Crazy Eights

In March 2007, Brad and I boarded a flight to Seattle, where he planned to propose to me. We sat on row 8 of our plane. At the time, Brad – a math and science guy – was very interested in the biblical significance of numbers, and I asked him if the number 8 meant anything. He told me that in God’s word, the number 8 is often used to signify a new beginning… which ended up being exactly what that trip was for our relationship. :-)

How very appropriate that as we begin a new year, I was tagged by Martha to talk about a series of eight things. Here we go!

8 TV SHOWS I WATCH
1. LOST
2. Top Chef
3. Project Runway
4. Mad Men
5. Barefoot Contessa
6. Passport to Europe/ Rick Steves’ Europe
7. The Office
8. 30 Rock
9. House

I watch too much TV! I know I added two extra, and I could probably think of 10 more shows to add to this list.

8 FAVORITE RESTAURANTS
There are SO many, but these were the first that came to mind:
1. Texas de Brazil (Dallas – special occasion place for carnivores)
2. Los Barrios (San Antonio – cheese enchiladas and margaritas!)
3. Longhorn Café (San Antonio – best greasy cheeseburgers on the planet)
4. Black Friar Pub (Dallas - cheese fries and beer!)
5. Toulouse (Dallas – so French, with delicious foie gras)
6. Trudy’s (Austin – great memories)
7. Café Madrid (Dallas – tapas)
8. Deep Sushi (Dallas – Deep Ellum)

Honorable mention goes to Grimaldi’s in Dallas for the coal oven-fired meatball pizza I had a couple of weeks ago and haven’t been able to stop thinking about!

8 THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY
1. Woke up too early on a day off (Happy birthday, Dr. King!) when one of Brad’s colleagues telephoned him at the crack of dawn.
2. Ate mom’s sugar cookies for breakfast, then felt compelled to go on a speedwalk/ run with Brad and my hand weights.
3. Scoured the house for garage sale items and amassed them in the formal living room (it never gets used anyway!)
4. Enjoyed vegetarian platter at Fadi’s Mediterranean Grill with Brad.
5. Bought a tea table and a new console table at World Market.
6. Re-wired entertainment center (around our house, Brad builds things and keeps up the outside, but I do the electronics), then tidied up.
7. Shopped for rugs online and determined I had already spent too much money on home stuff for the day.
8. Practiced shooting the Walther PPS.

Veggie Platter from Fadi's

8 THINGS I LOOK FORWARD TO
1. Toning up my arms before Matt and Brittney’s wedding on May 2!
2. Starting grad school this week… and finishing it in two or three years. :-)
3. Going on a Mediterranean cruise in October 2009.
4. Being a mom someday.
5. Finding a new home and getting new furniture.
6. The rest of my life with Brad (too corny?).
7. Meeting up with my Kindred and her hubs on their year-long sojourn.
8. Retirement. Is that a bad sign?

8 THINGS I WISH FOR
I think I answered this in the last question, no? Maybe the question here refers to material things? If that’s the case, I feel a little materialistic answering… but this is Dallas, so here goes:
1. Mortar and pestle
2. Slicing tools – a rasp for zesting citrus and a mandoline
3. Meat thermometer
4. A really nice camera, and the skills to use it
5. Hermès Kelly Bag
6. Apple laptop (mine got stolen, and Brad uses the Mac we replaced it with for his work)
7. New house or apartment (long story)
8. Chanel perfume (I love her, and the scents are quintessential France)

I also wish Brad and I could move to Paris.

8 SONGS I JUST LISTENED TO
That would be the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack. Amazing movie, if you haven’t seen it, and equally good soundtrack! It awakens the Indian belly dancer in me and makes me “shimmy,” a la Fit TV.

8 MOVIES I LOVE
Well, aside from the aforementioned Slumdog:

1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphondre et Le Papillon, en français)
2. There Will Be Blood
3. No Country for Old Men
4. Sabrina
5. Beauty and the Beast
6. Any movies by Wes Anderson or Christopher Guest
7. Amadeus
8. When Harry Met Sally

I’m desperate to see Revolutionary Road! Have any of you seen it?

8 PEOPLE I TAG
No pressure. These taggings are good for me, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have blogged for another week and this is good motivation... but I realize not everyone wants to let me tell them what to write. Don’t feel obligated, but I tag my friendly bloggers to write on these same topics whenever they're lacking motivation for original content:

1. Abby
2. Alison
3. Erin
4. Janette
5. Jashley
6. Jennifer
7. Meagan
8. Stephanie

Sweet Weekend

If only all weekends could be this simple and sweet. 'Twas a weekend of:

• Listening to presidential debates on radio (old-school)
• Grilled turkey-guacamole-swiss sandwiches
• Driving around Dallas helping Brad take pictures of gas stations (work)
• No makeup
• Messy hair
• Banana crumb muffins, straight out of the oven
• Working in the backyard with Brad
• Gardening
• 11-month anniversary
• Cleaning the house
• Netflix
• Relevant church and fellowship
• Laundry (even though I missed a pen in Brad's pocket with unfortunate consequences...)
• Sore muscles
• Fixing a leak
• Soothing my soul with David Crowder Band
• Speedwalking with hand weights
• Drawing
• "Mad Men" on AMC

Tomorrow I have to wear a suit. :-(

As promised...

Photos of the clean Gaultney Homestead:

Domestic Goddess

Perhaps the title of this post is misleading. As I’ve confessed in previous posts, I’m not the perfect housekeeper. Nancy Thorne, my darling mother, is – but I, her wayward daughter, don’t replace the shower curtain liner nearly as often as I should, nor the A.C. filters, nor even the smoke alarm battery… le sigh. How I wish I had her knack for maintaining a nest that honors her husband, reflects her passions (food, color, comfort, cleanliness, etc.), and welcomes others.

About once a month, however, something crazy happens. Be it hormones, out-of-town guests, or something else (in this case, roaches), I kick it into full “domestic goddess” mode, and I clean the entire house from top to bottom.

Two of my least favorite chores are cleaning the floors (I don’t mind vacuuming, but mopping and sweeping I detest) and putting new sheets on the bed. I don’t mind WASHING the sheets – I just hate that awful ordeal of figuring out which way the fitted sheet is supposed to go, tucking in the flat sheet, putting the pillow covers on and then remembering which pillow was Brad’s and which one was mine – ugh. What chores do you dread?

Anyway, I found two roaches in my bathroom within about six hours of each other. I killed one that had gotten into the bathtub and couldn’t climb out… I keep a can of Raid in my powder room at all times… and then I returned later in the day to discover the dead roach’s twin mourning his loss over the other roach’s carcass. The Raid was not taking effect on him as quickly as I wanted, so he quickly met his fate at the blunt edge of the Raid can.

(NB: I think I'm getting back into the swing of this blogging thing. I realized this as I was watching the first roach die, and I thought "I should take a video of this for my blog!" Clearer thoughts prevailed and I realized how disgusting that would be.)

This got me thinking. Granted, I live in an old house in a historic neighborhood – and this IS Texas, so there are bound to be roaches – but perhaps it’s time for an all-out scrub-down.

I keep my kitchen clean because I’m a bit paranoid about germs and I bake a lot (again, see here). So I figured I would ease myself into the cleaning madness and start with my cleanest room, the kitchen, and just make it that much cleaner. Check out my awesomely organized fridge:

And freezer (is this beginning to feel like an MTV Cribs episode?):

And my personal fav, the pantry:

I hope you noticed the vase full of limes and lemons on the top shelf of the fridge. I thought that was a nice, Stepford-esque touch. I’m very into room temperature water, no ice, with limes these days. I feel like it does wondrous things for my insides. Maybe it doesn't.

I also arranged a really lovely bowl of fruit. The vessel is a copper paella pan my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday. Really gorgeous! And the mix of bananas, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples, studded with black plums and cherries, makes for a pretty spread. I feel like the darker fruits look like little jewels of amethyst and onyx against the citron backdrop:

And with some mood lighting (I'm not as good a photog as Abby!):

Now onto other rooms of the house. Today I’ll focus on the den, formal living room, and my bathroom. The office I tend to stay out of because that’s Brad’s mad scientist lab and there’s no point in picking it up. The guest room is storing some extra furniture, so it’s not worth trying to make that room look pretty until we unload the excess at my little bro’s apartment. The master I tend to keep pretty picked-up. A girl’s gotta have a decent place to dress herself, right?

Look for more photos of the clean house later. :-)