Pitas and movies

Students had a 3 day weekend this past weekend so Andrew and I got a little extra break.

Friday morning we slept in!  Hallelujah!  I am a chronic snoozer, so I was very thankful for not having an alarm!  We wanted to take advantage of our extra day off so we drove down into St. Paul (think quaint almost Nashville-esque sized city wit Midwestern flair instead of Tennessee country) to Andrew's favorite brunch place, Key's Cafe.  It was fun to sit and talk get some good food and get in the Word.  He's writing a paper on Luke 16 which is about hell for a theology class he's taking.  We tried to study the passage together, which we don't do often, but is sweet.  Then we just drove around St. Paul looking at houses and new neighborhoods (while getting into a tiff) and after working it all on out in the car, headed home.

 (I'm not sure why pictures of hubs eating make me laugh, but these sure do! )

(our view from the perfect booth spot at Key's- yes still lots of snow)

Let me tell you how much a trooper my husband is.  He went to 2 fabric stores with me.  No complaining.  Fully engaged.  Even showed me things he liked.  Ha!  I love him! I kept telling him he would be bored to death, but I loved that he came just to spend time with me.  And he's great because he usually gets into whatever's in front of him.

He had been wanting for a while to take me to this Middle Eastern restaurant called Holy Land so we went there for dinner.  It was delicious food.  Incredible pita chips! Their tahini and cucumber sauces were so good.  I probably wouldn't have gone for them, but they were outstanding.  We got the Holy Land platter so lots of good rice, an incredible salad (that Andrew inhaled!) of chunky cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce with a tasty Greek dressing, lamb, beef, chicken and "kufta" which we still don't know what that is.  It was all great though.  I really felt like we weren't in the States because there was Arabic writing, only a few people speaking English and white people were the minority.  I was grateful that God reawakened my desire to love other people different than me.  To think of the violence and killing and hatred toward Christians in most of the Middle East and here we were eating among a lot of them in America.  Totally free.  We prayed before we ate and softly prayed for everyone around us.  It was sweet to think of God's power in the walls of a restaurant plastered with pictures of Mecca and Arabic writing (and such good food).

(Andrew at our table- I took this to conspicuously get a snap of some Arabic above his head)

(the Holy Land meal we devoured, note the fresh pita on the right!)

On the way home we stopped by our beloved Redbox and rented "Buried", which Andrew thoroughly enjoyed and I was a little disturbed by.  It's about a guy who wakes up and has been buried in a wooden coffin and is trying to figure out what is going to happen to him.  It's a interesting glimpse into the Iraq War too.  I also made some Toll House cookies per my chocoholic husband's request.  But I was running low on chocolate chips so we subs M&Ms.

Saturday Andrew was at the church all day giving support training to our team of students going to India this summer.  He left early and I was dabbling around the house: cleaning bathrooms, laundry, folding, cleaning out the fridge, etc.  Oh, and I'm doing an intense Precept Bible study at my church on Ephesians so I was able to get a good chunk of that done- I'll be sharing some of the sweet stuff from hat in the future.   After a while I began to go stir crazy so I started thinking of stuff I'd been meaning to get done for MONTHS and wanted to finally do it.  Like bring a load of clothes and home goods to some local consignment stores and organize my jewelry.  FYI Turns Style took almost all my still unused wedding gifts/decor things I didn't want anymore and good old Plato's Closet only gave me $7.70 for a thermal shirt of Andrew's that shrunk and a pair of black pants- struck out there!  Anyway, I got some new lamp shades to lighten up our dark living room at night (which starts around 5pm here) and some hooks.

I'd been looking for a non-power-tools way to make a necklace holder since all of mine are a big jumbled mess.  I already made this earring holder while in college but added the hooks for necklaces.

(Ha just noticed the huge ball the first one is in...typical!)

When Andrew got home, I'd been planning to make a quiche since I'd over bought eggs last week and had a bag of fresh spinach I still hadn't used.  So I found this Paula Deen recipe for Spinach and Bacon quiche which I lightened up with half and half instead of heavy cream and turkey bacon instead of the real thing. It was very good.  Hubs gave it two thumbs up.  I think next time I'd use a deep dish pie plate instead.  

After the quiche we decided to rent another movie and really live it up :).  This time I got to pick and settled on "Letters to Juliet" which was sweet but incredibly predictable.  It was fun but full of sap and unrealistic romance.  It was OK, but really was just glad we had a change of pace from our previous rentals!