A Rather Blustery Day (or two)

Mike and I woke up yesterday to a rather rainy and rather windy day yesterday. Our plans for cleaning and organizing the apartment sort of fell by the wayside as a result. You might think that rainy weather is perfect cleaning weather, but it's not. Not for us at least. It was too dark in the apartment and made us just want to watch tv/movies all day. We started off with a bunch of food network shows about Halloween. Which, of course, made us want to make Halloween treats. As we sat staring at the tv, we added cupcake and sugar cookie ingredients to our grocery list (which already included a few items for dinner). Just remember that there's two of us. And we're making cupcakes and cookies. Oh well, it's Halloween, the season of sweets. So anyhow, Mike was the lucky one to go to the store because he didn't like the movie on tv I'd chosen to watch. He swears we started watching Ghost Ship together before and we both thought it was stupid. I swear he doesn't know what he's talking about because none of it was familiar to me. I'm not saying it's a cinematic masterpiece, but I liked it enough. It was fun.

While he was gone I started preparing for dinner. And may I offer a tip for a good meal that works well as leftovers, too? Mike and I eat the Campell's Supper Bakes maybe once a week. We finally stumbled on one that cooks up well as leftovers--the Southwest Chicken. Very tender, juicy chicken the first time around and, since it's a meal for four, we had leftovers which I decided to make into chicken tacos. Mmm. Just reheated the rice with a little butter and red onions, cut the chicken up and reheated it with some taco seasoning, shredded some cheese and lettuce, bought a little sour cream and taco shells and voila! tasty meal number two!

Except tasty meal number two turned dangerous when Mike arrived with the taco shells. I couldn't open the shrink wrap around the shells and since I was too lazy to go in the other room for scissors, I just grabbed the knife I used to cut the lettuce and...slipped and cut my finger. Mind you I also opened the shrink wrap, but I put a pretty nasty gash in the side of my left middle finger. Ever actually cut through your nail? I did. The cut goes from about the center of my fingernail horizontally across and into my flesh on the side. Nice. I was bleeding pretty badly so I raised my hand over my head (because I'm sure...sorry, stupid reference) to slow the blood flow and directed Mike around the kitchen to finish the meal. It seems just fine now, but I'm interested to see how it grows out.

We sat down to our yummy meal and watched The Omen which was pretty good. About halfway through the movie I started mixing up the cupcakes (one-handed...kind of interesting). The first batch came out of the oven just as the movie was ending and then the power went out. Yay! Well, not really. Mike and I actually like power outages, but this time it was just inconvenient. At least we're prepared, though, because we had two flashlights nearby at the ready and plenty of candles already out ready to be lit. But we had more cupcake batter that would go bad and we didn't want to open the fridge in case it lasted a while. Also, Damien: The Omen II, was coming on next and since we liked the first one, we were excited to watch the second one. Well, I filled the cupcake pan and we decided to go for it and put it in the fridge. Then we played a game of Clue by candlelight (fun!). A little over an hour later the power came back on, we made the cupcakes, and, thanks to the magic on On Demand, we were able to watch The Omen II.

And now today it's still very blustery, which we love, and we're making some headway with our mess. Yippee.

Happy Trails...