Alternate post title: He Did It To Me Again.

The butterfly bush (or as my husband refers to it… “that butterfly monster”) turned out to be the fastest growing, most furiously blooming plant I have ever encountered. It smells wonderful, attracts butterflies by the hundreds through the spring/summer but has to be trimmed back several times a year. Emphasis on “several times a year.”

We’ve had an unusually warm January with some beautiful sunny days and since we had a new lilac tree to plant we spent last Saturday in the yard.

We cleaned up anything dead-ish, dug up an old rosemary plant that had died, cleaned out weeds that were trying to poke up and trimmed some trees and bushes. Then my husband said, “Oh, I trimmed up the butterfly bush…” I don’t recall anything he said after that because I took one look at my butterfly bush and made this face:

My butterfly bush should look like this (not now, it’s winter, but when it’s not winter it should):

Remember the last time he did this to me?

“YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL HER!!!!!!” I might have said a little too loudly, I think I could hear the neighbor’s curiosity pique from two, possibly more, yards away.

“I am not trying to kill it.” He said in a that stop-being-so-dramatic tone. “Your butterfly bush was trying to eat my redwoods… again.”

Admittedly, the first time those redwoods were still a little on the scrawny side and I could see why Mike was being overly ridiculous, dramatic and a complete sissy la la concerned about my beautiful butterfly bush appearing to attempt to dwarf his beloved redwoods.

This time? Those redwoods are HUGE. They are easily as tall as a two-story house and my precious butterfly bush?

NOT SO MUCH.

I stopped talking to him. I might have muttered something about doing a little pruning of my own on his precious sago palm which looks like this:

Compared to my butterfly bush, which for reference, looks LIKE THIS:

A little while later my husband said, “I put fertilizer on all the plants. I fertilized the butterfly bush too, I just wanted to make sure you know that I am NOT trying to kill your plant.”

I can’t say the same for the plant, Mike. I suggest you start sleeping with one eye open.

Are there cheap electricity companies in Texas? Do people in Texas have a choice over their electric companies?

Do you have a choice in electric companies where you live?

I don’t know why this interests me or piques my curiosity. I can only say that it is a completely new thought for me because here in Cali we have always lived under the PG&E regime, that would be Pacific Gas and Electric. If you want those light bulbs to light, those Christmas lights to twinkle, that electric stove to boil your pasta… you gotta have yourself chained to the all-seeing-all-knowing-creator-of-questionable-meters.

Well, unless you are one of those lucky hippies living off the grid. Got yourself a windmill? Maybe a little dam whipping up your hydro-electricity thing-a-ma-bob? Solar panels, anyone?

I think eventually I might like to disappear out into the foresty-mountain-ey sort of place and live off the grid. I think that sounds awesome. I’d like to go all Ed Begley and make Mike pedal his buns off on a bicycle to power my toaster. Yes, I think I might like that very much.

I cannot stand clicking on a video of a PREVIEW of an upcoming episode of a show I watch only to find a commercial before the preview. A PREVIEW is a COMMERCIAL. So now, we have commercials FOR commercials? This sends me into whirlwinds of pissed off that I can’t even begin to describe.

For what it’s worth? TV Squad used to be one of my favorite sites to visit daily. I loved the reviews and recaps of my favorite shows. Then, Huffington Post took over and ruined it. It’s a mess. I can’t find anything I like and it looks just like the rest of Huffington Post, which is to say, an ADD sufferers DREAM.

TV Squad isn’t that big of a loss considering it routinely did something else that is a pet peeve of mine… auto loading video clips. If I WANT to watch the video, I know where to find the play button. I don’t need you to play it automatically so it competes with the current Blake Shelton or Billy Currington song I’m playing.

On a mostly unrelated note, ne of the most tedious, boring tasks is photo scanning. I don’t have the patience to screw around with a scanner and wait for it to go back and forth over my picture, document or whatever. I have even been known to just take a picture of a picture just to save myself hassling with that stupid scanner.

No joke.

This brought to you by Friday nothingness. I doubt this will be a regular occurrence around here but… you never know.

11/11/11 – time for a list of 11 things!!!

1. Today I am making a batch of raw, kale chips for the first time.

2. It’s chilly but not too chilly so tonight we are going to enjoy some grilled tri-tip around a cozy fire on the back patio.

3. Along with the tri-tip I’m serving my quick and easy salsa!

Amy’s Quick Salsa

1 can of Herdez Salsa Ranchera (it’s a small can)

1 Can fresh diced tomatoes (salsa style, large-ish can)

1 onion

2 jalapenos

1 yellow chile (optional)

3 cloves garlic peeled

1 tblspn of lemon juice

salt to taste

You can chop by hand, but I run the onion, peppers and garlic through the food processor so they are fairly even an finely chopped. Dump into a bowl with the tomatoes, salsa ranchera, lemon juice and salt. Mix thoroughly and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.

Serve with chips, tacos, grilled meats, etc.

I also like to add about 3 heavy tablespoons to 4 avocados and the juice of 1/2 a lime for a fast guacamole.

4. I’ve been listening to Christmas music a lot. I’m really enjoying it.

5. One of my closest friends just gave birth to the most beautiful baby on the planet. Congrats, Chickie!!!!!

6. One of my current favorite blogs is “Better After” – I now have a project list days and days long. My husband sort of has a love/hate thing going with this concept. He loves that I want to acquire more tools for the garage but umm… isn’t too crazy about the long list of projects.

7. Really enjoyed this interview with Amy Grant and Vince Gill. I’m going to try out the cookie recipe soon.

8. I am ahead of the game for Thanksgiving. I’ve already bought everything that can sit in the pantry or freezer. All that’s left are the fresh veggies!!

9. People who are married and have the same facebook account BUG me. Just because you are married does not mean you can’t have your own identity. Good grief!

10. Ditto grown women who have to continually refer to their friend as “BF” every time they address them on Facebook. Dogs have more attractive way of marking their territory.

11. Veteran’s Day… to all the veterans out there, thank you for your sacrifice and service to our country. God bless!

I’ve said it before and I will say it again…

I’ve ranted about this before, okay, I’ve used a lot of expletives to express my rage and insanity displeasure at having to sit through a 30 second commercial to… drum roll… watch a PREVIEW (aka COMMERCIAL FOR A TELEVISION SHOW I WATCH) of a television episode that won’t air until next week. It bothers me. It bugs me. A lot.

If I cruise over to NBC.Com to watch the preview for “Parenthood” I shouldn’t have to sit through a 30 second commercial for insurance that lasts almost as long as the preview. Seriously.

/psycho rant

Carry on with your day.

Did you know that 41 million women in the United States and 250 million worldwide are experiencing the chronic symptoms of menopause, ranging from hot flashes, anxiety, fatigue, anxiety, mood swings and decreased libido? With thousands more become menopausal each day, these chronic and disruptive symptoms, wrought by wildly fluctuating hormones, can negatively affect families, jobs, libidos and mental and physical states. – Gotmenopause.com

I’m on a bit of a health kick in recent posts. I just feel that now, more than ever, people need to be in touch with what is going on with their bodies. Menopause is not some taboo word that dare not be spoken, or relegated to harsh whispers of “the change” with dainty hand-covered mouths. The debate of HRT vs. homeopathic, diet and exercise alternatives rages on and personally, I don’t think there is one right blanket answer or remedy for everyone. For myself, I do feel it’s necessary to go as natural and organic as possible.

Menopause symptoms make for funny television shows but women know all too well that these types of issues haven’t exactly been on the front burner of modern medical science.

I’m no stranger to pharmaceutical intervention, while it’s necessary in some cases, I firmly believe that in most cases it’s not and prescriptions do not need to be handed out like candy.

It’s great to see informative websites popping up to cover women’s health issues like menopause. The more information the better and it shouldn’t just be relegated to conversations between patients and doctors (who were just taken out to lunch by their favorite pharmaceutical sales rep).

For too long hormones have been thought of something floating around in a woman’s head and appropriate attention hasn’t been given to the role they play. In many places (especially where I live) there are very few physicians willing to pay any attention to what role hormones play in your quality of life or how they contribute to health problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and thyroid problems. It seems like unless you are trying to get pregnant (fertility = big bucks!) they just don’t have the time or interest to find out what is causing your weight gain, hair loss, skin issues, headaches, or joint pain.

High blood pressure? Here is a pill. Losing your hair? Excess hair? Go get it waxed, it’s not a medical problem. Joint pain? Welcome to getting older, sweetheart. Weight gain? Clearly, you are lazy and need to diet and exercise more!

More and more it seems we are plugging the holes in the dam with bubble gum and band-aids instead of repairing the dam. I won’t get started on why but suffice it to say it always comes down to more money in pockets that are already big enough. Which is why it’s so important to take a proactive role in your health, no one else is going to advocate for you better than you. Not to mention that while most people have hidden agendas and bottom lines to keep an eye on – YOUR only agenda is a better quality of life and life is too short to blindly hand the maintenance of your health over to someone without question.

What do you do to be your own health care advocate? Do you have specific websites you rely on?

I thought I would provide some more information in regards to the post on diet and food allergies yesterday. It’s funny because when you talk about a diet in our culture people assume you want to lose weight. It’s all about being thin. Sure, some people say that they just want to be healthy but the majority is about being thin.

Ladies, a great place to start is Women to Women if you haven’t seen the book The Core Balance Diet by Marcelle Pick – its absolutely fascinating. It really starts with establishing health that eliminates pesky hormone fluctuations, menopause symptoms, PMS and all the assorted yucky symptoms that go along with it and after all that, you naturally start to shed pounds. It’s not about a “one diet fits all” there is a lengthy questionnaire in the book that helps you to figure out which issue is your most pressing from digestive, hormonal, adrenal, neurotransmitter, inflammation, and/or detoxification.

I am just now beginning this process but I notice a huge difference when I keep the processed junk out of my diet.

I’ve found loads of fascinating information at Dr. Mark Hyman’s site.

Eat well for less even if you don’t have time – great article.

Check out this Ultra Simple Diet Quiz – it’s super short and eye opening.

And finally, take the time to watch this video… totally safe for work, kids, etc.

Recently, I came across information regarding children’s food allergies. Anyone with any notion toward curiosity has to stop and think, when we were crashing through childhood (ahem, those of us in our 30′s and up) there weren’t these kinds of allergies and antibiotic resistant infections.

When my children were little I remember there was always a cousin or classmate who had an allergy or an ear infection. As it turns out the US began putting certain additives into our food supply in the mid-90′s and since then, food allergies have been on the rise.

I had always noticed on the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream pint that in large print they refuse to use milk from cows that have been given growth hormone in order to increase milk production. It never really occurred to me to check further into it until I read that the growth hormone given to these animals caused them to have numerous and nightmarish diseases… so the industry began giving these cows antibiotics.

All the other countries on our planet refused to use the growth hormone because it hadn’t been determined safe. Our country in all it’s “protect the profit margin at all costs” wisdom elected to use it because it hadn’t been proven dangerous.

That’s terrifying. I’ve slowly been eliminating dairy from our diets around here or I replace it with an organic substitute and we eat less dairy because, obviously, it’s expensive to eat organic. We’ve also been eliminating all processed foods – slowly, because it isn’t easy going cold turkey on something you’ve been doing without thought for years and years.

As it turns out there are numerous health issues that can be resolved through overhauling your diet including but not limited to: asthma, IBS, acid reflux, acne, depression, anxiety, autism, arthritis, allergies, headaches, etc.

In short, our westernized diet is killing us and our economy isn’t exactly set up to help us remedy that easily. If this is something that concerns you, you might want to check out az food allergy testing.

If you have tips on how to get your family away from a typical processed food diet, please leave them in the comments.

My husband and I keep running into people who ask how we are doing and then ask about the appraisal industry. When my husband explains how HVCC and the subsequent Frank-Dodd act has killed the small appraisal firms more often than not the response is, “Well, you can’t blame them.” THEM? Who is them? Some benevolent group of people far smarter than us and out for our own good?

I recently watched “Knight and Day” with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Total brain popcorn at it’s finest, I know. But, what caught my attention was when he told her “if they say they are taking you some place safe, run, they are going to kill you.” (probably not an exact quote, but you get the point) and guess what? It’s not too far from the real truth of things.

I love the article below, it says it all so much better than I could. I hope you take the time to read it and be informed. The next time you hear someone saying that the market crash was all the fault of those unscrupulous appraisers – think twice, please.

“Homes have been appraised too high in some cases but it seems that the accusation is painted with too broad a brush than the few dishonest appraisers who were the exception to the rule.”

Housing Collapse: Whose Fault?
By Mike Foil

Is there a tendency to use the term “inflated appraisals” too broadly in connection with blame for the financial crisis? I have noticed that statements such as “over-valued” and “inflated appraisals” are mixed into the blame for just about anything that has anything to do with the housing meltdown. I do not deny that there were appraisers who compromised themselves to get an order and earn a fee but they were the exception.

Homes have been appraised too high in some cases but it seems that the accusation is painted with too broad a brush than the few dishonest appraisers who were the exception to the rule.

Memory Lane

I read where “appraisers over-valued homes” when the market was booming. I may be as old as dirt but I remember back to 2005 when lender guidelines required at least two sales from within six weeks and expected upward time adjustments even to those. The job of appraisers is to research the market, analyze the findings and report the results in a meaningful manner which is supportable by the market data. So, when we did that, using recent sales and did report an opinion of value, based on recent sales in a market with prices increasing at rates over one percent a month, the market did support the sales price for the subject. It was not a case of “bad appraisers” or “inflated appraisals” in a large majority of the cases, it was that the buyers and sellers were expecting to pay more this month than they did last month and the MARKET data supported upward time adjustments and higher opinions of market value.

Appraisers did not have a crystal ball to foresee what would happen. There was speculation that the “bubble would collapse” and it certainly did, but at the time the market data showed rising prices and buyers more than willing to pay the higher amounts. To me, appraisals done in that market and with that data do not translate into “inflated appraisals.” It just means that appraisers worked with the then-current market data and produced a supportable report using the same.

The fact that values ended up tanking is not proof of bad appraisals as it seems many believe.

I believe the appraisal process actually works when performed by an honest appraiser. I have been doing this a very long time and am still amazed, at times, at how well the process works when you just let the market data speak and make reasonable adjustments for the differences. When honest appraisers are allowed to do their jobs without unrealistic “scope creep,” UAD nonsense, etc. it works. To the voices who say we need to include a wide range of data into a statistical analysis in order to have a “process” that is reliable, I would answer: “garbage in, garbage out.” You are still subject to the human element in the selection of the data and the weight applied to different aspects but you lose the value of the human element when you bypass a physical inspection and an appraiser’s judgment for the clear differences between the various properties. I do not believe we need an overhaul of the process; we just need appraisers who have the backbone to do an honest job.

I am convinced that most appraisers by far good, hard-working, honest people doing their darndest to do the right thing and produce a credible report. Yet, appraisers are easy targets. When things go bad, people cite the few bad guys and repeat the examples of shoddy work and lump all appraisers into the same category. Now, in a declining market, appraisers are being blamed for values that are “too low.” Folks, we take the market data and report such.

Thanks to Buzz Forum
Good Read from American Banker: Appraisal Management Companies Create More Problems Than They Solve

College spring semesters are ending all over the US. I’m fortunate in that my college student is at a local college and I don’t have to worry about shipping furniture or boxes of belongings across the country. The same can’t be said for a few of his friends.

One of his friends had an off-campus apartment that he recently cleared out. It’s all up in the air as to whether or not he’ll return to the same university next year or change it up and transfer to a different university.

It’s amazing to me what these kids are expected to decide about their futures at such a young age. At 18 you are supposed to know what you want to do, set a firm course that can be difficult to change up or alter later on and begin attending school to further yourself along that course. Most people really don’t even know who they are at 18 and guaranteed by the time they are 30 they will be an entirely different person for the most part.

This isn’t a condemnation of going to college – it’s just me wondering if some of these giant life concepts are what cause so many of the depressions and anxiety related issues we hear about our college freshman experiencing. The impression to go to college and make something of yourself has been ground into these kids their entire lives. So, instead of having a hopeful expectation of what the future is bringing, I think many of these students just feel the pressure of expectations of what they are obligated to produce in their future.

You hear about jobs, workforce, unemployment rates, fierce competition for few available positions and all of the sudden the future becomes a very bleak and daunting figure looming over you, casting a dark shadow over what had, just a few months prior, been a childhood of dreams and “I wanna be an astronaut when I grow up” thoughts.

Society with its “knuckle down” “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” “get out there and make something of yourself” commands carries with it the fear of, “if I make the wrong choice I’ve wrecked my entire life.” Even in my own children I’ve seen this drive to create a plan that is set in stone in their own minds as if at the age of 19 their lives are half over already. Those of us on the other side of 30 realize the huge opportunity they have sitting at their feet, the world really is their oyster and they have multiple opportunities available to them.

The irony is that somehow few of us in that over 30 set can find the words (outside of those ridiculous, flowery graduation speeches) to impart what we know now. That it’s far easier to switch gears and change direction than it seems. That life is so much more forgiving when you are young than when you are 15 years down the road and pissed off that you never gave professional surfing a real try and now you can’t because you have a mortgage and car payments, a spouse and kids.

I suspect even at 35 there are remnants of that “this is where I am and I’m going to be here the rest of my life…” heavy feeling and yet someone 20 years ahead of me probably sees me just as I do many of these 18 – 20 year old kids I see all the time. I think what I’d like to hear more in these oh-so-serious graduation speeches are some simplified thoughts like:

Hey you? What you are deciding to major in or do today may not be what you want to do in a year from now AND THAT’S OKAY. You can change it up over and over again because it’s YOUR LIFE and you are the only one who has to be happy and satisfied with it at the end of the day.”

We might see some amazing things from people who feel a breath of freedom flow over them than the heavy weight of “you are the future, get out there and find the cure for every social and medical ailment in the world because we expect nothing less of you.”