Let me preface this by saying that these posts are probably going to regularly be lengthy, which means that if you’re not particularly interested in the rundown of our weekend, they’ll probably make you snore. The pictures will hopefully keep you entertained though and there are really some great things in each of these, like Cassie and a giant bag of organic broccoli florets!
A shopping trip to Trader Joe’s and Costco started our weekend off wonderfully because buying food means eating food and eating food is my favourite. Especially when it’s food that’s really good for you. A sample of this weekend’s eats included flax crust pizzas, steak and drunken mushrooms, spicy panko chicken sandwiches, (all of which I’m sure will feature here at some point soon) and a whole lot of fruits and veggies.
While we’re on the topic of eating, before we headed home from our grocery shopping adventure, we stopped into New Albanian Brewing Company and indulged in some fine dining. And by fine dining, I mean we sampled some of their beer and tested out their pizza for the first time.
Consensus? It’s pretty friggin’ fantastic. The standard Cassie and I judge pizza by is Mother Bear’s in Bloomington, Indiana and I’m going to be honest when I say NABC definitely rivals Mother Bear’s. The one thing that makes it better than Mother Bear’s? It’s a brewery. It’s a brewery with about 12 of their own beer on tap and another couple dozen others, plus about 50 others in the bottle.
Oh, and they’re a “lite free” establishment. To quote their website, they wanted to move “away from the typical slavish allegiance to mass-market American beer.” This means you won’t find any Budweiser, Miller Lite, or any popular domestic beer of the kind.
This makes the Johnston party happy and super excited to go back.
The rest of Friday found Cassie and I walking different avenues. While she unloaded the groceries, I went off with her father to pick up a couple things at her sister’s old house in Borden, one of which was an entertainment unit she left for us when her and her husband moved back to Oregon. Once I got back, I took on an interesting DIY project while Cassie took a break from her ridiculous schedule and watched The Princess Diaries.
What I’m referring to when I say “interesting” was that it was a project that resulted in piercing a hole into the cold water pipe under the sink. I am no plumber and I am not particularly comfortable doing something I can’t easily undo, but I held my breath and I did it and if you can’t already guess what I did, if you come back on Wednesday, you’ll see!
The rest of Friday found us laying low and watching some Olympics and turning in early. We sure didn’t get much sleep though, thanks to the banshee howls of our fluffy one. We’re not sure if it’s a matter of still being restless in a new place or if she’s just constantly on edge or both, but when she hears a nose she can’t identify, her bark is piercing and heart attack inducing.
Especially when you’re sleeping.
Long story short, she woke us up every hour or so, and it’s one of those situations that startle you awake so intensely that you can’t fall back asleep, especially when she’s in the queen sized bed with you. This meant that Saturday found us struggling a little bit.
Well, more so I than Cassie.
Preparing for posts for this and her other blog, we drove into Salem to pick up some supplies at the Goodwill and Dollar Store. While running the errand, I started feeling really dehydrated and developed a headache. Cassie thought it might be from the caffeine in the coffee we had, but it ended up lasting most of the day, which made me think it was something more, like I was getting sick.
Immediately upon suggesting I might be getting sick, Cassie told me to take a break the rest of the day. I’d been non-stop since we moved here, barely taking a break from all the cleaning and projects and unpacking, so she just suggested that I sit down and relax.
Part of me thought that no warrior would have any business with sitting down and relaxing, but then I realized I could sit down and play a video game as a warrior and help out the good, fictional, pixel people in my computer while Cassie spent the day doing her projects and writing her blog posts.
After some dinner later on, I was feeling better, so we took the furry face out to spend some of her energy in the hopes that she’d sleep better that night. On our walk, we stopped off at the garden and picked a few things and then headed down to the lake to see if the monkey nose wanted to swim. She did not, so we went to see if there were any blackberries left on the vines growing wild around the lake. We were way too late.
So, we went back up to the house and I tried my hand at a sugar free “frosting” to put on the flax cookies Cassie had made earlier on and while I was doing so, I felt something biting my foot. I looked down expecting a mosquito but there was no mosquito. There was, however, at least a hundred tiny insects crawling all over my foot. I went outside to hose them off, assuming I walked through some kind of spider nest and I came to find that they were actually ticks.
Pinhead sized ticks already working their way into my skin.
Not cool at all.
We both came to find that we had them all over us, so we spent the good part of an hour picking the little jerks off of us and showering and washing clothes to make sure we were free from their wrath.
Once we felt we’d sufficiently rid ourselves of the infestation (yet still continued to itch at the thought for hours) we took in some prime time Olympics. Eventually, when Cassie headed off to read in bed, I felt the urge to swap out our entertainment unit with the new, bigger one we picked up Friday.
We had also fixed what we thought the noise issue was that was keeping our puppy restless, so we were interested to see if it worked.
It wasn’t looking good.
When I headed to bed later on, she woke up and started getting restless again. There was a point where she was starting to bark at other noises, so I decided that instead of leaving the door open to let her roam free, I’d bring her water in the bedroom and close the door so the only sounds she could hear were coming from inside the room. This seemed to help because I didn’t hear her make another sound all night.
Which meant less struggling on Sunday!
I woke up while Cassie was getting ready to head to the gym and was determined to get some of our boxes finally unpacked from moving. I’d been meaning to set up our spare bedroom/library for a few days now, but just haven’t found the energy to unpack boxes of books, so I focused on the great room.
On either side of the fireplace are three sets of floating shelves that needed filling, so I focused on getting décor unpacked and making the great room a little prettier. Cassie’s the one with the eye for that stuff, so I’m sure she’ll rearrange it, but it’s nice to just have the stuff out of the boxes and on the shelves.
In addition to the shelves, I set some amazingness up behind the couch. Over the last month or so we’ve lived here, we’ve had a couple different tables behind the couch. The first ended up becoming a dresser in our bedroom, the second only lasted there a few hours before it was shifted out of the way (with no use for it yet, might I add) and the third is what we’ve currently landed on and really like.
Two years ago I bought Cassie a small briefcase style Crosley record player for Christmas. Since then, we haven’t really used it and it served more as decor. Also, we found a really pretty vintage Sony radio at a thrift store once and we’d really like to get into using both of them more often. As far as the record player goes, for such a small unit, it has great sound, not to mention we have some pretty fantastic vinyl and the radio sounds really great too.
What we ended up doing with the space was we hulked a seriously ridicu-heavy Free Sewing Machine Company sewing machine up from the basement to act as a table for the two machines. Unfortunately it only fit one, so I had to find an alternative surface to lay one of them on and what do you know, we just made a shopping trip last week to this really cool store and found us a nice, cheap table that worked perfectly!
Once it was all set up, I was very happy with how it looked. Cassie and I agreed that the table on the left needs to be painted, but for now, the area functions wonderfully.
The rest of the day found me cleaning and Cassie writing and just general Sunday nonsense all wrapping up with the writing of this breathtaking piece of literature.
To accompany the poetry, I’m going to throw in an obligatory shot of some hydrangeas.
Until next time, my fellow warriors, happy Monday and cheers to Friday!
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