How I Met My House

My friend Rebekah has a post by this title on her blog, and I thought it was a cute idea. She got the idea from "How I Met My House Party."

In 2007, I was living in Oxford, MS, while Chris was deployed to Iraq. We had a one bedroom, one bath apartment, and I knew before we actually got to live in the same location for long, we would need something bigger. Unfortunately, I didn't know how long it would be until we could actually live together. Chris was stationed in Germany, but the Army had no desire to let me move there when Chris got back unless he reenlisted. Neither of us had any desire for him to stay in and face more 15 month deployments and Army red tape. As it drew closer to time to renew my lease, I discovered the apartment was changing management and no longer did 6 month lease extensions. Lovely, I was going to be stuck with my apartment no matter what we figured out for when Chris got back from deployment.

One night we were chatting via Yahoo IM, and Chris mentioned he had been looking at some houses in both Kansas and Tennessee. I looked at the links he sent me for real estate sites, and thought it was pretty cool -- for later. I had a Christmas party to go to that night and friends calling and asking where I was, so I signed off from Yahoo, and left Chris to play on the computer alone. When I got back from the party, my email was filled with house pictures. One was a really cute old farmhouse near my family. Housing prices were considerably better in Tennessee than in Kansas, so that more or less settled where to buy IF we decided to do so. We could get all the things we wanted on a manageable budget, where in Kansas the best we could do was a run down fixer-upper.

My mother had a client who sold real estate, so when I mentioned to her that we had been talking about houses, next thing I knew I had an appointment to meet with Candy, the real estate agent, and talk about what kind of house we were interested in.

The farmhouse was no longer listed, but I gave Candy some requirements: 3 bedrooms, at least 2 baths, real trees around it, preferably somewhere with at least an acre of land. She gathered up some ideas, and the next day we hit the road. The first house we saw was this:

I thought it was adorable, but everybody says you can't buy the first house you see. But really! Three bedrooms, two baths, a bonus room upstairs, lots of closet space, Jacuzzi bathtub, stained glass pendant lights above the kitchen island, and a gorgeous carved fireplace! Plus it sat on about 2 acres!

We saw four more houses. Three were in the same subdivision, and all the houses there were pretty close together, with plans to build more behind them. One had a really nice formal dining room, but it also had a broken front door pane and black widow spiders! EEK!! The other two in that subdivision had weird layouts, and the last one was very cute and cozy (built in bookcases!) but the upstairs hallway was so narrow I could put my hands on my hips and touch both walls with my elbows, and outside there was some kind of leaky pipe. I just kept thinking about the first house.

I described the house to Chris when he called, and he told me to go for it. "But you haven't SEEN it!" I argued. "It will be perfect," he assured me. So I proceeded to buy a house my husband had never seen! We closed on it in January, one month after we started looking, and he came home on R&R about a week later. We spent most of his R&R moving in, and for a few nights we didn't even had a bed and slept on the floor in front of the fireplace. It was absolutely worth it!

Two years later, it is still home, even though Chris has only lived here about 6 months total. I'm very attached to our house, and I think he is, too.

On Admitting There May Be Ghosts

I wrote my ghost blog on Friday. Today, Sunday, strange things have been occurring around my house. Last night I folded a quilt on top of my suitcase, which is standing on the far side of my room next to a window. I woke up this morning and the quilt was in its place. After a shower and some coffee, I went back to my bedroom to get ready for lunch; the quilt was laying in the middle of the room, like it had been dragged. I folded the quilt and put it back on the suitcase.

When I came home after lunch at my grandparents' house, the quilt was in place, but a table cloth was in the middle of the living room floor. Yes, the table cloth was supposed to be in the living room since I was using it for a backdrop to take pictures of my jewelry, but when I left, it was on a chair, not in the floor!

The cats could probably have something to do with the movable linens, but the quilt seems a little big and heavy for them to tackle. While I was having coffee, they were all in the living room with me. I've seen them move rugs, even pull the table cloth backdrop off the chair, but entire quilts? That seems a little much.

Less than a week after Chris and I moved into this house, our wedding quilt that my aunt had made for us vanished. We assume it was stolen along with a wine rack that was in our garage, but maybe I just have a ghost with an obsession with linens.

It's Forever Raining Fungi

Summer in Tennessee is know for being hot and muggy, but this summer has seemed much damper than normal. Mr. Bookworm blames that fact on El Nino, which The Weather Channel insists has returned this year. I nod distractedly and return to watching the rain. When I venture outside, as infrequently as that may be due to the nasty weather and my skin deciding to suddenly become allergic to nature, I have noted a strange change in our vegetation that looks like this:

And this:

And this:

Our back yard and the woods surrounding our house has been infested by mushrooms of all types. I started chronicling our fungi explosion because there were so many in one place at one time, and some of them were kind of cute in that puffy golf ball growing out of the ground way.

Now that the rain has ceased a bit, our mushrooms have taken a more malevolent appearance:

I firmly believe that this fungus would like to eat small animals if provoked. Perhaps it might lead a take over of the planet. Fortunately we have Super Mario Brothers' mushroom to protect us (and its friend the cute toadstool that ran away from Fairyland):

And by the way, if anyone knows what any of these things are, I would love to know what oddities I have growing in my yard!

I Gave In

I gave in and submitted Christbelle's famous vegetarian picture to "Lolcats":
http://cheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=4799160

Go there, sign in, and vote for my little vegetarian princess! Meanwhile enjoy some veggies with Chrissy.

Bread and Tea and Disorganization

I must admit that I'm not the most organized person in the world. I wish I had more systems and cubbies and that everything fit nicely into cabinets and closets. Unfortunately, my shoes are always strewed on the closet shelves (or in the floor) and my kitchen pots and pans never quite fit in the cabinets with any order or aesthetic appeal. The same problems goes for my recipes. While I love to cook and try new things, my recipes are usually stacked on some high shelf or lost in whatever cookbook I had out at the time I clipped a new recipe from some magazine.

I may be addicted to clipping recipes from Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living magazines. I have piles upon piles of flimsy pages, and at the moment I fear that some may even be trapped under the bed. Transcribing them onto recipe cards is the ultimate boring activity, and although I'm sure it's more productive than watching T.V. or surfing the Internet, I rarely feel inspired to write recipes until my hand cramps. During a house cleaning frenzy, I recently mislaid a stack of pages that I wanted to try, and more than a month after their disappearance, they emerged on the top shelf of my cookbook cabinet. I had probably looked at them at least a dozen times, never completely sure what they were and too short to see the titles. My prodigal recipes have been cheerfully welcomed back, however; and I've successfully prepared several dishes that had been under consideration for four or more years -- yes, I am a recipe addict, but I have to have people to cook for before I enjoy myself in the kitchen.

Without further ado, I present my take on Better Homes and Gardens' "Lemon-Walnut Tea Bread":

Lemon-Pecan Tea Bread

1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened

1 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 cup milk

3/4 cup chopped pecans

2 Tbls. grated lemon rind

2 Tbls. fresh lemon juice

1) Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour 9x5 loaf pan; set aside.

2) Beat butter at medium speed with an electric mixer until fluffy; gradually add sugar, beating well. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating until blended after each addition.

3) Combine flour, baking powder, and salt; add to butter mixture alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat at low speed until blended after each addition. Stir in pecans, lemon rind, and lemon juice. Pour batter into loaf pan.

4) Bake at 350 for 50-55 minutes.

5) Cool in pan on wire rack 10-15 minutes; remove from pan, and cool completely on wire rack.

Lemon Glaze (optional)

1/2 cup powdered sugar

lemon juice

1) Combine powdered sugar with juice until mixture reaches desired glaze consistency.

2) Pour gently over the top of cooled cake

3) If mixture puddles at bottom of cake plate, carefully scrape up excess and drizzle back over cake and sides.

The original recipe calls for walnuts, as the title suggests, but I usually have pecans on hand in my pantry, and I prefer their flavor. You may use walnuts if you desire.

Also, the glaze is purely the idea of Mr. Bookworm and me. It wasn't mentioned in the recipe, but we wanted to make the bread more cake-like. It can be adjusted to taste.

To go with our tea bread, Mr. Bookworm tried his hand at making authentic Iraqi chai (using American-bought tea leaves, as sadly,there isn't a wide market for ethnic teas in the rural south). It made a beautiful presentation in our Middle Eastern chai set, and it was a delicious companion to the bread. I wish I had a better picture of the chai set with our boring teapot and the bread, but alas, Mr. Bookworm borrowed the camera and focused on the individual setting instead. It makes a gorgeous presentation with it's honey brown and gold tones. Next time, however, I'll arrange the photo op, and perhaps after some more practice he will share his chai recipe with me.

Christabelle, the Vegetarian Cat

For the past few days, Christabelle, the princess of the bookworm house, has been begging to go outside. She is an indoor kitty, but she enjoys an occasional stroll on the porch. She lets us know when it's time for her excursion by running out the front door ahead of us and parading up and down the porch, looking for a new plant to nibble. After a few minutes, the front porch becomes boring because all of the plants are down below in the garden, plus there is road noise; and the occasional tractor or log truck sends her racing for the door.

To appease her whim, we take her out on the back porch where it is quiet, the herb garden grows right up against the porch edge, and she can visit our outdoor cat Purr. Christabelle makes a beeline for the herbs. She seems to enjoy sniffing lemon basil, but to satisfy her green plant craving, she goes for shoots of grass that spring up. I was so concerned about getting her outside and making sure she was going to stay for awhile that I forgot my camera until she was almost done in the basil, but I managed to get a few shots, albeit under protest from the Princess.

Here she is contemplating her next snack. My little vegetarian has made it impossible to keep live plants inside. She destroyed a plant I wanted for my apartment several years ago. I had to take it to my grandfather for intensive resuscitation, and when she would go to visit my mom when I would go out of town for extended periods, all plants had to be put away -- far, far away -- out of sight and out of smell because Chrissy can find the most ingenious ways to get to her little green yum yums if she has the slightest inkling that there might be something edible in the room. I am extremely happy that our new house has a fireplace mantel and several tall pieces of furniture that she can't climb, jump upon, or hop from a low table to subsequently higher ones until she reaches her plant. At least here I can keep flowers from my hubby safe and unnibbled on the mantel or high and out of reach without having to build elaborate barricades of books to keep her away. For some reason building fortress walls around a vase of roses takes some of the enjoyment out of getting flowers from a thoughtful man.

Strangely enough, she doesn't want to play in the grass or walk in her favorite green stuff. Christabelle is too prissy for that. She wouldn't lower herself to eating anything she walks on, so she never leaves the porch or walkways. Miss Priss simply cranes her neck to see what she can nibble from the solidity of a clean concrete stoop. Today was a good day for yum yums because we've had too much rain and humidity to weed eat this week, and the grass that escaped into the herbs were just right.