I HATE Thieves

So, something horrible happened this week. Someone broke into my locker at the gym and stole my wedding rings, credit cards, and driver's license. I go to the gym to lift weights for 30 minutes every day at lunch. As usual, I changed into my workout clothes, stowed my rings in the inside zipper pocket of my purse, locked my locker, and went about my workout. When I got back upstairs to change back into my work clothes, I noticed first that my rings were missing. I thought maybe they had fallen into the bottom of my purse, so I searched there...nothing. My heart was starting to beat a little quickly at this point.

For some reason the next thing I did, without even thinking, was to open my wallet. It was becoming clear to me at that point what had happened. All the slots where I keep my credit cards and driver's license were empty. I just kind of stood there for a minute, not understanding what was going on. I mean, my locker was freaking LOCKED this entire time. I even had to unlock it when I came back to get dressed, so they locked it back when they were done. They didn't cut the lock or break it in any way, which means they either must have picked it or watched me for days and memorized my combination. But I think I would have noticed someone hovering behind me staring at my hand as I put in the combination! Apparently combination locks are easy to pick, though, so that's probably what happened. But I definitely think I was targeted. I mean, a ton of women do not put locks on their lockers at ALL. They just close the doors to the locker...I often open 3 or more lockers each day before finding an empty one I can use. Yet nobody else was robbed that day...only me. Also, since they didn't take my entire purse, but only the things they wanted out of it (they ignored my camera and iPod), I think they have had their eye on me for a while.


I have tried to look on the bright side of this situation, because things could have been a lot worse. The thief who has been watching me could have ambushed me in the parking garage and shot me to get what they wanted. (Maybe a bit dramatic, but this kind of thing does happen every day in Dallas). So now, with my second anniversary a few weeks away, Jeff and I have to design my rings all over again and wait for them to be made. Luckily the insurance company is not dragging its feet and is already in the process of completing our claim, so it shouldn't take too long.

What really pisses me off about this situation is the complete disregard for people's belongings. How does a person come to the conclusion that it is OK to take something that does not belong to them?! I can cancel credit cards and replace my driver's license, but my rings were one of a kind. Jeff picked out the stones and designed my ring himself, and it was on my hand the day we got married. That can't be replaced. I typically have a lot of patience with and faith in people, but this is something I just can't understand or tolerate. It makes me SO angry to think about it. I don't hold out much hope that the police will find whoever did this, but it sure would be nice if they did. The detective is going to check the videos from the gym entrance and the gas station where they used my credit card 10 minutes before I discovered the theft. He is also going to check pawn shops for my rings...but again, it's a needle in a haystack! UGH...it has been a crappy week.

New Year, Neglected Blog

Well, if one of my New Year's Resolutions was to post more regular blog updates, I am failing miserably! Actually, I didn't make any resoutions, but I do intend to be a better blogger. Starting now.

The year 2010 has actually been pretty eventful so far. Dallas got record snow fall during Valentine's weekend, and OF COURSE, we missed it. We were on a cruise to Cozumel with our friends Alli and John. Granted it would have sucked to endure the 2-day power outage, but I would have loved to play in the snow like a little kid! But the cruise wasn't too shabby either. We ate like absolute PIGS, enjoyed many relaxing hours reading on the ship's deck, and found a deserted beach in Cozumel where we racked up such a large bar tab that we almost got thrown in Mexican jail for inability to pay (not really, but the bar dude wouldn't take our credit card until he realized we truly did not have the cash to cover the bill)!

Work has absolutely SUCKED lately. Not that it was ever incredibly exciting, but now we are being micromanaged to the point of near insanity. We moved into a new office, which should have been a big positive since our last building was literally falling apart at the seams. I am still surprised that I never plummeted to my death in the faulty elevator shafts. Our new place is much nicer, but unfortunately there's a severe space issue. I am not sure what happened, but I suspect it has something to do with being too cheap to rent enough space for the number of employees. The result: two people at a 1-person desk. Sit me 4 inches (literally) from another person for 9 hours a day, and I tend to become a real bitch! I'm sorry, but I don't like ANYONE enough to sit on top of them all day long. Add that to being completely disrespected by most of the management and it makes for one heck of a work environment! But oh well, this job allows me some flexibility with my work hours (I can come in at 7:00 and leave by 3:00 or 4:00 if I want to have my afternoons free). Not to mention I make pretty decent money for doing an incredibly simple job where I can listen to audio books all day. I have become very well-read over the past 11 months!


This is what I feel like at work most days: "that's the last straw."

In other news, I have started volunteering with an animal rescue organization called Paws in the City. I work at adoptions on weekends, helping to find new homes for these poor abandoned dogs. It's pretty fun; I love meeting all the different dogs and seeing their personalities. Of course it breaks my heart to know that many of them may not find homes. Jeff and I have been throwing around the idea of finding a doggie companion to join our family. I grew up with dogs my ENTIRE life and really love the happiness they bring to a home. Jeff has never had a dog, so he is more skeptical. They ARE a lot of responsibility, but I figure if we are going to be having kids in the near future, we might as well get used to that! We just have to find a dog that works well with Bella. She is our first baby, so she calls the shots. We won't bring home a dog that will terrorize her! So, we have to be incredibly picky, which is something that everyone should do when adopting a pet in the first place! We actually brought home a temporary "foster dog" for a couple days a few weeks ago. It was kind of a test run to see how things would go. Plus, Paws in the City wanted to see how this dog behaved in a home since she had been picked up as a stray and little was known about her. We called her Kira, and she was a sweetie. However, her severe separation anxiety was a problem - it was clear to us that she needed a home where there was one stay-at-home person and/or other dogs to keep her company. Also, she was a little too curious about Bella for our liking! We couldn't feel comfortable leaving them alone together in the house.


Here's Kira, our temporary foster dog, checking out the kitchen.

I guess that's about it from the Prudhommes at the moment. Be watching (all 3 of you readers) for a new blog project coming soon. It's called Six Degrees of Supperation, and it is a cooking blog that I will be contributing to with a group of my girl friends. We all love cooking blogs, trying new recipes, and sharing them and our success (or failure) stories with each other. So very soon we will have an online forum to do that, and other people can read it too!

NYC Pics

Here are some of the pics we took in NYC:

Bella helped me pack the night before!

The Jackie O Reservoir in Central Park

It was a cold cold day in Central Park! We were so bundled that we would start sweating anytime we went inside!

A pretty and (miraculously) people-free bridge in Central Park

Loved this tunnel in Central Park - it reminded me of tiled tunnels and walkways in Italy. Can you tell the park was my favorite part of the city?!

The Christmas tree at Rockefeller - so pretty!

The craziness of Times Square on a Friday night - eek! This was around 11:00 p.m. after seeing the Lion King (wish I could have taken pics of that, but, sadly, it's prohibited)

Just a small part of the Santa herd at Santa-Con!

A few more of the VERY jolly Santas

We just had to try some Magnolia Cupcakes. Bit of wiki trivia for you: Magnolia is the bakery credited with really starting the "cupcake craze" that began in the 1990s and still continues!

A Lego Chewbacca at FAO Schwarz! This store was pure insanity - case in point: a $1200 stuffed giraffe at the entrance. We saw piano dancers perform a show on the giant floor piano from the movie Big, and we LOVED the muppet workshop where you can make your own Muppet...you can customize everything from the color and style of hair to eye shape to clothes to skin...so fun! Too bad we didn't have time to make one!

The ceiling at Grand Central Station had a very festive greeting for us.

Trinity Church is one of the oldest churches in the city. When the twin towers fell, debris rained down on it, knocking over a giant sycamore tree that somehow managed to avoid destroying any of the old headstones, some of which date back to the 1700s.

Alexander Hamilton is buried here at Trinity Church.

Ground Zero at the World Trade Center. They are clearing the way for the memorial, which will someday look like this.

The Concrete Jungle

Hey all, happy holidays! I can't believe Christmas is right around the corner...I feel so unprepared! I have only done a tiny bit of Christmas shopping, all of it online. I went to the mall one day in early December and now absolutely refuse to go back until after New Years!

Jeff and I just returned from a long weekend in NYC!! It was my very first time to visit the city, and it was a great experience! Jeff was the ultimate tour guide since he lived there for a bit in the early 2000s. We stayed in a hotel near Times Square, so we were right in the middle of all the holiday action. The tree at Rockefeller Center was gorgeous...I was amazed that it was actually a real tree, I have never seen a tree so huge! Being up there during the holiday season is a great way to get into the Christmas spirit. All the windows and storefronts were bursting with decorations - there were literally lines that you had to stand in OUTSIDE THE STORES just to pass by the larger stores' Christmas window displays. Craziness!

Jeff and I are not "touristy" people. You'll never catch us on a tour bus, and we rarely find anything worth standing in line more than half an hour. So we spent our weekend as if we were NYC residents, which is how we love to travel. We would rather spend a day poking around on our own than being swept into the masses of tourists frequenting all the usual sights. Since it was in the 20s and very windy,the last place I wanted to be was on top of the Empire State Building or crammed onto the top deck of a wind-whipped ferry on the way to the Statue of Liberty! We happily admired both of those sights from afar. Of course we couldn't get away with doing absolutely NO touristy stuff since it was New York at Christmas! So we gawked at the lights and chaos of Times Square, saw a Broadway show (more on that later), and took in the holiday cheer at Rockefeller Center.

~Here are a few of the highlights~

Animals and Quasi-Animals:

We saw some wildlife in Central Park. We were some of the only idiots crazy enough to wander deep into the park on a day with a wind chill of 18, so it was actually very peaceful and quiet. They have jet black squirrels there, which was so cool! Never seen the likes of that before! Also some beautiful mallards and cardinals. And a very strange guy thrashing around in the leaves while his friend photographed the incident...and a guy having a one-man dance party on top of a rock - I think those count as wildlife too!

We saw the Lion King on Broadway, which was spectacular. I totally geeked out and teared up during the first scene because it was so visually amazing. The woman who plays Rafiki should win whatever award goes to stage performers a million times over.

We saw NYC Subway rats...actually pretty cute for rodents who run around in wet subway refuse all day!

Food & More Food:

We ate in Little Italy our very first night in the city. As many of my friends know, I have a small obsession with the mafia, so I was super excited to go to Little Italy, even though that really makes no sense because it's not like you just walk around and see "the mob" loitering on the corners (thank goodness)! But I guess I just watched too many episodes of the Sopranos! Mostly I was super excited to go there for the food. And rightfully so! We ate at a little place called Pellegrino's, and it was delish! Jeff had the best veal dish I've ever tasted, and I had some awesome hand-made ravioli. Although we were totally stuffed after that meal, we couldn't resist stopping in at Caffe Palermo with its signs boasting "Best Cannoli in NYC." Inside we found out that the claim wasn't empty. There were pics of celebrities (largest pic was Ryan Seacrest) with the pastry chef and tons of awards on the walls. I had a chocolate cannoli and oh-my-gah it was AMAZING! Literally, I will be thinking about this cannoli experience for years to come.

We ate at an amazing restaurant called ilili (cute, a palindrome); it was Lebanese and awesome! It was a lot like other Greek/Mediterranean food, but with its own unique flavors. It was also served mezze style, which is basically like Spanish tapas - small dishes to share. Warm eggplant, chicken shish taouk, duck shawarma...why oh why don't we have anything like this in Dallas?!

We ate not once, but TWICE at a lovely establishment called 53th & 6th Halal Cart. Street Meat at its finest! This cart has become famous among online food bloggers, and Yelp writers raved about it. So, naturally we had to try it. We stood in a line about 25 people deep in the freezing cold after seeing the Lion King to try this place. You get the choice of a "plate" or a "sandwich". Plate = foil bowl stuffed with lettuce, rice, lamb, chicken, and white sauce (basically tzatziki sauce). Sandwich = choice of meat with lettuce, wrapped in a giant pita and drenched in white sauce. It was definitely not healthful and totally made us feel like bloated sacks of dung after eating it, but it was worth it! The experience was half the fun anyway. We visited the good ole cart again after a LATE night out with one of Jeff's friends who lives in the city...several cocktails later, the cart suddenly seemed like a good idea again!

Checking off the Must-Dos:

We visited Battery Park, the tip of the island, where we were able to view the Statue of Liberty and look out at Jersey and the tunnels connecting the cities.

We walked to the financial district and looked at Ground Zero at the World Trade Center. It is still a huge wreck, though not with debris anymore. Now they are clearing the way for new buildings and a memorial. It was mind-blowing to see the work still being done to repair the buildings surrounding the place where the towers fell. Very sobering, and a very necessary part of my visit to the city.

We ran into a gaggle of drunken Santas that lightened the mood after the World Trade Center. It was a happy coincidence that we were in NYC during Santa-Con, which can only be described as a disorganized, hilarious street parade and pub crawl of idiots dressed in Santa suits, elf costumes, wrapped up like packages, decked out with tinsel, etc. We died laughing when about 75 Santas emerged from a Subway tunnel in the financial district and started heading for a strip of bars to meet up with their bretheren. We saw Santas wearing no pants, Santas peeing in alleyways, Santas on stilts, and, randomly, a fat dude dressed in a giant panda suit (no idea)! Hilarity!!!

We took a walk through Jeff's old neighborhood and saw his old apartment building, wandered into his old grocery store, and ate at his favorite corner pizza place. Wish I could have lived there with him - we would have had a blast!

We strolled through the Village and window-shopped at the many artsy boutiques in that part of town. I loved this area of the city...it seemed to move at a less frenetic pace. We also stumbled across Bleecker Street Pizza, which was voted by Food Network to have the best pizza in NYC. Since we only ate pizza twice on our visit, I can neither confirm or deny this claim, but I can say that it was very tasty! On that same afternoon, we braved the line at Magnolia Bakery to try their famous cupcakes. We sampled a chocolate and a red velvet, and they were definitely yummy, although I do rank them below my favorite Dallas bakery - Society Bakery (way to go, Society!)

In all, it was an awesome trip! I love exploring new places, and although I could explore NYC for years and years and still find new things, I felt like I got a great overview in the few days I had there.

Pics coming soon in separate post...

Decorating for Christmas

Last night we put up the tree in our big front window...isn't it lovely?



Our tree is 9 feet tall and VERY heavy! We got it two years ago at Target about a week before Christmas. It was the floor model, so we got it for only $60 since it had been used as a display and came without a box!! It has some minor issues, such as a few strings of its pre-wired lights that refuse to come on, but considering how cheap it was, we think it's pretty awesome! It took both Jeff and I to haul it into the house. We had to go down the driveway with it and through the front door so we didn't have to dodge furniture. Bella was very excited for the tree to come out; she likes to snuggle up under it and pretend she is in the wilderness. As soon as we took the tree out of its storage bag and before we could even put on the tree skirt, she crawled under it!



Today we're going to put lights on the outside of our house for the first time. We'll have to borrow our neighbors' extension ladder because our Tudor-style roofline is pretty tall and steep. Hopefully we won't have any Chevy Chase-like moments...at least the roof isn't icy! It's actually so warm that we will probably be wearing short sleeves - some Christmas weather!

Our First Thanksgiving!

I realize that I am a horrible blogger and most people have given up on checking for new material on here...I've been so busy lately that I haven't even thought about it. No excuses! I will get better.

Anyway, this year Jeff and I did Thanksgiving at our house for the first time! It was just us and Jeff's parents, who came in from Austin. Jeff and I did all the cooking ourselves, so we were hoping that our first foray into Thanksgiving food turned out OK. And it was MORE than just OK...everything was delicious! Here's what was on the menu - I'll link to the recipes I found online:

Spiral Ham cooked on the grill
Cornbread Dressing (Jeff's family recipe)
Mac & Cheese - not a diet dish, but I can't explain to you how good this recipe is!
Green Bean Casserole - a healthier version, no canned goods!
Cranberry Salad - recipe courtesy of my friend Erin
Pecan Pie (Jeff's family recipe)
4-Layer Chocolate Surprise (my family recipe)

Needless to say, that was WAY too much food for four people...so we ate to the point of misery then complained about it. Then it was time for the A&M-UT game, and we gave them a great fight! I was alone in a room of UT fans, but Jeff switched sides for me since he has no alliance to Texas other than having lived in Austin a few years ago.

Today I'll set up the Christmas tree with Nicole (my mother-in-law) while Jeff and his dad go fishing. As much as I like shopping, there's just NO WAY I would go to any of the Black Friday sales. I don't like people nearly enough to deal with that...things could get ugly!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and took time to truly give thanks. I am so thankful for my amazing family who I missed very much this year (but will see at Christmas). I am also very thankful for Jeff's family who have become part of my family - I couldn't ask for better in-laws! I am SO thankful for my fabulous group of friends - near and far - who I am so lucky to have in my life. And of course I am indescribably thankful for my wonderful husband. We've been married over a year and a half now, and every day we become a better team. He's taught a headstrong, independent girl that it's OK to actually need someone else. He makes me laugh every day, and I am thankful that we share the same weird sense of humor!

Now let's get ready for Christmas!

Return of the 1980s Toys!

I recently saw a survey on Facebook that asked you to name your favorite childhood toys. A friend of mine had done it and posted her answers. I noticed she had a Chubble on there, which I found hilarious! I had a Chubble as well and loved him dearly! He was a little Star Wars-esque creature wearing a hooded robe, and he made a silly electronic giggling sound and his eyes lit up. It sounds maniacal, but really it wasn't.

Anyway, the point is that it got me interested in all my old toys that I used to love as a child. I was quite sure somewhere online I could find people buying and selling all the things I used to play with when I was a kid. In particular, I wanted to see if I could find a stuffed dog that is quite literally my most prized possession. If my house was burning, I would immediately run to my closet to grab Sweet Puppy (yes, this is his name...I was a creative child). He is an adorable, cuddly stuffed dog with brown fur, chocolate colored ears, and thin felt eyebrows above hard plastic eyes. I must have gotten him when I was tiny because I can't remember ever NOT having him. He went everywhere with me when I was a kid. Once I set him down and accidentally left him in a Mervyn's (ooooh, Mervyn's, the classiest of department stores). After my mom and I had left, I panicked and cried, thinking I would never see my Sweet Puppy again. Of course my mom, being the awesome mother that she is, immediately raced back to the store so we could search. SP was safe and happy in the store's lost and found, and I never misplaced him again!! And when I got too old to tote him around, he never got shoved up into the attic with all my other toys; he has always held a special place of honor somewhere in my room or house. Currently he resides on a shelf in my closet with Jeff's Kermit the Frog.

ANYWAY, long story short...I found him on eBay by searching "1980s stuffed dog"! Apparently the brand name is "Dakin Drooper," and there is quite a market for the little guys online. I saw some upwards of $60-$90!!! They all looked to be in great shape, too. It made me wonder - do people just buy up random toys to keep for decades, never allowing their children to play with them, thinking they may one day be valuable? I can see that with some toy that was all the rage, like the ridiculous Furby or Tickle Me Elmo, but a random brown stuffed dog? Strange!

I am glad I held on to Sweet Puppy, but I would never EVER sell him. For one, he would only fetch about 50 cents. His eyeballs faded long ago, and I colored them on with a permanent marker. But to me he is perfect.

Here is the e-Bay version of my little friend and a link to the page in case you just can't resist owning one yourself: http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-1973-Dakin-DROOPER-Dog-10%22--BROWN-PLUSH_W0QQitemZ120324825607QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting