Friday Photos

A look back at the week, Monday through Friday, through photos-

Abby was still home on break this week which was nice! Her school has a "J" term. If students don't take a class during J term, their winter break is extended. She has worked a few days each week at Donnie's office the entirety of the break. She and I took advantage of one nice day of weather this week and went on a long walk. 

Our pretty downtown...

...on a pretty day!

It was a good meal week; those don't seem to happen super often and with two fairly picky kid eaters at home for dinner, that decreased the odds even more. But it happened so I will celebrate it...

On Monday, I had chicken thawing but wasn't sure what to do with it. I saw on Marilyn's blog a recipe for chicken taquitos. I had all the ingredients so I decided to make those for dinner along with some homemade Spanish rice. Alyssa said that taquitos didn't sound that good to her but it worked out because she was not at the house for dinner. Donnie, Abby and I liked the taquitos quite a bit and we had leftovers. That worked because Alyssa requested chicken pot pie for dinner on Tuesday. She and I love CPP but Donnie and Abby don't care for it so they had leftover taquitos. Abby has requested homemade cashew chicken as her last meal at home before heading back to school. "They" say that it's better than take out cashew chicken. I'm not sure that I agree with them (Donnie and Abby) but I love it that they both like my version so much!!

Taquitos getting ready to be air fried...

All air crisped up!

I used this recipe for CPP but subbed whipping cream for the milk since I had no milk. Oh my! I highly recommend. Whipping cream is not healthy but you might as well go big or go home. The filling is ensconced in high fat pie crust; the substitute cream isn't going to do that much more damage...

Speaking of crust, I used my mom's homemade pie crust recipe that is insanely good. In a perfect chicken pot pie world, the crust would look much better than this; my crust rolling skills need improvement but neither Alyssa nor I cared about the less than perfect appearance. 

I didn't sub much this week which gave me more free time to read online news (I never watch the news on TV. But I like to read online to keep up with the news). One day I was reading an article from a local TV station's website about gambling in Ohio.

To put the article in some context:  Beginning in January of this year, a new law took effect in Ohio wherein denizens of the state can now legally gamble on sports games. When I think of gambling on sports games, I think of Pete Rose gambling on Red's games. But gambling apps of today render gambling not your grandma's/ Pete Rose's gambling of yore. You can place bets not only on the outcome of games but on specific events occurring during a game. So you can bet on how many yards a receiver will rush in a football game or even in a quarter. You can bet on how many interceptions will be thrown in a quarter or the game. Maybe you could do this pre apps- I don't know- but with gambling apps on phones, you can now gamble on a game during a game.

If you think about all the negative things associated with gambling... for purposes of brevity, I will not outline them here, the new law in Ohio, "raises one" (to use gambling parlance) regarding negative things about gambling. The article that I read concerned incidences where fans who bet on college sports games and didn't get the desired result, ie. they gambled on the outcome of the game and lost, posted hateful messages about the college student athletes and the outcome of the game.  

The University of Dayton's basketball team lost a heartbreaking game recently and fans took to social media to not just complain about the game but how the outcome cost them money due to their gambling on the game. Suffice it to say they did not take to heart the "Be Kind" mantra that is sweeping the graphic tee shirt industry and school bulletin boards for their messages were... not kind. 

Here are some screen shots from the article. The article in its entirety can be read here. Another article came out about the subject which can be read here.

Goodness, it didn't take long for legal sports gambling in Ohio to devolve did it? 

I did do more than read newspapers articles... One day I tackled organizing/ purging items in Jacob's room/ guest room. Yes, we are getting a guest room back as birdie Jacob spent (likely) his last prolonged period of time at home during winter break.  His nest will be his own when he starts a job in Cincinnati after he graduates in April. It's a bit sad as major changes tend to be. One silver lining is that we will have a guest room once again. 

When we moved into our current house Jacob and Abby were preschoolers and toddlers respectively. Alyssa was alive and well but gestating so we didn't need a nursery right away. We used the smallest bedroom as a guest room until we turned it into a nursery for her. Jacob got the largest of the three non master bedrooms since he was the oldest and had many toy trucks, toy truck accouterments and a plethora of other four year old boy type toys. When Alyssa was about nine years old, she begin a relentless campaign of expressing her indignation that she had the most toys yet the smallest room while Jacob, now a teen, spent his free time with friends or playing the PlayStation which was not in his big bedroom. Jacob said he'd switch rooms with her so the two did a room swap. The smallest bedroom became Jacob's. It's kind of funny but over the years Jacob forgot his magnanimous role in the switching of rooms with Alyssa. He thinks we made him or at least pressured him into agreeing to switch rooms with Alyssa. Not so. I had a very, "you win some and you lose some" attitude towards Alyssa and her small room injustice denouncements. Her status as the last born meant she lost out on the big room. I wasn't going to make Jacob switch rooms because Alyssa had five American Girl dolls and a quarter of the merch in the American Girl doll catalogs. The fact that he was willing to switch is a credit to him, not to us ;).

We will need to make one big change to turn the room into a guest room- getting rid of the twin bed and replacing it with a full bed. The room still contains many of Jacob's things- he can get them if/ when he wants them.  We don't have guests very often so I'm sure I will continue to view it as Jacob's room as much as I do a guest room. But it will be nice to have a space with a bigger bed for guests. 

There used to be a TV and stand under the shelf. Jacob has those two items in his place at UC. We've taken almost all the decor down from the walls.

How it used to look:

Poor picture quality due to taking a picture that's in a scrapbook, but I thought the following two pictures were interesting in contrasts and showed many of the changes to the room as it changed hands from Alyssa's room to Jacob's. 

We changed the flooring from carpet to hardwood, the paint from yellow to blue and the light switch from yellowed and old to new. The beadboard that Donnie installed for the nursery has remained and this board to hang items on has remained in the room the entirety of its existence.

Though the room sits unoccupied now, it was not that long ago that small hands and feet inhabited it and played in it. I'm thankful for all the memories and the pictures. It's a small room that played a big impact as Alyssa's first room and then Jacob's room for most of his teenage years until now.

This chair was a rocker and the the kids loved to sit on it and rock.

The cutest lil' stinker with the cutest smile- I wonder what she was thinking here? That in a few years her reign in the small room would end and she'd move to a room big enough for a queen size bed, good sized desk, chest of drawers and small sectional sofa??

A fun activity at middle school youth group on Wednesday night- each group (I was with my group of sixth grade girls) was given a container of Lucky Charms cereal and had to see how  many of the marshmallows they could extract from the container and place in another container. It was for two minutes and it was for sure the girls' favorite two minutes of the evening. They loved it! It was tied into the lesson (loosely... but there was a tie in- the lesson was a great one on focus).

Last weekend, Abby and I picked up some nice new to us clothes at Goodwill. This week, I picked up a couple of pieces of clothes for free which is, of course, better than GW's good prices:

The girls and I  "shopped" Jacob's closet and chest of drawers. He has many really nice brand names clothes that don't fit him anymore and/ or that he doesn't want. So now the girls have many oversized named brand clothes to wear... I may try to sell some of his clothes that are brand new with tags. I kept this quarter zip for myself. It's too big on me but it works being oversized. 

I got this shirt at our library board meeting one night this week. I am looking forward to our 100 year celebration later on this year.