New things

New thing number one : I officially started my position at Mylan as a Full Time employee with benefits today!  Yay for awesome benefits and thank the Lord that I don't have to deal with estimated taxes and private insurance anymore!

New thing number two : We started a new home group and are having a blast getting know the couples involved.  Very exciting!

New thing number three : Lexi has started jumping onto our bathroom counter...shame on her.  While I was getting ready for work one morning, I found her lounging in the sink.  I will add a picture as soon as I swipe it off of Adam's iPod.


New thing number four : my good friend, Ashley Griffith, has a birthday this week and I found this neat cupcake idea to mimick a fabric pattern.  Ashley is a big fan of cool fabrics and makes incredible things with them (you should see the diaper bag she made for herself, ADORABLE with tons of very useful pockets-my favorite part).  So I tried out new cupcake designs. This I will also post when I get ahold of Adam's toy :-)


New thing number five through three thousand : Recipes

   So most of you know that I like to try new recipes.  I have a small obsession with cookbooks and can even get Adam on board if it has pictures....he can't judge the recipe just from looking at the ingredients.  Not only do I like to get cookbooks, I also get recipes from magazines and online newsletters that I subscribe to.  If you're looking for some that have quality recipes - my top two emails would be Taste of Home (because you can look at the ratings and see how many people would make each recipe a second time--very insightful:-) and then Better Homes and Garden also has a weekly email that is very good.
    I've had to create an entire organization system around keeping these recipes in good order.  By the way, today's blog will be about recipes and organization, so if this interests you in no way, you can just go on about your day without finishing this blog-I'll never know!
    Now-with my cookbooks, I like to go completely through them when I first get it and mark the recipes that are actually do-able.  You know-with ingredients that aren't weird and that don't take some ridiculous amount of time to concoct.  I either dog-ear the pages, or use sticky page markers to do this (which can be made from cutting small post-it notes into small tabs.  Luckily-I used to work at a medical office and have absorbed thousands of sticky notes for my personal collection.  You'd be surprised at the shear quantity of junk that medical offices receive from pharmaceutical companies.  We were constantly throwing out stuff to keep our office stash to a reasonable amount.  So of course, I had to find some use for some of those items--thus my cookbook marking system.
    Anyway-I mark them so that I can quickly flip through whichever book I want, and then pick a few meals from each to try and add to my grocery list.  My magazine and printed out recipes of course have to have an entirely different approach to make the useful!  I have 4 notebooks that I manage for this purpose : 2 notebooks contain recipes that I have tried and are keeping for future use, and 2 are for organizing the recipes that I have saved that I haven't gotten to try yet.  The two are split into "Chicken" and "Other"....turns out there are way more chicken recipes than anything else...don't judge me...chicken is cheap and easy :-)  Oh-and did I mention I also have two other file folders-One for recipes that need filing, and the other for the recipes that I definitely want to try next.  (There's another one that I keep with my meal calendar with the recipes that I have bought ingredients for and will be making soon.......again...don't judge).
   The notebooks are divided into different categories (such as ground beef, other beef, pork, desserts, pasta...etc.) with pages to divide that I designed with whatever Microsoft Word clip art happened to look appealing to me that day.  I love just flipping through and imagining having the time to make all of these wonderful sounding meals.  That being the key factor - TIME. 
   So all of this organizational information about me to say, "I like new things".  I really do.  Although, I tried a new chocolate cupcake recipe this past weekend and it was not good :-)  Oh well--you win some, you loose some.