Good weekend
Well, good days off anyway. I’ve been off since Wednesday, which I completely slept through. I got paid on Thursday, did some math and discovered I had some extra money, so I did a little (very little) bit of shopping.
On Friday I bought the giant Oster toaster-oven* they’ve been carrying at Walmart for a while now. It’ll ultimately pay for itself since I won’t have to fire up the oven to do things like heat Texas toast or cook small pizzas. It’s got a digital thermostat and timer, does convection cooking, has two racks and will hold up to a fourteen inch pizza. They claim 14" is "extra-large" but I beg to differ. Anyway, I’ve used it once already and it does very well with the Totino’s pizzas I sometimes buy. I’ve cut back on those since I’m trying to lose weight, but I can also cook some of my Weight Watcher’s and Lean Cuisine stuff in it too.
Today I drove down to the the big camping/hunting store in the next town south of here to look at guns, boots, and cast-iron cookware. Yeah, I’m a little strange. Their inventory of firearms seems to shrink every time I go in there, but they do have some good prices on pistols. When I start to build my armory I’ll probably just go to a local shop though so I can make sure I’m getting what I really want. The lower volume at the local shops helps with customer service; they won’t mind spending a little extra time with me if they know they’ll get a sale out of it. I did ask about the little pink one K wanted, and they said they normally only carry those around Christmas, and they’d be getting some in later in the year. While I was there I priced hiking boots, and when I picked myself up off the floor I decided that maybe I didn’t really need any right now. One pair I looked at was $250, and the least expensive pair I saw was in the high $90 range. Crikey. I also checked out their Lodge cast iron cookware and ended up buying a five quart Dutch oven with the wire bail handle as well as a grill press. The grill press will be excellent for cooking bacon on my griddle and burgers in my frying pan. Of course it has been a while since I cooked any bacon, or really anything at all, on the griddle, but still. Now that I have a good Dutch oven I can try the Good Eats spaghetti and meat sauce recipe, which requires a Dutch oven, a sauté pan, and about six hours or so of cook time. It looks like it’s worth it though. It’s technically, due to the way it’s prepared, spaghetti bolognese, but don’t let an authentic Italian chef hear you use those two words together…**
All in all, I spent about half of the extra money I had, and I’ll let the rest of it sit in the checking account as a pad.
Haven’t seen Critter much the past few weeks, and I’m sad, but I’ll be OK. K is sick, the poor thing. Keeps throwing up all over their room. She nailed D’s new shoes Thursday night. Critter was a little upset, but not much. She told K when she felt like she was going to throw up her only job was to get to the toilet as fast as she could, not to just stand there and spew all over everything. I want to give K a big hug but I don’t want to get sick and have to miss work. Critter is already feeling a little icky. That could be bad.
That’s about all for now, still loving the car. When it came time to get more gas money our of the bank (I do that on payday so I always have gas money) I still had half a tank left and twenty dollars from the previous allotment of gas money. Woohoo! Now off to see what’s on the television, and make lists of firearms I want to buy…
*That’s not my actual oven, they don’t have it in their online catalog, but it’s pretty close.
**Italians don’t normally don’t serve such a heavy, meaty sauce with a noodle that can’t hold on to it.