Wednesday Lunch with Dan Downtown and Some City Pics

Somehow, don’t ask me how it happened, we made it back to the gym very early Wednesday morning. *happy dance* While I hate getting up at 5am I do like going to the gym early in the morning. However what I didn’t like was how darn cold it was when we got to the car. You know it is cold when your car doors are frozen shut. Yes, that was that cold and that is not normal around here.

Since we had to go in the back door of the car (since they weren’t frozen shut) we quickly realized that we had messed up when carrying groceries into the house Tuesday night. We accidentally left 15 pounds of bananas and 10 avocados in the car overnight. Given that it was 27 degrees in the morning I almost threw them away but decided to see what happened when they got warm. More on that later when I find out if things actually survived but so far everything looks good.

This is the view as we were leaving the gym. It is nice to have the sun rising a little earlier in the morning.

Savory oatmeal was my breakfast of choice when we got home from the gym. This bowl included: oats, water, nutritional yeast, cumin, freshly ground black pepper, no-salt seasoning, freshly ground flaxseed, wheat germ, baby spinach, cooked cannellini beans (yay intentional leftovers), and salsa on top. Dan had his favorite fruit and nut oats (oats, water, wheat germ, freshly ground flaxseeds, cinnamon, powdered ginger, stevia, frozen wild blueberries and walnuts).

Next it was time to rush around like a lunatic to get ready to leave the house with Dan. Somehow I managed to pull it off but it was touch and go for a while. ;-) How did I ever make it to work on time? That is just one of the great mysteries of the universe.

I had to show you this adore picture of Masi burrowed under the top blanket so he could get closer to the electric blanket. I may be a little biased but I think he is adorable.

Here is the walk from the garage to the dentist. For the locals this is part of Hopkins plaza.

I had to stop at the dentist to pick up my night guard and let the dentist check the fit. When he said I would only be there 5 minutes he wasn’t kidding. Since I had promised Dan we would have lunch together I had hours to waste until lunch. Dan’s office (and the dentist’s) is only a couple blocks from the Inner Harbor so I headed there to find something to get into.

Walking to the Inner Harbor for some exercise sounded like a great idea and I was happy that I did it. The sun was bright and the weather was fairly nice, a little cold but not windy at least.

Here is a picture I took of the dragon boats in the foreground with the National Aquarium in the background.

This is Baltimore’s World Trade Center. I took this picture looking from the bookstore.

Here is the city to the north of the World Trade Center.

This is the Barnes and Noble where I spent a little while. You probably aren’t too surprised since you know how much I love to read.

I wanted to stop at the book store for a few reasons. First it was a nice walk from the dentist’s office and I love to look at the water. Second I thought maybe I would find a book that I wanted to read. Well …. 8 books later I was ready to leave. Seriously I have book issues. There is no wonder there are so many books in my house. ;-)

Before someone asks I tend to avoid buying vegan cookbooks because they rely too heavily on processed food that we don't eat.  Since I find it easy to veganize recipes I tend to buy books that have beautiful food presenations and interesting food combinations. I find those types of books much more useful.

On the walk back to the car I snapped these pictures of the National Aquarium and the addition.

This is another picture of the city looking north.

After I hiked back from Barnes and Noble with the books I stopped at the car and dropped off the books since they were getting heavy. I grabbed one of the books and headed to Caribou to read and drink a green tea.

Conveniently Caribou is located across the street from Dan’s office so it was easy for him to stop by and get me for lunch. By the way it is not smart to buy 8 books that you need to carry for many blocks. I could have planned that better. Oh well, it was extra exercise right? LOL

I sat at Caribou and drank tea for about 45 minutes and read my book while I waited for Dan to take a break for lunch. It is funny how easy it is for me to lose myself in a book. When Dan arrived for lunch I had only drank about 1/3 of my tea. I really love to read. ;-)

Dan and I decided to stop at Suzie’s Soba for lunch. This is the building where the restaurant is located which is also just a few blocks from Dan’s office.

We ordered Edamame, Curried Tofu, and Yaki Soba to share.

Dan wanted me to drive the car home but I opted to ride the bus instead. Seriously that was a huge mistake I darn near froze to death waiting for the bus to arrive, 20 minutes late I might add. It was darn cold standing outside at the bus stop. I wouldn’t like to do this very often.

I got home from downtown about 4pm and immediately made myself a big mug of hot green tea to warm myself up. It felt like I was frozen to the bone. Knowing that dinner would be a few hours away I made myself a quick snack that consisted of prunes topped with homemade reduced fat peanut butter. This is a good combination I hope you give it a try.

Dinner was another big salad since I got home late and was half frozen I didn’t spend any time in the kitchen. I wanted something simple and healthy.  This salad contained:  baby spinach, cucumbers, carrots, yellow pepper, grape tomatoes, cannellini beans, salsa, mushrooms and roasted red peppers. While our lunch out was reasonably healthy it could have been more healthy. I thought salad was a good alternative to add veggies and nutrition to our day.

Happy Thoughts:

It was a good Wednesday and Thursday for me and here are my happy thoughts:

• Wednesday was a great day but a long one. I was such a treat to have lunch with Dan since we don’t get to do that very often. I really love the curried tofu dish and will be working on my own version of that sometime soon.

• We made it to the gym two mornings in a row. Woo hoo! I am very proud of us for this. I wonder if we can make it three early mornings in a row. We will see. LOL

• I had a great morning chatting to a girlfriend on the phone for hours. Sometimes you just need to chat to someone that understands you. Believe me the understanding part isn’t easy. LOL

• We are having dinner with our friend Phil from Missouri tonight. Since I haven’t seen him since Dan’s birthday in September I am really looking forward to tonight.

• I am also happy that the scale was my friend this morning. Whenever we go out to eat I always expect an uptick on the scale but that didn’t happen. It must have been the salad we had for dinner (totally kidding). I have no idea why it happened but I was happy about it.

• The weather is a little milder today and expected to reach 60 tomorrow. Come on spring!

Signing Out:

I hope all of you are having a good week and that the snow didn’t mess things up for you. If you did get snow I hope the warmer temps that are headed this way also make it to your place.

It is time for me to start getting ready for dinner. Talk to you again tomorrow.

Winter Wonderland and My New Kitchen Toy Reviewed

Wow did we get hit with snow Wednesday evening. It was the craziest weather I have seen in a long time. Thunder and lightning during a snow storm is wrong and creepy. It came down so quickly that many people abandoned their cars on the expressway (83 North) heading out of town and walked out. However Thursday morning we were greeted with a beautiful winter wonderland effect of a foot of wet snow sticking to everything. It is gorgeous but I didn’t have to drive in it so that is easier for me to say than those who did have to come home in it. I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

Our breakfast Thursday morning contained: oatmeal, wild blueberries, cinnamon, powdered ginger, cardamom, freshly ground flaxseed, and walnuts. I made mine with water and Dan’s with soymilk.

My lunch was okara sliders I dipped in a quick sauce of salsa and bbq. I liked the sauce because it was less sweet than bbq but also had chunks of tomatoes and more heat. I am not sure what possessed me to combine them but I liked the way it turned out.

The first afternoon snack of the day was a navel orange and two Brazil nuts (for the selenium).

My second snack was frozen grapes and walnuts. In case you hadn’t noticed walnuts are my nuts of choice, other than my two daily Brazil nuts for the selenium. I tend to grab walnuts because they have the best omega 3 to omega 6 ratios of the tree nuts.

For some reason I was hungry today and my third snack was a small bowl of the curried red lentil and tomato soup with a few sliced almonds on top

New Sharper Image Oven:

I had not planned dinner tonight so I decided to make something simple and try out the halogen, convection and infrared oven I ordered last week. Thursday night seemed like a good time to try out the oven. I used it make BBQ tofu since I knew how long that should take in the oven. Here are the pros and cons of the oven:

Pros:

• It preheats very quickly; it took under 10 minutes to reach 350 degrees which is much quicker than my stove. It is also easy to tell when it has reached temperature because the light goes out.

• In 20 minutes the tofu was firm and chewy and that would take 45 minutes in my convection oven

• It has a self clean feature that worked extremely well. You put two inches of water in the base and a small amount of dish liquid and set it to self clean. I was skeptical this would work but it did very well. The steam generated even softened the BBQ sauce on the lid making it easy to wipe off with a damp towel.

• It draws no more power than my Vitamix and uses much less than my oven.

• No VOCs were generated by this machine. I had an air quality monitor set up with two foot of the machine to see what would happen. This is huge for me since I know the oven sets off the air quality monitor every time.

Cons:

• Takes up a large footprint on the counter when not in use. Additionally it requires space on either side so you have somewhere to set the lid down when flipping or removing the food.

• The light coming off and on attracted the cats which wasn’t good since the exterior gets hot. I will have to work on how to keep the felines away from it when it is on. Hopefully they will get used to it and stop being attracted to the light going off and on.

Overall, I am happy with the purchase. If you are someone who uses a toaster oven for a small meal this takes up about the same amount of room and is faster.

Dinner was the BBQ tofu from the little oven and frozen broccoli that I cooked until lightly tender and tossed with tomato and raisin pesto and topped with sliced almonds for crunch.

Carrageenan:

Jenny asked how dangerous carrageenan was in a prior post. I had read years ago that it was linked to cancer in lab animals and then eliminated it from our diet. When you read your ingredient lists I think you will be surprised how often this shows up in processed food, particularly non-dairy beverages, cheezes and frozen desserts. It is also called Irish moss and is used often in raw food. In case any of you wanted to read more on this here is what Dr. Weil has to say about carrageenan.

Vitamin Water and Soda with Vitamins:

These products make me crazy! Why would people what to get their artificial vitamins in water or soda? Does anyone actually think these are natural sources of vitamins? Seriously they are no different than taking a multivitamin only most people that drink them seem to do both as though more artificial vitamins are better than less. *sigh*

Studies are now showing that getting your vitamins from artificial sources (like supplements or beverages) does not have a positive impact on health and in some case can be harmful. If you want to do something healthy eat more fresh whole food because that contains natural vitamins that your body knows how to process and use. There really is no magic bullet you can use to overcome living a less than healthy life.

Sorry for the rant but whenever I see commercials for this junk I get annoyed. As you can guess I just saw that vitamin water is on sale at Whole Foods and it set me off. ;-) *ugh*

Making Dietary Changes Part 2:

Back to this section I started on January 15 with the idea of starting your morning with a healthy breakfast. I wanted to give you plenty of time to work that in before introducing another idea. After writing about carrageenan and vitamin water I think the next idea has to be to reduce the intake of processed food. I can almost hear the collective groaning as I type this. I know it isn’t the easiest thing to do but it will have a huge impact on your health. Don’t believe me? Pull something out of your refrigerator or pantry and read the ingredient list. I will almost guarantee it you includes some chemical word that you can’t pronounce and don’t know that it means (unless you are a chemist). I am not a medical professional but it can’t be good to ingest a chemical cocktail every day. Humans weren’t designed to consume artificial food.

Corporate America has taken something natural, food, and turned it into “food-like substances”. It looks like food, it smells like food but it has been chemically altered making it not natural. When we initially gave up processed food it was difficult mostly because I needed to make more things rather than buying them. However once you get into the habit it really isn’t that difficult. Also now when I take a bite or sip of something processed it takes like the chemical concoction that it is. It never tasted like that to me before, I suppose my taste buds were used to it. But now processed food tastes vile to me.

I would suggest you start by removing the processed food you consume the most and substitute something natural for it. If you are huge diet soda drinker switch to water or tea. If you eat a lot of processed faux meat switch to beans and tofu or learn to make your own veggie burgers or seitan. By removing the thing you consume the most you will have the biggest impact on your health.

Happy Thoughts:

With all the snow we had I spent Thursday at home as you might have guessed. It was a good a day for me and here is what I am thankful for today:

• Thursday was a mostly me type of day. Sometimes you need to pamper yourself to recharge your batteries. I had a relaxing day which included exercising, listening to instrumental jazz, talking on the phone with friends, and a nice long soak in a hot bath with sea salt and essential oils. Doesn’t it just sound like heaven? ;-)

• I loved playing with my new kitchen gadget. I am totally a gadget type of girl so anytime I get a new toy I am in heaven. I am very pleased by how well it worked and love the self clean feature which was a very pleasant surprise.

• I was grateful that Dan made it to work and back this week safely and without incident. There were many travel horror stories which made me very thankful he wasn’t one of them.

• It was also wonderful to be one of the homes that didn’t lose power in the storm. I heard Friday morning that 80,000 in DC are still without power. It made me appreciate that ours very rarely goes out.

• Dan liked the combination of BBQ and salsa that I sent in his lunch for dipping his okara and oat sliders into. This is probably our new favorite sauce of the moment. I love coming up with new sauce ideas especially one that is super quick like this one. *happy dance*

Signing out:

Friday was a busy day but also a good one. Dan even ended up coming home from work earlier than usual. We spent a nice relaxing evening catching up on season 6 of "Criminal Minds" that we had recorded but hadn’t watched. It was a good way to spend the evening.

Talk to you again tomorrow. I hope you are having a great start to the weekend.

Okara and Oat Sliders & Sesame and Lemon Dipping Sauce

When we got up Wednesday morning we found a few inches of snow. So much for the predictions of the national weather service who said we would have rain overnight. You would think they would get it right a couple of hours before the “weather event”. Sometimes I have no idea why I check the weather forecast. Needless to say having snow on the ground in the morning made me especially happy that Dan had gone to Costco Tuesday night.

One of our Christmas presents from “the kids” was a book on tea. Aimee and Michael know how much we love our tea which is the reason for the book. It contains a lot of information about tea but most important to me is that it talks about the health benefits of many tea additions and gives recipes for tea blends. Reading about all blends in the book has me experimenting with blends of my own. My latest blend includes: sencha green tea, fresh lemon grass, cardamom, cinnamon, and clove. This was a good blend that even Dan liked. If you like experimenting with tea flavors give it a try. It is a good use for the dark green portions of lemon grass that you usually throw away. I used the lemon grass that I trimmed from my plant and had stored in the freezer.

Dan had a bowl of oatmeal with wild blueberries, ground flaxseeds, cinnamon, powdered ginger, ground cardamom a pinch of stevia and roughly chopped walnuts.

I had my breakfast after Dan has left for work and decided that I wanted to have leftover soup from last night. I was in the mood of something savory and since we had so much soup in the refrigerator that seemed like a good idea.

My lunch was okara and oat sliders with a little sesame, lemon, garlic and cumin sauce and salsa. These have become a new staple at our house. I have made them three times since this weekend. It is more of method than a recipe but that should tell you how easy it is. I measured but you will probably have different proportions. I will explain it below:

Okara and Oat Sliders
Makes 4 – 6 servings

Ingredients:

okara from 1 cup of dry soybeans (what is leftover over from making soymilk)
2 cups oats, dry
2 tablespoon minced dehydrated onion
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 ½ teaspoons paprika
¼ teaspoon ground mustard
2 cloves garlic, grated or finely minced
freshly ground pepper, to taste
no-salt seasoning, to taste

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line a half sheet pan with silpat, parchment paper or easy release aluminum foil and set aside.

Combine the okara and as much oatmeal as is necessary to firm up the mixture. I added it ½ cup at a time and stirred until it would hold its shape. How much oatmeal you need to add will be a function of how wet/dry your okara is. I used the dried minced onion to also help absorb the liquid in the okara. Now add seasonings that you like to taste. Be careful with salt as the burgers will become saltier as they dry out during baking.

Now use a small disher (in essence an ice cream scoop for cookies) so create equal size small balls. Roll the balls in your hands and press lightly so they are flat top and bottom or they will roll on the sheet tray. Form all the mixture into balls and place them on your sheet tray.

Bake the sliders until they are firm. Mine cooked for approximately 40 minutes but I didn’t check my oven temperature so that time could be off. I would suggest you check them after 25 minutes. Allow the sliders to cool for at least 15 minutes on the tray before trying to remove them. This will help them to stay together. They are less delicate when they have cooled just a little.

Nutritional Information:

I omitted the nutritional information since the nutrition stats on okara would just be a WAG (wild a.. guess) on my part. The servings are given as a range 4 for an entrée size and 6 for a lunch size.

Comments:

Dan has declared this the best use of okara yet. It is ridiculously easy and very easy to change or adapt to suit any cuisine. I have made in with Indian flavors, Italian and Mexican now and they all worked. They also freeze and reheat well in the microwave. When they come out of the oven they are more “crunchy” and are softer when reheated in the microwave.  If you want them to be a little "lighter" you can add a little baking soda to the mixture.

For dipping sauces I have used the sesame and lemon sauce that follows, salsa and a combination of salsa and bbq sauce. These little things are very versatile because of the mild character of the okara.

Sesame and Lemon Dipping Sauce
Serves 4 (approximately 2 ounce servings)

Ingredients:

¼ cup raw sesame seeds
½ cup water
1 lemon, juiced
2 cloves garlic
¼ teaspoon cumin seeds, to taste

Directions:

Combine in your high speed blender (I used my Vitamix) and blend until smooth. If you want a thicker sauce start with ¼ cup of water and slowly drizzle more into your blender (while running) until you like the texture. The sauce will become thicker as it chills. Refrigerate until needed.

Nutritional Information:

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 57.99
Calories From Fat (65%) - 37.74

Total Fat - 4.51g
Saturated Fat - 0.63g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 2.5mg
Potassium - 69.11mg
Total Carbohydrates - 3.94g
Fiber - 1.17g
Sugar - 0.4g
Protein - 1.77g

Comments:

This sauce has a lot of flavor but also adds a nice creamy mouthfeel. If you don’t like lemon and garlic this is not the sauce for you since both flavors are very prominent in this sauce. It works beautifully with the okara sliders but would also be a great salad dressing.

To accompany the okara sliders I also made myself a simple salad of romaine, fresh pineapple, cucumbers fresh strawberries and sliced almonds. Since the fruit in the salad was very juicy I opted not to use any salad dressing.

Around 4pm the predicted storm rolled through and was extremely weird. It isn’t often that you have lighting and thunder during a heavy snow fall. We got 11 inches of snow in less than 6 hours. At one point I could barely see across the street it was that heavy. Since it was a heavy wet snow 250,000 in DC lost power as did 100,000 in Baltimore and the surrounding counties. Thankfully we weren’t one of those power outages.

For dinner I made a salad that contained: romaine, cucumber, tomatoes, salsa and nut cheese. Now we are out of nut cheese, so it is time to make more. Knowing this I had macadamia nuts soaking before I went to bed last night. When I don’t do these things right away I forget.

No surprise Dan’s Dessert last night was strawberry banana soft serve. You would think he wouldn’t want that after spending thirty minutes last night shoveling once he got home. However he loves his dessert and was even hinting around for it within 30 minutes of coming inside. I am always surprised by how much he loves the stuff.

Happy Thoughts:

• Dan made it home safely in the crazy weather. I wasn’t thrilled that he left work at 7pm in our horrible weather but it was great that he made it home without incident.

• We weren’t part of the 350,000 people who lost power last night. That was a great thing and something I was very thankful for.

• It was also wonderful to have things mostly back to normal yesterday. Having my routine altered caused to appreciate the relative tranquility of my daily life.

• I have been enjoying playing around with making my own tea blends. It was great to receive the book from “the kids” that started me down that road. I am looking forward to coming up with more of my own blends.

• I found a nice cast iron tea pot warmer at Teavana that I ordered for Dan to use at his office. He has wanted something like this since I found the cast iron tea pot so I was happy to find it for him. I will let you know how well it functions once it arrives.

• The snow covered landscape is gorgeous this morning. I love to look at the snow from the comfort of my nice warm home. ;-) It reminds me a winter fairy tale outside.

Signing Out:

I have a few things to cross off my to-do list today. I need to make more soymilk, okara sliders, nut cheese, something for dinner and some house cleaning. It never ceases to amaze me that there are always things to do around the house. I am also starting to think about the garden and what I am going to plant this year. It will be nice to get back into the dirt.

I hope you have a great Thursday. It is almost time for another weekend. Woo hoo! Let’s hope this one is a more relaxing at our place. Talk to you again tomorrow.

Long Weekend Recap

Where did the last four days go? It started with a hot water heater which decided to leak so it had to be replaced. In addition to the plumbing problem Dan didn’t feel well on Sunday and Monday. To top things off I was up for 4 hours Monday night in the middle of the night. Tuesday Dan went back to work and I ran around trying to get caught up on the things I neglected the prior three days. Getting anything accomplished on less than 5 hours of sleep felt like a major undertaking. I should have taken a nap Tuesday but I was too busy. That wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did but at least I was able to cross a few things off my to-do list.  ;-) Tuesday night I slept for 10 hours which was a good indication that I was exhausted. I tried to post this last night but I was too tired to get it finished. This morning I feel great after catching up on my sleep.  *happy dance*

I am going to give you a quick recap of the food from the weekend. Sadly I was too busy to write anything down so there are no recipes. However I did make little okara sliders/bean burgers that Dan thinks are the best use of okara yet. That recipe/method will appear very soon along with the sesame/lemon sauce I made for dipping which was also very well received. Here is some of the food you missed with a quick description.

Breakfast for us was either savory oatmeal or green smoothies. The savory oats contained broccoli, nutritional yeast, ground flaxseeds, salsa, garlic, cumin and raw pumpkin seeds. The green smoothies were our usual with banana, kale, walnuts (for omega 3 and richness), cinnamon, powdered ginger and water or homemade soymilk.

For one meal I took the bean soup from the other night and changed it by added canned diced tomatoes. This is something I do often to change soup leftovers. I served it with a dollop of nut cheese.

Here are the okara and oat sliders with the sesame/lemon sauce. I have made these twice now because Dan really enjoyed them and I have a ready supply of okara from making soymilk everyday. I will post the method for these later this week. They are extremely simple to make and healthy too.

I also made a pot of vegetable barley soup with mushrooms. This type of soup is always a winner with my parents.

Since we hadn’t had Asian food in a while I also made a quick pot of soba noodle soup with broccoli, edamame, onions, garlic, ginger and finished it with black and white sesame seeds with dried ginger bits.

For another meal I used the mixed organic beans that I found at Hmart to make bean soup. I made the beans in the pressure cooker by cooking the beans for 10 minutes which was 2 minutes longer for the black eyed peas but less than the other beans called for. The result was that the black eyed peas disappeared but the other beans held there shape. Once the beans were cooked I added diced tomatoes, thyme, rosemary, oregano, minced garlic, hot crushed peppers (wet hots) and finished the soup with lemon zest and juice and fresh cilantro and served it over quinoa.

There was another bean soup that I made specifically for Dan since he loves red lentil and tomato soup. This time I used Indian seasonings and added turmeric, black mustard seed, coriander, ginger, and ajowan. I finished this soup with lime zest and juice and fresh cilantro and served it over brown basmati rice.

Of course we also had a number of salads. Some of the salads were made with veggies and others with fruit. I did make an interested dressing from reduced-fat almond butter, miso and apple cider that worked well with fruit. I will be making that again and measuring so I can share the proportions.

Increasing Water Intake:

Even with all the activity I have figured out how to keep my water intake up. I have started making my green tea double strength to decrease the overall amount of liquid while keeping my EGCGs where I want them. That seems to be working very well so far. I have been drinking the equivalent of 6 green teas and 6 mugs of water every day. With all the water rich food I eat (fresh produce and soup) that has been more than enough water.

Happy Thoughts:

Plumbing and body aches aside it hasn’t been the worst four day just hectic. Here are my happy thoughts today:

• I am happy to have the plumbing issue behind us. It is never fun to wait around for someone to come fix things.

• It is great that Dan only had some body aches, very minimal fever (less than 1 degree above normal) and was back to his usual self in less than 48 hours. It was also nice to have him home on Monday even if he did spend part of his sick day responding to work email. At least he was home so he could rest part of the day.

• I was fortunate to not need to go anywhere today given my sleep deprivation. Since I am one of those people that need their rest I would not have been a joy to be around today. ;-)

• The felines seemed to sense that “mommy” was cranky and exhausted Tuesday and gave me a wide berth to get to my to-do list. Wasn’t that sweet of them?

• I am grateful that Dan made a run to Costco for me Tuesday night since we are expecting snow and freezing rain Wednesday and Friday this week. That didn’t leave me much time to get there for groceries. Like always we were running low on many times. It is wonderful knowing I don’t need to drive in the inclement weather. I have been in Maryland so long I am turning into one of the weather wimps, LOL. I don’t like driving in this but it is pretty. ;-)

Signing out:

Hopefully today will be back to normal around here. *fingers crossed* I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the week. Unless something else unforeseen happens will talk to you again tomorrow. I need to make more soymilk which means I will okara to use again today. I should have the okara slider recipe up tomorrow.

Sorry for disappearing on you the last few days. It was definitely one of those periods of time where I felt like I was draining the swamp while being up to my behind in alligators. ;-) I hope the week is going much better for you.