This and That

I feel like nothing really big has been happening lately. So I'm just going to post a few little stories from the past week or two.

Today our ward choir sang in church (just a reminder in case you've forgotten or didn't know, I'm the choir director). We sang hymn #82, For All the Saints. It's a powerful hymn that we don't sing very often in church. I think it went pretty well. Jeff said that he got goosebumps a few times while we were singing. I'm really grateful that we've gotten several new members to come these past couple of weeks and boost our numbers. It really made a difference.
Next up, we'll be singing a Grateful hymn medley the week before Thanksgiving. For Christmas, the choir will be singing two numbers - Still, Still, Still and Night of All Nights - and I'm going to put together a small women's group to sing a song called Christ Child, Christ Child.

This past week I had a small cooking fiasco. I was starting to get tired of the meals that I seem to make over and over because they're easy and I'm familiar with them. So I pulled out my recipe book and looked through it, and decided to make Hawaiian Meatballs. For those of you unfamiliar with the dish, it's made up of small meatballs in a sweet sauce with pineapple and peppers (but I leave out the peppers because I don't like them) served over rice.
I first tried to make the meal on Wednesday night after leaving the hamburger to thaw for a day in the fridge. Sadly, the meat was still too frozen to make the meatballs, even after I tried thawing it under running water for 20-30 minutes.
So I put the meat back in the fridge to finish thawing and tried making the meal on Thursday night instead. I mixed up the sauce, started cooking the rice, then got out the meat from the fridge ... only to discover that it was a sick greenish-grey color and smelled horrible. Because I had the rest of the meal prepared and ready to go, minus the meatballs, I decided to try to thaw another bag of hamburger in the microwave (I usually hate doing that because parts of it will thaw, parts of it will start cooking, and other parts will remain frozen). However, I discovered that ALL of my frozen hamburger had that same nasty greenish-grey coloring. Jeff and I spent a few minutes googling descriptions of spoiled meat to try and determine if it was still safe to eat, but the universal advice we found was: when in doubt, throw it out.
I was super sad, not only for my meal, but also for the wasted meat. This was actually the first hamburger I had bought since Jeff and I were married, because it never seems to be on sale. And now it looks like we have to throw it all out. I vaguely remember that when we were bagging the hamburger the day we bought it, it was discolored underneath where the sticker was. If anyone has any tips about buying and storing hamburger, I would love for you to share.
Well, back to my meal: there I was with rice and sauce and no meatballs. So we had rice with sweet sauce and pineapple, and it wasn't a very well-rounded meal. We had a lot left over, so we decided to add chicken to it the second night and make it kind of a sweet and sour chicken meal. It turned out really well, actually, and since I find it easier to cook chicken than meatballs, I'll probably make it this way in the future. So my fiasco turned into a blessing in the end.

In the past week or two I've been feeling a bit stressed at work. There were a couple of different things that were contributing to it, but I decided that a major factor was my attitude. So for the past couple of days I've tried harder to focus on the positive and try to have a good attitude, and it really made a difference. I was a lot happier and found myself enjoying work a lot more. I've always been a big believer in the power of positive thinking - I just had to challenge myself to live up to my beliefs.

I have a confession: Jeff and I haven't been great about cleaning our home on a regular basis. Without kids, sometimes things don't get dirty very often. Well, and a large part has also been laziness, too. So for FHE this past week Jeff and I tackled a couple of cleaning jobs that we had been neglecting. We cleaned out the fridge and scrubbed the microwave (for the first time since we've been married), wiped down the kitchen counters and sink, scrubbed the tub (I bought a new cleaner, Lime-Away, and I LOVE it) and bathroom sink, and straightened up the house here and there. It felt really good when we were done. I have a renewed desire to set weekly and monthly cleaning goals - if anyone has any tips to share, please do.
As a reward for doing our cleaning, we went to Iceberg Drive-Inn down the street for a peppermint shake. If you've never been to Iceberg, I highly recommend their shakes. Their fries are good, too. The one by us is always busy. It was even busy on Monday night when we went, in the middle of a cold and heavy rain.