Dandelions and Daydreams

I woke up this morning with the musical equivalent of a Celine Dion concert playing in my dream.  Sometimes the alarm clock is a blessed relief.

Still no news back on the house.  The long wait is normal with a short sale.  We are impatient, never the less.  I have started dreaming about how to decorate this house and what sort of furniture we would need to buy.  Even if we get the house, furniture buying is longer than a long way down the road.  (Remodeling and paying off Student Loans would probably come first).  I guess that give me more time to look at magazines and dream–assuming we get the house.

We definitely have that fall feeling in the air right now, it’s hard to ignore the changing of the seasons when it’s only 37* when I wake up.  The days are hovering at a pleasant 75*ish, I hope my tomatoes hurry up and ripen before we get an actual frost.

Friday is shopping day.  I hope I can snat some good end-of-season deals on some gardening stuff (pots and potting soil).  I’m hoping to transplant some herbs to keep growing all winter.  Then there is always dreaming of next spring and that cute little house outside of town.

Image by manfred-hartmann via Flickr Last week, B and I put in an offer on a cute little house in a very small neighboring community.  We have heard back that the seller accepted our offer, but since the house is in a short sale situation (seller owes more on the house than it is worth) we have to wait and hear a response from the bank.  While we are waiting, we would appreciate your prayers.

And on another interesting note:

If this sale goes through, we would actually get to use our government tax stimululs money for the purpose that it was intended.  Amazing!

Family traditions are often centered around holidays, but it is also possible to create family traditions out of weekly routines.  The traditions that are created out of weekly routines are ingrained so much deeper than the ones that are centered around holidays that the week just doesn’t feel right without those routines. One tradition that both Brenton’s and my family had was Friday night pizza night.  Is it possible to start the weekend without pizza?

When I was little, we would make homemade pizza and split a coke between the five of us.  I remember that she set the table with her fancy dishes, I almost remember it being her wedding china and using the stemware for splitting the coke. That was our family tradition for celebrating the weekend.  As I grew up, appetites got bigger and just a little swallow of Coke wasn’t satisfying to the sweet tooth of three teenagers, my mom discovered $5 pizza from Little Ceasar’s Pizza.  The China dishes got packed away while we were building a house and the fancy dishes meant we ate off off the corningware [sometimes] rather than off of paper plates.  The boys had no interest in drinking out of stemware, but Mom and I still set the table with it.  We had to do what we could to keep them civilized.

I’ve always kept this family tradition in mind while I am making my weekly menu.  For a long time I struggled with incorporating pizza night into our weekly routine.  We don’t have Little ceasars and their $5 pizza, so I wanted to do homemade (versus paying $20 for a pizza meal).  I was stuck in a pepperoni rut and I hated the cost of packaged pepperoni.

About a month ago, I checked out a pizza recipe book from the library.  I was looking for ideas for different toppings.  Brenton read the book and took over cooking for pizza night!  He doesn’t give himself much credit, but my husband is an excellent cook, and what better tradition to celebrate the weekend and date night than to let my husband cook pizza for our family.

What’s your family tradition for celebrating the weekend?  Do you have any weekly traditions? I’m in search of more family traditions to incorporate in our lives.

I think I must have entered a new stage in my pregnancy.  The stage where I eat like a football team.  No, I don’t mean eat like a football player, I mean eat like the whole team!

If you need me, I’m the one hanging out at the fridge.

This weekend, Brenton and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary.  We had planned on staying home and resting, hiking, and touristing around town, but the weekend forecast was hotter n’ the blazes with no likelihood of finding a cool spot to relax.  Like most houses in this area, our house doesn’t have air conditioning, so we used our anniversary as an excuse to jump in our [air conditioned] car and take a trip.This anniversary trip was, of course, decided on and planned in the span of about 5 minutes Saturday morning about an hour before we had thrown a change of clothes and some food in the car and headed south with no destination in mind.

After driving for 5 hours on some of the curviest roads I have ever been on through some of the most breathtaking scenery I have ever seen, we arrived in Joseph, Oregon near the Hell’s Canyon Recreation Area.   The attendant at the Joseph tourist information stand didn’t give us much hope of finding a vacant hotel room for the night.  After calling a few hotels and being practically laughed at for looking for a room that night, I was starting to make mental plans for camping in the car (with no camping gear).  I had seen a sign for a vacancy at what looked like a bed and breakfast about a mile outside of Joseph so we drove back and hoped for the best.

What I thought had been a bed and breakfast turned out to be a gift shop in an old train depot building (moved from its original location).  The shop had one suite for rent–an old train caboose in the back yard complete with a kitchen, bathroom, and shower and room to sleep up to four.  Brenton and I were thrilled with the unique accomodations.

We spend the night in a caboose.  Early the next morning, we headed out to tourist the area and try a different route home that would lead us through Hell’s Canyon Recreation area and central Idaho.  Driving north through Idaho, we were amazed at the constantly changing landscapes.

The route home was senic, with more curvy roads than the drive to Joseph.  Twelve hours after leaving Joseph, Oregon we pulled into our driveway with just enough energy to go inside and crawl into bed.   We slept like logs until the alarm clock went off too early this morning.  We are already ‘planning’ another similar trip for 6 months from now.