The Last Quarter of the School Year

Well, I can't believe the last quarter of school is here. This year has gone by really fast (they all seem to when you look back on them). My experiment of being room mom in both my sons' classes is coming to an end soon. I'm kind of sad about it. I've had fun, although there have been some hectic times. I'm gearing up for things to get really busy at the end of the year.

Right now I'm heading a committee for a day-long celebration for the 5th grade called American Heritage Day. This is a day where we will have various speakers talk to the children and their parents about their specific experiences of being an American. I'm not sure who the speakers will be yet but in the past they have had people from various countries talking about what it meant to them to become American citizens, someone serving in the military and a politician. There will be three sessions throughout the day with three speakers per session. My committee is in charge of sending out sign-up sheets for the children to select which speakers they want to hear each session. Then we will assign the kids to the various speakers throughout the day and make a program highlighting the speakers and the schedule and registering the children the day of the event. The next few weeks will be busy getting everything organized for this. Everything seems to be fairly quiet in 3rd grade until June, so I'll be able to focus on this.

I also need to start working on the end-of-year gifts we'll be giving to the teachers. I'm planning on putting together a small scrapbook for my sons' teachers with each child making an individual page with a note to the teacher and any pictures they may want to include. I'll also put together some pages with pictures of events throughout the year like field trips and parties. Unfortunately, I can't find our camera - it's been missing since Easter. So if I don't find it, I'll need to rely on pictures from other parents.

I'll keep posting the goings-on for the next couple of months. More to come!

Why Is It So Hard To Roast A Chicken?

I really am a good cook. I used to be even better, but now I'm always rushing and cooking unfortunately has become more of a chore - it used to be one of my hobbies. One dish I just haven't truly mastered, though (I'm ashamed to say), is a roast chicken. I've tried a number of times because roasting a whole chicken is economical, delicious and every good cook should be able to master it (I've been told). So I tried again last night. I follow the recipe from The Joy of Cooking and I had even seen an episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" show which showed how Thomas Keller roasts a chicken. It all seems simple enough.

I had the chicken sit on the counter for about half an hour so it would warm up. I preheated the oven to 450 degrees. I rinsed, patted dry and trussed the bird. I put melted butter all over it and sprinkled some kosher salt on it. When the oven was ready, I put the bird in. After 5 minutes, I turned the heat down to 350 degrees. I basted it 2-3 times and let it cook for over an hour and a half (it weighed 4-3/4 lbs). During the last 10-15 minutes, I turned the heat up to 400 to try to crisp and brown the skin more. Then I took the chicken out and let it sit for about 10 minutes, while I tented it with aluminum foil.

It still had some pink (even red) areas that looked undercooked. My husband absolutely hates that and was getting turned off as he was carving it. Also, even though I truss the bird and baste it a few times during cooking, the sides of the legs don't get crisp and brown. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong unless my oven just isn't working right. Maybe my oven's thermometer is off and I need to increase the heat the whole time to 375.

Any ideas? Any opinions or tricks that have worked for you? I'm getting gun-shy about trying roasting a chicken again but I sure would like to figure it out?

Action Replay and Skateboards

My two sons are in the middle of a 3-week break (they go to year-round school). I thought things would slow down a bit and I had a (apparently delusional) plan to sort through our clutter during this 3-week hiatus. Instead, I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off and dealing with the strangest issues that I had no idea were going to come up.

First was Action Replay. If you don't know what this is, it's for games played on Nintendo DS and it gives players cheat codes to help them figure out how to play the game and get more points (I think - I don't know it as well as my son does). With previous games, he's just used Action Replay when he's wanted to and everyone's happy and I don't have to get involved - because I know nothing about these games or how to operate a DS. Then he got a new game: Pokeman Soulsilver. It just came out recently and I was surprised he wanted it because he hasn't been interested in any of his other Pokeman games for awhile. Well, Action Replay doesn't have codes for Pokeman Soulsilver. I was told that I could go on their website and manually download them. I went on their website, my husband went on their website, my son went on their website. We couldn't figure out how to download these codes. I tried calling their customer service number for about a week and even tried their automated help line when I couldn't get through to a live person. It was just so frustrating! I tried talking to the store where we get all our games (Gamestop) and after talking to three different employees, nobody seemed to know how to do it and they referred me to Action Replay's website (not going to help!) Finally, finally, one morning I just kept clicking on different areas on their website and got to an area where it seemed to tell you how to manually download codes. I called my son and had him get me to the right screens on the DS as I followed the instructions - it worked! Hallelujah!! However, you should see how many numbers and letters you have to download! I told my son I would download maybe 3 or so a day until we had them all. I felt suddenly very tech-savvy and proud of myself. Now a week later, somehow everything's gotten erased on his DS and he's not sure how. So, I get to re-download all the codes and cross my fingers that it doesn't happen again this time.

Then there's the skateboard. I had the foolish notion that you could just go out, buy a skateboard with your son and be done with it. Silly me. The first skateboard was fine at first, but after a couple of days, it started veering to the left. My husband tried fiddling around with various screws and such and nothing helped. So we took the board back and bought a different one. This one started veering to the right almost immediately. When we went back to the store, an employee told us to spray graphite on the wheels. We tried that and it didn't do anything. So we took that board back and went looking at different stores. After going to about four various sport and board shops and talking to various people, we bought our third board. We made sure this board rolls straight and my son tried it out and liked how it feels. All this took about a week to finally figure out. Is he outside riding his board now? No. He says it's too loose, even though the person at the shop said it was a tight board after he got on it. So my husband will tighten the d#mn thing and hopefully my son will decide it's fine to ride. Otherwise, he pays us back.

One more week of Spring Break to go. Will I ever get to our clutter?

OVERWHELMED!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've published a post - sorry. Things have gotten absolutely crazy around here! It's hard to get computer time since my husband's been unemployed. Between him and the kids, I get squeezed off of it. There have also just been a lot of little things, big things, annoying things to take care of on top of the everyday tasks. Some of these things are big time guzzlers too.

One of the most annoying and frustrating items I've been dealing with since mid-February is COBRA. I've been on COBRA twice before and have never had a problem. The problem is not with the COBRA program but with a company my husband's former employer uses to administer COBRA for them. I mailed them the sign-up paperwork and a check, but they never received it. We had to get about three people involved from my husband's former employer to get it sorted through so we would actually be signed up before the expiration date. I finally had to Express Mail a new set of forms and another check. God only knows what happened to the 1st check and my bank wants to charge me $29 for a stop-payment - not what you need when unemployed and doing things correctly in the first place.

Another annoying problem has been trying to start one of my prescriptions on mail-order with a new insurance company that we got as of 1/1/10. For some reason, they won't send me paperwork to mail a prescription to them. They prefer for it to be faxed to them directly from my doctor's office. However, my doctor's assistant has tried to fax it to them four different times throughout a 3-week period. Every time, they say they haven't received it. We've double-checked the fax number and it's fine and the fax from the doctor's office says it went through successfully. It just seems to fall into a black hole on the other side. So I'm still dealing with this issue.

On top of that our refrigerator is leaking water from the top freezer into the fridge below. So I'm constantly sopping up water and placing cups in there to try to catch it. We decided to just buy a new fridge because this one is about 13 years old and we've spent about $100/year for the past four years trying to fix different problems. We spent $100 about five months ago because the motor went out. The repairman said it would be "good as new" with the replacement motor and might have about ten more years left - HA!! We're sick of continually putting money into this moneypit so we bought a new one, on sale, with a $50 instant rebate for getting an Energy Star version. That whole process took a couple of weeks and I'm waiting for the new one to be delivered right now. It's supposed to come some time between 9am - 1pm. So I'm to just sit tight until they decide to arrive. No problem - four hours out of my busy schedule is nothing - nah.

So on top of all this and the everyday items have been the following: planning, shopping for and helping out for both my sons' classes' Valentine's Day parties, which did overlap, buying special pants and shoes for my son before a special field trip because he's out-grown the others, trying to find items for my son's upcoming play, having a pre-scheduled annual doctor's appointment without knowing if insurance is going to pay, having some major homework/schoolwork issues with one of my sons and planning two parties for my son's birthday (one for family, one for friends).

I didn't sleep much last night because I woke up around 2:30, then my head just started going. There's so much clutter I need to go through and projects I need to start and keep working on like putting pictures into an album from years ago and doing some spring cleaning. I worry about how my sons are doing, how we are doing financially, any unforseen bumps in the road in the future, etc., etc. Everything seems more unmanageable at 2:30 in the morning. I'm gearing up for parties on St. Patrick's Day in both sons' classes and my younger son's two birthday parties the weekend before. Hopefully, I can stop, breathe and remember to actually enjoy all this even when I get stressed.

It Feels As Though My House Is Falling Apart!

Right now I'm waiting to get a new garage door opener installed. It's been sounding strange for a couple of weeks now. Last night my youngest son accidentally opened the garage door, then closed it - only it didn't close all the way and when we tried to push the button, it did nothing, just made a weird, quiet humming noise. So we manually tried to open the door and the chain to the opener started falling and completely twisting itself. We finally opened it enough for my husband to get his car out. At first we thought my son did something to cause it to break, but it just seems that it was going to happen the next time the button got pushed and he just happened to be the one to do it. In the last seven years we have had the springs on that opener replaced twice. I'm getting very angry with this opener.
On top of that, in the last year or so we have had to fix our furnace, our air conditioner keeps not working and we'll need to replace that, we need a new refrigerator and have spent about $100 per year trying to fix various things wrong with it for the last 3-4 years (the last fix was about 5 months ago and now the freezer keeps leaking fluid into the fridge), our toilets keep backing up, especially the downstairs one which was replaced about 4 years ago, we had a leak in our ceiling caused by a faulty plumbing job (the repair to the ceiling took about 4 months, no kidding, because they kept messing it up), we had to replace our gas stove, replace our microwave handle and a few of the cupboard doors in our kitchen keep falling off. And these are just the ones I can think of at the top of my head. Our dishwasher sounds kind of funky every once in awhile, but I just try not to use it much and hope for the best. I feel that every week there is a new problem to handle. Of course money is really tight right now because my husband became unemployed as of early January so we're trying to hold off on everything as long as possible.
Do you ever feel as if your house is starting to fall apart? Our house is only about 16 years old and it seems the lifespan of everything is coming to its end. It definitely seems that things don't last as long as they used to. I'm going to buy a bunch of duct tape soon and wrap it around the house to try to hold it all up before it all disintegrates!

Tried to Be Healthy (Failed Miserably)

So last night I made a nice fish dish. I usually make fish on Tuesday nights because the garbage comes on Wednesday and I don't want the fish smell in our garbage for too long. I try to cook fish at least once a week because it is so healthy. So I went to a very good fish market in our area, which I do every Tuesday, and picked some fish called Rex Sole.

Rex Sole is a tasty, very flaky fish. But the hard part about it is that it has bones. You have to cook it and then cut through it and remove the spine and bones in one sweep-through, if you can. Now these aren't large fish. So to feed four people, I had about 10 fish. You have to do this with all the fish and when you try to remove the spine and bones, they sometimes fall apart, which makes it a lot more messy and difficult.

Anyway, it was done and we finally sat down to eat. The kids weren't excited about what we were eating - fish is never their favorite thing, but we made them eat some of it. My husband and I thoroughly enjoyed it! The fish was very fresh and when Rex Sole is very fresh, there can be a wonderful brininess (salty-seawater flavor). We very much enjoyed our meal, but there wasn't a lot of fish flesh after removing all the bones and skin. So we ended up hungry. After dinner, the whole family was still hungry.

Well, the weekend before we had a couple of our sisters-in-law over and one of them brought over a couple of Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches (can you see where this is going?) They were wonderful!! Filling, meaty, cheesy - just got to you where it matters. So we were all feeling a bit unfulfilled and decided as a group that what would fulfill us at this point would be splitting a couple of, yes, Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches.

So off to the restaurant I went to pick up a couple of orders and I realized my evening of trying to eat healthy went bust - oh well~