A Quiet/Slow-moving Saturday

Welcome to August!  Is it already August?  The summer is marching right along!  Go right ahead and march in my opinion.  I'm ready for football season to come around again. Speaking of football season, this weekend is Hall of Fame weekend.  The opening of pre-season football is tomorrow night when the Giants take on the Bills.  An all New York, Hall of Fame game!

Let's see what's been going on.  Last weekend was dedicated to our nephew Dylan.  He spent the weekend with us.  I made him some special chocolate cookies.  I had to tweak the recipe as I went so the cookies got better as I progressed.  Perhaps I should start measuring things?  Oh but what fun is that?  No seriously with those cookies last weekend I was slightly irritated with myself for not measuring at least the flour! 

Oh man, I have to tell this story...we took Dylan to a bit of an upscale Cajun restaurant. Now mind you, I have only had Cajun food since Brad came into the picture. Definitely not something you grow up having in AZ. I have enjoyed some good Cajun food though. And I even make jambalaya periodically( a lot in the winter time). While looking over the menu, Dylan and myself were both leery of "tiger sauce". So we looked for items that did not feature tiger sauce. He went with a shrimp hoagie and I went for a pasta dish. The dish I chose was parmesan chicken served on a bed of angel hair pasta. Angel hair pasta is likely my fave pasta. The dish looked amazing when it arrived. Perfectly golden brown parmesan chicken smothered in Fontina cheese with a drizzle of Alfredo sauce as a bonus on top. At one bite, my taste buds were on FIRE! I mean....FIRE! At least a 4 alarm blaze. Coming from AZ I'm no stranger to spices.  However, those are Mexican spices and these spices I was tasting were Cajun! Yikes!  It was very good just super spicy.  My taste buds were doing a dance they've never had to do before, the tango or something! Clearly the spiciest dish I've ever eaten. Possibly I should re-phrase that....the spiciest dish I've ever wanted to keep eating!  The spice was quite intense but it didn't make me want to stop eating it. Oddly enough!  I was up for it! After surviving the 4 alarm blaze my taste buds endured will I ever let Brad take me back to this particular restaurant called Copeland's? Heck yeah!  I'm up for it! I did notice that Dylan never mentioned his shrimp hoagie to be spicy so perhaps I will try what he had next time. Wink-wink! It was good just much more intense flavors than I'm used to. I'm still adapting to Cajun fare!

I'm currently wasting time away at home today as my wonderfully cute husband is working.  It's the first Saturday of the month so off to work he went today. But the good news is he has next Friday off! I'll work my tail-feathers off during this coming week to take the day off with him next Friday. We are sharing one car right now.  His car had a very odd issue with a tire. An issue I've never heard of before. He feared a blow out was imminent and he refused to let his wife ride in his car until the issue was fixed so off to the shop it went yesterday.  Brad's mechanic friend and his wife super politely came to pick up Brad's car yesterday afternoon.  Yes, it's nice having a mechanic as an actual close friend! When Brad needed to go to work this morning I convinced him to just take the Pathfinder. I don't need to go anywhere today.  Oh sure I could go out browsing, but on Saturday's without Brad I'm like a lost puppy dog when out browsing at a store. I generally stay home and bake as well as do laundry. The only small issue today though is that Brad took both sets of keys.  His set of keys has all his work keys so he has to take those plus he took my full set of keys instead of taking only the car key and remote. So I'm keyless!  I've had to be a bit crafty today when taking the boys out. The boys were probably wondering to themselves why I was making them quickly run under the parking garage door before it closed when I took them out earlier. I'm not going to tell Brad about the key issue! So shhh! This is all our little secret. It's no big deal, a slight inconvenience for me and the pugs when trying to get in and out of the building but otherwise no biggie. I don't want Brad to feel badly that he mistakenly took all keys with him when he left this morning. Although he will likely realize it at some point today!

These Saturday's that he works are always a bit boring to me. I did make some candy. I recently made a friend of mine some cookie bars and sent them to her for her bday only to find out after they arrived she doesn't eat white flour anymore. Those cookie bars I sent were most certainly made with white flour. She didn't want to eat any of them. So I've been racking my brain as to a replacement batch of something to send her. I finally settled on candy. Earlier today I made some butterscotch TX haystacks. Yum!  Now my only concern is sending them all the way to CA in the heat of August! Butterscotch based stuff doesn't seem to melt as badly as chocolate based candy. Fingers-crossed they survive the trip come Monday!

Hmm, what time is it? Is it too early to start planning out dinner? I have salmon marinating in the fridge but I suddenly feel like spaghetti, perhaps that's because I was telling the story of my fiery Cajun pasta experience. Although I think my husband is expecting taco night. I originally said tonight was taco night but then changed it to tomorrow night because the salmon needs to be cooked up. The freezer might be receiving the salmon very soon.  Oh good something to debate while I continue to watch the clock for when my hubby returns!!!