Sofa Dog

When we got our new couch my mom banned Emmy from sitting on it.  She originally said that if I wanted to keep the sheets on the sofa, wash, and take them off whenever we had company that she could sit on the couch with us.  Well, I didn't want to do this.  But then I found a dog blanket at Costco.  It was perfect! I brought it home and happily presented it to my mom.  By this time, Emmy had adjusted to her little bed on the floor or was happy to settle down at our feet.  She would only occasionally look up at us longingly.  She is a smart woof and knows not to get on the sofa now.  My mom vetoed the new blanket.  Hum Bug.

Now that they are gone, Emmy has found her rightful place next to her mommy.  She even seems to know that she is only allowed on the spot with the towel.  Now, I know what you're thinking Nick.  I'm just confusing her.  But!  My plan is to get her to have permanent rights back up on the couch.  I've already sent a picture to my mom to show her how cute she is curled up in her corner.  Hehe.

For some reason my camera phone wasn't focusing.

Don't Worry Mommy, We Won't Starve

Before my parents left on their trip, I think they were a little worried about leaving us.  They knew that we would be fine on our own since they left us last winter to go to China (we didn't get invites), but they still had those parents-leaving-their-kids jitters.  Mind you, I'm 26, went away to college, and then lived in NY for three years and Christopher is almost 19.  We're doing just fine.  It would have been nice to get an invite to this trip though!

On Tuesday I planned to grill a pizza, but in classic Allison fashion, I piled the topping so high that I couldn't slide the dough off my pan onto the grill.  I used flour, but next time I will try cornmeal and less toppings. I was hoping to find dough from a local pizzeria at my store, but they only had the Pillsbury kind.  It worked out because I wouldn't have been able to do the circular toss anyway.  I put all the things that we like on top and roasted some garlic as a finishing touch.  It was quite yummy.

Toppings: red onion, green bell, zucchini, olives, mushroom, jalapenos
mozzarella cheese, dried basil, pepper, and roasted garlic.

Pizza toppings just should have that height

Wednesday I made turkey burgers, but didn't take pictures because they looked, well, like turkey burgers.  Yesterday, however, we had a nice big meal of turkey kielbasa, zucchini, and scallops.  Yum!  I sent pictures to my mom to show her that I wasn't starving her little boy.  She patted herself on the back for producing two big eaters.  We ate straight from the big plate of protein and veg and polished it off.  There was no need to dirty other plates when it's just the two of us.

Tomorrow I'm planning a nice dinner for Linda and Rob.  After a hard day of shopping, Linda and I deserve some good eats.  Rob is just coming for dinner and to hang out.  I'm planning on grilling everything for easy cleaning.  On the menu are garlic shrimp, bacon wrapped filet mignon, asparagus, and moten chocolate cakes.  I had originally planned to make the cakes for early Easter dinner with Bonnie and Abby, but that was postponed.  So I'm going to give it a go with Linda since she knows my terrible baking history and is forgiving.  I bought all my supplies yesterday at Costco so hopefully it all keeps until tomorrow!  I believe that Briana will be joining us for dinner as well.  It will be a nice welcome home dinner from Colorado, though from what I hear, her grandma is quite the cook! ...She literally owned her own bakery!

Silly Doggy

A few weekends ago Nick and his friends got together for a softball practice.  I had brought Emmy along so that she to exposed her to people being loud and running erratically.  She's never been great with sporting events, but she did really well.  She would get visibly frustrated when the softball hit the fence she couldn't catch it.  I swear she was looking at Nick like, step aside,  I'll make sure to catch those for you.  She did get some bonus frisbee time in at the end of practice though, which impressed everyone there.  That's my girl!

I made sure to bring her treat bag and clickers in case there were any trying moments.  A friend of ours brought her two little nephews.  Emmy has never been that much of a "children" dog, like her mommy, but I wanted her to meet them.  She gently ate the treats out of the little boy's hand like a doll.  That was that and I put the treats away.

When we got home I dumped all of our stuff on the laundry room floor because it was covered in gritty sand from the baseball field, gave Emmy a quick bath because she was covered also, and took a shower before heading out with friends.  The next day when I went to wash all the dirty stuff, I realized that her treat bag was missing.  I was pretty bummed because it was $10 and not that old.  I figured that it had fallen out of Emmy's bag (yes, she has her own bag) when we were leaving.

Yesterday I was dusting the living room and saw something red stuffed in the corner where the two sets of curtains meet.  At first I thought it was a fake poinsettia flower that we missed when putting away our Christmas decorations.  When I bent down to pick it up, it was her bag!  She must have taken it out of her travel bag and hidden it for future gorging.  It has been missing for weeks!  I'm glad that I didn't immediately order another bag.  I'm pretty sure that she forgot that she put it there, but the next time something of hers goes missing I'm going to have to scope out her hiding spots!

Scorgify!

If only this spell really worked...

Yesterday I started my cleaning rampage,

1. Because my dad isn't around to undo what I've done
2. Because Linda is coming over for shopping and dinner but she's allergic to Emmy
3. Because I actually like cleaning
4. Because it will stay this way until my parents come back
5. Because who wants to live in a mess?

It took me a few days to get myself going after my parents left, but now I'm going full force.  I started by dusting my room on Wednesday because just looking at the layer of dust on my desk was aggravating my allergies.  Then, yesterday, Christopher vacuumed upstairs and the stairwell, I dusted and vacuumed downstairs, cleaned the downstairs bathroom, cleared off the bar area, sorted through piles and piles of magazines, disinfected everything my Lysol wipes could touch, and Swiffered.  

Today I plan to:

• Wash Emmy's beds
• Wash Emmy
• Wash towels
• Wash bathroom rugs
• Clean upstairs bathroom
• Take out all trash and recycling (it's building up from my purging)
• Spray down the patio furniture

By the end of all of this our house will be spick and span.  Maybe with the house being clean I will reconvince myself that I should try to paint the bathroom. 

Bittersweet promotion

I normally don't talk about work on my blog, but I feel the need to today because there will be a significant change in the coming weeks.  I am becoming the new supervisor at our office.  My coworker, D__, got an awesome job with Habitat for Humanity that he couldn't pass up.  I will be taking over his duties.  I am very happy for him, but very worried as well.  He keeps the office in order and the ship running, so to speak. Because of him, our CEO N__, has been able to go to more conferences to get our name out there.  With D__ leaving, I'm not sure how we are going to run things.  If I was back in the office I wouldn't be so worried, but I'm not going to move back to NY just to keep the office running.  Since my last mini promotion, I've taken on a good portion of D__'s duties to help lighten his load.  I'm confident that I can take over all of his responsibilities as far as customer support and the servers goes, but I can't do the physical stuff that he does in the office like spontaneous accounting and shipping.  He said that he will be coming in about an hour a week just to do the weekly accounting for us still so he won't be totally gone, but we'll see how this all plays out.

So this promotion is bittersweet.  N__ has no more ties in Troy, so he won't be keeping the office space that I know and love.  He will move the office down to Newark, NJ where his wife has her dream job and family is located.  Even if I wanted to go back to visit now, it just wouldn't be the same and makes me a little bit sad.  I feel like a kid who went away to college to find that her parents moved into a one bedroom apartment and I have to sleep on the couch when I come home for Spring Break.  D__ and I started a day apart from each other and have grown pretty close.  The company just won't be the same for me without him even if we only talk once a day and used instant messenger the rest of the time.  I'm just glad that I had to say my goodbyes over a year ago.  The days of countless cups of coffee, darts, rolling eyes at crazy customer calls, and Friday night beers while answering phones are long gone.  I think saying goodbye over the phone will be much easier than see him walk out that door.

Sinful Colors: I Love You

Generally I really dislike this brand because it is cheap and looks cheap, but this color is actually really pretty.  The formula, in my opinion, still stinks.  It is streaky and sheer so that I needed a good four coats to get a nice opaque quality like the bottle, but it paid off.  I was undecided on stamping today, but after testing the stamp on a piece of paper I decided to go for it.  With my new "stamp once" attitude, it makes stamping so much easier.  Before, I would do the nail over and over until it was perfect.  It would take me hours.  Now it only takes me about 10 minutes to do both hands.  So they're not perfect, but didn't take me three hours and half a bottle of nail polish remover to do.  Chances are that I will go back tomorrow and fix the nails that really bother me like I did last week with the blue polish.  Heheh.

This was the sample I tested to see how the stamp would look
before taking the time to do my nails.  I kind of wish
that I had left it plain purple for at least a day.
The purple sparkle is so pretty.

Flash

No Flash

Relaxing Weekend

With Nick gone to Paris, I had a very low key and relaxing weekend.  It is exactly what I needed.  On Saturday I went to our friends Will and Lindsay's for an early Easter brunch and then laid around the house for the rest of the weekend.  It was great.  I sat around watching hockey and drinking beer (I kind of felt like a man), took Emmy for a long walk and frisbee time, made Easter breakfast and Easter dinner for my family, and even did regular work out of sheer boredom.  This is the downfall of working from home, you can do it anytime you want... or don't want.  What a great weekend.

My dad also cleaned the garage of all of his tools so now we can fit my Mom's Pilot back in the garage.  We have a three car garage and can only fit one car in there.  It is our largest car so at least it is an improvement.  When I cleaned out the garage last spring, we were able to fit our two little cars in, but that lasted for about a week.  Anyway, he also fixed the door jamb that Emmy ripped off in my bathroom, a hole in the wall that he had to cut open to repair a leak, and put a pad/guard on one of the window sills that Emmy puts her paws on to look out the window.  My mom got all of her stuff ready for their trip and hemmed like four pairs of new pants.  This is a big deal.

1. Because my mom never buys new clothes for herself.  I had to buy her all the clothes that she wore on our last cruise.
2. She never seems to get around to hemming pants even when she buys new clothes.  They sit on her floor all pinned up and ready to go for months before getting to them. 

Last but not least, Christopher was studying.  He was actually studying, which is a rarity.  We were all quiet productive.  Now that my parents are off to Panama for the next three weeks and the bathroom is fully fixed I might, might being the keyword here, paint the bathroom.  I hate painting.  I have an "accent" wall in my room because I started painting it and then decided that I didn't want to finish the room.  While just telling Linda my plan to paint, I realized that there is a lot of non-movable stuff in our bathroom that I could potentially splatter all over.  She suggested getting a tarp to lay over the counters and floor.  That is more work than I want to do to paint.  I think I just talked myself out of it, but we will see how bored I get over the weekend.

We have so many left overs, but it was nice sitting down as a family of four once in a while.  Our honorary family members, Nick and Briana, are on vacation.

Stila

I decided that I would keep the Stila set from Costco.  When I had gone to Sephora to pick up another Urban Decay 24/7 liner I tried the Stila Kajal eye pencil and the Starlight eye shadow.  They were both extremely nice and extremely expensive in comparison to what I paid.  I let the package sit on my floor for another week while I decided if I really wanted to keep it.  I do.  I really do enjoy the Starlight color even though it's so similar to a lot of other colors I have.  I will probably use the color a lot more than the Storm.

This liner is so creamy and goes on smoothly.  Make sure to use a
primer otherwise it might transfer color onto your crease.

I haven't tried this yet because I just purchased a new L'oreal Voluminous,
but this looks like it could be a very thickening mascara.

Beer Can Chicken Take Two

If you've been following my blog for a while you'll remember how terribly I messed up my first try at beer can chicken. I was determined to get it right this time.  I made sure to sit out there for the whole two hours that it was cooking.  I did get up for a while to weed my little vegetable patch in preparation for planting, but would go and check on the chicken every few minutes.  The directions I was following on Epicurious.com said to leave the chicken on for about two hours until the meat is fall off the bone tender.  I used my own blend of spice rub instead of the Memphis rub they give a recipe for.  Well it was falling off the bone when my dad was carving it, but it was dry.  Bleh.  An hour and a half would have been fine. The flavor was good and I'm pleased that it didn't resemble a large lump of coal, but next time I won't have it on so long.

Another experiment

I've been trying more and more to grill vegetables.  I made this butter mixture to spread on the corn before wrapping them tightly with aluminum foil.  I didn't take a picture of the final product, but it got a little brown.  I didn't know that it could get brown in foil!  I am going to try the same recipe again tonight because we have three more ears and Christopher will be out with friends.  The flavor was really good, but the brown kernels weren't so hot.  They weren't completely burned, but they were on their way and definitely over cooked, which I also didn't know could happen with corn.  Briana liked it so much she ate Christopher's so I guess the recipe is a keeper.

Garlic-butter Corn 

5 ears of corn
4 tbsp butter, melted
2 tbsp garlic powder
1 1/4 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp black pepper
Splash of Worcestershire sauce 

Directions: 

Mix ingredients into melted butter and then liberally spread over ears of corn.  Wrap tightly in foil and grill over medium heat for 20 minutes, rotating frequently. 

Yes, it is tilting.  Yes, it did fall over. Yes, I did catch it.

The browned parts at the bottom is where I had stuffed
lemon so the sugars burned a little faster than everything else. 

Silver Cleaning

My mom has always used a jewelry cleaner for her wedding ring.  I've tried it several times on my silver ring from Nick, but it just doesn't shine like it used to.  Maybe I need to upgrade to a platinum diamond solitaire.  *wink wink*  I didn't want to take my ring back to Tiffany's and chance that they charge me for a polishing and fight traffic, so I bought my own tub of silver polish.  Oh it did wonders!  After I cleaned my ring it was so bright!

To show you how great of a job the polish does I took an old heart pendant that my Auntie SuAnn gave me for Christmas when I was in high school.  I loved wearing it, but it got really tarnished.  When I used the silver polish it came back to life! For $6.48 on Amazon, the tub will probably last me for the rest of my life and saves me from having to fight traffic and parking.

Before
Note the dull gray edge/outline of the heart.

After
It literally looks like there is a halo now.

$6.48 on Amazon.com

Jane Haul and ELF Palette

After weeks of waiting for all my Jane products to come in the mail, it's taken me another few weeks to write about it.  I think my umpf for buying makeup and writing about it is finally petering out.  It'll be another year or two before I go on huge hauls like I have been.  I still have my sights set on a nice brush kit, but I'm trying to hold out until my current ones are bald...which will be soon.  Hmmm, and I also wanted to try out some new Palladio eyeliners from Sally's and Orly nail polish too.  Maybe the obsession hasn't quiet dissipated, but it's getting there.  My bank account is rejoicing.  I thought I had purchased a lot more, but it doesn't really seem like I bought much.  I went wild when I saw that all Jane products were $4.00 on Hautelook.com, but now that I look there really isn't as much stuff as I thought.  That is probably a good thing.  On with the show!

I got this concealer to see if it would work like the YSL Touche Eclat a highlighter stick.  I'm not willing to spend $40.00 on a highlighter even if all the testimonials claim that it does wonders.  I don't think this concealer is the right thing for the job, but it does match my skintone.  I rarely use concealers, but I might give this one a try.  

My enthusiasm for $4.00 palettes failed me.  I got the same colors twice!  The top palette has two extra colors so I kept that one and gave the six-panned palette to Linda.  I must have been stuck on purple because of Briana's senior ball.  At least purples make brown eyes stand out.

I love the champagne color jumbo eye pencil.  At first I was disappointed because I purchased three of these.  These two colors plus a dark gray/black.  When I opened the dark gray the makeup "lead" came flying out of the pencil.  After I put it back in, the lead fell all the way to the bottom and was unusable.  I immediately got online and contacted Hautelook.  Since they are a boutique site they couldn't send me a replacement, but they did refund me.  The next day I was going to use the champagne colored one and the same thing happened.  By then I was starting to think of how I could remedy the problem.  The lead falls to the bottom and is braced there, which made me I realize that I could just sharpen the pencil all the way down.  I saved my two pencils and was reimbursed for their faultiness.  I'm glad I was able to save them because I absolutely love the champagne color.  I have been putting it all over my lid and then using Buck from the Naked Palette on top.  It cuts down my makeup time by 10 minutes when I don't have to sit at my desk trying to decide what colors I want to use.  I have all this makeup and only use two colors.  It's a good thing I don't have it in me to keep buying loads of it.  

I've only used this once so far, but I like it.  The colors are pretty sheer but blend well with the Naked Palette colors.  

Okay, so this is what I really was waiting for.  It just looked so great on the Target website.  It is smaller than I was picturing, but still a pretty good size.  You can tell by the pens I put next to the box about how big it is.

Level 1

I'm not a big lip product person, but I think I will start trying these out.  I've already used the purple eye shadow in the bottom row and really like it.  This will be great to travel with since it's all just right there in one little palette.  I like that it even comes with its own eye pencil and has a huge mirror. As a little girl I would have loved, loved, loved to play with this.  As an adult, I love, love, love playing with it.  Hehe.  

Senior Ball Makeup

After all the practicing and buying of purple eye shadow, this is how Briana's Senior Ball makeup turned out.  After we were done she said, "I like this look the best out of them all."  My response was, "Good!  Because we don't have time to do anything else!"  So I'm glad that she liked it.  We ended up using the Naked Palette for the most part because she liked the neutral colors that I was wearing that day and then incorporated some hints of purple tones in there.  She has very long lashes, but to glam her up we put on some accent lashes.  They really did complete her look so I'm glad that she decided that she did want them.

Initials Necklace

This is going to be a quick post because I have a lot of stuff to do at work today.  I've been searching for an initial necklace for months now.  I really wanted the circle Tiffany's pendant with an 'N', but then realized that one of my cousins has it with a 'B' for her hubby.  I didn't like cursive 'N' that they had as their other initials style.  Then I saw a tiny pendent on ideeli.com, but it was pretty much the same as Linda's 'R'.  So I've basically been on the hunt for something different than what my friends have.  This is what I found and love it.  The Etsy.com artist called BragAboutIt has some super cute necklaces and for a total of $40 including shipping I was able to get a personalized necklace.  Check out her site.  She has a bunch of different designs and would be a really cute gift for Mother's day.  It does take her about three weeks to process, make, and send the jewelry so don't wait!

It came in this cute little package.

Flash
This is our anniversary date.

No Flash

Grilled Pork Tenderloin

Christopher and I decided that we are going to learn to barbecue together.  Well, it started with him doing the meat and then ended with me doing it while he was playing a game on his laptop.  Oh well, maybe next time.  The pork rub was yet another one of my concoctions.  I thought it turned out really well, but I think it was a little spicy for my family. I will probably use this again and cut back on the cayenne.  I think this would go really well on chicken.

Meat Rub 

2 tbsp dry mustard
1 tbsp ground savory
1 tbsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp black pepper 

Directions: 

Mix ingredients together and spread liberally over meat.  Cook meat as desired. 

We always eat the same kind of greenbeans: sauteed with garlic and salt.  It is one of our staples and appears on our plates almost as often as white rice.  This time I decided to spruce them up and follow this recipe from Allrecipes.  It turned out pretty well, but I think I still like the good old garlic and salt.