The Most Important Meal of the Day

I have long been a fan of breakfast.  I'm not sure when or why it started, but breakfast is easily my favorite food group, if you can call it a food group.  From Lucky Charms and Trix (thank you, grandparents) to pancakes, waffles and eggs benedict, I have an affinity for breakfast foods and could easily eat them every meal.

I am not, however, a morning person.  I'm more of a brunch girl, if we're being honest.  I love a nice big "breakfast" of pancakes, eggs, fruit - the works - somewhere around 10 am.  Work, on the other hand, starts at 7, which presents a real problem for this night owl.

Recently I realized that I needed to come up with better breakfast solutions.  I was eating far too much sodium between the instant oatmeals and store-bought breakfast burritos.  Not to mention, that gets expensive!  I decided I needed to find ways to have breakfast that I make without having to get up any earlier.

Enter my new obsession, the pre-made breakfast.

I did a lot of googling, pinteresting, and more googling and found several breakfast recipes that freeze and reheat well.  I also found recipes that are meant to be enjoyed cold.  I've been making this and stocking our freezer with them.  They're homemade, meaning I know every ingredient that goes into them, and healthy.   Some of my favorites are

Refrigerator Oatmeal from The Yummy Life
Cream Cheese Pancakes from I Breathe...I'm Hungry
3-2-1 Custard from The Greenbacks Gal

Finding these recipes has really made a difference for me.  I love that I can have hot pancakes in the morning without having to stand over the griddle.  Truly, 1 minute in the microwave and they're just as good as when I pulled them out!  The refrigerator oatmeals are grand, especially when it's already 80 degrees in the morning.    I also love that I have variety at my fingertips.  I am definitely not one who can eat the same breakfast every day.  I love breakfast and I love variety, and I love that these make ahead recipes allow me to have both without too much stress in the mornings.

Six months? How did that happen?

Somehow I managed to let 6 months go by without a post.  I thought about posting, but never seemed to have the time, energy, desire, motivation, inclination...whatever you want to call it.

Jacko and Cody are still with us.  Cody has only had 1 seizure since that first one, so he doesn't have to be on medication - yay!  Jacko is definitely slowing down.  His breathing is getting more and more labored and he can't play for long, but he doesn't seem unhappy or in pain.  Mostly what he wants to do is cuddle and chew on bones.  He's also discovered how to take the lid off the treat jar (told you he's smart).  He managed to empty the jar one and a half times before I discovered his new knowledge and moved the treats to where he can't get to them.

We recently went through a strike at my job.  I have never been through one before and I hope to never do it again.  It is easily one of the worst experiences of my life.  On the flip side, we discovered just how tight our staff is and how different we are from some of the other schools.  Our staff gets along very well, and the strike just highlighted how much we care about each other and our students.

My Advanced Theatre class produced two successful plays this year.  We opened with The Phantom Tollbooth in February and ended the year with The Jungle Book in May.  Unfortunately, The Jungle Book got overshadowed by all the strike goings on in the district and attendance was less than satisfying.  It's sad, too, because several people said it was our best show yet.

Ricky is still working nights, and I have just 3 student days left at school, plus two staff workdays after that.  Then I have about a month off before the Chinese kids get here!  After that, my cousin is coming to visit to celebrate his high school graduation.  This is the baby of the family, the last of us to graduate high school.

In the meantime, I'm trying to get back into shape again, still, whatever.  My current obsession is make ahead breakfasts. I've been trying lots of recipes and will post them soon, with reviews.

So, that's about it.  Six months in a nutshell.  I'll try to be better about posting, but no guarantees.  It might help if I had some specific things to write about.  Any suggestions?

Tough times

Things around here are bleh. For one, I think my "winter blues" (yes, I'm technically diagnosed with SAD but I hate saying it) are worse this year than they've been in the past.

Secondly, both dogs are having health issues that are scary and unpredictable and I hate that. They're my babies, I want to protect them!

Third, I'm having anxiety about every. little. thing. Everything feels like this huge weight on my shoulders and I'm stressing about everything and nothing. It sucks. I'm guessing it's a byproduct of items 1 and 2.

So - puppy health. First, Jacko has what's called a 3rd degree heart block or complete heart block. The two parts of his heart (atria and ventricles) don't talk and his heart rate is incredibly low. There is no cure. The options are to do nothing or do a very pricey pacemaker surgery and hope it helps. After hearing the cost of the surgery and doing some research on the risks, we've decided against it. So now we just wait for him to die. I know that sounds awful, but it's true. He is going to die, sooner rather than later, and all we can do is wait and watch and love on him a lot while he's still here. It's a fairly rare condition so there's not a ton of information on it, but the research there is tells us we have anywhere from a week to 6 months or so with our beloved pup.

While that's all happening, Cody decided it'd be cool to be epileptic. He had a grand mal seizure at 3 am on Black Friday, scaring Ricky and I half to death. He's fine now, and the current treatment is "watch and wait." The medication to prevent seizures has enough side effects, and serious enough side effects, that the vet advised we not use them unless he's having more than one seizure every 3 months. As far as we know, the seizure he had on Friday was his first, so for now we're just waiting and hoping it doesn't happen again.

Add all that to the crappy weather and you can understand why every little thing is stressing me out. I need a vacation from my life.

My Shellac Experience

A few weeks ago, I decided to give the new shellac nail polish a chance. I'm a lifetime nail biter and I thought this might be just the thing to help me stop, since I don't bite when I have polish on my nails. Unfortunately, traditional polish lasts approximately 7.6 seconds outside the salon before I screw it up, whereas the shellac is said to last for 2 weeks without chipping or peeling and it's dry before you walk out the door.

The process begins the same as a normal manicure. You soak, you get your cuticles pushed back and trimmed, your nails are filed and buffed. It's when the basecoat comes out that things change. Between each coat of base coat, polish, and topcoat, your hands are put into a small UV dryer. I lovingly refer to it as the nail tanning bed. Without the UV dryer, the polish will never dry! It's essentially baking the polish onto your nails. The dry time for each coat is about 4 minutes.

How do I like it? I tell you what - this stuff is amazing! It does not last a full two weeks for me, not because the polish looks bad but because my nails grow so fast that by the two week mark I have a full 1/4 to 1/2 inch of new growth, and that just looks silly. I love that I can walk out of the salon with dry nails - no smudging it when I open the car door, yay! I love that I can be rough on my hands, as usual, and the polish holds up to the challenge. I love that I appear to have quit biting my nails!

Now, about those nasty rumors that shellac will ruin your nails: according to the nail tech I've been seeing, there are two kinds of "long lasting" polish, the shellac and another called gel nails or Gelife. She said they tried switched to the gel because it was a lot cheaper and significantly faster, with a UV dry time of only 30 seconds for each coat. She said that at first they loved it, but then they realized that on a client's 2nd or 3rd time with the gel, their nails were completely ruined. She beliefs it's because the gel isn't as high quality as the shellac. While the shellac is more expensive and takes more time, the salon I patronize prefers it because they believe strongly that it's much healthier for the nails - so much so that they threw away all the gel polish and switched back solely to the shellac!

After about 10 days, I notice that the edges of the polish are starting to lift. This also happens to coincide with the noticeable growout, so I've been attributing the lifting with the fact that the polish is no longer butted up to the nail bed. If I'm good and don't pick, it's fine and not noticeable unless you get really close. When I'm bad and can't leave it alone, I notice that peeling the polish off is not great for my nails as it seems to take some of the top layer of the nail with it. I do not notice that it significantly weakens my nails if I have the shellac removed the proper way, however.

Speaking of the proper way, to have the shellac removed, the nails are soaked in acetone and then the shellac is easy to push off the nail. This is not something I've ever tried at home, and I don't intend to. The salon will remove it free of charge, no appointment or new manicure necessary.

Adjusting, one day at a time

About a month ago, Ricky switched positions within his company and is now working nights. This is a big switch for us. He worked nights when we were first married, so I figured it would be no big deal, but apparently years of him working the same basic schedule as me made me forget how hard it can be.

As I said, it's been just over a month and I feel like we're finally hitting our stride in how all of this works. Of course, it will all change again in a month when I go back to school, but for now we seem to be adjusting and adapting - finally. It was hard on all of us, dogs included.

Right now our schedule tends to be that I get up around 6 to let the dogs out - if it's light outside they think they need to be out there. I go back to bed until 8 or 9 when I get up for the day, feed the dogs, and get started on whatever projects I have (during NISE, I just got up at 6, let the dogs out, then let them back in and fed them before I left at 7:15).

Around noon, Ricky rolls out of bed. If I'm home, we hang out, but more often than not I'm not home. He lets the dogs out again and then does whatever he needs to around the house until it's time for him to leave for work.

When I get home, I let the dogs out, then let them back in for their dinner. While they're eating, I make my own dinner and eat. Sometime in the evening, after it's cooled off outside, the three of us head out to the backyard where I read my book and the pups play. I'm usually in bed by the time Ricky gets home, at which point Jacko stays in the bedroom with me and Cody joins Ricky wherever he is.

Our poor dogs went from going out and coming back in once in the morning and once in the evening to this weird, seemingly random in and out routine. Jacko especially wasn't adjusting well, especially since it took Ricky and me several weeks to figure out what the new routine was. Now that we've figured it out, he's doing a lot better, but for a while we were dealing with a pouty, whiny dog who just wanted to chew up all the paper in the house.

I will say, I'm enjoying my evening reading time. It's nice to be outside in the cool air, and even though I'm not an active participant in the dogs' playtime, it seems to be enough for them that I'm just there, which goes a long way to reduce the neediness they exude once we're back inside. How all this will play out in the school year, especially in the winter, I don't know. For now, we're just taking it a day at a time.

A song in my heart and a tear in my eye

Show time = stress time, and for me stress time = dredging up old emotions and feeling all kinds of sad and melancholy.

It stands to reason, since we just had the anniversaries of all 3 grandparents' passing, that I'd be missing them tonight. This song kept coming up for me as I sat here working on variousAlice projects. So I listened, had a good cry, and then decided to share.

Oops!

Well, so much for "blog-a-day" in April. Perhaps may will be a better month. Besides, that rhymes - Blog-a-day in May.

For now, here's a quick recap on where we are:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland opens on Thursday closes Saturday.
• We still have stuff to finish - yikes!
• But the kids are doing really well and I think we have a show!
• The doggies are great
• Jacko is still crazy smart
• We've discovered Cody's pretty dumb. Good news, he's learning. Bad news, he's a really, really slow learner
• We are taking some of the blame for Cody's slow learning. We haven't had the time to work with him like we did Jacko. As soon as the show is over he'll get more of my time and attention.
• 42 student school days left.