Surviving At Home

This weekend was frigid cold and after putting up the deer netting around our shrubs, trying to pound the stakes into semi-frozen ground, I was chilled to the bone and longed for some comfort food for dinner.

I’ve always loved chicken pot pie and am usually in so much of a hurry to gobble it down that I burn my mouth. A friend of mine told me she makes her own so I decided to give it a whirl, even though I knew my picky family wouldn’t give it a sniff never mind taste it. But since I usually make 2-3 different meals at dinner time anyway, why not make something that I wanted.

*Disclaimer: I am not a cook so let’s just pretend that this is MY pie in the picture. You wouldn’t want to see how mine really came out!

Amazingly enough, I had all the ingredients to make the chicken pot pie. Usually I’m scrambling to the store to get “one last thing” or making substitutions or even leaving out whole ingredients. See, I’m challenged in the kitchen.

Simply put:

1. Take one pie plate and place a pie crust layer in it (refrigerated pie crust worked well for me).
2. Mix together some cream of mushroom soup with 1/2 c. milk, some frozen veggies, and 2 c. of cooked chicken.
3. Take this mixture and put in pie plate.
4. Place 2nd pie crust on top, crimp edges (yeah, that didn’t happen on mine), and make a couple of cuts in the top to let the steam escape.
5. Bake for almost 1 hour at 350 degrees.

Let’s just say, my mouth is watering as I typed those directions and it couldn’t have been easier to make! I live for short and easy recipes; like I said, I’m challenged in the kitchen. It was scrumptious and it was all mine because nobody wanted to try it. Their loss!

Guess who’s cooking Christmas dinner this year?  

photo credit: zappowbang

I love being a homeowner. Honestly, there’s nothing better than having a place to call your own with room for the family to spread out, a yard to run around in…

ahhhh….bliss…

The part I don’t love so much is how everything seems to break at the same time. This year we got the double whammy of losing 3 big items right before Thanksgiving. It’s not like we can tell the kids, “Sorry, Santa brought a new dishwasher to mom and dad instead of toys for you under the tree.”

This was one of those “grin and bear it” scenarios.

We start the saga with the tale of our dishwasher. It was a basic GE brand, no frills dishwasher that we had installed brand new 9 years ago when we moved into our house. It served us well, despite the racks getting a little broken from the constant wear and tear.

We were stymied when we ran a regular load of dishes twice only to discover no water was leading into the machine. My non-technical hubby took off the kickplate and made some noise under the sink but because he’s not a mechanical person, could not figure out a way to fix this thing. Needless to say, we were NOT happy to pay the GE repair guy $97 to tell us the machine wasn’t worth fixing.

Ugghh…

The next casualty we had was our lawn tractor. It was a nice ride on mower which again served us well for 8 years but when we heard the kathunk sound of a broken belt (or so we thought), we had no idea it was going to the great metal graveyard. So we had to pay the local lawnmower repair guy $65 to haul away our tractor and pronounce it dead.

Double ugghh…

And rounding out the trifecta was our vacuum cleaner. Granted, not as big as the other two items but still an annoyance. I don’t remember how long we had this one – less than 8 years, I’m pretty sure – but it decided it had had enough with the dog fur and started emitting sparks.

Good times…

I’ve managed to find the silver lining, however, despite having to shell out more $$ than we wanted to. We got a rebate for free delivery ($69 value) and we paid far less cash to the delivery guys to install it (saved $40) so we already made back the $97 we paid to GE.

Paying the lawn guy to haul away our tractor was worth the $65 because we don’t have a truck and it would have sat by the side of our shed, becoming a home for wild animals and hiding behind the weeds.

Classy…

(And besides…where the heck do you bury a broken tractor anyway?)

And lastly, I had my suspicions that the vacuum was on its way out for quite awhile. I should have followed my intuition (just like Oprah always says) because we bought a new bagless, super-duper-strong-pet-hair- picker-upper and let’s just say, we sucked up enough hidden dog fur to match the equivalent of 3 puppies. Just goes to show how badly our old vacuum was running.

Where’s the money tree when you need it?

Here’s keeping our fingers crossed that nothing else breaks until AFTER Christmas…

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

photo credit: pfala

One of my twitter friends mentioned this great blog design contest and I’m so excited because, as I’ve mentioned before, I am no designer and this blog needs some serious work!

Actually, serious work is a serious understatement…it needs to be completely gutted and rebuilt!

So, here is my official entry for a chance to win. I’m so hoping that with a really pretty/hip/cool design I’ll find my blogging mojo once again and make the time to post more frequently. At the moment my VA work is keeping me busy and my personal hobbies have fallen by the wayside.

Ah, the joys of finding that work-at-home and family balance.

Thanks for running this contest, Lara!