meat, cleaning, etc.

big day of cooking and cleaning. i love tuesdays. usually i don't have any actual commitments, no babysitting or piano lessons. and this week i'm not watching blake as far as i know at this point...i wanted to sleep in this morning because my sinuses are extremely...clogged...? for lack of a better word...and i'm not sure i slept very good last night as a result.

however, i remembered that i am supposed to take a crockpot of ham and beans to aaron & jessica's tonight (to eat while we watch the star of bethlehem video) so i had to drag myself out of bed with dave and pull ham off the bone of a ham hock and get it all going in the slow cooker. lovely early morning job, pulling ham off the bone, let me tell ya. but i think it's going to be a lot better than the ham i normally put in my bean soup.

mom recently blessed us with over 80 lbs (yes, 80 lbs, we weighed the cooler and that's how much it was) of meat from her freezer. she had to get rid of a bunch of meat to make room for some new stuff. so i pretty much won't have to buy meat all year (with the exception of some chicken now and again), as far as i can tell. it included about 28 lbs of ground beef, 5 ham steaks, a ham hock (which i'm using today), a bunch of bacon, 3 packages of brats, roasts, tons of stew meat, cube steaks, and much more that i can't even remember... and then we already had the 2 deer (stew meat, ground meat, sausage, roasts). and scrapple. and sweet lebanon bologna. it's awesome. i'm so thankful.

anyways, my goal today is to try to bring some order out of the chaos of junk in our house. everything from the laundry room cupboards and closet has been displaced into tubs. and they're haphazardly tossed around the great room. so i want to label them and stack them so things inside them can be somewhat easily found when needed. yesterday afternoon i made some really great progress on the office. i actually filed a bunch of paperwork. actually read some letters that i'd just tossed in a pile at one point thinking i'd deal with them later. one i received november 12 and was supposed to respond to by dec 12. oops. turns out by not responding i made a decision already. so that was sort of already taken care of. nice. and i finally got some info turned into the mortgage company for the refinance. hopefully we will close soon. i'm not sure if i ever did follow up about the appraisal. it came in low but the underwriters went ahead and assumed a higher sale price and said the loan could go through after all.

i would also like to make some other food today. granola, maybe banana bread or cookies, and thinking also about a pecan pie or pumpkin pie. but our group doesn't really want dessert tonight due to some of them being on diets, which i totally understand. although i intended not to while pregnant, i guess i'm sort of in the process of "letting myself go" right now. due to not feeling good/energetic/etc. i have worked out (WALKED) maybe once since i found out the good news. not good. totally not what i wanted. i guess i will add working out to my to do list for today. or maybe i'll count moving tubs as a workout. because it will be. considering how slothful i've been.