It's a beautiful day...

...but I'm feeling not-so-beautiful. I was up most of the night - partly my mind in a whirl and partly my stomach. I don't know what caused my stomach to act up - maybe the brownies - but I do know what has my mind racing....

This past April, we put our house on the market in an effort to upgrade to a bigger home across town. After 6 months on the market, we had finally resigned ourselves to staying in our small home (it's about 1800 square feet) as our contract expired at the end of this month and we did not want to keep it on the market over the holidays. Just when it looked hopeless, we got a showing, a second showing and an offer all within two days! So, we are now set to close on our new home on November 25th (not the best timing, but we can make it work)! Now my mind is whirling with all we will need to get done between now and then, what we need to buy for the new home, etc. It will be a hectic month and a half, no doubt.

Here's a view of the new house from the golf course. Our property ends over near the basketball court and spruce, so not all of that is our yard. I'll post more on the house later. It's double the size of our present house, but there are some things that will be an adjustment - like no fireplace and finding out if I can hook up a gas range. Please, please, please I hope so! Don't make me go electric! The kitchen is not exactly my style, but it's not bad. And it will have to stay "not bad" because we won't have the money to re-do it with our new, bigger mortgage.

Today we are grilling out steaks and making a grilled veggie-pasta salad as the side. I was originally planning to only do the pasta salad - I like to try to eat vegetarian at least once a week and preferably more. With the move, however, we'd like to use up as much meat in the freezer as possible, so we may be eating a bit more meat than we normally do. It's only across town, but there are still the logistics of moving our freezer, getting it cold, storing the meat in the interim, etc. Whew - makes me tired just thinking about it.

The salad we are making is a combination of two Cooking Light recipes that we really enjoy. Part Roasted Vegetable Pasta Salad with Grilled Chicken and part Summer Vegetable Salad with Grilled Bread. When I want to do this salad as a vegetarian main dish, I use grilled vegetables, pasta, beans, and feta or goat cheese. This makes for a very substantial salad. We always grill the vegetables, no matter which salad we make. It seems silly to roast the vegetables if you're going to grill the chicken, doesn't it? Besides, I think that grilled vegetables are soooo much tastier than roasted. Still, it's nice to have the roasting option for winter when it might be too cold to grill - you could roast the vegetables and do the chicken on the stovetop. My favorite vegetables for either of these salads are bell peppers (red, yellow and/or orange), mushrooms, asparagus, red onion and sometimes green and/or yellow squash. I also often add cherry tomatoes - usually raw as the boys don't like them grilled - but I forgot them this time.

I would have liked to have done a little baking, but it's no fun to bake and not have the appetite to sample. Another day......