Where there's smoke...

The other night, I made this recipe of pineapple and shrimp skewers.  Yum.  If you look at the recipe, you'll notice you use a broiler, and you can also use a broiler to cook french bread, which is what we decided to do for a side.  In the interest of just using one dish laziness, I laid foil on top of the rack and placed the bread on top instead of removing the rack and putting the bread down in the pan.

Unfortunately, this led to the bread being WAY to close to the flame and yes, the bread caught on fire.  I had flaming bread.  Fail.  In the theme of "waste not, want not", I cut off the burnt part and heated the rest up in our toaster oven.  For those of you that have never tried smoked bread, you shouldn't.  But we ate every bit.

But really, the pineapple and shrimp skewers were fabulous.

Lori as a decorator: FAIL

Blake and I bought our lovely home in June 2009 (or July- maybe I should check my blog).  Before this we rented, and I was constantly thinking how excited I would be when we finally had a home I could decorate.  And here it is, a blank slate before me!  Our house is fairly new, built in 2005, and has a great layout, and wonderfully neutral walls.  I could do ANYTHING I want.  So what do I do?  Nothing.  Because I'm too stinkin' indecisive, and feel like a move in any direction will have me on this path I can't reverse in case I change my mind.  I'm afraid to decorate.

The way a home is decorated says so much about the people that live there.  I adore home decor and home improvement sites, and I come up with tons of ideas about what to do in our house.  Painted walls, interesting art, homey touches.  I'm a creative person, gosh darnit.  I love color, and shapes, and texture, and the way a perfectly placed image can make you cry (just me?).  And yet, my house is boring.  Neutral.

However, I will say that a bit of this neutrality and indecisiveness has come in rather handy lately.  We recently did a little switcheroo in our house.  Our former game room/ formal dining is now Blake's office.  Blake's former office is now our guest room, and our former guest room is now my photography studio!  We had talked since the day we moved in about buying a futon for Blake's office, but never got around to it.  Good thing as we now have no place for a futon.  We JUST purchased curtains for the guest room, but hadn't purchased anything for the office.  Good thing, as we just purchased the same curtain rod and moved the curtains into the new room and have a rod in my studio begging for curtains (won't that be a fun decision?)

What I'm saying is, it's been a good thing so far I wasn't super decisive.  But, seeing what a difference curtains in one room made, I'm motivated to move forward.  Plus, I'm pretty thrifty, so for the most part, decor decisions will not be breaking the bank in the Crockett casa.  If I change my mind, it's ok.  Explaining to Blake I've changed my mind... well, it's a good thing he loves me:)

Five hours later...

I realized today that my photography website, loricrockett.com, has been unable to receive comments the entire time it's been active.  After a lot of investigating and trying everything I could think of, the only possible solution left was to update my theme to the newest version.  And so, I did.  My comments worked, but, unfortunately, I lost pretty much ALL of the edits I had done on my site style-wise, over the last two months.  Hours, upon hours of work, gone.

When I first started the website, I had about two minutes of programming knowledge- just enough to know I didn't know anything about it, and really had no desire to learn.  However, in an attempt to be cost effective, I attempted to educate myself.  So, what did I learn? 

Everything works together, and it's easy to screw it all up.


Fortunately, the more you do something, the faster you get at it, and the more you understand about how things work together.  Tonight I was able to fix (for the most part) in five hours what took me two weeks to do initially.  And, I actually have some understanding of what I did, rather than just trying 363538 things, finding something I thought worked,  never being able to figure out what I did, and realizing two months later I did it wrong.  I'm not an expert, but more and more, I think I'm learning.


Now if I could just figure out how to program my house to clean itself:)

Sometimes I Do Dumb Stuff.

I did something really dumb this morning.  And it's going to cost a lot of money to fix.  It invloved my car, and Blake's truck.  No one is hurt, but my car is pretty smashed.  So is my pride.

I highly reccomend always checking behind you before backing your car out of the garage.

Lesson Learned.