Chairs from the Curb: What I’m Loving Right Now

Day #5

Here’s some things I’m ‘real’ly digging as of late:

1. Ben Rector’s new album.

I can’t remember if I’ve EVER purchased an entire album on iTunes. But I did with Ben Rector’s Brand New album.

No, really, that’s the name of it: Brand New.

I had never heard of Ben Rector when I read two or three different tweets about how fabulous this album was. When one of them was from Amy Grant, I decided I needed to investigate this for myself.

It is absolutely FANTASTIC! Ben can write some lyrics.

“The Men that Drive Me Places” is my favorite song and just flat out poetic:

Oh isn't that just the way it goes
You're dealt a good hand and you get celebrated
Oh how am I the only one who knows
I'm half the man of the men who drive me places

“Crazy” is funny and so easy to relate to, especially when he says they went to bed by 9:00 pm.

“Paris” is amazing and catchy and makes me want to go back to Paris, BAD.

Paris feels like falling back in love

“More Like Love” is a song that stays with you.

But now I just wanna look more like love
I just wanna look more like love
This whole world is spinning crazy
And I can't quite keep up
It's the one thing around here
That we don't have quite enough of
So I just wanna look a little more
Like love

ALL the songs are good. I usually just hit shuffle and I never even think about skipping over a song.

2. Caramel Almond and Sea Salt KIND bars.

These bars are AWESOME! They are a great taste of sweet when what I really want to do is eat an entire bag of Candy Corn. And only 5 grams of sugar.

3. How close we live to a corn field.

I stood in my driveway to snap this picture. I love that I can see this corn field from the front of my house and the buildings of downtown from the back of my house (after the leaves fall from the trees).

Now that the corn has been harvested, Canadian geese have been hanging out in the field. Saturday morning, McDaniel noticed a big group of them STARING right at us from the field as we all stood at the kitchen sink.

It was a teence far but they looked to be giving us the stink eye.

Before we could turn away, a good handful of them spread their wings in aggression and flew off.

McDaniel screamed.

Or maybe we all did.

She was absolutely sure that they flew on our roof and were waiting on us to leave the house.

4. Clean windows.

We’ve never had our windows professionally cleaned before.

That was always a good chore for the girls to do.

Monte decided to book a great deal through Angie’s List since we have more windows now with the addition and they were FILTHY from all the construction dust from the patio and monsoon rains of the summer.

The company cleaned every window, inside and out

AND the screens!

It took two guys two hours.

Our house looks a million times brighter!

I will definitely do this again.

5. Making Creme Brûlée.

Monte and I love creme brûlée.

Monte has ALWAYS wanted to have our own little blow torch to melt the sugar on top to a thick crunchy carmelized taste sensation AT HOME.

One evening I found an old episode of Julia Child on TV where she was making vanilla bean creme brûlée. It look so good that I decided right then and there that the time to get a blow torch and make our own creme brûlée was upon us.

I had never scraped vanilla beans before.

Looks like a dried out worm from the sidewalk

after a big Spring rain, doesn’t it?

But it smells WAY better.

The little mini blow torch we got from a set at Bed, Bath and Beyond proved to be a great source of frustration to Monte. It didn’t consistently work and wasn’t very powerful.