Painting and Office Rearranging

So yesterday was a productive day!  We finished painting our spare bedroom (remember that project from like 2 months ago?); I happened upon an extra can of paint in our garage and actually did a little dance upon finding it.  Yes!  Free paint!  (Well, kinda.)  Anyway the spare bedroom is now el completo, which is nice because now we can focus on getting the shade up and trying our hand at crown molding.  Oh yeah.  I'm totally there.

Since I was running around covered in paint I also decided to paint the bathroom (it's been sitting primed for a month or so; for me the hard part about painting is just getting set up.  Once I get started I'm fine, but actually dragging out the plastic tarp and taping things down just seems like so much effort..) The green is softer than I remember it, but I like it a lot.  Reminds me of mint.  A and I have decided we want to pull out that vanity (what is that little dangly part over the toilet, anyway?!) and put in a cream one with a matching mirror (still can't agree on whether we want rectangle or oval) with light purple accents (towels, soap dispenser).  Of course, the first step is just getting all the walls to match (trickier than it sounds).

We also rearranged our office, which always felt a little off (but since neither of us are decorators we didn't know how to fix it).  Turns out, it was the layout that was offending us - the computer was tucked against the wall and the drafting board was on the opposite wall, so if you wanted to work at the drafting board then look something up at the computer you had to do a complete 180 to look at the computer, then do another 180 to get back to your work.

Chickens and bathrooms

Today I tried something that has scared me for years (both because it's kinda gross and looks hard)... cutting up a whole chicken!  On a random sidenote, I kinda like the smell of raw chicken.  It makes me want to sink my teeth into a steak (yeah I don't understand me, either).

This is my second chicken (out of three).  Normally, I would throw this little guy into our crockpot with some seasonings and in the evening have a fall-off-the-bone roasted chicken.  This time, I'm performing surgery.

I've already found I like starting with the legs, the bigger bones are easier to find versus the wings.  The video I watched advised breaking the legs and cutting the skin, then cutting between the two bones (kind of like a ball and cup) to separate the legs.  One of the worst parts about doing this is the sound of bones breaking and shifting around inside the flesh (seriously).  In this photo I've broken both legs and cut through the skin so all I have to do is find where the ball joints meet and cut through that (I love these knives)

 No legs!  The process is essentially repeated for the wings (find the ball joint, which I totally misjudged the first time and ended up with a super short wing).  I'm planning to use the thighs and drumsticks for fried chicken and the chicken breasts for sweet and sour chicken, but have no plans for the wings... maybe we could make some impromptu buffalo wings?

 Now we're left with just the chicken carcass.

I flipped the bird over (breast side down) and broke through a ribcage with the scissors, then split the breasts apart and deboned them.  Nice and easy (mostly).  This photo looks like something out of Resident Evil.

 Now this looks more like chicken I'm used to seeing!  I'm thrilled - I've never been brave enough to try deboning a chicken (always afraid I'd mess it up or chop off my hand somehow), but it's actually not too terrible and by the third one I was slicing pretty quick.

I have realized that while I always thought I'd have an edge if a zombie apocalypse ever occurred (because I spent so much of my youth playing zombie videogames); this dismembered chicken has made me realize that all I would do if confronted with a zombie would be to run for the hills screaming like a small child.


Sooo... since I don't have access to the internet on Monday but I don't want to miss a day writing, I'm going to just start double posting on Tuesday (writing on normal like Monday then uploading it the next day).

Jump for the post from Monday, 7/23/12

Pie, pretzels and lost dogs

Our guests!

We took our dogs for a walk yesterday and came back to our street only to have another dog run up to us and follow us back to our house.  We decided we'd leash him up (he had no collar) and walk him down the street to see if anyone was looking for a dog.  Which is how we met the second one (on the left).  The lesson I choose to take away from this is if you try to help, you will just end up doing more work.  (They were so cute, though.  They both belonged to one guy who was running up and down the street looking worried.)

So I'm looking back at our weekend and we... actually had a pretty busy one.

We took the giant piece of glass off of the hallway bathroom, for starters.

Surprise!  Yes those walls disgust me, too...

Then we went to a nearby farmer's market, which was totally rad.  I loooove farmer's markets.  Know what I don't love?  Ten thousand strollers.  Everywhere we went there were strollers.  It was stroller city.

But that's forgivable, because they had giant pretzels and cupcakes:

Also on the table: I had no internet yesterday but I did write a post!  It's after the jump...