Sometimes an ending is a perfect way to have a beautiful beginning...

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Zucchini Bread, YUM!

I needed to clean out the freezer today, we just have a bunch of hodge-podge stuff in there, 1/2 bag of mini corn dogs, 1/2 bag of meatballs, frozen veggies, frozen strawberries, etc... So tonight we are having a 'clean the freezer dinner', just a mixture of all the items that need to be eaten. A few days ago my next door neighbor brought over zucchini from her garden along with yellow squash. I was so grateful because I had to leave my garden, in the prime of it's production I might add, to move here! So, instead of just weird dinner tonight from the freezer we'll be having zucchini bread with it!

The Best Zucchini Bread
3 cups of all purpose flour 3 eggs
1 tsp. salt 1 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. baking soda 2 and 1/4 cups white sugar
1 tsp. baking powder 3 tsp. vanilla extract
3 tsps. cinnamon 2 cups grated zucchini

Preheat oven to 325. Sift dry ingredients together except sugar. Beat oil, eggs, vanilla and sugar together in large bowl. Add dry ingredients to wet and stir well. Stir in zucchini. Bake 2 loaves for 40-60 minutes until cake tester comes out clean. Cool for 20 minutes until your family enters kitchen and devours the entire loaf in one sitting, if you can get them to wait that long.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

What I Miss

I miss cleaning my house and it staying clean for a week, or longer...
I miss getting in my car and there not being books, wrappers, toys and trash in it...
I miss my waistline. It's still there somewhere... On that note, I miss that things are no longer where they used to be, you know, higher...
I miss my camera... my Buglette threw a fit and threw the camera. Bye bye camera.
I miss my first job, working with all of my friends, making a few bucks for fun money...
I miss money being 'just for fun'...
I miss my high school girlfriends; we are all too busy with our lives to see each other regularly...
I miss that if I saw all my high school girlfriends it wouldn't be the same...
I miss kissing Hubby after a high school football or soccer game when he was all sweaty and he wasn't Hubby...
I miss staring at my engagement ring and getting goosebumps...
I miss my little brother... he's no longer little and lives far, far away...
I miss the smell of my baby's head...
I miss feeling the butterflies of life in my abdomen...
I miss the cute little two-door car I had for so long...
I miss the movie theater...
I miss trying to decide what to do on Friday and Saturday nights...
I miss my dear friend after she left the state...
I miss laughing with said friend till someone had to run to the restroom...
I miss carbohydrates, sugar and eating without counting points...
I miss quiet dinners when Hubby and I could actually talk to each other...
But I'm grateful that life is exactly where it is right now...

Thanks for listening.



Sunday, October 10, 2010

Thirteen in Eighteen

Well. Yes. I am here. I think. No, no, I'm here. Yes. Here. I am right back where I started from. Literally, the same town I grew up in is now where we live, again. It's all very very good. I am happy to be home. We got to move right back into our same house, too. I have been forcing myself to come up with different places for things, you know, switch it up a bit. It's been going well. I knew we were moving back just one week before we actually pulled the three (yes, you read that right, 3, tres, three) moving trucks out of the driveway. But more on that later.
All of the moving had me recalling all of the moves we have made in our eighteen years of marriage. We counted thirteen total such events. Thirteen.
First, the week of our wedding I moved from my parent's home and my baby pink bedroom of many many years into my first home, ever. There wasn't much to move, a navy blue couch, a kitchen table and chairs, a few end tables, a bedroom set and various boxes and wedding gifts. It all went into a small little one bedroom house just outside Hubby's first duty station in the middle of the desert. We didn't live there (not even one night!) until we returned from our honeymoon.
The next most memorable move (there were 2 more in between the first and this one) was down to the beach town we would spend the next three years in. We lived on base. We loved it. I spent the first summer freezing in sweats and wondering where the heck the sun went. Then we adjusted, and fell in love with it. It's still a bit of a home away from home for us.
Another memorable move was to our first home we ever owned. We felt like we were royalty! We watched it be built. We wrote in drywall things like 'baby's room' and put our hands into wet cement. We lived there for three years but that will always be our house.
After leaving that house (yes, with baby in tow now) we were back in an apartment at the same small beach town as before, waiting for orders for Hubby to head off to war. As he prepared for war, we headed back to the town we are in now. We bought a house again, this time on a lake and once again felt like royalty. He returned from Iraq and sold that home on the water and bought the home we are in now. After three years here, we rented it out and moved to the last house we were in. Two years later, we are back and whew, I'm exhausted.
So, two months ago, we packed by just throwing things into boxes, loaded up a four bedroom plus loft home and, with help from my family and a few of our friends drove three large moving trucks of stuff and four vehicles following back to where we started from. Before moving this time I made Hubby promise that this was the last move. He agreed. You all are my witnesses.