My new office

It seems like I spend day after day after day after day sitting at this desk working.

Tonight, I thought I would mix it up a bit.  Maybe a change of location would make me more motivated to get lots of work done.  So I got a hotel on the beach.  Just kidding.

I downloaded my Quick Books onto the laptop and did my work lounging in bed, watching TV, (and if you look very carefully in the picture), enjoyed a nice cold beer.

That box the laptop is sitting on is all the stuff that I need to get entered into QuickBooks to try and getting ready to get the stupid taxes done.

My office assistant was on hand, in case I needed anything and I didn't want to get up.

Actually, I sat there for about 2 1/2 hours and made really good progress, although I still have LOTS more progress that needs to be made.  But it really was a nice and refreshing change. 

I think I'll try and do that again tonight.

Look what I made today!

Chicken Taquitos!

And they are BAKED taquitos......so it's a healthy meal!

 

 

I gathered my ingredients:  shredded chicken, black beans, white & yellow corn, salsa, monterrey jack cheese, cheddar cheese, cilantro, and egg roll wrappers.........what??? egg roll wrappers????  Yes, these taquitos are baked in the oven in egg roll wrappers.

Assemble all the ingredients together and mix it up really good. 

Then you roll it up in the egg roll wrappers.  The recipe called for Cumin......but I can't stand to eat any food that has Cumin in it.  I can't stand the smell of it and unfortunately my husband LOVES it.  So........I portioned out some of the filling and added cumin to it just for him.

Had to separate the Cumin laced taquitos.......I'd have a fit if I ended up accidently biting into one of those.  After you put them on a butter sprayed cookie sheet.....you spray the tops of them with the butter spray as well.

Let them bake for about 30 minutes until they are golden brown.  I had to keep flipping mine so that they browned on each side.  I served mine with a little lettuce, tobasco sauce, and guacamole on top.  They were a big hit in this house and we'll plan on eating them again.

The filling can be changed up like adding spinach, chicken and cheese or adding different vegetables.  The egg roll wrappers were nice and light and were actually better than if we'd put them in a flour tortilla.  I will be experimenting with these again the near future.

Sometimes I get to play housewife

This weekend I could just not bear the thought of sitting at my desk and doing paperwork.

The best part of the day was getting to do the bank runs with the top down.  It was a beautiful, gorgeous day and it was so nice to feel the fresh air and get my hair all messed up!

I got up off my butt and did "wifey" things.  Like clean the living room, cook, bake, launder, get called into Pizza Zone (grrrrrr.........), and play with something that I got for Christmas.

I got to start my garden......indoors.  I had a hard time picking only 3 things out of the four packs of seeds they sent.  (hmmmmmmm.......wonder how my mother is doing on her garden????)

But here's the 3 items I've started growing sitting in their new home.

I even had time to whip up a delicious salad for us to munch on the next couple of days.  My only problem is I always want too many ingredients in my salad and it takes forever to make.  This one has Italian Lettuce Blend, cucumbers, green onions, radishes, zucchini, jalapenos, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower.  I had carrots to put in there too......but I got tired of cutting all that stuff up.  Made up a bottle of Good Seasons Zesty Italian (the bestest dressing for salad in the whole wide world) and we'll be munching on this for a couple of days.

The only thing I did not get accomplished was making the Baked Chicken Taquitos I was going to make for dinner last night.  Got called into work.....so cancelled that plan.  However, I do plan on making them tonight for dinner.  Should be interesting......baking them in egg roll wrappers.  I plan on documenting this monumental occasion with a blog.

Have any of you noticed I have a good obsession??

I'm not just a Pizza Zone employee

There are so many days I'm nothing more than a PZ employee.

My days are filled with paperwork, employee issues, or some other emergency that has cropped up that needs to be dealt with.

Today......I decided to take a small portion of my day and so something that does not have anything to deal with Pizza Zone.

I made banana bread!

Actually, we had some bananas that were very ripe and they either were going to be thrown away, cut into slices and frozen for smoothies, or make banana bread.  We haven't had home made bread for so, so long......so the decision was easy.

I also purchased the necessary ingredients to make Zuchinni bread in a couple of days (actually going to use the recipe my sister sent me 2+ years ago).  That's our absolute favorite kind of bread......although Pumpkin bread is really good too.

Now I think I'll do something productive and work on cleaning up some of this messy house.

Just making it by the hair of our chinny chin chin

Last day in Columbus.  Woke up and the weather was ZERO degrees!  I've never seen that before.  We had an 11am flight and were a little concerned about the weather in Charlotte.  They were having a weather advisory and we hoped that we didn't get stuck there.

But our last day in Columbus began in the usual way -- get up and go downstairs to the breakfast area.  We especially loved sitting in the window seat where we could enjoy the view, read the paper, see the TV news, do work on the laptop, or play with our phones.  Of course, we also enjoyed our little breakfast.  Here's what the area looked like (not my picture):

After breakfast it was time for us to take the hotel shuttle to the airport.  We got to the airport with plenty enough time.  Our flight took off on time and we were on our way to Charlotte. 

When we finally got settled into our gate in Charlotte, there was only enough time for us to catch a quick potty break and then make the mad dash over to Terminal B -- which was a good 15 minute walk.  Since we had eaten only a small breakfast, we dashed into a little shop that sold pre-packaged sandwiches and grabbed a couple of sandwiches and chips to eat on the plane.

We had absolutely no time to spare.  Our plane was in the final boarding stages as we got to the gate.  We were thankful we made the connection, but never realized how important that was going to end up being.

Here was our view as we were waiting to leave the gate to go through the de-icing process.

In fact, from the time we landed in Charlotte to the time we took off (maybe 45 minutes or so) the weather conditions really started to deteriorate.  I snapped this next picture as we were finally cleared to go to the de-icing area.  There were literally planes sitting everywhere.

Thankfully, for some reason, our plane had been given first priority to be de-iced and get approved for take off.  Must be they knew some celebrities were on board (us!)

I took lots of pictures of the de-icing process.  We have never been through that and it was quite interesting.  Luckily the pilot explained what was happening during the course of it so that made it even more interesting to actually know what was happening.

You pull up into an area on the runway that is lined with these funny little trucks on each side.  First they spray a mixture of hot water and a chemical to melt any of the ice buildup on the entire plane.

Then these same little trucks spray another solution on the wings that will prevent from ice forming.

 

After you get de-iced the plan is to get you on the runway to take off quickly before the chemicals wash off.  I was just praying that those guys did a good job and we wouldn't have any problems taking off. 

It was funny to look back and see all the planes still waiting to go through their de-icing.  We heard that it was the first time in 10 years that Charlotte has had to de-ice planes.

And here we are during take off saying good-bye to the nasty weather in Charlotte!

Once we got above the clouds the weather was beautiful, clear, and sunny.  We found out later that our flight was the last one out for the day to Houston, as they had to cancel the other 3 flights due to weather.  In fact, the airport shut down for two days because Charlotte had such bad weather. We are so thankful that all our connections were made and that we were able to get out of there before everything took a turn for the worse.

We actually do have to say that Columbus was even better than we had expected.  Yes the weather was cold and the warmest it ever got was 20 degrees, but we made it an adventure and enjoyed all the new challenges we had to deal with.  We've also decided that we choose to live in the South and not have to deal with all that nasty weather.  We also learned that this was the worst winter the Columbus had had for a long, long time and we feel fortunate that we were able to go there and enjoy a little bit of it with them.

Now, it's back home and back to work!

Taking a food break

I still have one more exciting day to post from the Columbus trip......our adventure to get home, but I've been taking a few food pictures the last couple of days -- so I want to post those instead.

 My husband made the best patty melts the other night.  Paired with some fresh cut veggies and Ranch dressing.....I was in heaven!

Sampling a new wing flavor.......Carolina Gold.  The employees think it sucks......we think it's delicious.  Hard to sway these Texans to a new flavor of BBQ sauce.

Sampling the March Pizza of the Month.  Shhhhhhhhh.......don't tell anyone what it is yet.  We want it to be a surprise.  It's got Pizza sauce mixed with Honey Mustard Dressing, Turkey, Ham, Bacon, Tomatoes and Swiss Cheese.  OMG.....it's delicious.  I wish we could say that it was our own creation, but we "borrowed" it from a pizza place that we tried on our trip to Memphis.  I think we "borrowed" it wonderfully!

That's what theirs looked like......it tasted just as delicious as it looks.

Well that's enough food for one day.....I'm getting hungry and I don't have plans for dinner yet. 

Do you really want to know what happened on Day 3 in Columbus?

Day 3 really started the same as Day 2.  Breakfast in the hotel lobby, except this time we ate Cheese Danish along with the coffee, orange juice, hard boiled eggs, and English muffins (with butter and grape jelly on them).

Day 3 began with the bitter cold, like 6 degrees, so we just bundled up and braved the elements for the walk to the Convention Center.

This day was spent the same as yesterday:  visiting vendors, attending seminars, sampling food, yada yada yada.

One of our favorite tastes of the day was the Cheese Ravioli with Pesto Sauce and the Sausage Ravioli with Marinara sauce.  YUMMMMM.  We have requested a sample from our food distributor and plan on doing a trial run on it to see how successful it was.  It was incredibly delicious!

The hours for the food show today were 10:30 a.m. and ended at 4:30 p.m.....so we knew where we would be spending our entire day.

Of course you can't go to a trade show and not come home with bags of treasure that you will have to go through when you get home.  A collection of the samples and people we met.

 

 

That's another whole job just to go through those bags and sort through what we are really interested in.

We finally headed back to the hotel at the end of the show and just relaxed and napped for awhile before making plans for our last night in Columbus.

We headed for the North Market, which was supposed to be an eclectix mix of Farmer's market type stores, but by the time we got there most of the businesses had already closed.  Probably because all the crappy weather was keeping everyone home.  We ended up at Barley's again to get a couple of beers.  Paul had really liked their house Pilsner from the other evening and it was a warm and close place for us to make plans.  We ended up eating dinner here since it was their $5 jumbo make your own hotdog night.  How could we resist?

The evening's entertainment was going to be at Bernard's Tavern, where we expected to see some karaoke action.  We love to watch other's sing, but we prefer to just be spectators (we both know how bad we sing).

We had awesome service, awesome beer, awesome homemade potato chips, and some really great karaoke singers.  The night was getting late and it was freezing outside.....we opted to hire a taxi to take us the short distance back to our warm and snuggly hotel.

What a nice way to spend our last evening in this really cool little city.