Welcome to January.

So it's January. And it's 2009. The last time I blogged it was 2008. Weird. Our New Year's Eve consisted of me getting out of work early due to the snow (but having to come home and still do work...), Doug making up a bag of Totino's Pizza Rolls, us eating a late dinner of Hungarian goulash, a recipe courtesy of my mother's Crock Pot instruction manual, and watching movies on the couch. What did we watch? I had plans of putting in Smart People, since that's been kicking around the house for a while and I wanted to send it back to Netflix, but we instead got hooked on John Hughes movies playing on cable, so we watched Sixteen Candles and Weird Science. I admit to being asleep on the couch well before midnight. Apparently Doug was trying to wake me up when the ball dropped in Times Square, but I have no recollection of this at all. New Year's Eve and giving my husband a kiss at midnight were not priorities for me, it seems.

But 2009 has been good to us so far, which may bode well for the rest of the year. We met with our mortgage guy about refinancing and it looks very good for us to refinance. The new rate would be considerably lower than our current interest rate, which means lots of savings each month come mortgage time. I will no longer have to cry myself to sleep after writing out the check to the mortgage company, or at least won't have to cry as hard.

We've also been cooking more in 2009. I do not make resolutions come each new year, but I do tend to put a few things on my running mental list that I'd like to get done in the next 365 days. On my running mental list is always "cook more at home," and so far we have been. It helps, too, when we get new cookbooks. For Christmas my sister and her lovely family gave us Jeanne Lemlin's Quick Vegetarian Pleasures, a cookbook that her friends Suzanne and Heinrich swear by. Since it is also always on my running mental list to incorporate more vegetables in our diets, this cookbook serves two wonderful purposes. The first recipe we've made is the corn chowder. I put in ground thyme instead of dried thyme (I already made a note in the recipe not to do that again!) and I will say that despite the fact that I don't like ground thyme and that the thyme was all I could taste in each bite, the recipe came out well and I'd gladly make it again. See below for some photos of our corn chowder adventures. Up tonight is an eggplant-tomato sandwich, and for tomorrow a split pea soup with homemade golden raisin Irish bread. Yum!

The negative retail environment has been good to us, too. We made a trip to IKEA, really just because we wanted to get out of the house but didn't want to travel far, and we ended up getting a new cushion for our Poang chair. Many of the cushion fabrics were on sale, probably being discontinued, but one was marked for $20! Compared to the original $89 price, that was quite a discount. It was not our favorite fabric (it's not very bright and has an odd pattern), but it would work right in our living room and for $20 we couldn't say no. So we trekked into the self-serve area to get the cushion, only to see the price on the bin in the self-serve area marked as $39. Well, for $39 we didn't really want the cushion, so we took it to the register and asked the cashier to check into it. She called the salesroom floor and no, the cushion was indeed $39. Well, we bought it for $39, but we were mad at ourselves because on the tag on the showroom floor the cushion was marked as $20. So Doug and I, determined to be a) more money conscious in 2009 and b) more assertive, decided to contest the sale. Doug took the receipt to the showroom, showed a salesperson the tag with the $20 price, had to have a manager write a note saying that we could get the cushion for the (accidentally) marked price, and then went down to the returns area to get our $19 refund. Yes, this made for an overloy long IKEA trip but we got the cushion for $20 and like it much better now. In other purchasing news, we also got a new coffee table at the Boston Interiors clearance center, which is very close to IKEA. The coffee table was half price, with no visible scarring. How could we go wrong? It's larger than our old one, has a shelf on the bottom for storage of magazines, the computer, etc., and is the same color as the woodwork in the room. So it works well, was a great price, and we like it. Thank you, failing economy!


Doug and I have also scratched off of our running mental list "eat at 50s Diner." The 50s Diner is a Dedham staple and one of the only little breakfast/lunch places in town. We've been meaning to eat there for a while, but it's always packed with a line waiting out the door. Yesterday we were determined to eat there, so we waited in the line for our first 50s Diner experience. The verdict is... the food was okay. I did not have the best club sandwich ever, Doug did not have the best cheeseburger and onion rings ever, but the ambiance was good and the waitstaff was friendly. It was also cheap. So in all, a good meal, but we both say that we would not be willing to wait outside on a freezing cold day for the food (even though we did, but not again).

Not all is great in 2009, however - Doug is sick and is passed out on the sofa right now. His father was just coming down with some kind of bad cold when we were at his house for Christmas, and then my sister and her family all have bronchitis, so we were exposed to all of their germs, too. There was no hope for us. I am getting over my cold, though still sound a little like Kathleen Turner, and Doug just got hit with his on Thursday/Friday. We do hope to get a movie in this weekend, but it looks like much of the weekend will be spent on the sofa in front of the television with orange juice IVs going into our arms. Which is fine - it seems the only time Doug and I ever slow down is when we're sick. I don't feel guilty about being a sloth when I'm ill because I have no choice. So I say "yay!" to sickness for once and look forward to sharing the sofa with my ailing husband.