Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
friends

social butterflies

Another party tonight. This time, it was at my manager’s house. He always puts on a good party and tonight was no different. Brian was the designated driver, so I got to have a couple of Margaritas (the drink of the evening). They were pretty good. So was the tequila he had available for shots. I don’t recall the name, but I remember the bottle.

There were a ton of kids there, so Jake had a great time, too. I feasted on some seafood kabobs, though burgers and dogs were available later in the evening. I made a layered dip (Mexican-style). It was another new recipe for the weekend and it turned out quite good–it’s a keeper for sure.

We hung out there for a few hours and then headed home to do some work (we’re all about work around here–at least I am). The dogs needed walked and wine needed racked, so we took care of that and now I’m sitting around waiting for bedtime. I have a feeling it’s going to be soon.

food & drink

that’s entertainment

We haven’t been doing much entertaining this year. I’m not quite sure why, but I can’t say that it’s really bothering me, either. Our guest list got whittled down to nothing this year. But, Brian’s parents made the cut, so they came over for a cookout last night.

I’ve been trying to find ways to use my abundance of cherry tomatoes, so I tried out this recipe last night. It was a big hit. We also had lemon-oregano chicken, thyme potatoes, grilled bread, glazed carrots, and for dessert, a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting.

We hung out until way past dark, then they had to go home and take care of their dog. I also needed to walk the dogs (there was no time after work because I was busy cooking), so that worked out, time-wise. I’ve found that Friday evenings are the perfect time to entertain. It’s harder to get stuff organized because of having to work that day, but by the end of the evening, I find myself forgetting that it was a work day. And, I guess that’s the point, after all.

gardening & landscaping

what?

Absolutely nothing has been going on here. I get up, go to work, get off work, make supper, do housework, walk the dogs, sit down for an hour, and then go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

I did manage to work in the garden a little this week, but I could use a lot more time out there. I’m having an odd zucchini problem this year. To start off, I planted one zucchini plant. (I did two last year, but that turned out to be a little ridiculous, so I only did the one this year.) Something kept eating my cucumbers so I had to buy cucumber plants at the beginning of the season. Well, it turns out that the cucumber plants I thought I bought were actually zucchini plants. So, I ended up with five zucchini plants instead of the one this year. You’d think we’d be drowning in zucchinis, but all but one plant died, and the others didn’t produce much before the great zucchini plague of 2006. Weird. I don’t even like zucchini. I mean, I’ll eat it, but this hasn’t been a great hardship. I actually plant them for my mom. Zucchinis take up a lot of space and she doesn’t have room in her garden.

In other edible news, I’ve found that working full time has magically cut down on our grocery bill. I still cook every day, so I can’t blame it on that. I guess I’m just making easier recipes that have less ingredients.

That is all.

auto

got mp3s?

I ordered a cd player and an external cd changer for my new ride. Brian and I installed them yesterday. The cd changer resides in the cargo area, so that presented a bit of a challenge as we wanted to hide the wire that leads to the stereo at the front of the vehicle. You’d have thought Brian has installed 100’s of changers the way he tackled this job. It went way more smoothly than I could’ve imagined.

Next up was the stereo. Brian had to run some errands after installing the changer (and he took Jake with him), so that gave me an opportunity to solder all of the wires from the stereo to the harness adapter without being interrupted constantly. That didn’t take very long, so I went out to my vehicle, ripped out the dash, and started to install the dash conversion kit. At this point Brian and Jacob returned and we finished up the job after supper. All in all, I’m pretty happy with it. The only bad thing that occurred is that the cover for the passenger seatbelt warning light came off at some point and we can’t find the darned thing anywhere. I mean, it has to be in the car somewhere, but I think it must’ve fallen into the open dash. So, the first opportunity we get, we’re going to have to open some things up and see if we can find it. Otherwise, we’ll have to go to the Toyota garage for a replacement because I haven’t been able to find the part online. I’m sure it’ll probably cost all of $2, but I’d rather just find the original.

I did the calculations on the cd changer and if we load up all 12 disks with mp3s, we could drive to San Francisco and back and then back to San Francisco and not listen to the same song twice. Plus, there’d still be 9 hours of music left over. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not going to have to listen to the radio anymore. And, I don’t miss my Scion’s six disk changer quite as much as I did a week ago.

movies

american movie

We watched this a week ago. It was a documentary about an amateur filmmaker’s attempt to film his latest horror movie, Coven. The movie was somewhat interesting, but it was hard to laugh at the funny parts because it was a real person. That’s just being mean, I think. The movie would’ve been funnier to watch if it would’ve been a mockumentary (ala Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show), but it was not, so I have to give it a thumbs-down.