New52 | Week 41-44

October was one hell of a month. I spent the majority of it feeling a bit unplugged as I tackled deadlines, houseguests and some unexpected health issues.

First let me introduce you to my latest love – my new Android tablet. Tom bought me this ASUS Transformer as an anniversary gift. I liked that it has the ability to add the keyboard to it (and up to 16 hours of battery life). Also we’ve had good luck with our other ASUS products and it’s well reviewed, so it seemed like a safe bet.

Normally I’m a pretty easy sell on any new form of technology, but I had been going back and forth on whether or not to invest in a tablet for a while. I was a bit worried that I might not find it as convenient as I had made it out to be in my mind. I can say after almost a month it has become a vital part of my daily existence. I do my fair share of work on it – answering emails and blog comments, etc – but mostly I’ve found that it’s become my little place to unwind. At the end of the day I like to sit down and read through news sites and blogs that I don’t normally make the time to read. And since the tablet isn’t encumbered by cords, I find it easy to walk around the house with it doing all sorts of other things (nagging the boy to clean his room, nagging the boy to brush his teeth, nagging the boy to take a bath) while catching up on goings-on in the world.

And Nicholas loves playing Angry Birds on the larger screen. (I find that game exceedingly frustrating, but he’ll play it for hours.)

All my doubts have flown out the window on this one.

For week 42 we held a little backyard barbeque with my visiting in-laws, my parents, our friends Alex & Alyssa, and Alyssa’s parents (who were also visiting). When family comes to visit it can always feel as though you do the same things, and since Alyssa’s parents were in town we figured we could combine forces and entertain the whole lot of them for one night – easing the “find something fun to do!” burden that we often face with out of town guests.

We grilled a ridiculous amount of meat that night, but we knew it would likely be our last backyard gathering of the year.

I had also ordered a duplicate of our wedding cake for our anniversary, an Almond Praline cake from Buttercream Cakes in St. Paul, MN. They deliver wedding cakes to our area so if you catch them at the right time, you can order a regular layer cake and they’ll bring it along for the ride.

We fully stand behind our belief that the Almond Praline cake from Buttercream Cakes is the best cake ever made on earth, and my greatest desire is to order one every year around the time of our anniversary – just so I don’t have to feel guilty about eating through a 10″ layer cake. I order it for love!

We also pulled out the firebowl for the first time … um … ever.  Alyssa started one hell of a fire in it – which meant we all got to enjoy an Autumn evening outdoors instead of cooped up in our house. Nicholas even got to make s’mores.

And since I had recently unearthed the recipe for Applebee’s Red Apple Sangria online, it was a pretty great night all around.

Then on to the waaaaay less glamorous (but LONG overdue) home improvement projects.

Like most homeowners, we inherited a substantial list of problems when we purchased this house. From the day we moved in we’ve had problems with the kitchen faucet. It always sounded as though there was air in the line – so you’d lift the handle to turn on the water then there would be these stuttering bursts of air/water for the first few seconds and everything would run smoothly after that.

At first we thought it was a problem with the separate sprayer – so we replaced that a couple of years ago and it literally never worked. You could press on the lever all day and the only thing that happened was the water coming from the faucet turned off. Nothing came out of the sprayer though.

We’re not entirely sure where that water went. It boggled the mind!

Tom went into an Incredible Hulk type rage any time the kitchen faucet was brought up. The kitchen faucet existed solely to taunt him, and any time someone would say something like “This faucet is totally jacked up, man…” a vein in Tom’s neck would bulge a little and you could see flames shoot up in his eyes.

So you can imagine how thrilled he was when, a few months ago, the kitchen faucet just stopped producing water altogether whenever it felt like it. The water would always come back. Eventually. When it felt damn good and ready. Sometimes I would walk past that faucet three or four times over the course of the day and not get a drop of water out of it, then Tom would come home and I’d say “The faucet is OFFICIALLY dead!” and he’d walk over, flip the handle and water would come pouring out just to make a liar out of me.

But just before Tom’s parents left town, the water left us for good. And whenever Tom’s dad is around we like to pack at least three or four home improvement projects in – because he’s crazy handy and has the patience of a saint! The faucet stopped working, we turned around and looked at him and he said “The valve between the faucet and the sprayer is shot” and suddenly 5 years of faucet problems came into focus.

So we went faucet shopping – and it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be because there are a lot of faucets. And I was all “I don’t really care, I just want it to be nickel, and I want it to be a pull-out sprayer/faucet combo.” So we moved to the nickel sprayer/faucet combos, and there were twenty of THOSE. Do you want the water control on the side? Do you want the water control on the top? Do you want the sprayer buttons on the bottom of the faucet? Do you want them on the top? Do you want a soap dispenser? Do you want an anti-smudge finish?

You know what I really wanted? Water. In my kitchen.

I had honestly never thought about how hard it would be to cook without running water in your kitchen. I’d pick up a bunch of chicken and put it in a pan, then be like “Crap …” and have to go all the way into the bathroom to wash up. Then I’d chop up an onion, turn around and be all ‘Oh for Pete’s sake…” and trudge off to the bathroom again. It makes for a really lengthy meal prep. I must wash my hands at least a dozen times over the course of preparing any single meal.

So one more item off the “To Be Fixed” list for this house. The new fancy faucet looks wildly out of place in our fairly unexciting kitchen – but doing the dishes feels a lot more luxurious as a result.

Photo courtesy of VolumeOne.org

I spent the majority of last week not feeling well (or eating well) – then on Saturday I finally felt better again and wanted to eat everything in sight. Tom offered up a choice between our usual burger joint or a restaurant downtown that we hadn’t eaten at yet. Normally when I’m ridiculously  hungry I go for the tried and true, but I opted for adventure – and we went to a restaurant/bar called The Livery (a.k.a. Cowtown Saloon) downtown.

We’d been there before for drinks with friends a couple of times and had some appetizers on those occasions – but we’d never been down for dinner. The Livery usually has some adventurous wild game items on their menu – like rabbit, grouse, elk, quail, etc. I went with the totally safe “Cowtown Burger” – which was insanely good – and a baby greens salad with cucumber wasabi dressing. Tom had a sirloin sandwich with hand-cut fries. Were it not for my continuing blood sugar concerns, I could have eaten a barrel of those fries.

It makes me a bit sad to say it, but I think it may be my new favorite local burger. The place gets a fairly bad rap in local reviews because of their excessively long wait times (which was true), disappearing waitstaff (true) and the almost intolerably loud country music (also true) – and you always hope that if you put up with the sub-par service and loud music that the food will at least be worth it. I have to say that I’d probably endure it again for that burger. It was that good.

So that’s one month of what’s new with me. A lot of information to absorb all at once, isn’t it? What’s new with you?

About This Project

New52 is a cooperative project between Christine and I that invites participants to live outside the box a little bit more and try things outside their comfort zone. Just because it’s 52 things for us doesn’t mean it needs to be 52 things for you. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post, scrapbook page, photograph or other recorded history of your walk on the wild side in the link list below. It isn’t about making a life-altering changes every week, it’s about keeping an open mind and embracing little changes in your life.