Too Much To Do

• Bake cookies for Thanksgiving
• Go to Wal-Mart for soup ingredients
• Make soup to bring for Thanksgiving
• Meet two little kids at daycare for annual Thanksgiving Lunch.
• Clean up kitchen
• Vacuum family room
• Clean 3 bathrooms
• Finish 3 loads of laundry
• Fold and put away 4 baskets of clean laundry plus above 3 loads when finished
• Pack for myself plus 4 kids for 4 days at grandma & grandpa’s
• Write paper on acid rain (MBA class)
• Research Wal-Mart’s sustainability strategy (MBA class)
• Provide intelligent comments on music piracy, a topic which I care nothing about (MBA class)
• Gather remaining odds and ends that need to go with us this weekend
• Review and finalize Christmas lists for Black Friday shopping
• Oh yeah, and do some work for my j.o.b.

…all by 5:30 this evening.

And what am I doing?  Updating my blog.  Priorities!!

Happy Halloween!

Better late than never, I guess.  Here is a picture of the kids all ready for trick-or-treating on halloween.

William, you will notice, is not in costume.  He has been unbelievably badly behaved at daycare lately and was warned that if he didn’t have a good day on Halloween, he would not be going trick-or-treating.  He was beyond awful that day (gee, think it could have been all the sugar from the *morning* party? ugh…) so we had to follow through and not let him trick-or-treat.  He walked along with us but had to pass up the candy offered to him.

For the kids that did get to dress up, I was a huge slacker…normally I make the kids’ costumes.  I found Katey’s costume at Old Navy for $5.  It was cheap and warm so I couldn’t pass it up.  Aiden had his heart set on being an army guy, which was quick and easy and meant no work for me.

Alex, too, led me to believe he was going to be an army guy until about 6 pm the night before Halloween when he announced that actually wanted to be a robot as we had discussed earlier in the month.  So I found myself making an emergency trip to Wal-Mart and working until the wee hours of the morning on a robot costume.  I even got up early the next morning to finish it as Alex needed it for a Halloween parade at school.  For those of you that know me, you know what a chore it is for me to get up early in the morning!  In all, it’s not my best work.  I feel like I need to make another robot costume next year for one of the kids to redeem myself.

I think my favorite two costumes over the years have been the ducks and duck hunter in 2005 or the cupcake in 2006 .  This was when my kids were still young enough to go along with my suggestions, although I have a hard time believing I actually put Aiden in a cupcake costume!  Sometime, somewhere this will come back to bite me.

Catch Up

After I posted the Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe yesterday, I went back and looked at the meager postings in my blog and realized I need to close up a few loose ends.  So here you go…

Crappy ISP

They finally came and did what they needed to do.  There was an installation fee that no one told me about (although I was kind of expecting it) until the bill showed up in the mail a few days later.  A few days after that I got another bill from them for monthly service, which did not go up in price.  The stupid part of this equation is that they’re supposed to be auto-billing my credit card for any charges. 

I called them on a Monday and told the answering machine that I would like someone to return my call as soon as possible regarding a billing matter.  A full week after not receiving a call back from them I wrote a little note on the bill reminding them to bill my credit card.  A few days later they finally called back and said that they went ahead and billed my credit card…you know, like they’ve been doing for the past 3 years.

So back to the installation for a minute – when they came they didn’t have a face plate for the jack in the wall and promised to come back “in the next day or two” to take care of it.  It’s been more than a month.  I don’t think I’ll be getting a face plate.

My internet is much faster these days though! 

Baby Blake

My nephew Blake is at home and doing well.  My SIL updates his CaringBridge page once a week.  Prayers are always appreciated.

Grad School

I’m 6 weeks into my first 8 week course – Business Ethics.  It requires a lot of writing, which I don’t actually mind.  It also includes a lot of group work, which I’m having a harder time with.  It seems to be difficult to form a cohesive and committed group in this class.

I’m looking forward to my second course on Organizational Behavior in January.

Medical Update

We have been fairly healthy this fall but the kids keep coming down with weird rashes.  They range from 5-10 non-itchy spots to a body full of itchy spots.  I think William might have chicken pox right now…but I also think he had them in September.  Of course the doc doesn’t want to see them, I’m just told to “watch them”.  Ugh…  So William has been home for the past two days, healthy as a horse, no fevers, but covered with itchy pox-like bumps.

Katey’s eczema is getting worse.  I think she likely has a dairy allergy and if we took her off of all dairy she would clear up.  However, (there’s always a however), we can’t switch to a non-dairy diet at daycare without a written note from the doctor, who doesn’t seem to see things the way I do.  I wish we could find someone who is as interested in finding out what is causing Katey’s problems as they are to treat the symptoms.  It seems like they’re more than happy to prescribe medicine after medicine to stabilize her but won’t necessarily go any deeper to find the cause.  We were told that we shouldn’t do any more allergy testing until she was 4 or 5 years old.  I think I’m going to request more testing to be done after she turns 3.  There has got to be *something* triggering her eczema and allergies!

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I have a lot to blog about but both a lack of time and motivation, it seems.  One of these days I’ll go back and post Halloween pictures, pumpkin patch pictures, etc.  For today, I feel compelled to share a new recipe. 

It is rare that I cook dinner and when I do, it’s rare that I get very adventurous.  However, I recently ran across a recipe for Chicken Tortilla Soup made in the crock pot.  Since Monday nights are normally crazy here, I decided to give it a try today.  It’s been simmering for about 5 hours and the aroma is so very tempting…I just had to sneak a taste…and it’s good!  Really good!  And its so quick and easy to throw together, too.  A perfect meal, in my opinion!

Chicken Tortilla Soup

1 lb shredded, cooked chicken (I used a deli rotisserie chicken because I’m lazy like that)
1 (15 oz) can Red Gold Mexican Fiesta diced tomatoes
1 (10 oz) can red enchilada sauce
1 can black beans
1 medium onion, chopped
1 (4 oz) can chopped green chiles
2 cloves minced garlic (I used a spoon full of the minced garlic in a jar. Again…laziness…)
2 cups water
1 (14.5 oz) can chicken broth
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp salt
1 bay leaf
1 pkg frozen corn
1 tbsp chopped cilantro

Mix all ingredients together in the crock pot. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours or high for 3-4 hours.

The original recipe explains an elaborate ritual whereby you cut tortillas into strips and coat them with oil and then bake them in the oven to make crispy tortilla strips. Here in the land of cheap and easy, we’ll be using a bag of tortilla chips.

I made a double batch of the recipe posted above and it filled my largest crock pot to the very top. I don’t have high hopes for 2 of the 4 kids liking this so I imagine we’ll have plenty of leftovers which I plan to freeze it for another meal.

When I re-heat it, I might add something to make the broth a little thicker…maybe a can of cheddar chese soup and a little milk…or I might just use corn starch. I really think this would make a good creamy soup. I hesitate to make such grand modifications on my first attempt at making a recipe. There is a very real possiblity that my “adjustments” will end in disaster.