Sock Monkey

The other day my sister-in-law posted a picture on her blog.  I made a comment on her post taking credit for taking the picture while we were in Gatlinburg. Jeni replied to my comment and said,

and a wonderful picture it is. Then again...what else can you get with such an awesome couple.  


I couldn't resist the temptation.  My apologies to all of you Photoshop experts out there.

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The Things You See On The Way To Work

Moving to a new place is always an adventure, and it's fun to get a acquainted with a new location.  Every place has it's quirks and oddities.  North Alabama is no exception.  Every morning on my way to work, I drive by these two businesses:

Humble Heart Farms

This morning we went out to the Madison City Farmers Market to check it out.  We arrived later than we would have liked and most of the merchandise was already gone, but Anna and I had a nice chance to visit with the good folks from Humble Heart Farms.  These folks milk 100 goats and sell some wonderful goat cheese.  They took the time to let us sample a number of varieties, and gave us a couple of samples to take home with us. 

The kids are in bed and Anna and I are sitting here on the couch trying the cheese.  We've decided that the honey cheese has more of a "goat" taste to it than the Rio Grande and Texas Hickory.  However, the Honey does go very well with fruit.  We've tried it on strawberries and with apples.  The Rio Grande is quite spicy, but very flavorful.  The seasoning is quite strong and overpowers the native flavor of the goat cheese.  In my opinion, you can't taste the cheese itself, just the seasoning, but it's still quite good.  The Texas Hickory to me, is a good balance.  It's a little spicy, but the seasoning is more subtle and the flavor of the plain goat cheese shines through.  All of the cheeses were good and we enjoyed the opportunity to try them out.

In addition to selling cheese, Humble Heart Farms also sells fresh lamb and goat (chevron).  Looking at their website, they also offer tours of their farm.  I think I'm going to have to take a day off of work so we can take the girls on a field trip to take a tour of their farm and learn more about making goat cheese.  Should be fun.  I'm looking forward to it.

Brownwood Christmas Under The Stars

Brownwood is gearing up for the first annual Christmas Under The Stars festival. You can read about it here.

I heard some discussion about this on the radio the other day, and interestingly enough, they will be serving Hot Dr. Pepper at this event. Yes, you read that right...not Hot Chocolate or Hot Apple Cider. Hot Dr. Pepper.


Ok, I'll pause for a second to let you recover

As it turns out, Hot Dr. Pepper is a pretty popular drink in Texas. I'd never heard of it before, but I found this recipe. Sounds good, I guess I'll give it a try.

Logistics

Amazon has disappointed me. Indeed, their actions have subjected me to great peril.

We order everything from Amazon. Ok, maybe not everything, but we do order a lot of different things from Amazon because we live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Using Amazon helps us fight back against high local prices on a variety of items, including toilet paper.

Yup, we order our toilet paper from Amazon.

Amazon has a Distribution Center in DFW, so we can order and it's delivered the next day, maybe two. Amazon sells it in large jumbo packs, similar to what you might find at Sam's Club so we don't have to order it very often. And it saves us a little money.

At this point, you're probably asking yourself why I'm blogging about this.

Well, you see, a few weeks ago we started to run out of toilet paper. We procrastinated a little too long and suddenly we realized we were down to our last two rolls, one in each of our bathrooms. This wasn't a big deal because, Amazon always comes through and delivers in one or two days for us. So, we logged on to our Amazon Prime account and ordered our favorite TP.

The next day it didn't arrive. No biggie. It always comes by the second day. A quick check of our "inventory" revealed that we were still in the safety zone, but we'd need to step things up with our just-in-time (JIT) vendor to make sure we didn't run out of material for "production".

We checked the Amazon website, and to our horror, our toilet paper had shipped from Nevada instead of DFW. OMG! We issued orders to the kids to be extra conservative in their paper usage. Addi obliged us by unrolling half of the kids' bathroom roll down the hallway. Blast!

The next afternoon when I came home from work, this is what I saw in the bathroom:



I checked the kids' inventory and found that it was perilously close to the same condition. I ran to the computer, hoping and praying that by some miracle Fedex Ground would come through for me and deliver our stuff before we ran out. It turns out that our toilet paper was somewhere between Utah and Oklahoma.

What to do? What to do?

Hold it for a couple days? Unlikely.

Borrow from the neighbors? (Imagine what that would have been like... Hey Bud, can I borrow some TP?)

It was hopeless. Realizing that our JIT system had failed us, we finally relented, got in the van, and drove to the place I hate most: WalMart.

Ironically, once we re-stocked with a small 4-roll pack, our consumption dropped.

Two days later, our TP finally arrived and we now are flush with 43 rolls.

Hope's back

After a prolonged absence from blogging Hope finally had an experience today that drove her back into the blog sphere. You can read all about it here.. Here's a picture of her typing away on my laptop getting ready to post her story. This is all still pretty new to her and it takes her quite a while to type up a story like this.

Kohls Bargains

Lately I've been driving Anna nuts with my mad shopping skills. We went to Kohls a few weeks ago because Anna was looking for some new tops. She dug around the women's section looking for stuff and I decided to give her some relief by taking the kids with me and exploring the rest of the store. I ran across a 90% off clearance rack in the men's section that was chock full of Docker's dress shirts. I ended up getting 20 shirts for about $100. Every chance I get, I have to remind her that after 10 years of working on me, she's finally made me realize by bargain shopping potential. :) She says it was just luck.

As it turns out, this wasn't a one time event. On Black Friday we ended up at Kohls again. While Anna and the kids were busy getting stuff for Christmas I wandered over to the kitchen section (I like to cook.) I've had my eye out for a set of omelet pans. A few years ago we bought a stainless steel set of pots and pans. I like them, but it takes a lot of patience and skill to use them to reliable produce good eggs because they're not non-stick.

I dug around for a while looking at hard-anodized cookware. I found these nice Food Network pans and realized they were marked down. 80% off! Yeah baby. So, I picked them up. I was even more surprised when I got up to the register and they rang up an extra percentage off of the clearance price. Here's Hope holding my $70 Food Network pans that I picked up for $11:

Anna's Altoid Addiction

If no one else gets this post, I'm sure Josh will....

When Anna was pregnant with Tori she craved Altoids. A lot. She did not consume them like a normal human being. Instead of gingerly sucking on the curiously strong mints, she would chew them up and eat them four or five at a time. At first, this completely weirded me out, but then I tried it myself and found that chomping up Altoids gives them a completely different flavor experience, and I actually liked it too.

So, now we chomp our Altoids.

Apparently, this phenomenon is contagious because our kids now eat them this way too. When Anna breaks them out, say, maybe after the end of a meal out, there's all sorts of good breath in our van.

At any rate, while Anna has slowed down her Altoid consumption considerably she still likes them a lot. Eating them has turned out to be a rather expensive habit since they're like $3 a tin. Whenever they run them on sale someplace, she stocks up. Apparently CVS recently ran a buy one get one free sale on them because I came home to this:

 

Yup...that's 34 tins of Altoids in my junk drawer...