rachel's continued ramblings

I recently replaced the curtains in my family room (that is its own story) because one of the was severely faded. The other one was fine, and it seemed a waste to toss it, especially since I really like these curtains. But what do you do with only one curtain? Unrelated is the fact that our cat’s litter box resides in the linen closet, which means the door needs to stay open all the time, and there is always the risk that the door gets shut and then we have unpleasantness. I’ve been contemplating a solution to this situation for a while. Suddenly, they came together!  A backyard game of “license plate baseball” broke out randomly. License plate baseball is one of those things that will go down in Dapelo family history. It has only happened a few times, but for some reason it is legendary. We use old license plates as the bases, which is how it got its name. The joys of Mr. Putter & Tabby live on. Never too old. This morning, my dad took Micah and I bowling. I got to try out my new

The joys of homeownership paid us a visit this week. First, the water dispenser on our fridge decided to stop functioning properly, leak all over the place, and need to be replaced. Thankfully, a few parts and a handy hubby and we are back in business.  Today, he replaced the brakes on the Subaru because it was making a horrible squealing noise like cars do when they start demanding new brakes… Yesterday’s situation, however, required a professional. For a couple of weeks, our downstairs toilet has been making a weird gurgly noise after you flush it. We initially thought it had something to do with the new innards Dave had to put in it recently (since it was running and needed the ball float mechanism replaced with a new situation), but that wasn’t the problem. We thought there might be a clog, so tried plunging it and even snaking. Made no difference.  Then Wednesday, I went outside to look at the garden and got all kinds of heinous whiffs of sewage smell.  {insert ominous music} So D

Yesterday, “monthly meal plan” came up on my digital to do list. The past month or two, I’ve been operating week to week, which is better than nothing, but monthly is one thousand times better. As usual, I was dissatisfied with available methods/templates for this task, so I whipped up my own. I think I love this. Highlighting weekends is important to just give me a little grounding for where we are in the week.  You’ll probably notice a lot of instant pot recipes on there in the first half of the month. I’m still in the middle of my tour de instant pot - the end of which will come at whatever time I determine whether or not the beast gets voted off the island. Lots of people gave me lots of suggestions, plus ones I looked up on my own and people said they wanted to try. This has been going on for almost 2 weeks now, and so far only 2 recipes have gone directly into the recycling.  Here’s what we’ve tried (and liked enough to keep) so far: https://www.365daysofcrockpot.com/instant-pot-