By popular demand (of two whole people), here is an blog update for you. Let's see... what's been going on... I am trying to get my act together with my new callings as Enrichment Committee member and leader of our ward's cooking group.
This month, I was put in charge of making arrangements for the nursery on Enrichment Night, which involved recruiting some Young Women to watch the anklebiters and planning a snack and an activity for said anklebiters to do while waiting for their mommies to exhaust their creative juices and their need for gossip. :o) This seems like a fairly easy task, but I was mildly intimidated by it, since I've never done it before. With a little planning, however, everything seemed to fall into place pretty easily. On September 23rd, the night of Enrichment, I showed up to the activity to find that only one Young Woman showed up to man the nursery, so I then had to volunteer myself to take up the slack, which actually turned out to be a good thing, because I had a total blast! I wish I could have taken some pics, but alas, I don't think the mothers of the ward would necessarily approve of me posting photos of their kids on my personal blog anyway. But they were so dang cute and I had such a blast coloring with the little girls! As the official activity, however, I made some peanut butter playdough, which was a big hit. Here is the recipe, for anyone interested:
18-oz jar creamy peanut butter
6 tablespoons honey
3/4 cup non-fat dry milk (FYI, I added way more than this.)
Mix ingredients together, using varying amounts of dry milk for desired consistencies. Knead it with fingers, forming into desired shapes, adding other foods like M&M's, peanuts, marshmallows, or dried fruit for eyes, mouths, etc.
Anyway, so glad I can check that whole thing off my list. Next, though, comes the cooking group planning. I scrambled yesterday to recruit a sister in the ward to teach the lesson and another to host it at her house, so now we've got that settled. Sister Merrill will be teaching the sisters how to make homemade noodles, which (hopefully) should be interesting. How we're going to pull this off with a $10 budget, though, is another matter entirely... If y'all have any suggestions, I'm all ears.
Let's see... what else, what else? I've battling some pretty crazy migraines lately, as I have since I was 12, but they've been getting especially bad and causing me to miss work, so I knew I needed to finally listen to my mom and my husband and go see a doctor finally. So I did so exactly a week ago, and the doctor prescribed me some new medication that lowers my blood pressure, thus heading off migraines before they can begin. So far, it seems to be working pretty well. Not 100%, as I'm still having to supplement that with Advil, but at least I'm down to one dose per day (as opposed to the usual 2 or 3). The doctor also sent me to get a neck x-ray done, which showed that I have muscle spasms in my neck. He thought that that could be the cause of my headaches, so he referred me to a physical therapist, and I need to set up an appointment for that as well. I'm hoping and praying that this will help!
A big source of drama lately has been the gas shortage here in Georgia. I don't know what it's like in other states at the moment, but it is about reaching the crisis point now. Ever since Hurricane Ike down in Texas, we never know when and where to get gas. You can pass twelve gas stations and all of them will be out! Luckily I found some last week, which should last me through Friday, but after that, I don't know what I'm going to do. Part of the problem is that Georgia law requires that we have special low-emissions gas, so we can't just borrow gas from other states since their standards are different. Supposedly the state is going to lower their standards temporarily, but so far we haven't seen a change. My supervisors are considering letting some people start telecommuting from home a few days a week, which I think would be a huge blessing, so I'm crossing my fingers that I get chosen to do this.
That's all the news for now. Stay tuned, and I'll try to find some time to post some pics of our recent trip to Chattanooga, TN!
This next pic needs a little explanation. It's of me making some alterations to my shoe, which had broken before I walked into the restaurant (that'll teach me to buy from Payless). Using a pair of scissors I bummed off of one of the backoffice folks at Ruth's Chris, I just snipped the back straps off both shoes, converting them from slingbacks to mules, so that I wouldn't look like a total freak walking around later on. Thank goodness we were pretty much alone in the restaurant, so no one else noticed my strange little project.
The food was absolutely amazing. If you've ever been to this restaurant, you know what I'm talking about. We both ordered steaks that you could cut with a butter knife, and shared an order some steak fries between us. And while we ate, we enjoyed a tremendous view of Centennial Olympic Park from where we sat. We even got to see two just-married couples have their wedding photos taken amongst the greenery, which totally took us back to our own wedding day. It seems like it was just yesterday! 
