MaverChick

I've been a very devoted Mavericks fan this year. D let me sign us up for League Pass as an early Christmas present to myself and we have gotten our moneys worth out of that. I only missed a handful of the Mavericks' games all season.

Ever since the big trade with the Wizards, things have been looking up for the Mavericks. They had a fourteen game winning streak. They gradually climbed up Western Conference standings. But it's been interesting this year. Last year there were more teams in contention. I don't think the final teams had clinched until the very end of the season (similar to how it's playing out this year in the East between the Raptors and the Bulls.) But this year there have been a lot of ties. Take a look at the current Western Conference standings. (The Mavs have two games to go.)

After pasting that in there, I realize it's kind of hard to read at this size. So I'll just tell you, teams 3-5 are tied and teams 6-8 are tied. For posterity's sake, here's how things are looking in the East:

This basketball talk prompted me to go look at my fantasy league. I had forgotten to check in and see how things wrapped up (after the little debacle that I mentioned before).

Third place. I won't complain.

Reading List

I'm a reader. In fact, I was a reader before I could even read. Seriously! I wanted to read so bad that I would hold my parents books in my lap and pretend to read them. (At least half the time they would be upside down.)

I prefer fiction and I tend to gravitate towards lighter reading but I'm not really choosy. I am a fairly fast reader...which can be bad because sometimes I go so quick the content doesn't really settle in. Or if I'm in a hurry to find out what's about to happen, I'll start skimming through the prose. I never skip ahead. In fact, I don't even like to read the blurb on the cover. I don't want to know what's going to happen until I'm supposed to. I almost always finish a book if I start it.

I've gone through several reading droughts: when I was in college, when I first started working, when I had kids. In the last year or so I've started reading again. I'm still hot or cold with it. Sometimes I'll go for weeks...or maybe even months without picking up a book.  Right now I'm on a reading kick.

Last year I read the Twilight books and Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I enjoyed the Twilight books and LOVED the Dark Tower books. While reading the DT books, I went off on a tangent and read The Stand and Salem's Lot. (And Farenheit 451, which is kind of random since it's not an SK book.) There are a couple of other SK books that I want to read now, which were relevant to Dark Tower, so one of these days maybe I'll get around to that.

In the meantime, a few months ago my sister-in-law loaned me a stack of her favorite books. I've really been enjoying them. Thanks Amy!

So anyway, for my purposes as much as anything, I thought I'd list the novels I've read so far this year:

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (a Sookie Stackhouse book)
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Gerald's Game by Stephen King (reading)

Stumble

This morning while the girls were taking a shower, they informed me that they were hungry because their tummies were stumbling.

The Things Kids Say

Kiersten gets so mixed up with the words tomato and potato...well...all the girls do really. I'm forever having to clarify that tomatoes are red and potatoes are white.

The other day I had a little incident where I started out driving with my emergency brake on. *ahem* We won't get into the details of that. But anyway, from the back Annika pipes up, "Why were you driving with the ambulance brake on?"

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Every day the kids say so many amusing things but most of them are lost forever because they slip my mind before I remember to jot them down. The frustrating thing is that I can remember they *did* say something funny, I just can't remember what that funny thing was. Oh well. At least I do remember to write down some of them. I should just be happy about that, right!?

Laundry

If you've been following my blog, you might know that life's been a little crazy for me/us lately. We've had so many medical appointments in the last little stretch! So I got behind on a few things, including laundry. Today I'm finally tackling Mount Laundry.  (This is in addition to dropping off my car for repairs, switching the car seats to a rental, and taking a two-hour jaunt to sign some tax-related paperwork - all with four kids in tow, of course).

Anyway, as I was saying, you know you have a lot of laundry when you are able to sort it as follows:

whites
beige/tans
grays
browns
blacks
reds
pinks
yellow/oranges
light blues
greens
dark blues

(Unfortunately several most of those baskets contain more than one load, plus I already had a load in the washer, another in the dryer and two baskets ready to fold.  *sigh*)

Over-used-Recipe Swap

Look at all these recipes! Woo hoo!

And thanks to ICantWanna for posting the link on your blog.

Chickpea Spinach Pasta

I'm always going back to Kirsten's site and hunting around through the archives trying to find this recipe so let me just once and for all put a link here on *my* site with a recipe label.  Hopefully that helps me keep track of it when I need to pass it along to someone else.  :)  And for the record, once I realized that I didn't have chickpeas so subbed in fresh mushrooms and my husband *really* loved that version.  So there's a variation for you to try...