Gut rentching laugh

Can life get better than this?

"Yes" Ok..now what?

Have you ever made a careful decision and said "Yes, I want to do this" but then have to wait to actually be able to do the thing or go to the place??

Ugh.

Addiction

I struggle with addiction...

I'm Veronique, and I'm a bookaholic.

Lately, the majority of books I've read, I've actually listened to. I started listening to a book on cd when I would have trouble sleeping. It worked to distract my mind from the monotonous circle of thoughts that prevents me from falling asleep. I switched from a CD to my iPod. I now keep my iPod under my pillow on a regular basis...only bringing it out when I'm so invested in a book that I bring it downstairs and in the car. I went to the library today to get a book on cd that my mom was having trouble finding. We're going down to visit her tomorrow, and I told her I would get this for her. I completely spaced and remembered this afternoon 45 min before the library closed. I told Jon and got in the car and headed to the next town over where the book, Founding Mothers, was resting on a shelf just waiting to be listened to.

I went for the one. I got 6. One is SO long, it takes two cases ( I think it's over 20 cds).

Spring

It's coming. Two things told me this.

1) They had daffodils at Trader Joe's this week!!!

2) At 4:45pm, it was still light out.

Enjoy with me a bit of spring with snow still in the background.

Veronique’s Chicken Pot Pie

One container of Trader Joe’s Chicken Broth (32fl oz) in a box

Chicken and veggies desired

Wondra

Poultry Seasoning, Salt & Pepper

Pillsbury Pie Crust—2 crusts 1 package

These ingredients are optional:

Joseph

SNOW!

Music!

I tend to roast a whole chicken and use the leftover chicken pieces to use in the pie the next night. If you’re cooking chicken just for this, I would recommend poaching the chicken in water with onion and celery. It doesn’t take too long and it keeps the meat VERY juicy and the chicken doesn’t need to be flavored because of all the rest of the flavor going into the rest of the pie.

Heat broth med (up to a low simmer—just be careful the higher you put the temp, the easier it could stick or burn to the pot, so keep stirring!!) and add about a teaspoon of poultry seasoning, and a little salt and pepper. Gradually wisk in Wondra until it becomes a moderately thick sauce. (I recommend starting this and continue working on it while you prepare the rest of the pie)

Thaw TJ’s frozen broccoli and cut into smaller bite size pieces. Any other veggies you desire, a lot of people put peas and corn, I would also recommend just putting them in when everything is mixed together (DO NOT COOK FROZEN VEGGIES—THEY WLL COOK WHEN THE WHOLE PIE BAKES) If you choose to use fresh veggies I would suggest only steaming them if you wish to cook them before putting them in the pie.

The crust: Roll one of the crusts little bigger than how it comes to make sure it will fit in your pie plate.

Spray bottom of pie plate with Pam (or the like). Fit into pie plate, start at the center of the plate and work your way out to the sides, making sure it comes up over the edges.

Cover edges with tin foil.

Heat at 350 for 10ishmin (sorry, got distracted and forgot to check the time), or until bottom crust is golden brown.

If crust balloon’s up, give it a couple minutes to see if it’ll settle back down, if not, take a toothpick or something the like and make the smallest hole possible to let the air get out from under the crust.

Cut up potatoes into bite size pieces; boil until you can put a knife through them easily

Once sauce to desired thickness, put all the rest of the filling (chicken, veggies, potatoes, etc) in to the sauce and mix to cover other ingredients with the sauce.

Put top layer of crust on and pinch bottom and top crusts together and take a sharp knife and cut some steam slits on the top crust.

Bake for 25-30min. or until pie crust is golden brown—remember, everything’s cooked inside so it just needs to be warm and the crust baked!

Wait impatiently for it to be done.

ENJOY!

New England Girl

I know I've talked about this before, but here it is again...

I love living in New England. I know it snows elsewhere, but I still love it here.

Joseph woke up at 4 something am...then 6 something am...both times, he went back to sleep on his own!!! I stayed in bed and Jon had to leave at about 6:50am. At about 7:15am, I heard Joseph making some noises, playing with something in his crib. I turned to get my glasses and through my blurry vision saw something falling gently to the ground. Snow. Big fluffy flakes. It was so pretty and it put a smile on my face. I came downstairs and have been able to do a couple things for myself (eat breakfast being one of them) before Joseph starts making the noise that says "I WANT TO GET UP NOW!" I've been able to sit here all snuggled under a blanket and watch the snow through the windows to my right and to my left. From this one spot, I can look through 6 windows! The 4 to my left are full of beautiful evergreens that are now dusted with snow. It is now coming down smaller and faster. Later it will get not so pretty, a mix of rain and snow is expected. My plan is to stay inside all day and enjoy as much of the snow as I can and hope that Jon's meeting tonight will be canceled due to weather and he can spend the evening with me and Joseph.

Chicken Pot Pie is planned for dinner...even going to try to make the stock from bones....

...And there's Joseph...this is my life!

The car story

I cheated. I told this story to CG the day we were going to pick up our new car. I simply edited the chat and posted it below for the rest of you. My apologies..but that's kinda the week or so I've had. CG, I PROMISE to post something new to you soon!


Ok..so, a couple of weeks ago Jon made a comment "Uh..we need more space" while packing things into our car

while we manage just fine, every once in a while we feel that and he can't ride in the passenger seat with the car seat behind it for any length of time..he's too tall.

We knew we wanted to head in that (an SUV) direction one day...one day we will have more kids and that means more stuff for more people...

when we bought our red car, it was so fast, and we did an odd loan thing called a smartbuy. it gave us a couple of options, basically like a lease to own..needing to keep in under a certain number of miles in order to be able to trade it in after a certain number of years...the end of the "years" is next Feb and the end of the miles is in 800 miles...not good.

so, i kept thinking about it...and i went online to our local saturn dealership to see what they had for cars online...see for any specials, etc.

I saw this category "$250 and below $0 down" Intrigued...I looked. I saw this VUE (small SUV) that was 10,000 less miles than our car, one year older under this category. (we pay $290/mo)

I thought....could it really happen that we could pay less and get a better bigger car?

(the big X factor is of course the loan we were signed into)

so I talked to Jon

he really didn't think it could work, but we decided, the more we looked over our loan paperwork for the red car, to go and ask some questions, even if a new car couldn't work, get some things straight about our current situationso we went. We drove that SUV we saw

at first when we came down the the money talk, it was "you can't fold in anything from your current loan and you'd need to put $1,000 down"...much nicer than that, but still...it didn't seem like it would work

Jon basically said "I'm ok sitting on this car and just keep paying it off till it's ours. We really don't have the money to put down"

so he goes and talks to his manager. He comes back (after a couple times) and takes $1,000 off the car and finds out that we can that we can roll the "leftover" of the current loan (what they would take for the trade in vs. what we still owed) into a new loan...plain and simple, pay this amount till it's paid off....that amount was 291.32 (some random amount of change)...AAAHHH $1 more than what we pay now...IF we could put $500 down.....Closer....

then he asked "have you paid your February loan payment yet?

"no..."

"You can use that for a big part of your "down payment" and we can defer your first payment for the SUV for 45 days...not be due until mid march"

AAAHHHHH

That's when Jon realized this was actually going to work!!!

So..now we're basically at one more dollar a month and $200 to pay off for the down payment...then!

they said they'd call and make sure our financing would be ok'd by the bank...supposed to be the next morning, the guy ran out after us and said "We heard from the bank..You got approved!"

the next morning, I called our insurance agent...to find out how this would change our premium

she called me back and said "I have good news"

"I upped your coverage, cuse you have a little one now right?"

"With that, it'll be $100 LESS a year"

...so now (in effect) we are paying $100 and an extra $2 a month for a bigger car, lower milage, and out of that weird loan thing

Jon has to keep my old silver car, which works fine (other than it leaks through the sunroof when it rains, but we've never had it looked at or fixed)

So, we're getting our new SUV (standard and has a sunroof which is the ONLY thing I missed about my silver car) in 2 hours!


We have our new car and I'm back to driving a standard!

My New Car

Story to come....