Maybe this schizophrenic weather will settle down soon and we can start getting our gardens in order again. What do you think?

We had a couple of really hot days a week or so ago, it almost felt like summer as it reached the 80′s! All that sunshine and warm weather has had me sitting in the backyard again and I can’t help but look at its dried out and scraggly state and yearn to get it back in shape again.

Then, the cold snapped back! Just when I almost got happy and pulled out my sandals and put away my coat, I had to turn back around a day later and pull out my scarf and gloves.

Then the long overdue March winds decided to blow through and even managed to uproot a tree or two. WTH, right?

This week though, it’s looking more promising. It’s supposed to be in the 70′s to 80′s for the next five days with evenings only dipping down to the 50-60′s. I think it’s time to spruce up the garden!

It’s the time for it, for sure! It’s time to get out there and start sprucing things up and maybe even get some seeds in for an early start. Or not so early start, depending on what you’re planting.

And if you’re in need of inspiration to get your garden going, maybe this video of the White House garden will spur you on…. well either that or intimidate you! lol! Their garden is pretty darn nice and clean, isn’t it?

But don’t forget, Madame Obama has a staff of gardeners to do the weeding and tilling for her while most of us just have ourselves or at the most, a staff of one like I do. I call him husband, but he does a great job digging, composting and weeding. I talk big about OUR garden, but he actually does all the work. My main role is to decide what I will want to harves and cook so he can plant them

Good Monday morning to you! Maybe you didn’t even notice, maybe you missed me. Whatever. I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks and I haven’t done much blogging. Then this weekend, I was really going to buckle down and do some writing. That didn’t happen either. What happened was, my attention was diverted much like the mouse by the cookie.

I signed on to blog, and realized that I hadn’t updated WordPress in a while. I thought I was up to version 2.9 when I realized that I was still on 2.6! Well I figured, it should be easy enough to click that button that says update all my blogs, right? Right. It was easy alright. Done in a minute!

Except that when I went to a couple of my blogs I realized that some things have gone terribly wrong. This blog, for instance, was not showing any posts at all! On the backend, some menu options have either disappeared or not working at all. It turns out, some of my themes were not quite compatible with the new WP. So I got down to tweaking and hacking.

So I tweaked one thing, which led to another, to another, and so on… you know the drill. Before I knew it, the whole weekend had just about gone and I hadn’t written a thing on the blogs. The good thing is, I got all of them upgraded and they are now all working again!

Once I fixed all the bugs, I was able to appreciate more the brand spanking new Wordpress 3.1 and all its added features. I’m loving it! I love that plugins can now be added on without having to download files and upload them again to your server. You can do it all right here! Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, yea, I know it’s been out a while and you’ve probably been on it since it came out. For me, it’s all new. I afterall just came from the bowels of 2.6 to 3.1.

Another good thing about being forced to do some of this backend maintenance, it keeps this idle brain of mine going. I had forgotten how to do some of the simplest stuff and was at a lost for a while at all the new coding, but I muddled through. I felt quite accomplished for having figured some things out without having to call tech support!

On one of my blogs, I even managed to revamp the theme and added one on those cool image sliders on top! I’ve been wanting one of those for the longest time and I finally managed to get it done thanks to free WP theme designers who incorporated it into their design and pretty much made everything automated. I’ll be implementing this on my food blog soon. It’s in desperate need of a makeover but I have been to afraid to tinker with it.

So to celebrate this accomplishment, the girls and I treated ourselves to some good eats at the Asian Market. It was a good weekend!

Did you know that today, almost every state in the U.S. has snow except for good ol’ Florida? Even Hawaii, which was at first thought to be the only holdout, got it’s share of fresh snow atop Mauna Kea mountain.

Everywhere you look online today, the topic is snow. I was reading somewhere that Wordless Wednesday‘s photos are almost all of snow! Some people experienced their first snow in their lifetime between yesterday and today! We had our share of snow and ice too, but not as much as some areas. The main problem for us was ice and the fact that yesterday was the scheduled day for my daughter to return to college. Luckily, the ice problem wasn’t as bad and we didn’t lose electricity which is always the main concern everytime it ices around here.

Schools in our area closed yesterday and today, and actually my college girl’s classes were also posponed to start tomorrow so she didn’t have any classes today yet either. But we still managed to get her there yesterday. The roads were actually not that bad, they were wet and a bit icy but certainly still driveable. We made it there and back without incident.

Today, the sun came out! It’s still freezing cold though, but at least the sun helps to melt some of the ice on the roads. I have a feeling the kids will be going back to school tomorrow. I came in to the office today and the drive was actually not that bad, just cold!

Good thing I didn’t commit to any of the everyday/356 blogging projects going around, because I would have fallen off the wagon already. I really did have the best of intentions to start off this year right. I was going to cook up a storm on New Year’s Eve then stay up all night blogging about it and wishing all my friends well for the New Year. Ah, they were grand plans!

I had such high hopes and I almost pulled it off! I did cook up a storm worthy of the winter wonderland we were blessed with on Christmas. For the New Year Eve’s supper I had lined up a surf and turf meal (ribeye steaks and shrimp scampi) complete with loaded baked potatoes or rice, a huge salad and I forget now what was dessert, but I know we had something. I can’t remember because beyond getting all the food prepared, everything quickly became a faint and hazy memory. See, as soon as I pulled the steaks off the broiler, that damned migraine, the one that I don’t usually have to mess with but once a year, decided to strike before I could put them steaks down and it struck hard! You’d think something jumped out of the oven and hit me over the head!

I heard dinner was great and the girls got to talk to all our family in California via Skype. I heard some mini sausages even got fried into mini-corndogs and they were great.

I wouldn’t know. I was splayed out in bed, my arms over my eyes and wishing sleep would claim me and save me from the torture. I woke up on the first morning of the New Year still with a pounding headache despite several Tylenol pills.

I stayed in bed for most of the day, but I couldn’t possibly let the first day of 2011 go by with me lying in a darkened room and nothing cooked, could I? Of course not!

I dragged myself up and called up my girls who turned out to be troopers. Way to start the year, girls! Between us, we managed to keep the kitchen clean and put together a pretty decent first dinner for 2011.

We baked some cornish hens but not with the sweet glaze or rice stuffing as we did in the recipe posted on our blog. It was just plain roasted like you would a turkey or chicken. By the way, don’t you just love how the six cornish hens fit perfectly in the paella pan?

In addition we also had some cornbread stuffing, black-eyed peas, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, and gravy. Oh don’t forget the canned cranberry jelly! So shoot me. lol! they were good and we found a can in the pantry, so there!

After dinner though, it was back to bed for me and for the rest of the weekend all the way into Monday when I finally got to see my doctor to adjust my meds and all was made well again.

So today is officially my first day of the New Year. I got out of bed with just a trace and fading hint of a migraine, the sun was shining, I got dressed and got to work and nothing disintegrated in my absense. All is good.

Happy New Year! And here’s to more days like today!

P.S. excuse the photos, my daughter took them from her cell phone. It was just too much effort to pull out my camera and plate stuff.