekend planned--date night Friday night, visiting friends on Saturday, and preparing our menu and shopping for Thanksgiving on Sunday. And up until Sunday, things were going as planned. Our date night experience was a little sub-par; it's a restaurant we've been to before and enjoyed, so when we had an opportunity to get a coupon there we jumped on it. Well, turns out that since we've last been there they've changed locations, and we just didn't have a good experience at the new location. To begin, our seats were literally in the bar area, even though we'd waited 45 minutes for a table. Now, I fully understand the necessity of needing to utilize all available seating area--but when we went out for a "romantic" dinner, I wasn't expecting to have to compete for my husband's attention with the basketball games that were being televised. We also weren't given a wine list because of our "baby faces" (word to all wait-staff: do not assume we are under-21. If you are going to card us, at the very least assume we are 21 and provide us with what we need to order. And then do not comment on our baby faces like it is a compliment. We are 25 and 26 people. Comparing us to babies is a good way to hurt your tip). But we brushed that aside and ordered a bottle of the house wine--which was served to us in small water glasses. We're not talking stemless wine glasses here, but honest to goodness water glasses, albeit slightly smaller than the ones we had water in. We were less than impressed. Thankfully, we ended the evening by going shopping for our adorable nephew who is turing two this weekend, and by the time we got home we were in much better spirits.


Saturday morning was busy with both of us at work, but by 1:00 we were on the road to go visit our dear friends and their 2-month old little girl. And, alas, I already broke my first goal of blogging by forgetting to take my camera. Not that we had much opportunity for pictures; they are currently in the process of building a new home (which will hopefully be finished early next week!) so we spent most of the time out there loading and unloading boxes and appliances. Always a good time with those two though, manual labor or not. We ended up staying for dinner and staying way later than we anticipated, which was fine except for the fact that by the time we ended up getting on the road it had started to rain. And in South Dakota in November, when it rains, it freezes. So our two-hour drive home took a little longer than normal, but we made it home without issue. Can't quite say the same for the handful of cars we saw in accidents though.


We were actually able to sleep in on Sunday, which never happens, so we took full advantage of it. We even decided to stay home from church (eek!) since we didn't have to teach Sunday School and treat ourselves to a big breakfast--which subsequently forced us to lay down and nap for about half an hour on our full bellies. After planning our Thanksgiving menus for both the meal between the two of us and the meal at my parent's, we set in to town to do some grocery shopping, but not before hitting the gym. Despite having one of the longest grocery lists we've ever had, we were able to get most of our goods on sale so we didn't blow our grocery budget too badly. And then the fun started....


My car had been in town all weekend because we left Saturday straight from work. After picking up our groceries, we drove over to get my car. We had to spend a lovely ten minutes scraping ice off it (have I told you how much I love our garage?), but before long it was warmed up and ready go. Now, I should preface this story with saying that my car is a 2003 with over 100,000 miles, and over the course of the past week it hadn't been running incredibly smoothly, especially when it needed to change gears. I attributed it to the weather getting colder, though, and left it at that. Sunday afternoon was no different, it was shifting noticeably hard as I left the parking lot, and had some difficulty getting into a gear high enough for me to travel at 40 mph. I started to get nervous when the problem didn't go away after a few miles, especially because my RPMs kept jumping way up whenever I tried to accelerate, and started to stay really high. I called Darrell (who was following me, thankfully) and we pulled over in a nearby parking lot. He decided to jump behind the wheel and see for himself how it was driving. We made it a few blocks from the parking lot and he was able to get it up to 55 mph (within the speed limit, of course), so we figured it just needed a lot of time to warm up after sitting outside overnight. But when we turned around to head back to the parking lot, the card stopped moving. No amount of pressure on the gas pedal would cause the car to move; the engine/transmission just spun like we were trying to accelerate in neutral. Never a good thing (but reassuring for me that it wasn't just my driving causing issues). Thankfully I'm still on my dad's AAA plan, so we were able to get a free tow, but not after sitting in the car for thirty minutes. Some good Samaritan was nice enough to drive Darrell the few blocks to his car so he could drive home and put the groceries away, then drive back out to sit and wait with me. At least the car didn't die completely so it would still run and keep me warm, plus I had my atlas there for some leisure reading. And surprisingly, I was mildly amused by the whole situation. Usually I would freak out about stuff like this, but maybe it was because the timing was good (or as good as timing can ever be for your car to break down), or because I wasn't actually the one driving when it stopped working; either way, I thought the whole situation was rather comical. I have a picture on my phone of them towing my car, now I just have to figure out how to upload it.


The not-so-funny part hit home today when Darrell and I realized the difficulty of only having one car when we work in different cities--and when I work a shift at my second job to boot. Not to mention the phone call to let us know that the entire transmission is shot, which means no car for at least a week and a hefty bill. We hope that in the long run fixing the transmission pays off to be cheaper than buying a new car--and in the meantime, I'm going to be bumming rides off of lots of people! Thankfully it's a holiday week, so now I have an excuse to do nothing but sit at home and bake cookies my two and a half days off work :-D

Setting Sail

Welp, here goes nothing. 
I've been debating about embarking into the "blogging world" for some time now, but always reasoned that I didn't have a good enough reason to take up cyberspace. I'm not training for a marathon. I'm not planning a wedding. I'm not even a "true" newlywed (six months on Monday!). I'm not building a house or moving. I'm not planning to start a family--child, dog, or otherwise. I don't have crafty or cooking expertise to share. I'm just an average Midwestern girl (Jess), married to typical East Coast boy (Darrell)--but you know what, I've decided that's good enough. I've learned that if I wait until the "perfect" time for everything that a lot of opportunity goes by the wayside, and this, my friends, might very well have been one of those lost opportunities. So carpe diem, buck tradition, and all that other inspirational mumbo jumbo.
In truth, I'm hoping to blog more for some personal gains that worldly gains. I'm pretty terrible with correspondences--while I do remember cards for most birthdays, anniversaries, and other major holidays, I've let the spreading of my friends and family across the country (and world!) become an excuse for falling out of touch. It's not as personal as a card or letter, and I do still want to get better at that, but it's a start. I also recently realized that my husband and I are pretty terrible at taking pictures. I was attempting to design our 2011 calendar, and ran out of pictures of us with four months still left to fill (excluding wedding pictures of course. I restrained myself and only did our anniversary month in wedding pictures--and the following month with honeymoon pictures). So hopefully having this blog space will entice me to take more photos and document our lives, because really, we aren't that boring of people. Lastly, blogging gives me a chance to do something I've enjoyed all my life--write. I was a journaling fiend in high school, filling seven in the span of four years. But then college and the real world caught up to me and I fell out of the habit. But I'm ready to fall back in--and this time, I'm taking others with me!