Signs of Life

Yes, we are alive. There just hasn't been a whole lot going on around here lately. I think we've got a serious case of the blahs. But there haven't been any more fires, so that's a good thing.

We finally pulled our act together on Saturday and went out to dinner to a Thai place that is one of my favorites, to celebrate my promotion at work. It's downtown, and we used to go there more earlier in our relationship, partly because our old apartment was really conveniently located no more than 10 minutes away. But now it's more of an endeavor, and as the downtown area has really grown up in the past few years, it's crowded, we feel old, and it has lost some of its allure. But driving in on Saturday night, I made a list of at least 5 restaurants that I wanted to go to. Maybe this will help us get out of a rut, too. When we eat out, 90% of the time, it's Moe's, Panera, or Doc Chey's. We tried a new Chinese place last weekend, and were a bit disappointed. For what it was, it was kind of pricey, and if I'm going to spend that much, then we'll go to PF Chang's and get Chang sauce, dang it.

The weather this weekend was gorgeous, with highs in the mid 60s. We had windows and doors opened, and the cats were just loving it. (The feel of wind through your whiskers, I guess.) Most of the daffodils around have already bloomed, but ours (like usual) are a bit behind. The ones right outside the front door are almost ready to bloom... maybe Monday or Tuesday.

Saturday was spent in pursuit of flooring. We had this whole, big elaborate PLAN to get our new downstairs flooring from Costco. There's a coupon that came out months ago for the stuff, that starts on Monday. So, since January, we'd been planning on going to Costco on March 3 to get the flooring. Well, last weekend, we noticed that Costco no longer had the color we wanted. We looked at Costco, Sam's, BJ's (no, we're not giant club whores. They're all free through work.), and Lowe's. Lowe's was easily double the price of anywhere else. BJ's didn't have a whole lot. We definitely found some good options at Sam's, though. They have some additional colors available online, and I think we're happy with that. I looked a little bit more closely at the Costco coupon today, and realized that it does actually say "flooring with padding," which is what all of the stuff they now have is; when we were first looking at it in January, the stuff they were carrying didn't have the padding.

Also trying to break the blahs by trying some new dinner recipes this week. We tried this meat loaf recipe from Cooking Light, which calls for dividing the meat up and cooking it in a muffin tray (so it's done in like 25 minutes). It was really, really good! I'll report back if the other new ones are any good.

I think we finally decided on a vacation for this year, but don't have much planned yet. We want to go out to the Pacific Northwest, and drive around Oregon and Washington for a week. We've just started reading up some information, so if you have recommendations, let us know. It will probably be early June. (No, it's not *just* to make a Starbucks pilgrimage...)