Busy, Busy, Busy

There's a line in the infamous classic, "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" near the end of the movie spoken after the nefarious Grinch converts. When he realizes how much work he has to do now, to bring Christmas back to Whoville, he says "Busy, busy, busy" and yesterday, that was exactly how I felt.

It was supposed to be a productive day but... let me start at the beginning. The plan was to go meet hubby for lunch and then go grocery shopping. I left here later than I should have -- I was trying to find an envelope and arrived up north about 12:15pm. I wasn't really hungry so we both just grabbed some yogurt and fruit. We went back to his office so he could go back to work in the builidng I refer to as your "One Stop Soldier Shop". It's true. Everything a soldier could possibly want is in this building: medical, dental, finance, MWR. There's alot in there too for civillians. So while I was on post, I thought I'd stop up and see what they could tell me about employment opportunities on post. As I was at the counter, the woman who's in charge of the whole program happened to be walking by and we spoke after introductions were made and she made me fill out all kinds of paperwork and gave me a few leads. Then I went grocery shopping with a stop at Walmart on the way home to pick up a phone cord. We now have an answering machine that works, thank you.

While I was at Wally World, I decided to look at cutting boards. Two older women were also in that aisle looking at tea kettles. One of them decided to tell me her story of the tea kettle. It seems she had purchased a tea kettle at an upscale store but it was an unworthy specimen. The lid, unless you were holding it, would fall off as you were pouring and you would consequently burn your hand. Obviously, this is not a good trait in a teapot. I really don't know why she wanted to share this with me. Maybe I had that look. I told her that some teapot designs were faulty indeed. Since we were sharing, I solicited their opinions on which cutting board to purchase. It was between a tempered glass one and a poly-plastic type. They both agreed they liked the glass better (which I had been leaning towards) and the one lady said, "Ah, I'm just opinionated in my old age" and I told her it was probably wisdom. She liked that. We had a whole conversation in that aisle. They told me about their husbands, I told them about mine. The one woman said she always prays for the troops using Pslam 91. We spoke about the weather. Now I wish I could remember what the one woman said to me that prompted my response to her. It was some sort of comment about faith and/or relgiion and I said, "Well, the thought that gets me out of bed when I don't want to get up is that Jesus didn't sleep in on Good Friday either" and they really liked that. And with that, I took my leave of them.

I had left here at11:45am and I did not return almost 5pm. Hubby was on the way and I started dinner. I found a recipe for Tomato Gazpacho Soup. It's very easy to make but also time consuming. It's tomatoes, a red onion, cucumber, red and yellow bell peppers, some cilantro, Tabasco, salt and pepper. You must finely dice all the vegetables, making sure that the juices from the vegetables end up in the bowl. The tomato and cucumber seeds are allowed too, but not the pepper seeds. Mix all of this with your hands, add some red wine vinegar. Mix some more and then add some olive oil. It's all done to taste and even though I had no red onion, it turned out very well. It shall be made again in this household. It was cool and low cal and refreshing, if I do say so myself.

After dinner, I did laundry. Hurray for laundry. The apartment has a washer but no dryer. There's a laundromat down the street so I go there for the drying. $1 later and my clothes are clean and dry. Life is good.