For a throwback to good ol’ blog-times past, let’s do a little Tuesday Tell-All, shall we?
*For starters, I call the picture above, “Sweet Taters Through Steam.” Sometimes I think my calling in life is making food, taking pictures of it, and then eating it. I’m perfectly okay with that life vision for myself.
*Apparently when you move to a new apartment (at least in some areas), you have to call the gas company to, you know, not shut off the gas. Otherwise, you wanna know what happens? Two days in, your showers start to seem suspiciously lukewarm, and then on the third morning, neighbors everywhere wonder why there is intense shrieking coming from your bathroom (maybe with the movie “Psycho” coming to mind?).
*Good news though, folks—we wised up to our mistake, called our manager and the gas company, and all should be fixed by 1:30 PM today. (Which is a good thing, because my husband and I were starting to smell a bit because who’s going to take a shower in 20-degree water, really?).
*It must be the month of making phone calls because this morning found me on the phone trying to add the new (used) car we just bought to our insurance and trying to figure out the maze that is car registration through the DMV (it’s mostly just complicated because we just moved and have no idea where anything is).
*One important fact you must know about me—I absolutely DESPISE talking on the phone, especially to people I don’t know about issues that I don’t want to deal with. I thought my mission would cure me of that (since I regularly had to make those calls daily, and in Spanish no less!), but it didn’t—in fact, I think I might dislike it more than ever, largely due to the fact that many of the phone calls I was making during the school year were to parents whose kids had been acting up like crazy. I wish I knew some way to get over my phone phobia that didn’t involve actually making a lot of phone calls, but I’m coming up blank. Do you hate talking on the phone too? (Or maybe you’re actually a “real” adult, and I just need to grow up about my fears of making my own doctor appointments. Or something like that.)
*I love breakfast in the summer because it gives me an excuse to try out new things in the kitchen without feeling overwhelmed (aka, inventing a dinner or baking recipe = me being overwhelmed). But breakfast? It’s really hard to screw up breakfast. You just add whatever vegetables you have on hand to a little oil in a skillet, cook ’em ’til they’re soft, throw on some eggs, and top off the whole thing with cheese. See? Impossible to go wrong.
*(And yes, that’s exactly what I did in this breakfast you see pictured here—all it consisted of was a sweet potato, a little onion, and some sliced yellow and green peppers mixed in with a little apple cider vinegar and olive oil. After those got soft(ish), I added two eggs, some thyme, rosemary, and salt, and topped it off with Parmesan cheese. Btw, it was delicious, thanks for asking.)
*Unpacking Update: our front room and kitchen are pretty much entirely unpacked (mostly because we had friends staying over last weekend). As for the rest of the house, well….the bathroom’s about done, anyway. I don’t even want to talk about the spare bedroom. And we have a grand total of two things hung on the walls. (Translation = you might not get to see pictures of the new place for a long, LONG time.)
*”But wait a sec, Torrie,” I hear you say to me. “Don’t you have all summer off? Isn’t that kind of the whole point of becoming a teacher?”
“Why yes, smart reader, it is the whole point. And you know what I do with those summers off?”
(You blink at me in undisguised anticipation.)
“NOTHING,” I say with an evil gleam in my eye. “Well, nothing apart from eating ice cream, trying to avoid the box elder bugs around the place, and watching all the t.v. and movies I missed while working.”
*Yeah, summers as a teacher are pretty much the life.
*(Note: I actually DO accomplish SOME things on a daily basis, such as getting ready for the day, reading a few chapters (or maybe a hundred pages) from some book, and possibly making dinner. But after the first week after moving in is past and gone, I find it difficult to keep up the motivation to continue unpacking when I pretty much have almost everything out that I need. Maybe this is a cue to me to start getting rid of more stuff.)
*Some things I do have to get done this summer though? Help Matt apply to grad school (again) in July, attend two different teaching conferences, be a proctor for the occasional test up on the local college campus, and work on fulfilling my new church calling (which is now “gospel doctrine instructor,” by the way). So I do have to do SOMETHING, sometimes.
*Speaking of that new church calling, can I just say that being a Sunday School teacher is my absolute FAVORITE calling to have? (Maybe next to being a teacher in the Relief Society, which is the women’s organization?) I’m seriously excited about the fact that I get to have all the fun of teaching and interacting with people while not having to deal with any of the stress of going to meetings, planning girls’ camp, or organizing weekly activities (which came with my last calling). And while I’ve learned to love every church calling I’ve been given, teaching’s just kind of my thing.
*Hence the reason I’m a teacher. Go figure.
*Okay, time to go eat a cookie and watch some Big Bang Theory. It’s a hard knock life, but someone’s got to do it.
Have a positively delightful summer day, and thanks for stopping by!