Less Hustle More Coffee

My daughter has taken some really great pictures of storms coming through in the Rosemary Beach area of Florida as storm clouds and a squall moved through. Amazing pics – so amazing I asked if I could use them in my blog.

I used this one for a wallpaper for my phone’s Lock Screen.

Hello Fresh has been amazing this week. I forgot to take pics of the other two plates this week as we were so hungry, lol but here were the Hamburgers from last night. Probably our most fattening meal yet, but it was hamburger and fries so we knew that. Plus it came with a special sauce like thousand island sauce.

Here is what a meal might look like when you pull the ingredients out. One night we had Italian herbed pork chops, sliced and drizzled with a lemon sauce. The directions are very clear and they send you mostly what you need except for like salt, pepper, and olive oil, butter etc. The website or app tells you what you need to make sure you have before hand but it’s very basic stuff most households will have on hand. I go in on Monday’s and reset the menu selection for the week after next. By Wednesday your choice is locked in for the following Monday’s delivery.

Everything we have had has been truly delicious. I also ordered the Egg Bites (not shown) but they are made like muffins along with bacon and cheese, or sausage and cheese. Both were good. And filling. I won’t get them every week as boiled eggs or making eggs here are cheaper, but it’s great to have on hand as a breakfast for work every now and then. I liked it about as good as a Chic Filet breakfast and it was cheaper than that, lol.

I will also say that the Hello Fresh is giving me a new perspective to cooking. I’d have never dreamed of making a lemon sauce for pork chops. The pork chops were sliced sideways and the sauce drizzled over it. It was divine. I think it had oil (olive oil or veg oil), garlic, cream cheese, lemon zest, lemon juice, butter. I can’t remember what else without looking at the recipe card. I also decided I should get a notebook, find my hole puncher and see if I can’t fix up these cards for safe keeping. I want to keep every one of them. So this is going extremely well. As you can see they send you just what you need so you don’t have to buy the “whole” thing of glaze or cream cheese and waste anything. So if you went to the store and bought it all for one recipe you’d be buying bigger sizes. And that is ok too as you can use again for other things, but I can see where it could save you if you didn’t ordinarily use cream cheese for example.

Dexter says he likes the box it comes in!

So life has been just a little bit crazy. However, I will say that the shift to having a dog has made our life seem more complete. Dexter is filling the void we were feeling no longer having Tugie, Maisy, and Roger. I have some bitterness in my soul still at the impersonal approach and “made to feel inadequate” approach to the adoption process that we went through. I should think of it like searching for a job though. It makes you feel the same way when rejected or if someone else was chosen. So there is some of that bitter residue left over. I don’t really think it is something I will “get over”. I see why it happens and I don’t think the agencies are doing a bad job, I just know as a dog lover and the ability to give one a good home, I kinda felt like they judged us too quickly and did not give us proper consideration. I guess yes, I’m saying sometimes their restrictions are just too rigid for their own good. It’s like saying only perfect people get to go to heaven. Thank goodness at least God gives grace. So there is no way to really remove the imagery of what we went through back there with some of these adoptions agencies – it’s simply what we experienced and that can’t be changed. It was what it was and we remember it. Perhaps if we had continued we’d have eventually found success as they would be tired of us. But we found our Dexter in person where the people could see us and know by very own tears that we would be loving parents to him. And that seemed to be what did the trick to attend the adoption events and that way they see we are real people with real good intentions. But the reason for the paragraph was to say that despite all that being made to feel bad, we are filling the void.

It has been crazy though. We are really having to work at training, puppy proofing, and redirecting of his energy. He is calm most of the time, but a bit mischevious as puppies are some times. We will get through this. And he will be a good dog. Right now, I am short on sleep because he wakes up to pee (or I do) at 3:00 a.m. and he thinks it is time to get up and also there is a problem going to sleep at night. It’s taking an hour to get him settled so I’m short on both ends of the stick. The afternoons are often not very alert because I am so very sleepy. So this is critical to get worked out. I don’t always have time to go to bed earlier. So if he will not mind or do what he should – he goes to the hallway til he calms down or til I wake up. Last night b/w 3 and 4 and tried putting him back in bed with me about three times – all the while training him to sit, lay, rollover, stay. I was able to make some progress, but he was not able to sleep and wanted to play so back in the hallway he went til the alarm went off. He will get it eventually. He is a puppy! He wants to please but where playing and eating is concerned, he’s very stubborn. Here is quick video of night time. (insert eye roll emoji here, lol)