Britney Simpsons Blog

Finally got home this morning. I drove all night. As much as I love my family, three days of holidays and dinners and exchanging gifts at my mother’s house was plenty of family togetherness for me. But I’m glad I made the trip.

My mom went all out to entertain everyone, but this year my two sisters and I pitched in a lot to keep the kitchen running. I took mom to the grocery store for the last few things and she told me how tired she was. So the three of us took over the kitchen and had mom get off her feet as much as possible. After all, we knew how to cook everything – mom taught us all how to cook!

Almost everyone was on their best behavior. But I swear, you cannot get this many people together in one house without someone getting mad over something. This year it was my brother’s wife who turned out to be the bitch. She is a little bit of a dingbat anyway, but something my mom said must have insulted her – unintentionally – and she went stomping out the door. We were all surprised, as no one heard anything said out of the way. But whatever it was, my brother got the bitch calmed down and they stayed outside for about 20 minutes “to smoke.” When it was time to eat, they came back in and acted like everything was fine, although she sat at the far end of the table away from mom and went they left she barely said thank you before rushing out of the door.

All in all, I’d call it a success. And I’m home again, safe and sound.

I’ve used WordPress for my blog ever since I decided to write online. I love the software and it is free. This is one of the best bargains in the world except for maybe the air we breathe. I mean, there’s hundreds of thousands of man-hours put into this software and they never charge any money for it. I don’t see how these guys can make a living and pay their damn bills!

Some of the things that I want to do with this blog are not working out right, so I started asking some tech friends if there is anything I can do. Of course there is! I can use plugins to do almost all of the extra things that I want WordPress to do for my blog. I just have to read up on plugins a little and try out a couple of them.

If you have any favorite plugins, leave me a comment and share the name of it with me. The only one that I know is Akismet, which came with WordPress for free and it blocks spam. I love Akismet – it works great and saves me from the aggravation of deleting doznes of spam comments every day.

My house is so messy I really need to spend a day doing a major de-cluttering and deep cleaning, but I’m just not in the mood for housework lately. It seems like when the sun goes down before 5:00 in the winter time that I get bummed out and just want to cocoon. I’m just not productive after dark in the winter time.

Maybe I should dedicate 2 or 3 hours of a Sunday morning to the cleaning. most weekends I am out late on Saturday night and I need Sunday morning for sleeping in and getting my rest. I feel like I actually recharge my body’s energy batteries by sleeping late on Sundays. But I have to carve out some time for housework someplace and it looks like Sunday morning is the most likely target.

I’m hungry but nothing sounds good. I almost never eat breakfast, so tonight I got the bright idea to cook breakfast for dinner. I went all out with bacon, pancakes, warm syrup, scrambled eggs and hash browns.

One thing that I have never really mastered in the kitchen is properly cooked hashbrowns. I keep trying but they never seem to turnout like the hashbrowns that they serve at Waffle House. Maybe its because they cook everything on a flat top grill and its seasoned better than my cast iron frying pan. I use the same frozen, shredded potatoes that Waffle House uses, but their always stick together and brown evenly. Mine tend to fall apart when I try to flip them over with my spatula. So frustrating!

However, I do kick ass when it comes to pancakes. I use my mom’s recipe for pancakes and they always turn out light and fluffy and perfect! I like small pancakes – not the tiny silver dollar size, but smaller than a salad plate. I know some people like big ones that take up the entire dinner plate. But I would rather have a small stack of pancakes with butter and syrup tucked in between each layer.

My scrambled eggs are a nice finish. Sometimes I like fried eggs, but most of the time I like to scramble them so there is nothing runny. Sometimes I add some shredded cheese, and if I have any, a spoonful of salsa.

Yesterday was one of the craziest days of the whole year – Black Friday. Every woman who has bargains on her mind has been plotting and planning for the biggest shopping day of the year. People had big turkey dinners yesterday with family and a house full of people, then they got a couple of hours of sleep and then they hit the malls and department stores to do their Christmas shopping.Some of them left the house at 1:00 am to get in line at their favorite stores.

I am not that desperate for bargains, but I do like to shop and save money when I can. We decided to meet up at 7:00 am at the outlet mall and I was shocked at how full the parking lot was already. We had to park way out in the outskirts and walk forever to get into the mall at all. I didn’t really see that many bargains on the things that I was looking for, and by 10:00 I was ready to leave.

My friends were upset that I wanted to leave so early, and they wanted to stay. So I went to the food court and got a table in the corner were I wasn’t going to be jostled and bumped by dozens of people. I pulled out my Nook tablet and read an entire book while waiting for them to finish their shopping and meet up with me.

It turned out to be a good day. Not exactly what I had envisioned, but we all bought a few things and had fun being together. That’s the important thing anyway! And next year, if I do a Black Friday shopping party again, I’ll take my own car so I can leave when I’m ready to go.