Hallway Paint Job

The days before I start work are quickly disappearing, so I have been trying to cross things off of "my list" before I don't have so much free time anymore.  I actually have a really long list of projects that I would like to accomplish, but at the moment we don't have the funds to do any fun extras, so that left me with things I could do for free ... or cheaply.  The only part of the house that I had left to paint was the stairway and the upstairs hallway.  I had been putting it off because I was really nervous about painting all the way to the ceiling in the stairwell.  Somehow I managed to do it, and I am really happy with the results.  I chose the color because we had paint left-over from the dining room and I was trying to avoid buying any more.  However I did run out of paint after the first coat, so I ended up buying a little more anyways.  Oh well, I am sure I will find a use for it at some point.  Here's the goods ... Before:
The only pictures I have from before are just of the stairwell, but you get the idea.

 

After:

I love how the color makes the window picture frame stand out.

I have plans for this dresser too ... I would like to paint it or at least re-finish it.  I might also hang a mirror in place of this picture so that I can use this area for doing my hair.  The dresser would be convenient to store my hair dryer, curling iron etc, and at the moment, there is not a lot of room in the bathroom (the mirror is also too tall for me, which is really annoying!) and I don't have an outlet right near my vanity in the bedroom, so I need to come up with a solution sometime.

While I was working on the hallway I decided that I should re-organize the linen closet.  I started out with this:

Which actually wasn't too bad ... except I always had trouble finding washcloths and pillow cases.  I also like to buy "backups" for all of our toiletries/cosmetics and I was having trouble keeping track of what we had and what we needed.

I spent about $10 at the Dollar Store for plastic containers, and organized all of our toiletries.  I organized the sheets by putting each sheet set into its own pillowcase (I tip I found on Pinterest), and then the towels were easy from there.  Kevin and I just have two sets of bath sheets that we I rotate on a weekly basis, which works well for now.  We also have 4 guest towels, and then just standard hand towels, bath mats and wash cloths.  The top shelf has my "hair tools", I put my hairdryer and straightener (things I use often) in the basket that I can just pull down when I need it without getting cords tangled and messy.  My curlers and other curling irons are just up on the shelf.  I labeled everything for good measure (which Kevin laughed at), but now I can find EVERYTHING and I love it.

 

On the bottom shelf I put bins for cotton balls, q-tips and teeth stuff (brushes, whitening, toothpaste) ... these are things we only need when we have to "re-stock" so they didn't need to be readily accessible.  Kevin's stuff is in the blue basket ... it amazes me that all of his grooming supplies can fit in one place .. one shampoo, bars of soap, razor blades and deodorant.  Then the obvious toilet paper and the dog's shampoo.

My stuff is in the middle shelf, and I divided it all into "hair", "body" and "face" .. pretty self explanatory.

 I am satisfied for now ... like I said, I want to paint the dresser, and I also want a new rug on the stairs.  I would tear that one out right now, but I don't think the dogs would be able to walk up and down the steps without it.  Actually area rugs for the rest of the house are on my "list" of things to buy when I start getting paid ... the poor pups slip and slide all over the place, plus it would be warmer on the feet in the winter I think.

So that's it for projects for the immediate future.  My Christmas List does have an orbital sander, a jigsaw and a Kreg jig on it so hopefully I can get some more accomplished after the holidays :)

Homemade Chicken Souvlaki Gyro Style

This is my last full week not-working in Syracuse (I will be home next week), so I wanted to make sure to make some dinners that I have been wanting to try.  I am sure that I will not be cooking as many things "from scratch" after a day of work.  I actually have to start preparing for the fact that I am still going to be doing all the cooking/cleaning/grocery shopping and such as well as working a full week, ahh the life of a resident's wife ... I just remember that Kevin works two times the hours that I will be, which makes it a little easier to not complain.  I am actually not sure how all the women in our program that have children as well do it.  Anyway, I have been "pinning" on Pinterest  a lot of yummy things, and one of those was homemade Pitas from this site: homemade pita recipe ... to go along with the pitas I decided to make chicken gyros, with the recipe from here: Chicken Souvlaki Gyros ... and the result was DELICIOUS!

First up, the pita bread:
They were pretty easy to make, just a little time consuming.  I am wondering if there would be a way to make the dough/let it rise in the breadmaker and then be able to just bake them up right quick.

Pita Bread
Yield: 8 pitas
Ingredients:
3 cups flour, plus 1/2-3/4 cup more as needed
1 ½ tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar or honey
1 packet instant yeast
1 ¼ to 1 ½ cups water, roughly at room temperature
2 tbsp. olive oil, vegetable oil, butter or shortening

First you mix the dry ingredients together, then add the water and olive oil.  Mix together with a wooden spoon.  Once mixed, then knead the dough for 10 minutes or mix on low with the dough hook in an electric mixer (I used the mixer).  The dough was a little sticky, so during this step I added flour until the dough formed a ball away from the side of the bowl.  

After ten minutes, form the dough into a ball and place in a greased bowl and cover with a warm towel.  Allow to rise for 60-90 minutes, or until it reaches double its size.  (My dough did not rise very well, I don't know if I had bad yeast or what.  However, it did not seem to effect the outcome, so I wouldn't worry too much about it if this happens to you.)

Once risen, punch the dough once and then separate it into 8 equal portions.  It was pretty sticky at this point, so I added a little more flour and floured my hands before handling.

Roll each portion into a small ball, cover and let sit for 20 minutes, meanwhile preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  If you have a pizza stone, put it in the oven now, if not, turn over a cookie sheet in the oven which can be used as a cooking surface.

After 20 minutes, roll each ball into approx. a 6 in. diameter pita

Allow to sit on a greased cookie sheet for 40 minutes or so, they should rise to almost twice their size. (mine actually didn't rise that much, again.)

Place as many you can on the pizza stone, and allow to bake for 3-4 minutes.

Then you get these delicious pitas!

As for the souvlaki part of the equation ... the only mildly complicated thing was to make the tzatziki sauce .. I just chopped the cucumbers in my food processor and then added the rest of the ingredients.

All ready to go .... Kevin was working late, so I put all the ingredients in tupperware containers so that I could put them away for him to eat later.

It was delicious!

Dog Days

This has been another fairly uneventful week.  It has actually felt like a really short week because we did not make it back to NY until Tuesday evening, so it's kind of shocking that it's already Friday.  Just a quick update on our lives:

Kevin has started his next rotation and is now on the Burns unit, and he has been enjoying it so far. There aren't as many patients and he is the only resident on the service, so he is getting some operating experience and learning a lot.

I found out on Monday that I officially have a job! yay me!  I don't start until the end of November, so I have a little bit of free time before I become a working girl.  I plan on painting the last little bit of house we have left (the stairway and upstairs hallway) and making an extended visit home to DE/PA for University of Delaware's Homecoming and a visit from friends in Florida. 

I did do a little bit of yard work this week (the weather is insanely warm - 60 degrees!!), so it has been a nice little reprieve before winter inevitably hits.  As I was raking leaves in the yard, I had the dogs out to enjoy the sunshine, and they actually listened really well and stayed in the yard(no fence yet :( ).  They were so cute playing in the leaves I took some fall fun pictures!  Happy Friday everyone!

Stop taking pictures and throw the ball!

Emily is really bad at taking pictures ... she hates the camera, and looks away every time you bring one up to your face, so I was really happy to get her smiling here:

Baxter LOVES leaves .. I think it goes back to running and jumping in leaf piles at Forest Lane when we first got him, but he was getting a kick out of hiding his ball and then "digging" for it again in my piles.

 My handsome boy

Fun Halloween Stuff

We had a great first Halloween in Syracuse.  To start off the festivities, I went pumpkin picking with some of the other ortho wives and cutie kiddies.  This was the first time I actually went into the field and picked my pumpkins .. and I don't know why you wouldn't do it any other way!  It was cheaper ($2 a pumpkin!) and a lot more fun.

 

All our pumpkins:

After picking our pumpkins we visited the small petting zoo they had on the property.

This little guy is the cutest/sweetest kid ever.

Unfortunately we ended up needing to make a trip back to PA for a funeral, so we were not actually at our house for Halloween.  We missed out on our first Trick-or-Treaters! I also did not carve my pumpkins, which I am really disappointed about.  Kevin is not a big fan of pumpkin carving, and we have nasty black squirells that ate chunks out of them!  Oh well, maybe next year.  They do look nasty now besides the big chunks, but you get the idea of why I couldn't really carve them.

We did get to enjoy some Halloween festivities though, a resident in Kevin's program and his fiance hosted an awesome Halloween party!  We went as a white tailed deer and a hunter.  It was pretty easy to put my costume together (I just shopped for camo in Walmart and Target), but Kevin was determined to wear REAL deer antlers in his costume, so it took some ingenuity and creativity on my part to make his costume.  Here's a quick overview of what I did:

First I picked out matching antlers ... which may seem silly to most people, how many choices can you have?!  However, Kevin has 16 individual deer antlers that he collected last year by walking around fields at White Clay and Fair Hill.  I simply chose the smallest antlers he had so that they would be easier to deal with.

 I made the rest of this up as I went along, but I will go over my thought process a little bit.  I knew the antlers would need something sturdy to hold them up, so I originally thought of a head band.  However I still thought they might fall forward or backward, Kevin wanted me to hot-glue or duck-tape them to a helmet ... but I honestly could not find a cheap, plastic helmet anywhere!  I don't know where kids get toy construction-worker helmets.  So I had to come up with something else, while I was in A.C Moore I saw the plastic checkered stuff that you use for cross-stitching with yarn.  I bought one sheet of it to make a sturdy helmet of sorts. 

Since Kevin was at work, I used his fitted Phillies hat as a guide for his head size (and my own head because they aren't that different in size).   I made a ring to go around his head and then attached a band across the top to stabilize the antlers to:

 This is what I ended up with:

I then put a brown hat(bought at Walmart) over top of it to hide the "bare bones" of the thing. 

 I actually didn't attach the hat, it stayed nicely over top

 To insert the antlers I cut holes in the hat, and in the top band of the plastic stuff.  I then poked the antlers into the holes and generously hot-glued them in place.  I then took a picture to send to Kevin so that he could let me know if I needed to change anything.

I just had to tweak a few things from there.  I re-enforced the antlers by placing another piece of the plastic between them and hot-gluing .. I also placed a little felt over top of the whole plastic thing so the antlers wouldn't poke Kevin in the head, and the plastic wouldn't be itchy.

I then just cut out two ears from the fuzzy, fur fabric I bought and felt, I glued the bottom together to make them curl in like real ears:

 I just glued the ears in place and ended up with this:

I also made Kevin a tail out of white, fuzzy fabric and made it "stand up" by loosely sewing the top to Kevin's brown sweat pants.

And here we are together:

We had a great time!