Cooking with Sister

My sister is in town.  She's a fantastic housemate and we've been having a great time.  Last week we made a delicious dinner together.

(Okay to be honest, she made everything.  I just cooked the shrimp because she'd never worked with raw shrimp before)

Grilled Cabbage Wedge Salad

Shrimp Pasta in a Creamy Mushroom Sauce

I would love to share the recipe with you, but I don't understand pinterest.  I mean, I really really don't get it.  So you'll have to get a hold of Cheryl if you want to know!

Dark Shadows Movie Review

Have you seen "Death Becomes Her"? "The Haunted Mansion"?  Any vampire movie ever?  Any Johnny Depp movie ever?

Then no need to see "Dark Shadows."  Just mix all of those movies together in your head and you can pretty much imagine exactly what the movie was like.

I'm not a huge movie goer.  I prefer to watch movies in the comfort of my own home surrounded by my fur family and with access to all kinds of delicious snacks.  But this movie we were in the mood for a movie and "Dark Shadows" had the most desirable starting time and movie location.

Johnny Depp has a particular character he likes to play and he plays it well.  So I don't think anyone will be surprised to see him as a dark character hailing from 1700 England.  I like Depp, I think most of his movies are fun and I also tend to have a slightly darker sense of humor.  But I even found his character a little confusing as we are supposed to accept his very proper manner of pursuing women even while randomly 'hooking up' with several others.  I assume it was supposed to be assumed that the women who had his hearts affection was of his class, while the others weren't, but since she was actually the family's nanny, even this falls apart.  More likely, Hollywood didn't think there was enough sex in the movie so threw it in for ratings/viewership/whatever.  Another reason I don't like watching movies in theaters, you may be cool with your 7 year old daughters watching those scenes, but it makes me really uncomfortable.

I'd say skip this one especially in the theater.  If your a huge Depp fan, rent it from red box.

Book Club: The Happiness Project

I just finished the latest book from my book club The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.

It was described to me as fun and easy to read and I agree.  It's a great book club feel good book for summer. 

The author documents her one year goal to be happier.  I thought her outlines were great, her goals were interested and personal enough to make the book approachable.  I wasn't a huge fan of the random pages dedicated to comments made on her blog.  If I wanted to read those, I would read the blog.  Overall I really enjoyed it.

I won't be started my own happiness project.  But mostly because I already have a very similar sytem in place in my life.  I also envisioned as more of a life map/game plan than a happiness project, but it's not that dissimilar.  Every year in December, I sit down and write down all the categories in my life and come up with specific goals for each.  Some goals are specific like "run a 5k" or "convert family files to electronic files" and some are more general "be neater" or "be more involved in the community" which are then broken down into specific goals that particular month.  It's always worked out pretty well for me, and I'm sure it will benefit this December from some of the ideas in the book.