Category: Uncategorized

I’m a little short on time today, so why not share another recipe?  This one is really from Pharmgirl, who was kind enough to advise me on the ingredients list by phone as I strolled through the grocery store last night.

8 ounces penne pasta (the low-carb kind is good in this)

1/2 rotisserie chicken
1 zucchini, cut into 1/2" chunks

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 yellow squash, cut into 1/2" chunks

1 yellow or red pepper, diced

1 bundle of asparagus, cut diagonally into 2" segments

1-2 carrots, halved and sliced into thin ribbons

1 jar Ragu Light Parmesan Alfredo sauce

3 tablespoons pesto sauce

Grated parmesan to taste

Begin boiling water for noodles.  Heat olive oil in a good-sized frying pan, adding vegetables when ready. Remove bones and skin from chicken and tear into bite-sized chunks. Saute vegetables to desired tenderness, add pesto sauce and chicken, and continue sauteeing briefly.  Drain cooked noodles.  Add alfredo sauce to the vegetables and chicken and stir to warm sauce.  Combine sauce mixture with noodles, sprinkle with parmesan and serve.

This dish was was a big hit with my husband, and he’s rather picky.  It makes enough to feed about four people, so we had leftovers.

It’s never a good feeling when you wake up, look at the clock and realize you should ideally be at work already, or at least on the road. That happened to me this morning, so my blogging time is severely limited.

Last night, my husband and I finally returned the beer kegs from the party. We’d managed to break one of the taps, so there was an extra $60 down the drain. Actually, a lot of beer went down the drain, too. I ended up pouring out several gallons of the wheat beer to make the keg lighter. I’m afraid our friends just can’t drink the way they used to!

I’m reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and enjoying it immensely. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it, but it’s exactly the kind of book I like (well, one of the kinds of books I like).

I’ve noticed a lot of cool author websites lately. J.K. Rowling’s site is really awesome, too.

Perhaps someday I’ll write a few things of note and be able to launch something more sophisticated than AverageJane.com. First, though, I should get to work. Have a lovely weekend!

Here’s something fun for you digital camera buffs: a photo project called “Shoot Your Shelf.” Here’s my shelf. Just shoot a photo of a shelf in your home or office, not tidied or changed in any way, and send it in.

On my shelf, you’ll notice on the upper left, my bas-relief Mayan jaguar eating a human heart. In the middle is my Zen Alarm Clock, which proved to be a little too annoying for use as an actual alarm clock. On the upper right is a vase I found at a flea market. It’s a lovely, pastel, pearlescent scene of an elephant being savagely attacked by a tiger. The whole sensibility was so incongruous that I had to have it.

This entry at BoingBoing.net reminded me that I have never rounded up my packet of triops starter and created my own colony of freakish, super Sea-Monkeys. I immediately set about rectifying the situation, and have ordered the Smithsonian Prehistoric Sea Monsters kit to be delivered to my office.

I will, of course, report their progress once they arrive, although it may not be in as much detail as my enormous Sea-Monkey Journals project (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV, Part XV, Part XVI, Part XVII, Part XVIII, Part XIX, Part XX, Part XXI and Part XXII).

By the way, I realize this is the blog equivalent of when a TV show advertises a new episode but then shows a lame collection of clips instead. If it makes you feel any better, it took a long time to go through and link it all.

At least for a month, I’m back to work full-time as of today. That means less time for Average Jane, but better cashflow, which will be INCREDIBLY important once I get find out how much I owe in taxes this year. (It won’t be pretty.)

I meant to accomplish lots of stuff around the house this weekend, but I can’t seem to shake this cold/bronchitis/sinus infection/whatever I have. It’s looped back around to the sore throat stage in the last couple of days, so I’m making a point of disinfecting my toothbrush before each use, just in case. I apologize if you feel that’s TMI, but I come from a family where we played the “grossout game” at the dinner table. It’s made me a trifle less sensitive to the grossout threshholds of others.

Anyway, I didn’t clean up my office, which means I still have to hop over piles of papers to get to my desk. A big pile of junk slid off the desktop onto the floor behind my desk yesterday, so that’s one more incentive to get going. The other incentive is that every receipt and tax-related piece of paper I need to sort out for my accountant is buried in the explosion of paperwork that engulfs my workspace. At this point, it’s pure insanity that I haven’t gotten around to remedying the situation, but what can I say?

My sister believes that everyone in our family displays classic ADHD symptoms, and after taking a couple of diagnostic quizzes, I’ve come to believe she’s onto something. It’s nice to know that there may be a reason I’m such a scatterbrained procrastinator. Maybe it’s even fixable! I’ll be reading up on it when I get some projects out of the way.

Anyway, I’m almost through with my cup o’ soup, so I need to move on to my real work.

Yes, I know I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days. I won’t run through my list of excuses except to say, remember last week when I said I was sick? Well, I’m still sick. But I’ll soldier on for the good of the site.

Today I looked around at the squalor that has overtaken my house while I’ve been feeling poorly, and it occurred to me that I must somehow address it. I believe that every drinking glass in our entire house is now dirty, so it’s time for one of those top-heavy dishwasher loads that has nothing in it but a full rack of cups and glasses, one dessert plate and five peanut butter-coated knives. I just ran a load of laundry through for the THIRD time after days of neglect. It’s finally made it to the dryer, so its ordeal is now over. Then there’s a nice stack of overdue bills, but then that’s par for the course.

This weekend I’m hosting a baby shower at my house, so I’ll have to do a more thorough cleaning job between now and then. Even though the house should still be fairly clean, it’s amazing what four oft-puking cats can do to bring down the level of sanitation.

Tonight I need to grocery shop to get the ingredients for the cheesecake, blueberry scones and Devonshire cream I’ll be making for the shower. I was fortunate enough to be on some kind of high-level, “we love you and your money” mailing list for either our local grocery store or Starbucks which resulted in my receiving a good-sized sample packet of Starbucks coffee in the mail yesterday, just in time for the party. It’ll be a midday shower, so we’re concentrating on desserts, tea and coffee.

Obviously I’m rambling today, so I’ll quit before I get off on another tangent. Tomorrow: Something more interesting, I promise!