Menu Plan Monday 3/21

These last couple of weeks have really been up in the air in terms of menu planning. I applied for an open management position at my job and had a series of 3 interviews for the job. Let me tell you, I was a wreck before, during and after each interview. This job was something I really wanted and I just didn't think my interviewing skills were going to be good enough. Especially since one of the interviewers was someone that had no idea of my work ethic or abilities and was there to be completely unbiased. After all of that, I found out I got the job and as a result, there has been some celebratory eating out and less money saved.

This week I have decided that I really need to write out a menu instead of just saying "I'll just pick something out after dinner tonight for tomorrow". I don't want to end up giving my raise to restaurant owners!

Here goes, and hopefully all goes according to plan!

Monday: Hot sausages with yellow rice
Tuesday: Herb pork chops with sweet potatoes & green beans with stewed tomatoes
Wednesday: Dinner at my grandmother's house
Thursday: Hamburger quesadillas with oven fries and applesauce
Friday: Roasted chicken, sweet potatoes, peas, carrots & applesauce
Saturday: Leftovers

As always, please make sure you check out Menu Plan Monday for hundreds of menu ideas!

Remington S-9500

Let me begin by saying that I know next to nothing about hair styling. For most of my life, that was just fine. I have nightmare hair. When it gets to be a certain length it knots, and by knots I mean it makes the equivalent of rats nests in my hair. It requires brushing several times a day just to keep it manageable. I remember as a kid having to sit for two hour clips while my cousin ripped all of the knots out of my very-long-to-my-rear hair.

When I got old enough, I chopped it all off. I didn't mind that from behind I looked like a boy. All I liked was that it was easy to take care of.

Then I got older, and I realized that short hair with my round face is not the most attractive thing in the world. So I have been dealing with having to brush it out a lot.

Well, today I felt adventurous. I went to get my hair cut and realized that I usually love how it looks when they use the straight iron on it but I hate that I spend an extra 10 dollars just to get them to straighten it and blow dry it. Today I decided to pass. Instead, I went to my local Target store and bought this amazing piece of hair technology!

Now, I don't even own a blow dryer, so this was going out on a limb. I came home and watched some tutorials on how to use it and then into the bathroom I went to give it a try. It was hot in 30 seconds and did such an amazing job. I never thought I could do this but I did! I am loving how my hair looks tonight!

Decision Points

Yesterday I stopped by the library to return some books that were getting close to the due date. While there, I picked up George Bush's Decision Points. I'm only 23 years old so the first presidency that I can say I actually had opinions and (somewhat) knowledge to make those decisions was the Bush-era. I was in 8th grade and 13 years old when during our "Career Block" class I first heard the news about the World Trade Centers. My entire teenage years were affected by that day, as I am sure it did for a lot of people. The aftermath also helped to shape a lot of my somewhat confusing political views.

At 13, I did not like the reactions that I saw. I have never been a person that my first reaction to any situation is violence. I have known a lot of people that their only reaction to a bad situation is to use violence. I sometimes think people make decisions to use violence as a answer to a problem because violence can happen now. Anger provides us with all the ammunition we need to rationalize a violent response. What I saw after 9/11 was that before mourning could take place and before we could see through the fog that anger produces we chose that more violence was the only possible solution to what happened to our country.

Now, I am not saying that I do not think that we should have went on the defense, but I am also saying that we could have used a cooling off period to make sure that we were going on the offensive as a way to defend our country instead of going on the offensive as a retaliatory measure. I remember being in a Wal-mart store with my grandfather when he saw a man that he knew that informed him that we "dropped our first bombs". My grandfather and this man cheered and somewhere inside of me I questioned how this was any different than the people that cheered in the Middle East during the attack on 9/11.

This all leads to the point that I did not like George Bush much at all during his administration. I did grassroots efforts for Howard Dean prior to the Democratic primary and then remember my heart breaking when George Bush was re-elected to a second term. I remember fearing for our country and after looking back all these years I cannot keep myself from thinking "What if?".

However, yesterday I picked up this book wanting to see him explain it all. Wondering if it could provide some insight that my teenage self didn't know or didn't want to know. I'm about 100 pages into the book and while I haven't changed my mind about the President George Bush - I do feel respect for the man George Bush that had to be the one to make these impossible decisions.