We have made the plunge and are purchasing a townhouse. Luckily looking forward to the end result is exciting enough to go through the energy draining process of moving. Counting moves where we physically moved the majority of our belongings, since Randy and I got married, this will be move number 9.

Randy will be collecting our things from Kentucky where they have been in storage in our dear friends’ basement for 2 1/2 years. This is the stuff that we didn’t need or have room for in our aparment (e.g., washer & dryer, weed eater, china hutch, etc.) and when we finally open up all those boxes, it’ll be like Christmas. Or will it?

We’ve lived without this stuff for a long time. There is the school of thought that we just don’t need it all. We’ll try to employ the guidelines from Peter Walsh’s book “It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff” which make a lot of sense. Over on 43 Folders, Merlin Mann is taking Walsh’s advice to heart and he has blogged about his journey to a richer life. I picked up my copy of this book from the side of my bed and am re-reading it in preparation for facing our stuff.

That aside, I am very excited to move into a new home with more room than our apartment, a patio where we can use our gas grill, and a kitchen that might hold most of my kitchen wares. And we won’t have to walk up three flights of stairs to get to our front door!

At the moment, my life is all about packing.

Oh and if this isn’t enough to do, the company I work for is moving to a new building the day before we move into our new home. When it rains, it pours.

One of my favorite organization blogs is having a little contest with great prizes. All you have to do is leave a comment that includes a clean and tasteful joke.

Have fun!

We received news from the Philippines that my lola (grandmother) fell asleep in the Lord yesterday. My mother was able to fly there and arrived just a day before Lola’s passing.

My Lola Juana lived with us for several years when I was young and I have wonderful memories of her. Although only 95 lbs., she was able to lift giant bundles of laundry tied up in bed sheets over her head, strong from a lifetime of hard work. Lola had a sweet, wonderful laugh and a kind spirit. I wish I’d had a chance to know her better once I became an adult, but those questions and conversations will have to wait until the hereafter now.

I love you, Lola, and will miss you.

Randy and I tried out our new underwater digital camera (Vivitar ViviCam 6200W) this week while snorkeling at Blackrock at Kaanapali Resort on Maui. After years of wrestling with disposable or even refillable 35mm underwater cameras, it was soooo nice to have the luxury of taking digital photos and video and having an inkling if we got a good shot or not.

We encountered three green sea turtles who couldn’t have cared less about the swarms of snorkelers surrounding them. It was like a little bit of magic being able to swim along side them (keeping our distance because 1) they are endangered and 2) turtles can bite).

I’m loving this camera so far and it seems to be just a good back up digital camera so Randy and I don’t have to fight over the Kodak.

In a cool twist of fate, flickr.com is now allowing pro users to upload short videos. I’m loving it!

Back in the day, Randy had long hair. He was very popular around Easter as everyone wanted him to portray Jesus in their church dramas and musicals. The rest of the year, church people looked at him like, “We really need to get that boy saved.” Funny how that works.

One of his guitar students requested to see pictures of his hair and so I scanned a few to our flickr.com photostream. If I find any more gems, I’ll add them too.

I’ve been a fan of Tupperware® for decades. I especially love their big bowls (like the Thatsa™ Mega Bowl). That being said, I have found a new love: Lock&Lock.

What makes Lock&Lock different is that they quick and easy to seal – you just press down two of the four tabs at a time and just like the name, you lock and lock. There has been many a time when I thought I’d properly sealed a container from other food storage systems only to find salad dressing all over the inside of my bag at the end of the day.

Lock&Lock has been on QVC since 2001 (and is now available at my favorite brick and mortar retailer Target) but I didn’t buy any pieces until just a couple of months ago when I bought the 4-piece pitcher & mixer set. Now that I’m addicted to Arbonne’s Go Easy! Protein Shakes, I constantly use the mixers. They have a little insert that looks like a wagon wheel that breaks up any lumps. I just put in some water, add some ice cubes (I like my shakes cold), and add the shake mix. I lock down the lid, shake the mixer and voilà – I have a tasty, smooth, healthy shake.

Now, I wasn’t sealing my mixers correctly, pressing only one tab at a time and over time I tore off one of the locking tabs. I called the U.S. office of Lock&Lock and they are sending me a new lid (free of charge, I must add). A great product AND customer service? I guess it can still happen outside of Nordstrom.

I think my next Lock&Lock purchase will be the divided container which is like a little bento box. As a child, there was a period when I wanted all of my food separated onto different saucers so nothing would touch. Now there is a modern, more convenient way to keep my foods’ flavors from getting all mixed up. Okay, maybe it’s not good to feed these OCD tendencies but bento sure is tidy and pretty as well.

Yeah. I know. Where have I been for the last few months? Well, I started working more hours and it seems to have wreaked havoc with my life’s rhythm. It feels like I’ve blinked my eyes and suddenly went from Christmas to almost St. Patrick’s Day.

I did manage to make a trip out to Seattle to see my family a couple of weeks ago. My sister flew in from Arizona so it was a nice mini-reunion. As I get older, seeing family has become more important, more valued, and more bittersweet. Now that I’m an adult and can really appreciate my family, it’s sad that we all live so far away from each other.

Amazingly enough, I didn’t gain any weight on this trip. It’s a miracle. I discovered The Confectional, a bakery specializing in mini-cheesecakes located in the Pike Place Market. They sell this hot chocolate, I think it was Colombian hot chocolate, which was unbelievable. I only bought a shot of it (yes, it’s that rich), but now I wish I’d indulged more. The cheesecakes are fabulous too.

I’ve posted some pictures on our flickr.com photostream. I didn’t take any pictures of the cheesecakes, but there are some food pictures, some family pictures and a zillion shots of Kes (naturally).

I’ve just posted pictures on our flickr.com photostream. It was great to spend the week of Thanksgiving with Randy’s family. Monday we went with our new nephew-in-law (is that a real term?) Mikey and his new bride our niece Cindy to visit Washington, DC. We went just a few months back with my sister and her family and at that time we felt broiled, but this time, we had to bundle up. The crowds were quite reasonable and the autumn leaves gave the city’s landscape a completely different feel.

One of the highlights was our dinner at Phillip’s Seafood Flagship Restaurant. Although we eat at Phillips in Ocean City, MD every summer during our family vacation, we’d never been to this location and never tried the buffet (we normally order off the menu). The seafood buffet was yummy. The sheer volume of food choices reminded me of the buffets in Las Vegas.

Another little adventure on this trip was our stay in the Marriott Renaissance M Street Hotel. Normally we don’t stay in 4-star hotels as they are just a bit out of our price range, but when we decided to stay overnight in DC, I remembered my beloved William Shatner and his campy Priceline.com commercials. Was I going to be a namby pamby? No! I offered a measly $65 for our one-night’s stay, and it was accepted! The hotel has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation and it is lovely from the two LG HD LCDs in our suite to the modern bathroom sink and counter top. Ever since watching the movie “Beverly Hills Cop” in the ’80s, I’d always wanted to stay in a hotel that provided the guest bathrobes during their stay. Anyhow, we enjoyed our experience very much.

We’ve been busy and we’ve been sick. Not a great combination. I have managed to upload a few pictures to our flickr.com photostream. Perhaps I’ll have something more to say when the Daquil® kicks in.

I’ve read that the two biggest things that couple argue about are money and the division of household duties (sex comes in at #3). That’s not so for Randy and me. I think the biggest source of contention is the difficulty we have deciding what to eat for dinner and/or where to go if we’re going to eat out. It’s ridiculous. We’ve been struggling/arguing about this for over eleven years now. How hard can it be?

I think though that figuring out meals and menus must be a problem for more than just us. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be places like Super Suppers or Dream Dinners where one can go and assemble meals from prepared menus to pop into the freezer. There are other resources as well. Saving Dinner will email weekly menus, grocery lists and recipes. The magazine Taste of Home offers a weekly Menu$aver newsletter with a week’s worth of recipes. Kraft Foods offers online meal plans and a free cooking magazine.

I’m making the effort again to plan our meals ahead of time instead of daily opening the fridge hoping that inspiration will magically strike. My plan is to make the dishes that we like from the dozens of cookbooks I own. As I prepare a recipe, I’ll make a copy of it, put the copy in a sheet protector and add it to my two 3-inch binders of recipes I’ve saved over the years. The binder is organized by categories (e.g., quick breads, cakes, appetizers, etc.) which I adapted from the my favorite reference cookbook The Joy of Cooking (why reinvent the wheel, right?). As I add the recipes I use regularly to the binders, I’ll remove the recipes I’ve never made. Eventually, I’ll be able to use my cookbooks for ideas but for my day-to-day cooking, my binders will be what I utilize. There will be no more searching for that one recipe that we liked but don’t know which cookbook or magazine I pulled it from.

I figure if I can also make a list of the entrees/meals that we like, I can pretty much just rotate through it over several months so we’re not eating the same thing week in and week out. I keep my pantry stocked with staples so it’ll just be a matter of referring to my “menu” and buying the necessary perishable items each week.

My hope is that we won’t waste precious time going back and forth about what to eat, we’ll be able to save some money as we won’t have to resort to take-out or fast food out of desperation, we’ll be able to eat at a reasonable hour because the decision-making process will have been done ahead of time, and when we do dine out, it will be “on purpose” and actually be pleasurable. Plus, our eating-out budget won’t be used up by nights of meal indecisiveness.

If this all works as planned, I wonder what Randy and I will argue about.