Victorian Inspiration

Noel starts back up at his next job tomorrow, so today we took the opportunity to explore a bit.


Remember that gorgeous $45,000 house in Palestine?



Well, someone bought it. But it wasn't us. *sniff sniff*


There are some other really beautiful homes in Palestine though, and we have daydreams of having a project house to fix up. Today I found a really cool website about a couple who fixed up their old Victorian house into an absolute showpiece. Check it out!

http://www.ourvictorianhouse.com/index.htm

So don't be surprised if we decide to go out on a limb and buy a fixer-upper. :) Ha Ha! Pass the sledgehammer.

Mystery Door and Crackers On the Floor!

We've been busy the last few days! Noel's job has temporarily finished up (again, with the parts on order!), but the job in Fairfield is ready to start back up. So we're getting ready to drive back up there today. On the road again!

But before we go, I have some pictures to share with you! There's a beautiful bridge that's on the way to Noel's work. It's so pretty - gray concrete with yellow cables:

Very abstract arty, huh?

I've been quite productively knitting of late, and I do actually have a picture of a few things that I can show:

A baby hat, my own design:

Snowflake ornaments (so Victorian, these things. I love them!):

Also as promised, the purple Ford Mustang planter:

CLASSY. You can take the redneck out of Texas....or can you?

Since Noel finished up work night before last, we decided last night to go out for a little fun. This is one of the drawbacks of him working on night shift - we rarely ever get to go out to do anything together. So we had passed by this place once or twice and wanted to try it out. It's called the Sherlock Pub, and it was great! Good ambiance:

And huge! It had a whole room of pool tables. Here's Noel in action - he totally skunked me at pool. I'm not ashamed. (After all, I skunked him in air hockey! )

The best part of the entire place though was the bathroom doors. Think I'm kidding? Check this out!:

It's just so Agatha Christie, no?

And here's the men's room, open, so you can see how well these doors were hidden. We've decided that we absolutely MUST have these in our house whenever we decide on one to renovate. HA!

Then this morning, we woke up to some carnage. WHY, I ask you, WHY do we have the only carb-addicted cats in the world? We have to hide the bread, the tortillas, and the rolls. We didn't think about the Ritz crackers, with disasterous consequences:

We thought Loki must have been the guilty party, but he may have had an accomplice:

Ah well. Such is life. :)

Now we're packing up the house to go back north toward Dallas. Bon voyage, and see you in Fairfield!

Slow Day...

I have to admit, not much happened today:

1) More work on Christmas presents (my fingers keep getting stiff, not because of the quantity of knitting, but because I keep eyeballing the calendar and tensing up, because HELLO - Christmas is about 2 weeks away. GULP).

2) More squirting the cats with water. They've not only discovered the Christmas ornaments on the tree, but weirdly enough the vinyl snowflake decals too, which Loki sneakily attacks when he thinks we're not looking. Why would he want these things? Maybe the same reason we have to hide the bread from him. He's an odd cat.

3) More presents, but these are for me! Noel went shopping this morning for presents, and made me swear up and down that I wouldn't sneak a peek. He told me where he hid them though, so I wouldn't accidentally find them.

So here's another thing about living in an RV that you normally wouldn't think about: there just aren't a lot of places where you can hide stuff!

So today wasn't necessarily thrilling, just full of Don't Peek At Your Presents torture. And then I checked my email this evening, and got a great suprise - an article I wrote got accepted to an online health magazine! It's not up yet, but I was very pleased that they liked it. :) As soon as it's up, I'll post the link.

Since there isn't much else exciting going on here, I thought I'd post another of my favorite recipes. I like the taste of omelets, but sometimes the texture just totally grosses me out. Something about it being kinda rubbery on the outside and too liquidly on the inside. UGH. Also a fancy omelet takes a lot of effort and risk. It takes a lot of practice to flip the omelet over without either tossing it on the floor or sticking it to the ceiling. So I cheat, and make:

Kelli's Scrambled Omelet (serves 2)

Ingredients:

1/4 onion, chopped
2 slices of sandwich meat of your choice, chopped (ham or chicken are both quite good)
1 1/2 cups of eggbeaters (or your store brand)
3 slices of American cheese (or more if you're a cheese addict)
salt & pepper

Heat your saute pan over medium heat, and spray with non-stick spray. Saute the onions and meat until the onions are tender and translucent. Add eggs, and stir until eggs are fluffy and liquid is cooked off. Tear up cheese and add into eggs, mixing until cheese is melted. Salt and pepper to taste. Devour and enjoy!

You can add anything you want to this - green peppers are great! So is that precooked turkey patty sausage. This is very fast to make and tasty. And if you use lowfat cheese and lean meat, it's pretty healthy too (well, healthier than pancakes and bacon and muffins, but I digress).

More exciting events tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be clearer and I can get some pictures of the neat stuff around this area! Three words: Ford Mustang Planter. Aw yeah.

Dancing Feet and Numb Fingers

One of the goals I've tried to set for myself (Noel has set the same goal as well, but he's doing a MUCH better job of it than I) is exercising on a more regular basis. it's been rainy weather, so I've not wanted to go out for walks (my usual form of low-impact exercise).

So instead, I've decided to try a new tack - something a bit more...rhythmic!

Some of you may know that I wanted to be a ballet dancer in my early youth. I was actually a pretty good dancer, performed with a small dance group for local schools and events (even dancing at the Biltmore Estate once!). However, I was too short to audition for the adult ballet in Asheville. So frustrating, especially when I grew about 5 inches within a year of stopping dancing. Sigh.

Anyway. Not to be depressing about failed dreams. The point is, I love to dance, even if I don't study it formally anymore. I've taken flamenco dancing, salsa classes, and dipped my toes into modern dance (not my favorite, to be honest). But sometimes it's fun to just put on music and dance! So for the last few days I've been doing dancing exercises in our tiny little living room space. I even got a DVD of different Latin dances. If only the cats would stay out of the way! :)

Ok, so now that you've got that rather amusing image in your head, you may be wondering, why am I telling you this? Because it gives me some motivation to know that others now know I'm working on getting back in shape. So thanks for helping me be accountable!

Dancing isn't really the most practical exercise for this living space. But my friend Lisa (Hi Lisa!) brought up a good point once - that people in New York City live in apartments as small as this RV and they pay a ton for the privilege! Then today, I saw an article on Yahoo that drove that point home:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/city_tiniest_studio_AF3nqD1kArYgpdyTyjNnXP?photo_num=9

The smallest apartment in NYC, a whopping 175 sq. ft. The interesting thing to me is that they don't cook at all in their space, and use the kitchen as storage. This is odd to me, because they aren't really maximizing their space, are they? It's funny that they have a bed and a desk, a kitchen counter, and a that's about it. In our space that's not much bigger, we have an actual functioning kitchen, a big desk, a couch, 2 chairs, a standing freezer, a bathroom, a bedroom, and enough space left over to samba. It's not a minimalistic as their place, but at least we have room to store our clothes and books!! (And all my yarn and fabric too!)

As for the numb fingers (in the title of this post), I'm knitting like crazy lately, trying to get everything done so it can be sent off in time! I'll post a few pictures in the coming days.

Now it's back to it - 2 hats on the needles that need finishing up!

We arrived into the outskirts of Houston just fine yesterday. It was a pretty easy drive, about 4 or so hours, and blissfully uneventful. We LOVE uneventful drives. :)

Noel decided to show his Christmas spirit by driving with the tree still in the passenger seat. He wished that he could've kept the lights on the whole time too, just so people could see it better. ha ha!

We stopped for gas and saw this super cute car. It's an old-school Fiat:

How adorable is that? LOVE IT.

It was rainy and the weather deteriorated after we arrived, and we were hungry. But we didn't feel like going out anywhere, or making anything too challenging to eat. So we had a quick dinner of leftover pizza. After that, I felt energetic enough to channel Martha Stewart again:

Mmmmm....MORE apple pie! This one has some fancy decorative crust on it, and I also sprinkled sliced almonds on top, which added a nice taste to it. YUM.

We had some pie and were watching Harry Potter, when ZAP! We lost power! It wasn't just us though - the entire neighborhood was lights out for a while. Our lights can run off of battery power for a while, and we also have a generator. So it's not a problem to be without electricity temporarily. We don't really like to run the generator all that much though, since it's kinda loud. We didn't have to use it last night, because the power came back on (after Harry Potter had gone off though - oh well).

Noel started work tonight (he's on night shift again - stinks). He's excited to get started on this new job. It'll be nice to have him on day shift again!

On The Road (Yet) Again!

This will be short because Noel just got a call today for a last-minute job back in the Houston area. It starts on Monday, so we're moving out to Houston tomorrow morning (Sunday).

At least it's not a long drive - less than 200 miles!

Houston, here we come!

(p.s. Please note that Fate has caused us to miss the big snow in Houston by 2 days. Sigh.)

Snow News Is Good News!

Guess what happened today!?!?

SNOW!

Not a ton, it never stuck to the ground, but it snowed for about an hour and a half! It was so pretty and we walked around outside for a while in it. Yay!

Apparently Houston got a lot of snow. Jim Cantore was even there. And we all know that when the Weather Channel sends ol' Jim anywhere, there's some serious weather happening.

We felt so festive after our little snowy walk, we came home, put on some Christmas music, and started decorating for Christmas!

No, that's not our place. Heh. We saw that house in town today and just had to snap a picture. How much do you think their electric bill goes up in December? Wow. That's some serious dedication to being festive.

Seeing that we live in a very small space (about 230 sq. ft. or so) we have to be thoughtful about our decorations. We also have 2 destructo-kitties who can NOT leave anything alone. So I got some of those vinyl clings in the shapes of snowflakes to go on our shower stall, mirrors, and windows. I figure the cats won't be able to easily pull them off if they're near the top, and may not even notice them in the first place.

And they're cute, right? :)

We also put up our fabulous Christmas tree! There was a fair amount of debate as to where to put our little 5 ft. tree. I had originally voted for the desk. Except the ceiling's too low, and also we use that space for cooking. So we figured we'd put it in the passenger seat up front, since we only use that spot for the cat bed (and they like sleeping in the front window better anyway). However, the tree was again too tall. So we ended up putting it in the floor between the passenger chair and the dashboard. It actually fits very well right there! Here's Noel putting up the tree:


Here's Loki being helpful by sniffing the tree box:

And then he decided the box was his new Fortress of Kittytude (this cat physically can NOT stay out of a box):

Our tree is a bit non-traditional. First of all, it's black. Yes, solid black. We have red & green ornaments (all non-breakable, because of aforementioned Tasmanian Kittens of Destruction):

(If you look really closely, you'll see some strings from the top of the tree to the cabinet handle and the fan. This is so the cats can't knock the whole tree over. HA HA! Foiled again, cats!)

We also have some other fun ornaments I picked up on a business trip last year through Tupelo, Mississippi:

Oh yeah. Rhinestone Elvis ornaments.

There are also some that looks like some of Elvis's record covers. LOVE these. (Hope you like yours too, Lisa!)

So yeah, we don't have a traditional tree, but it definitely suits our sense of style. Also, how many people can say their tree matches their pets? :)