Weekend report: Nov 25-26

There's not much to report for last weekend. Since the addition of my new laptop to the family, I have been working on getting all the settings "just right". I have also discovered the joys of Bitcomet and downloading torrents. Thanks to a bit of help from Bones, I am downloading Seasons 1-3 of Deadwood as a gift for my FIL. I've never watched the show myself, but he was mentioning the other day that the only thing he'd bother getting from the iTunes store if the Canadian one had TV shows was Deadwood. I don't know if this will be his Christmas present, but we shall be keeping this as an option for sure.

On Saturday I spent the entire afternoon making stew. This was a new recipe for me from Canadian Living Cooks Step-By-Step, which was my all time favourite cookbook until ES&BM came along. Firstly I've decided that I will never cook with rutabagas again. They are much too hard to crack into and tasted kind of like squash in the end (not a stew vegetable, in my opinion). Secondly, this stew smelled and tasted amazing but I just cannot be fond of anything that takes that long to make. Thirdly, if I have a hankering to make this again, I'm busting out the crock pot... it was just not worth babysitting a pot in the oven all afternoon when I could have been outside enjoying the nice weather.

Anyway, Bones came over to see the new house and have supper with us while showing me how to download tv shows on my computer. After he left we suddenly decided to put up our Christmas tree... and were falling asleep by the end of it. Mike's dad gave us his old tree b/c they wanted a skinnier one to fit in the corner of their living room. We bought a set of red sparkly ornaments from Ikea a few weekends ago. Mike's mom gave us a box of old ornaments the last time we visited but I only ended up wanting to use the little gold glass balls. Pictures are on the camera still but I will post them later. Even if it was mostly hand-me-downs, it's very exciting - our first tree!

Sunday was a housework day. I cleaned the bathroom and did 2 loads of laundry. I was going to do a third but a) our washer doesn't have a "hot/whites" setting (weird no?) and most importantly b) we are out of detergent. When Mike was done his math assignment we took an outing to run errands. We stopped at Futureshop to buy a spool of DVD -Rs and to get $100 + tax back on my computer (yay price protection!). Then we went to Home Depot to get stuff to re-tar the roof over our porch. Mike says that water must be getting in under the shingles on the flat part b/c the insides of our porch bricks get wet when it rains and that will be bad if the temp drops. While we were there I bought a Christmas Rosemary and picked up some paint chips of our main floor colours. It seems like we keep spending $$$ on the house. So much for saving! Hopefully it will slow down soon... especially since I only have another 4 weeks of work left. We had dinner at Mexicali Rosas which was a little disappointing. Mike's steak quesadilla was delicious, but my chicken and beef enchiladas were not as good as they looked. Also, the Mexican Fried Ice Cream that I thought they were famous for is not fried at all! It's ice cream rolled in crispy topping. What a let down. We had the brownie sundae instead, which was good.

All in all, it was a nice 3-month anniversary weekend. Gosh... it feels like we've been married forever already. Not that it's been dragging! Ha ha. It's just that so much has happened since August that it feels like so long ago. Next on my plate is planning for our NYE party... I'm excited about planning the menu and stuff. I hope there's a decent turn-out but I'm not going to be surprised if there isn't. People seem to be very possessive of their New Year's Eve - right up until they realize that there won't be anything bigger or better in the works and they end up sitting at home with a few friends (though I have to say that is a good time in its own right).