Crockpot Failure

  The weather has finally chilled here in East Tennessee, and I have a confession. Cold weather makes me want to just snuggle up on the couch, eat mountains of potatoes while drinking vats of hot cocoa. Today seemed to be the perfect day for potato soup. I knew I probably wouldn't feel like cooking after work today so I found this potato soup recipe.

 I only have a small crock pot so I ended up cutting the recipe in half. It looked promising, I chopped my onions, garlic, and potatoes and dumped them in the pot. Added the broth and butter and gave it a stir. Setting it on low for 8 hours as directed. Around 2:00pm Phillip came home and sent me a text "wow, that soup smells awesome!"

  I had high hopes, I really did. As soon as I walked in the door at 6:00 I smelled nothing but onions. I used my handy immersion blender and topped it with some bacon and cheese. Lifted the spoon and...gross. It smelled awful. I made Phillip taste it first. He can usually eat anything but actually spat this out. Now I have some potatoes roasting in the oven.

 Bleck. I will now depend on Phillip to make me some tasty potato soup, his is about 100 times better.

Forming New Habits

    I'm back! We moved over a month ago and finally Charter has connected the internet at our new place. They hired a contractor to come out and put in a cable line but it kept slipping through the cracks. Their communication is terrible.

   This week I have started focusing on my habits around the house. When I was growing up our house was always clean and tidy (well except for the basement, but don't tell mom I told you that). I'm struggling to get into the habit of tidying up my house daily so that I don't have such a mountain of stuff to do on the weekends.

 So far I have learned to start small. If I try to accomplish a lot of things at once I feel overwhelmed and end up not doing anything. This week my focus has been on the kitchen. Every day I have made myself do the following and hope it become a habit. Wipe down the counters and, load the dishwasher instead of piling things in the sink, and sweep the floor. It seems to help if ti do most of this while dinner is in the oven.

 After I get into the habit of having the kitchen finished each day I'll add another room, then another. We still have a couple of rooms that are in disarray from the move. Tomorrow we will hopefully straighten those up and get the garage sorted into my sewing room. I've promised my mom I will share pictures when the place is ready to go.

How do you form new habits and make them stick? I seem be to really great at learning bad habits, like plopping on the couch and watching the entire season 2 of The New Girl. I don't really need any encouragement to do that!