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Mad Dash for a Father’s Day Gift

Tonight I mad a mad dash out to Target to buy a Father’s Day gift for my stepfather. I knew it was Father’s Day tomorrow, but I had bought him a greeting card and a gift card. Then I was talking to my mom on the phone this afternoon and she mentioned that they don’t like getting gift cards, so various reasons. I don’t agree with most of their reasons, but I knew right away that the gift card was not going to be well received. So I ran out to Target to find an actual gift.

My stepfather loves to putter around in the garden and I went straight to the lawn and garden section to see if they had anything that would might a nice gift. I saw the section of barbecue grills and all of the accessories and decided to get him about $100 worth of BBQ tools, hickory chips, a grill cover and a special bowl with holes in it to use for vegetables on the grill, so they don’t roll off or fall through the spaces in the grate. I bet he will love all these grilling items and put them to use pretty quick, too.

I guess I will find someone else who would like the gift card to Longhorn Steakhouse restaurant that I was going to give him. I remember he raved about the Longhorn last time they went out to dinner with me, but since he doesn’t want gift cards, I will hold onto it for a while or maybe even use it myself when I feel like going out to a restaurant for a nice steak dinner.

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Fun Video Games for Kids

Last Friday night I agreed to babysit for my girlfriend so she could go out to a baby shower. Her hubby is deployed to Afghanistan, and she is stuck in Clarksville without any family close by. All of her friends on the base are going to this baby shower, so she had no one else to help out. I don’t mind, although it was kind of weird babysitting after all these years. I don’t think I’ve babysat for anyone since I was 16 and got my driver’s license. Once I had my license, I was on the road every weekend going to football games and parties – no time for babysitting!

Her kids are 6 and 8, which is a great age for playing a lot of games and they are smart enough at this age to follow instructions and pay attention for a while. We decided to play some video games on the Playstation 3 until bed time. I never realized until now that most video games are being designed and sold to teenagers and college age guys. There are not many games for little kids.

The only kid game she had at the house that was a kid’s game was a Mario game, so I put the kids in the car and went to Target. I found a Lego’s Batman game for about $50 and decided to buy that. We also had a piece of pizza from the Pizza Hut that was inside Target. Then we went back to her house and played the Lego Batman game for 2 hours. By the time they were getting tired and ready for bed, my girlfriend came home from the baby shower. So it was a fun evening with a couple of cool kids. I enjoyed it.

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Season Finale for Game of Thrones

Tonight is the season finale for my favorite TV series, “Game of Thrones.” I can’t wait to see what happens, however, it makes me very sad that my Sunday nights will be empty until the next season starts. I don’t even know when that will be – I heard that HBO is going to make another season, but I have no idea of when that will start. Part of me wants to go buy the books and indulge myself with some spoilers. But I hear that the TV series does stray quite a bit from the books, so maybe it will be wiser to wait until the entire series is complete and then go buy the books.

Game of Thrones has been so completely entertaining for the past 10 weeks. I love the complexity of the plots and the way all 7 kingdoms are so entertwined with characters and the storyline. I’m not sure which character is my favorite, but I have to admit that a lot of the ones I was very fond of have been killed off. Last week they killed off a lot of the characters in an ambush, so I wonder what tonight’s episode will show?

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Collecting Recipes

As much as I love to cook, I have found myself in a rut when it comes to menu planning. I need some new ideas of things to cook for dinner, so I have been reading through some old cookbooks and reading through some recipes online. I wish there was an easy way to collect the recipes that I want to try and then write some notes about whether I like it or if I would change something…and if I would even make it again.

Years ago, my mother would keep a little metal box in her kitchen with her favorite recipes written in ink on little 3″ x 5″ file cards. She would write her own notes on the back, and sometimes she would find a photograph of the finished dish, cut it out and clip it to the recipe card. I never did find out what happened to her recipe box. I would love to see it now and read through all of her favorite recipes.

I have a shoe box that I use to keep my recipes. It is big enough to hold a complete sheet of 8″ x 10″ printer paper or a page torn from a magazine. I need to scan them in and find some way to organize them for my own recipe collection. Maybe I will make a large MS Word document and code it to generate a table of contents and index so I can find the recipe that i want to prepare. Or maybe there is a way online? If you have any ideas of how I can do this, I would appreciate your suggestion in a comment.

Thanks!

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Ironing is SUCH a Joyless Chore!

Most of the time I can put off ironing. I hate this chore! I find ironing completely boring. The only way I can bear to do it is to put the ironing board in front of the TV and watch a funny show for an hour or two while I get the ironing done.

When I was a little girl, that was my assigned weekly chore. I did get an allowance for doing the household ironing, but it did not seem like enough money for the hours and hours that I had to spend ironing all the clothes.

Most of my clothes do not need ironing, as I try to not buy anything that will need ironing. But some of the nice clothes for work do require ironing and taking them to the dry cleaner gets way too expensive to do that every week. So, I keep a basket of clothes that need ironing, and I try to save them up until there is enough to spend a couple of hours one night while watching TV.