BBQ Bake

Here is a new recipe that I threw together the other night!! It was pretty yummy, and not pasta! So I decided to share!! Hope you enjoy!

1 lb ground beef
1/2 chopped onion
1 pkg smoked sausage (I used turkey)
1 can black eyed peas
1 cup frozen corn kernels

Sauce:
1 can cream of celery soup
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup BBQ sauce
garlic powder
Mesquite seasoning

1 bad frozen tater tots
shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

Pre-heat oven to 350*. Brown the ground beef and onion with a little garlic powder and mesquite seasonings. Drain well and mix with sausage, peas, and corn. Put mixture in a 13x8 baking dish. Mix sauce ingredients, season to your taste. I added a little extra garlic powder and mesquite seasonings. Top with tots, no need to thaw they will cook through in oven. Bake uncovered for 30 minutes. Sprinkle with cheese let cook and additional 15 min. I would let stand 5-10 min before serving!
That's it! It's easy and delicious!!

We are all Misunderstood?

As many of you all know, I am the sole person responsible for my grandmother. This is quite an addition to my already hectic life. I acquired the responsibility after my mother passed away in 2003. I was never given a choice. I am all she has left besides some nephews that are out of state.
I know some will judge me for saying this, but I resent her at times for being a burden to me. I know she doesn't mean to be, but she makes my life so much more stressful than it COULD be! And I know the people at her facility judge me. I don't visit as often as I should, I don't get her exactly what she wants when she wants, and I'm often late on payments, because managing my own finances is hard enough.
It upsets me to know that they judge me without knowing the details. And I know they do. As a nurse we judge families everyday. You try not to, but it can be hard. We don't know the stories, we don't know why a family hasn't spoken for 20+ years. It's not our job to know it's our job to take care of those who need us.
Granny and I have a lot of baggage from the past. Fortunately for her, she doesn't remember most of it and if she does, she pretends not to. I however remember it all. I remember how she took my uncle in after my grandfather died. How she paid for everything for him, even the company that he tried to start that bombed. She babied him, and let him do whatever he wanted. She gave him control of her money and her life. In the end he had moved her away from her friends, exiled her from her family, kept her drunk 24/7, and drank himself to death (in 1998). During his last 2-3 years she has little to no recollection of what happened. To this day he still walks on water... she thinks he was taking care of her. During those years my mother tried to go through the court system to have them both declared incompetent so she could at least save my granny's money. He paid people to speak on their behalf.... the courts decided they didn't need to intervene, my grandmother is now almost penniless and has no clue.
Guess who got to go pick up the pieces after my uncle died.... You guessed it... me! She wanted to go back to Florida, so I was in charge of her while my parents got her business settled in TN.
Granted I was in my early 20's, but I had a life all my own. She hadn't wanted anything to do with us for several years and I was supposed to swoop in like nothing had happened.
Lets fast forward to fall of 1999. I was pregnant, my parents didn't know yet. I went to visit for the weekend with the intentions of telling them the news. (I was unmarried at the time and knew it would be difficult for my parents at first). I end up in a meeting with my parents and my mom's therapist. It seems that for several years during high school, my mom was sexually assaulted by one of her teachers...a female teacher. My mom went to a boarding school and was looking forward to summer so she could be away from her attacker. Then she discovered that her parents had invited her into their home for the summer. She was assaulted in her own home, the one place she thought she would be safe. (Needless to say I didn't share my news that weekend.)
I was there when my mother confronted my grandmother... my grandmother's response... we thought something was wrong, thats why we invited her to spend that summer.... they wanted to "figure out" what was going on. I mean seriously what kind of parents do that. My grandmother brushed it off like it was no big deal. My mother was severely depressed for most of her life over this and other stupid lacks in judgement by her parents.
There is so much more.... I could go on and on, but I won't. I hate that even in granny's demented state, her stories sound plausible..... people believe her even though they know they shouldn't.... There's no telling what she says about me when I'm not around.... I try not to worry about it, but I'm only human.
We are all human and we all judge..... just try to remember, we don't know the stories that aren't told.

Special visitor

As many of you all may know I have not been on top of my schedule at work! I have managed to work Easter and Mother's Day. I am scheduled to work my Bday, anniversary and my 3yo's Bday....

Anyways, as I was pouting around work on Mother's Day my terrific hubby decided to bring the kids to eat lunch with me!! This was wonderful news, because I was having a stressful day.

My hubby and kids arrive and I go out to tell them that i'm going to be a few minutes!! (Code Brown!) Taylor is asking over and over again "why would someone put a paper towel up there?" as she is staring at the ceiling!

It seems she had noticed this brown thin sticking out of the ceiling and had asked daddy what it was... he answered, it looks like a paper towel, just forget about it. Well of course seeing as how she's my child...she can't get over anything until she has an answer!

So now I'm standing here staring at this brown thing in the ceiling. And i noticed that it was not a paper towel as my husband had thought....unless of course paper towels have eyes!!!

It seems we had a little visitor trying to take a nap in the hallway!! Unfortunately the pictures aren't the best, because they were taken with my phone, but I think you can see it pretty clearly!!

The bat was rescued from the ceiling and let go outside.....It was sweet of him to visit, but time for him to go...

Pierogi Casserole (New family fave!)

I had a bag of frozen pierogies in the the freezer and wanted to do something with them. I googled and read several recipes and came up with one that was similar to what I found. It is yummy and rich and feeds a crowd!!

Pierogi Casserole

Prep time @ 15min
Cook time 45min


Ingredients

1 bag of frozen Pierogies
16 oz sour cream
1 can cream of celery soup
1 small onion
1 tbsp butter/margarine
1 package turkey smoked sausage
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp onion salt (can use plain salt instead)

Pre-heat oven to 350*.
Chop onion and sauté in butter (feel free to use EVOO or another substitute) until translucent.
Chop smoked sausage into bite size pieces.
Spray a 13 x 9 casserole dish with cooking spray. Layer pierogies in the bottom of dish.
In a small mixing bowl combine sour cream, soup, garlic powder and onion salt.
Sprinkle the onion and smoked sausage over the pierogies.
Spoon sauce mixture over other ingredients and spread to cover dish.
Sprinkle with cheese.
Cover with aluminum foil and cook 30min.
Uncover and cook for 15 additional minutes or until cheese is melted.

Serve and enjoy!! I generally serve 3 pierogies as a portion, this recipe feeds my family of 5 (that eat) with leftovers!!!

TMI

Just a quick post!!

So to make a long story short.....My in-laws are divorced...going on a year now!. My FIL work in Cali and my MIL lives in their house in MS. My FIl comes home every so often when he is not working! Well Mother's day was one of his return visits. This time he decided to bring his girlfriend (even though he says she's just a friend!) with him...... Do you see where I'm going....They are all staying in the same house together.

My MIL thought she would be alright with this arrangement. (I have no clue what she was thinking)But apparently she is not. It seems my FIL is sharing a wee bit too much info!! I will spare my hubby and not recall the convo he recently had with my MIL, I think it may have scarred him for life.

But word to the wise people...even when your kids are grown....they DO NOT want to know about their parents 'love' life. There is a line that should not be crossed when you are talking with your child!

Unfortunately for my husband, that line was crossed...........he might not ever recover!!

Bank of America helps??

As many of you know, Kelly's identity was stolen last week. He called me on my way home from work one night in a panic, because he had tried to order pizza and our debit card was declined...from 2 different places. i pulled up my mobile banking only to find out that there was a debit of $888,888.88 to our account. there was no explanation as to where is came from. Kelly tried to call customer service and of course....they were closed. There was nothing we could do.

That empty feeling washed over me as I wondered what were we going to do. Obviously we couldn't do anything until the next business day. So we had to wait...... and as we waited i got more and more frustrated, reasonable thought went out the window....

Who the hell would try to take that much money....from not just us, but anyone....

and why had the bank not caught such an odd amount..... I pondered on this for the next 12 or so hours....

First thing the next morning after we got the girls off to school. Kelly called the bank. I was downstairs feeding the baby and started googling $888,888.88...I knew there had to be a reason it was for that amount!

At first I found info that the bank had done it because they thought someone had committed fraud. I wondered what we possibly could have done for the bank to think that we had done this. I decided to keep reading.....I found a blog posted my someone (didn't think to save the search) stating that their bank had done this when their identity had been stolen.

I had mixed feelings over this! i was glad that maybe the bank didn't think we had committed fraud, but worried about our information.

When i was finished giving A her bottle I joined Kelly to see what he had found out.

Sure enough his info had been stolen. We didn't know where or how. the bank had put this hold on our account, because they knew it was a legitimate account and they didn't want whoever this person was to be able to touch it. For this I was thankful. They credited our account for all the fees that had been acquired. Kelly went into a branch explained the situation...new account opened...old account closed....they gave us some information on what we needed to do to report the theft......we thought that would be the end of our issues...at least with the bank...

It was not....

Yesterday was payday. I had managed to stop my direct deposit (to the old account)but, they could not start the new one in time so i got a paper check. Kelly came to work to get it a rushed to the bank to deposit it in time.....We do have bills to pay people!!!

He received a notice that there a hold being placed on our account until they could verify that the check was a good one...WTH.... this is my paycheck from the big hospital that I work at...the same one that had been direct deposited into our old account for 5 years.....

I told Kelly to call to find out why and get the hold taken off ( I had to do this once before). I thought maybe it was because I have not been added to the account yet...and yes I signed the check over to him before he deposited it!

He couldn't get any info on the phone, and the branches were closed by this point so we had to wait til this morning.... Saturday morning. the worst banking day of all days.

He went into the branch thinking this would be the easiest way to handle it. It wasn't!

The person he talked to informed him that not only was there 1 hold on our account, but 2....and the account was severely in the hole. It seems that they ended up putting 2 holds on 1 check, each hold was for the amount of the check....and other transactions had gone through so lots of overdraft charges......

The guy didn't have a clue what to do about it. He said hopefully Monday night it would be reversed and both hold should be removed.....HOPEFULLY...WTF....seriously thats all the help he could be.

Kelly immediately left and called customer service. He was told by the rep that when they pulled up our account it was blocked. All that would come up was a message stating that the account holder had to go into a branch to access this account. Seriously....He told the CS rep that the branch didn't know what to do with it either.....By the time all this happened it was after 1pm and the branches were all closed

So here we are, beyond moneyless, bills due, HOPEFULLY it MIGHT be fixed Monday night....

So Bank Of America really seems to think that we are going to stick around after all this. I am greatly appreciative for what they did when they discovered my husbands info had been stolen. But it was supposed to have been fixed with our new account. Why do we have to keep jumping through hoops, why are they doing this to us. Do the not think that the stress of everything else we have going on is enough.................

Monday morning we are going to stalk every manager we can find until this is resolved.....we will then run away as fast as we can and take our money with us...........

Hurt feelings go both ways!

I got a call from my granny this morning. I haven't had a chance to talk to her in a few days so I answered the phone. The first words out of her mouth were "you really hurt my feelings this time". I knew what she was talking about. She says ( I say it that way because, she's not often accurate) that she has received some award from the "National Assisted Living Organization" (I'm not even sure if there is one.)

She says there was a big write up and she wanted me to make copies so I could have one and she could send some to her friend in Florida. I haven't had a chance to talk to her, because I have been working. She knows I'm not allowed to talk when I'm working.

When I answered the phone I had all intentions of congratulating her and telling her I couldn't wait to read the article.....she never gave me the chance. When I tried to explain that I was sorry I didn't have the chance to call her she just kept saying "you may not care about it, but I'm very excited".

I tried 3 different times to apologize and tell her I was excited, she wouldn't listen to me. I finally got frustrated and asked her why she never listened to me...her response "I'm sorry I bothered you."

I give up....we have many conversations that go this way. She asks me a question and when I give her the answer she ignores me.

I told one of my Twitter friends this morning that she is "crazy granny" she is either crazy funny or crazy mean.

Kelly tells me not to let it get to me. I try not to, but it's hard. I know she has dementia and gets confused....but she's not totally gone, part of her is still in there. She was always a little bit narcissistic, but it has gotten worse the older she gets. She is the master of guilt trips, she always has been. There are days when I wish that was something that was lost in the dementia.... instead, it seems to have only gotten worse.