Recipe review, and other notions

The Chicken recipe was delicious. Tender and juicy. Creamy and rich. I give it an A+, although I have to admit, after all that, I didn't have Golden Mushroom soup so I had to substitute Cream of Chicken + 1/3 cup water. Husband liked it, even AJ liked it, and that's saying something. We've got 2 lunch portions in the fridge and a whole 'nother meal in the freezer. Hello, efficient!

I was SO productive yesterday it kills me. Work was very quiet, so I:

• checked email as often as I could
• washed, dried, and folded 3 loads of laundry
• did the crock-pot dinner thing
• saved 2 dying bananas by making the best banana bread I've ever made
• paid bills through March 28
• made ump-teen calls to credit card companies and my bank, looking for 3 checks that seem to have gotten lost in the mail (eek)
• and went to Walgreen's for lotion and soap and Sudafed and an Rx.

I spent the whole day feeling SO grateful for the work-at-home gig. So. Grateful. For my life in general, really. It was the complete opposite of how I often feel, which is wishing for more, wanting a "better" situation. But I've really got it very good. Of course, when DH got home he said, "If you'd taken out all the trash, as well, then I'd be impressed..." but he was only kidding, and it was mildly funny.

I want to do Sheryl's "this day in the life" exercise regularly, but I especially want to do it on days like yesterday where I'm proud of what I accomplished! :)

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Forsythia is on sale this weekend at Home Depot Landscaping for 12 bucks. I want one. It's Atlanta's herald of springtime. It, and the cherry trees and bradford pears. But that yellow... I love it. Everything's starting to bloom around here and the days are getting much longer. Hooray! I love spring!

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I had said I wasn't going to talk about my uncle because it was too sacred a time, but in all honesty? ...it's still too raw. I'm still hurting about the whole tragic thing. And I don't feel that I even have the right to be hurting -- his daughters and his wife, and my dad (his brother), are grappling with much more difficult grief than I, who saw him only sporadically in the summers. But.... I don't know, I guess since my memories of him go back to forever -- when we were young, we all lived in the same town -- that's a lot of him to be missing, now that he's gone. So much of my daily life, even, is somehow relative to him. Yesterday I got out a small yellow plate to put in the microwave and soften some butter on. I got that plate when I was single and moving into my first apartment. Unearthed it from a box of my mother's old things. She had received it in the '70s as a gift from Brenda, my uncle's first wife. So it actually made me think of him. I wear a ring from Aunt Brenda's jewelry shop -- wear it every day. So it makes me think of him, too. We live near a private airfield, so any propellor airplane goes by? Think of him. And then I turn on the radio and Brad Paisley sings "When I get where I'm going," which they played twice at the funeral, which makes me cry more than a little bit, again. I ache to think that happy, friendly Uncle B isn't in the world anymore. That I'll never hear him say my name again (he did it with such charm, and such a big smile). That his little baby granddaughters won't get to be tossed in the air by those farm-toughened, loving hands. That no one's around who can fly his antique planes anymore. Bah. It's too much to think about it. I don't want to, and yet, I do. I keep doing. I heard on the news this morning that 4 fishermen in North Carolina were dead as their boat capsized in the Atlantic yesterday, and I thought about those families who are now feeling those same, unexpected feelings of emptiness and loss that my family felt last week.

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Last night I had all kinds of things I wanted to include in this post, but this morning I can't remember them. Guess I'll go.