Strange Dreams, etc.

Sorry about the lack of recent posting, but the last couple of days have been rather hectic for both of us. Monday found Lauren headed to Jefferson City with two busloads of students for Child Advocacy Day at the Missouri Statehouse. Although we hadn't planned on it, the timing was such that the bus dropped her off at Hazel's, a longtime independent coffeeshop in St. Joe, and I was able to leave work, head up to St. Joe, and pick her up to take her to dinner that evening.

The remainder of the week went by rather rapidly, or at least it's gone that way because of the below zero wind-chills, which have done much to encourage getting home as quickly as possible and making one's way straight to bed. Of course, that gets interesting when you start having strange dreams: in my case, one night I'd concocted a mash-up of Battlestar Galactica and Enterprise, with a harried Trip Tucker being chased by a determined Caprica Six. Utterly strange. And Lauren's been having some strange dreams, too. Those I blame on the NyQuil she's been taking. I'm not sure where mine came from.

This week's also been a bit of a cooking week: with the temperatures encouraging us to stay indoors, I've been finding the time to cook a bit. Wednesday night, I made a West African soup-inspired peanut curry recipe I found off one of my favorite recipe websites, the Simply Recipes! blog, which was an instant hit with Lauren (hey, it had curry, it had cilantro, it had mint, and it had creamy peanut butter ... what wasn't there not to like?).

On Friday, the development team I sit with held yet another potluck. I've been with them a little over two months, and they've had two potlucks and one team dinner for the holiday. These are my kind of software developers.

Friday's potluck was the "Security Siesta", so named because the team I work for supports the security side of the software the company sells, the theme for the potluck was Mexican, and because it would be a break from work. Yours truly brought Chicken Mole ... a bit of chocolaty-BBQ sauced goodness made quite easy with the crockpot. I cooked the chicken the night before, then got up early to shred the chicken in the morning and mix in the mole sauce (okay, I confess, I cheated ... rather than do a scratch mole sauce, I used Dona Ana's pre-made sauce, except I livened it up a bit with some extra cocoa (Hershey's Dark), a little bit of creamy peanut butter, and some Splenda to cut the edge on the sauce.) It was received pretty well; I had exactly 1 bowl left afterward, which became Lauren's dinner Friday evening.

This morning found us getting a break from the cold weather (finally!), and it was a good day for sleeping in. Lauren's been feeling a little bit under the weather due to that cold, but it had warmed up enough this morning that we could scatter seeds for the side garden, after which I realized it had thawed enough outside that I could do another raking of branches (from the ice storm), and sawdust (from the tree we had to have removed following the ice storm). The lawn's not 100 percent back to where it was (we still have to replace the trellis that the drunk driver took out), but all in all, the lawn's looking a bit better than it was before Christmas.

Lauren also put out new seedlings in the phonebooth-sized greenhouse she keeps out on the back porch. After that, she headed back to bed, which is where I will likely go here shortly ... we'll both need to be in good shape to watch the game tomorrow (well, at least I'll be watching the game ... Lauren will be watching it for the commercials). I must admit, we're going for the "reasonably healthy" for game-day snacks: buffalo wings with fat-free blue cheese dressing and guacamole accompanied by multi-grain tortilla chips for snacking. I might even be tempted to pull out a pack of chicken-spinach sausages to grill on the George Foreman in lieu of the usual brats.