Gwinnett Gladiators

A couple of weekends ago, Scott and I went to a Gwinnett Gladiators game with Callie, Amy, and Josh. It was the annual "Teddy Bear Toss" for the Gladiators. This means that when the Gladiators scored their first goal, everyone who brought a stuffed animal got to throw it out onto the ice. The stuffed animals were given to a local charity. It was a lot of fun. The Gladiators lost, but it was still a good game. It was amazing to see how many stuffed animals were thrown onto the ice. I got to throw the little bear we brought, but I am not a very good throw...it hit some guy on the front row and he threw it over for me. Thanks, Callie, for inviting us!

Here is a little snippit of what it looked like during the "Teddy Bear Toss".

Blogger's Choice Awards

So, as you will see there are a few new things over to the left. Jennifer nominated my blog for "Best Photography Blog"! Thanks Jennifer! Scott has nominated our blog for all the others. Other blogs that I know have been nominated for things are Jordan Family Happenings, Another Day...Another Opportunity, Callie Michelle, and Shadburns-R-Us. It's fun to go and see all the other blogs that have been nominated. If you sign up with a user name, you have to wait for them to send you an email, which may end up in your trash folder, before you can vote. Happy Voting!

Easy Chicken Cordon Bleu

Easy Chicken Cordon Bleu

Source: Kraft Food and Family Winter, 2006

2 cups Stove Top Stuffing Mix for Chicken in the multi-serving container (4 small boneless skinless chicken breast halves (1 lb.)

4 slices Oscar Mayer Thin Sliced Smoked Ham

1 can (10 3/4 oz.) condensed cream of chicken soup

1 Tbsp. Grey Poupon Dijon Mustard

1 cup Kraft shredded Swiss cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Prepare stuffing mix as directed on package; set aside. Place chicken in a 13x9 inch baking dish, cover with ham. Mix soup and mustard; spoon over chicken. Top with prepared stuffing. Bake 25 min. or until chicken is cooked through. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake and additional 5 min. or until cheese is melted.

Makes 4 servings.

Serving suggestions: Round out the meal by serving this dish with hot steamed broccoli.

Recipe notes> I looked online and this recipe is not still available, but it is really good. If you buy the box of Stove Top Stuffing instead of the can, you won't have directions for 2 cups of stuffing and the box makes 6 cups, I think. Of course, I usually use recipes as more like guidelines, so I make the following changes: I usually use 2 chicken breast and pound them out then cut them in half; I do not like Swiss cheese, so I use slices of Provolone cheese, which I almost always have around for sandwiches; we made this the first time and decided that 1 Tbsp. of Grey Poupon was too much for our tastes, so I only do 1/2 Tbsp. Everything else I leave the same. My picture really does not do it justice!

I really like this recipe and so does Scott. I hope you try it and I hope you LOVE it!

Encounter With A Cardinal

Snow Today!

Cole Family Gathering

We got together with my extended family from my dad's side last Saturday. We tried to make it a pretty easy get-together, so we met at the Golden Corral in Austell. Yum. Here are the pictures.

Snow In Atlanta

We have had snow today. A lot of snow. It snowed for over an hour (of course during rush hour) and now it's raining and below freezing. That means that over night when there are no cars on the road, it will a freeze and the roads will be covered in black ice. Dangerous. However, I am thankful for the precipitation that we are getting. We had Bible Study tonight and Lauren got a really good picture of it actually snowing. I have some "after" shots. It was quite pretty though. All the houses are "snow capped".

Sampson Watching Birds

Here is a video I took on New Years Day while we were working on taking down the Christmas decorations. It was windy and the birds were spending a lot of time at the feeder we have in our front window. I have a really good video of both cats I will post later, but this one really makes me laugh. It shows how short of an attention span most cats have. Our cats can be tearing through the house like mad cats and they will suddenly stop, sit down, bathe a spot for two seconds (very hard) and then move on with tearing through the house. Crazy. Please forgive the fact that it is so long. I need to get some sort of editing software...you can also hear Scott and me talking. But, regardless of all that, it is too cute! This truly captures the personality of our sweet Sampson.

Randomness from Marcy

So, it has been a while since I have posted. Work has been crazy. I need to get into a routine and it is hard to do that when I work overtime so often. I am beginning to like my job better, I think, but I need to start sticking to my regular hours. That way, I can do more of the things I like, like spending time with Scott, blogging, scrapbooking, trying to learn to sew, and exercising (yeah, I really need to get motivated on that front). I am getting very close to finishing the scrapbook I started over the summer of mine and Scott's engagement. That was way back when we started having our little scrapbooking parties. I have acquired quite a bit more scrapbooking stuff since then. I have lots of things I want to scrapbook now.

Okay...on to the randomness...

I know you are just SO excited...

First, some certain people will be VERY happy to know that I have turned off the date stamp on our camera. So, now it won't be permanently imprinted on all my pictures. I liked this feature because I like to remember when things happened, but I realized that with a digital camera, as long as you have the date and time correctly set on your camera, it will save this information with the picture. So, that's that. It may seem unimportant to some, but to others, they will be glad.

Next, I finally added the Christmas pictures from our gathering with Scott's family for Christmas. That pictures pretty much tell the story. The picture up at the top is a picture of the painting that Scott's Grandma gave us. She painted this painting her self. She takes art classes somewhere close to their house. This will really be a treasure for us!

Also, I have added a feature to the left side of our blog that is entitled "Recipe Collection". As I post recipes, I will add them to this list. That way, if you think you might want to try one of my recipes, but don't have time to sort through all my previous posts, there they are! I have so many recipes to blog about. I have been taking lots of food pictures, but just haven't had time to post them. They will come in time and still be just as good.

Scott is not taking any classes this coming quarter at Gwinnett Tech, but he is going to study Cisco on his own. So, we'll see how that goes. Please be praying for him on that. Cisco is a big deal in the computer world, so I am lead to understand.

I failed to previously blog about some of the favorite gifts I gave and received at Christmas this past year. They are all made by my dear friend Amy, who is very talented. Amy made me a beautiful frame a couple of years ago for my birthday and I would post a picture of it here, but we put it in storage when we were told we shouldn't have too many pictures out by our real estate agent. But, for Christmas, she gave me a super cute frame of our cats, which I am on the lookout for a good picture to put in it and she made frames for Scott and I to give to Robert and Tracy (Scott's sister and brother-in-law) for Christmas. I will post pictures. They are really nice and cute. Amy puts tons of details in all the way to the little label on the back that she customizes for each frame. Here is a link to Amy's blog. She has a slide show of various things she has done. You should order something from her! She also does very ornate cards.

Amy did not paint these cats, but had her mother-in-law do that, but you can see how much thought she puts into things. She did a frame for each of the ladies in our Bible Study!

These are the frames I ordered from her. She is very good at giving ideas for what to make frames about too. I just love these frames!

Well, I think that is enough randomness for tonight. I hope you are all having a great 2008 so far! Take care!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! I can't believe that another year has gone by. What did everyone do for New Years Eve? We didn't do much. We had leftover pizza and salads and watched several episodes of CSI Miami, then we shot off some fireworks. We invited our neighbors Bill and Jennifer to come down and shoot them off with us, but Bill wasn't feeling well. So, Jennifer came down without him and we had a good time. We only spent about an hour out there and came in probably around 9:30, because it was too stinking cold. Then, we layed in bed watching another episode of CSI Miami. We had planned to watch the New Year's Eve specials on TIVO, but we only have TIVO in the living room and didn't want to get out of bed, because it was too cold. So, we were going to just watch the rest of the show "live" and see the ball drop then go to bed. At some point in time, Scott flipped it over to football (for what he says was approximately 2 minutes or less) and I fell asleep (if you are surprised by this, you don't know me very well...everyone knows how much I LOVE football). So, he tried to stay awake so that he could wake me up just before midnight and he fell asleep. So, at 1:30, I woke up to the light and the tv on and woke Scott up just to tell him we missed the ball dropping! Then, we turned everything off and went back to sleep. Pretty lame, huh? I think that is the first time in my life I have slept through ringing in the New Year. The picture above is a picture that Scott and I took when Jennifer ran home to get her gloves. Hee hee.

Here is a picture of our "Grand Finale". It was called Main Squeeze. It went on for quite a while. It would stop and then start again. I was pretty impressed! Just an aside, if it had not been raining a good bit the last couple of weeks, we would NOT have done fireworks. We got almost an inch last week and then a little over 2 inches this Friday and this weekend.

This is our neighbor Jennifer. She is really sweet. Scott and I have also spent New Years Eve 2006 and 2005 with Bill and Jennifer at their house, playing games and eating food.

We have been fairly productive today, but not as productive as we probably would have been if there hadn't been a CSI Miami marathon on TV. What can we say, we like CSI Miami. We took down all of our inside Christmas decorations. I have cooked enough food for an army. Last week, we ate the last of some vegetable soup that I had cooked a while back and frozen and I realized that we had eaten all of our "reserves". That's what I call it when I cook stuff like chili, spaghetti, and vegetable soup that you can cook a ton of at once and then freeze what you don't eat in a couple of meals. Also, we are going to have a covered dish Sunday at church and I am taking a meal to Maggie on Saturday. I figured, hey, I will be home all day, I'll get some stuff cooked up. I had already planned for Scott's and my New Years Day meal to be a roast pork. Needless to say, I did a lot of cooking today. I cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, chili, two whole chickens minus the legs, which I froze for frying later (including shredding the meat off the bones to prepare it for inclusion in casseroles), and a pork roast with carrots, potatoes, and onions. Oh, and when Scott had gone to the store yesterday on his day off, he found a really good deal on some sirloins, so we prepared a marinade for those as well so that we can have them tomorrow night. I will say that I am a purist when it comes to steak and I usually will not put anything on them except for some seasoned meat tenderizer. However, we have found a few things that I will put on a steak: Scott's cousins who live in TN gave us a recipe for a really good rub made from seasoned salt (or maybe it's seasoned meat tendrizer), garlic salt, onion salt, and butter salt and his cousins who we visited on Christmas day cooked steaks with a marinade made from three parts soy sauce, one part jalapeno juice (from the jarred jalapenos), the juice from half a lemon, and a few chopped up jalapenos from the jar. Now, I will also tell you that I do not do super spicy stuff because of my stomach, but this was not really spicy. I really didn't think it was spicy at all. We tasted ours before putting our steaks in it and it was just right: flavorful but not a lot of heat.

Well, I guess that is enough rambling for now. Happy New Year to you all and we wish you the very best. May your blessings be overflowing and may you grow closer to the Lord every day!