It’s Not Easy Being Green

Because you might get a cat next to you!

We had to move a chair out of our guest room for Peppermint to come stay with us for the next few days.  Noodle found the chair in the living room right away and climbed on next to Kermit. 

A couple of nights ago I had insomnia.  I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep.  All because I came up with a scrapbooking game!  I figured out a way to use up supplies and make a game out of it.  And make lots of scrapbook pages in a short amount of time.  This sort of thing is exactly the opposite of my deliberate and slow approach, so I’m anxious to try this “game” out!  If I succeed, I will be blogging about it!

All this really came about because one night this week I made my layout for the May gallery at Write.Click.Scrapbook., and it was one of those “everything aligned under the stars” scrapbooking moment when it call came together rather quickly and effortlessly.  It made me feel so happy and productive.  Here’s a sneak peek at the layout.

Did I mention that this year my Project Life pages go into the same album as my regular scrapbook pages?  It’s all good and I love it.

We cooked some great meals this week.  This was Broiled Salmon with Roasted Tomato Sauce.

And this was Chicken Udon Soup.  And man, was it good!

This past Tuesday (4/22) we went to our second “Taste of Terroirs” at Mille Fleurs. 

This monthly event pairs wine and cuisine from a different region in the world each month.  This month it was the Piedmont region in Italy.  We had hors d’oeuvres with a white wine in the salon.  Then we were seated at the same table that we were seated last month.  We even sat with some of the same people we met last month!  John and Angela, Jeff and Valerie, and we met Chuck and Linda this time.  It is FUN to show up at the event after last month and chat with the same people at the table.

Started out with white wine….

And a trout and ravioli dish. 

A selfie.

Then the red wines were poured.

Paired with Bollito Misto Piemontese, a dish with veal, beef, chicken, cannellini beans, polenta, and bagnet ross sauce.

I have to admit I liked the dishes from last month’s Mendoza, Argentina region better.  But his month’s dessert was good!  This was Torta Gianduia.  It was  hazelnut-chocolate torte, cherries, and cream.

Todd is sad because next month we will miss out on Taste of Terroirs.  They will be doing wine and cuisine from Todd’s favorite wine region of Rioja, Spain.  Perhaps some cute Noodle photos will cheer him up.

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Movies & Good Eats

Am I cute? Noodle likes to lie on the floor and get his belly rubbed! Maybe he thinks he’s a dog?  He cracks me up, so cute and funny!

On Monday a bunch of us girls at work went to lunch at Chef Chins. It was (yet) another celebration for us March birthday girls. Yes, I know it’s April now, but the original March birthday lunch got postponed.  Kim & Donyale enjoying lunch.

Patsy (the other March birthday girl besides me) and Roxanne.

And my friend Erecca. We used to work in the same department.

It was so fun to hang out with my women friends at work. So blessed to have a job where I can socialize and make friends.

On Tuesday after work, Todd and I drove down to Hillcrest to have dinner at Chocolat and to see the documentary movie “Jodorowsky’s Dune”.  Todd had seen good reviews of Chocolat on Yelp and wanted to try it out. When I heard they had crepes and gelato, who was I to say no?  :p

Todd had the fennel sausage pizza and he loved it!

Yum yum!

I had spinach ricotta manicotti. The sauce was delicious.  I was in carb heaven.

We shared a chocolate ganache with hazelnut gelato for dessert.

After dinner we walked over to the movie theater to see the “Jodorowsky’s Dune” documentary.

Todd had seen the movie review in Entertainment Weekly magazine and was really curious about it.

The movie is a documentary about genius-madman Alejandro Jodorowsky’s big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune, which was never made.  The movie was going to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dali! We’re always interested in strange and fascinating documentaries, so this was quite enjoyable.

On Wednesday night Todd cooked one of my favorite dishes that we hadn’t had in a long while, “Spring Vegetable Pasta” from America’s Test Kitchen.  I love this dish so much!  It doesn’t have meat but is SO good!

So I was completely SHOCKED when I went to My Fitness Pal the next day to input my dinner and found out that this dish was a little over 800 calories PER SERVING!  I didn’t believe it, so I put the recipe in myself at the website, and sure enough, it was 800 calories per serving. I am SO sad!  :(  This will have to be an occasional treat and not a regular meal.  Sniff. 

On the other hand, tonight we cooked broccoli tofu stir fry and this one is much lower in calories.  Still yummy though.

I’ve been experimenting with printing 3x4 polaroids from the Collect App.  They are automatically dated and I type in the journaling for the photo inside the app.  I will be writing a blog post soon about printing these, and also digital journal cards. I’m so in love with printing at home!

I spent a few hours yesterday (Saturday) totally cleaning up my craft room. I purged some supplies to give away, plus I re-organized my Raskog cart again.  I had to get my craft room super-clean so that Peppermint and I can scrapbook together when she comes to visit!  Yay!

Oh yea, last night for dinner, Todd and I went to our local Vietnamese restaurant. I had this shrimp with vermicelli noodles, except I always ask for “no noodles” and just veggies.  It was so good!  A refreshing meal after my carb-fest this week.

Todd and I went to see “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” today.  I thought it was very entertaining, but I think I liked the first Captain America movie better. 

I always like the origin story the best, although I did like “Star Trek Into Darkness” even more than the reboot of Star Trek. 

Parting shot.  Another one of Noodle.  It’s like he makes me get my camera out every day so I can capture his funny and cute moments!

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Listgirl Elsewhere

The coolest thing came in the mail last week.  The special DIY Issue of the Dutch magazine Flow Magazine!  Back in December, I was contacted by Otje van der Lelij, one of the freelance editors at Flow Magazine.  She had stumbled upon my blog and seen my Project Life pages and became intrigued.  She was writing an article about Project Life for the DIY Issue of Flow Magazine and wanted to ask me a few questions and use some of my photos.  I agreed and we had email correspondence back and forth.  They said they would send me a copy of the magazine when it came out.  I received it in the mail last Thursday!  I was super-excited and shared on Facebook and Instagram right away.  If only I could read & understand Dutch!

 

Another cool thing I stumbled upon this past week was an article at Craft Storage Ideas, about the way I organize my journal cards for Project Life!  Hazel Hamman (one of my blog readers) wrote the post over there.  I was so excited to see it, lol.  Thanks for the shoutout, Hazel!

 

And… the end of an era has come.  The Digi Show has recorded their final podcast and ended its wonderful run.  I will miss having new episodes to listen to, but am also glad that I’m friends with Katie and Peppermint and will continue to keep in touch.  Well, of course Peppermint, ha!  We talk on most days.  But the good news is, they’ve moved all the old episodes from their Paperclipping days over to The Digi Show, so now all the episodes are at one place, available for listening!  I’ve been honored to have been a guest on four of the episodes over the years. I won’t lie. It’s awesome to see that “Christine Newman” link on their sidebar and have a URL link to all four of the episodes. 

If you’ve never listened to The Digi Show podcast, you can start with the latest and go back.  Or start from the beginning.  If you’re interested in the episodes where I was a guest, then they’re here!  Funny fact about this.  On two of the episodes that I was on, I happened to have a cold so my voice was funny and nasally.  They had a knack for asking me to be the guest when I was sick, lol!  :p

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Clap Along

Or jump along.  I can’t get the “Happy” song by Pharrell out of my head. Above photo was yesterday at the end of my three mile run by the coast.  Did someone say weekend? Beach? Running? Tacos?? Yaaaay!

Todd wanted in on the jumping too.

It was an overcast day along the coast, but it did not dampen our spirits.  Always a fun time running and seeing the ocean.

Beautiful Moonlight Beach, where we ended up stretching after the run.

After the run, we picked up lunch from El Nopalito. They have Todd’s favorite carne asada there.  And it’s really cool because you can buy 8 oz, 16 oz, and 32 oz containers of just meat, beans, rice, guacamole, and pico de gallo.  We pick up tortillas there too and then bring everything home and have a feast. 

Every morning when I leave for work lately, I’ve been finding Noodle sunning himself in our exercise room downstairs. I love to go and pet his warm fur!

He’s also been hanging out next to the treadmill for some reason.  I’m guessing the sun heats up the black mat and he finds it warm and inviting, ha ha.  So cute.

Todd went to master’s swim class on Thursday and they did drills to establish their “cruise time” speed.  He was super-happy because his cruise time for 100 yards has improved by 10 seconds since two years ago when he was going to master’s swim regularly.  Go Todd!  Todd is training for another half Ironman this summer.  It is 70.3 miles, very grueling.  (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run.)  You can read about his first Ironman 70.3 here. 

Last weekend we saw the “Divergent” movie at the theater.  It was a good movie.  However, my desire to see the movie had waned after reading the third and final book, “Allegiant”.  I hated the book, lol.  Hated the ending.  So while I loved Divergent and liked “Insurgent” well enough, the final “Allegiant” sort of ruined the whole thing for me.  You can see my review of all three books here.

On Wednesday evening Todd and I met up at Karl Strauss for dinner after work.  Todd had a turkey bacon sandwich, his favorite sandwich there.

I had the meatloaf, which was their Wednesday special. Unfortunately I didn’t like the gravy.  It had beer in there and tasted too bitter!  I know… it is a brewery.  But still!  I don’t like beer, lol.

We’ve been watching our backlog of “Agents of SHIELD” on our DVR and finally caught up.  There’s only a couple more episodes for the season and it is GOOD! 

One of our favorite kind of date night is going to the bookstore.  We used to go to Borders bookstore in college.  Now we’re sad that Borders closed and we go to Barnes & Noble.  We decided to have a bookstore date on Friday night.  First we had dinner at The Kebab Shop.

Then dessert and chai latte at Barnes & Noble. 

Bookstore dates are the best!

Todd went on his Sunday bike ride, but without the group this time.  They are riding a hilly 60 miles and Todd doesn’t need to go that far in his Ironman training yet.  Today I’m paying mid-month bills, cleaning up my desk, and playing some more with Project Life.

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