• Home
  • Blog
  • Archives
  • Links
  • About
  • Guest Blogger
  • Contact

Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

  • Home and Lifestyle
  • Recreation
  • Health Fitness and Beauty
  • Entertainment
  • Web and Technology


You are here: Home / Archives for Home and Lifestyle

My back is bad again

September 15, 2009 by Tricia

Darn it! My back is bad again! It was pretty good for most of the summer, but I guess I haven’t been quite as active in the last few weeks so it’s started hurting me again!

Yesterday I went outside to do a little gardening and to water the front and back gardens and pretty much as soon as I stepped outside, before I even did any work, my back started hurting. Same thing this afternoon – my husband and I went outside to sit on the patio and I took some pictures and as soon as I started working with my camera – bending in odd ways, my back started screaming!

Earlier this year I found out that I have a slipped disc in my lower back and it’s pinching a nerve. Pretty much anytime I lean forward (especially for an extended period of time) my back starts to ache because that position pinches the nerve even more than when I’m standing straight or leaning back. My left leg, to just below my knee, has been numb since January … it will probably be more numb than usual this evening.

I’m actually still outside on the patio, typing away from the garden, but once I go inside I think I’ll have to lie down and put some heat on my back.

Do any of you have bad backs as well? What do you do to make your back feel better?





Filed Under: Back Pain, Health Fitness and Beauty, Home and Lifestyle Tagged With: aching, back pain, herniated disc, inactivity, leaning forward, numb leg, pinched nerve, slipped disk, sore back

Grilled Halibut

September 11, 2009 by Tricia

Last Saturday evening we had Grilled Halibut for dinner. It’s very easy to make, and it’s a healthy meal!

Here’s how I prepared the halibut for grilling:

Grilled Halibut Dinner for Two

  • 2 pieces of Halibut (approx 1 inch thick, 1/2 lb per piece)

Marinade:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp lemon juice (concentrated)
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp dried dill or 1 tsp chopped fresh dill

Mix marinade ingredients together in a mixing bowl or flat dish (corning ware?) that is large enough to hold the fish.

Rinse Halibut pieces and pat dry. Place the Halibut in the marinade container, turning once or twice to make sure the fish is covered in marinade. Let sit for approximately 30 minutes prior to cooking.

When cooking fish in the oven or on the grill it’s good to keep in mind that it takes approximately 10 minutes to thoroughly cook a 1 inch piece of fish.

Prepare the grill by oiling it and once it’s reached a high temperature place your fish on the grill. Halibut usually has skin on one side so place the skin side down when you first begin to cook the fish. Turn after approximately five minutes and cook the other side for another five minutes (10 minutes in total per inch thickness of fish) or until the fish is opaque and begins to flake easily. (test with knife or fork while cooking.)

Serve the fish immediately after cooking. Asparagus and grilled vegetables are wonderful additions to this meal.

Steamed Asparagus

When preparing Asparagus I rinse the asparagus, then snap off the hard ends on the stalks. I then place the Asparagus spears in a microwave steaming dish and cook them for approximately three minutes.

Once the Asparagus spears are tender I drain any water from the microwave steamer, place the asparagus in the bottom tray with a little bit of margarine (we use canola margarine) and a few drops of lemon juice concentrate. I then toss the asparagus in the margarine and lemon juice and serve. The lemon really adds to the flavor of the asparagus. Delicious.

Grilled Vegetables

Grilled vegetables are easy to prepare and cook on the grill. You can grill just about any vegetable on the grill (onion, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, garlic, tomato etc) – just make sure that you cut your veggies large enough so that they don’t fall through the grill and or use a veggie grilling basket on your barbecue.

The other day I purchased a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers – what better than to grill them!

Simple marinade for grilled veggies:

  • two tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp garlic powder or 1/2 tsp finely diced fresh garlic
  • sprinkle of ground pepper
  • 1 tsp Italian seasoning mix

Mix marinade ingredients together in a bowl.

Prepare vegetables for grilling

  • 1 Zucchini
  • 1 pepper
  1. Cut Zucchini in half lengthwise and then quarter each half creating 8 zucchini wedges
  2. Clean and Quarter the pepper removing all seeds
  3. (prepare any other vegetables you might like to try grilling)
  4. Toss the vegetable pieces in the marinade and let sit for approximately 30 minutes before grilling.
  5. grill veggies on medium to low heat, turning often to prevent charring. Serve immediately once done.

If you enjoy grilled vegetables you should look at this grilled veggie recipe!  The recipe above is very simple, but if you want really tasty grilled vegetables or your cooking to impress this grilled vegetable recipe is the one that I’d use! Yummy!

This meal if very quick and easy to prepare and oh, it tastes so good! Give it a try and let me know how you liked it!

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Home and Lifestyle, Nutrition, Recipes Tagged With: barbecue, BBQ, delicious, dill, easy, easy grilled fish, easy recipe, grill, grilled fish, grilled halibut, Grilled vegetables, grilling, halibut, lemon juice, paprika, recipe, Recipes, spice, steamed asparagus, tasty, yummy

We had some delicious meals for my birthday celebration

September 10, 2009 by Tricia

It was my birthday last Sunday. We didn’t do anything extra special like go out for dinner or have a party, but we did have two really great meals over the weekend in celebration.

On Saturday we went out to get our hair cut. My hair grows really fast and I was past due for a hair cut. It’s so nice now that it’s cut and it’s so nice to not have to struggle with my hair being too long!

After Chris and I got our hair cuts I decided that I wanted to buy a cake for my birthday. We haven’t had a cake, pie or really any dessert other than fruit for over a year so it was time to splurge on something tasty.

While we were in the grocery stores bakery picking out a cake I decided that I want to take a look at the fish section to see if they had any Halibut. Halibut grilled on the barbecue is tasty!

In the end we purchased over a pound of fresh halibut (expensive!), two t-bone steaks (they were on sale!), asparagus, a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers (on sale – 3.99 for a basket) and a basket of fresh peaches, garlic bread and a cake for my birthday. The cake was (is, there’s still some left) a banana chocolate chip cake with chocolate truffle between the layers and a chocolate cream cheese dressing. Needless to say it’s a rich cake and we’re only having small slices which is why there’s still some left!

So with all that delicious food my birthday was really a two day celebration. The steak and halibut were more expensive than our usual fair, but they made excellent meals, much nicer than the meals we probably would have gotten if we’d gone out to a nice restaurant on Sunday for my birthday.

I expect we’ll have another celebration in a week or two. Not birthday related though. We’re very friendly with our Greek neighbors and one of my neighbors grandsons is going to get engaged this weekend (i just gave him the name of one of my certified diamonds contacts from my time in the jewelry trade) and I’m sure my neighbors will have some kind of big engagement party soon that we’ll end up invited too. I’ve mentioned before how our neighbors give us food all the time (especially when they’re celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter) and inviting us to their special events … so I’d be willing to wager that we’ll get an invite to their engagement celebration. Mmmm more good food!

So … what do you do for your or your spouses birthday. Do you go all out and celebrate with a party and lots of gifts? Chris and I pretty much have everything we need (except more money!) so we don’t really buy each other gifts. We buy things when we can afford it and when we want it not just for special days or holidays.

I’ll post the recipes for the Grilled Halibut and the grilled T-bone steaks in the next couple of posts in case anyone’s interested in how we made our fantastic tasting food!

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try Tagged With: Birthday, cake, celebrate, celebration, chocolate banana cake, Chris, delicious, dinner, dinners, Gifts, grilled veggies, halibut, husband, special, tbone steak

We’ve got to fix that darn tri-light that keeps fizzling out

September 10, 2009 by Tricia

I have one light in my living room that drives me nuts! It’s an old standing lamp that I got from my parents house when my mother died. I think there’s something wrong with the wiring in the light fixture.

It’s a Tri-light lamp and it seems to burn through bulbs every few months. Once a bulb starts to go it’s tri-light feature stops working. It will usually lose the low light setting first, then the high setting and only the medium will work. The light will also flicker on and off every few minutes too.

I think maybe this weekend (if we have time – see last post!) we’ll have to go and look at light fixtures. Maybe we can find a new fixture to put in the lamp that won’t fizzle lights so quickly. I’d get a whole new light for the living room 1. if we could afford it, and 2 if this one didn’t have sentimental value. I hope that we can fix it.

I don’t know if all tri-lights fizzle out like this when they go, but I figure that our bulbs should last at least five or six months instead of the three months we’re getting for each bulb on average. I don’t have any other tri-lights in the house to compare this one to.

Do you have any lights or appliances in your home that don’t work the way they should? Isn’t it frustrating?

Filed Under: Appliances and Accessories, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try Tagged With: blinks on and off, bulb, fizzle, frustrating, light fixture, living room, standing lamp, stops working, tri light, tri light bulb

Busy Busy – Every weekend it’s something else!

September 10, 2009 by Tricia

The past few weeks have been so busy! Scratch that – the whole summer seems to have been a busy time for my husband and I.

The last two weekends Chris and I went to his cousins to help them dig up their backyard. They have a strange drainage problem … their whole backyard slopes back towards their house! To make matters worse the backyard is filled with clay soil so that made digging really hard!

I also celebrated my birthday last Sunday so that kept us busy too! Hmmm I should write a post about the great meals we had on Saturday on Sunday as part of my celebration.

Now this weekend my husbands brother is here from Chicago. His teenage son is participating in a weekend long hockey tournament. So guess where I’ll be all weekend … sitting in a cold ice arena!

Then … next weekend it’s my brother in law’s birthday and a family friend out of town wants us to come to her house for a dinner party. This means probably staying overnight, but we can’t bring our dog because our friend (the one that had heart surgery last fall) hates dogs! That’s a dilemma because we can’t leave the dog alone for most of the weekend. So we either have to figure out something for our dog, not go … or what usually happens when this friend invites us to one of her parties – just my husband will go.

We have things going on into early October! I think by the time all of our planned activities are over I’m going to need a holiday! Maybe I should look into one of those Myrtle beach vacation rentals that I keep hearing about. Sounds good to me!

How busy are you these days? Did you have a busy summer like I did? Are things settling down now, or are you just as busy with parties, family obligations and other things as you were all summer?

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Life with Chris, Toronto Tagged With: backyard, Birthday, busy, busy summer, busy weekends, celebrate, cousins, digging, dinner party, drainage problem, Family, friends, need holiday, tired, vacation

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • …
  • 310
  • Next Page »

Connect with Us

  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Categories

Sites of Interest

Useful Links

Eavestrough Cleaning Toronto

Shopping

Gifts, Gadgets,
Books and More!

Recent Posts

  • Is your home well insulated or do you have energy leaks?
  • Pet Safety Tips
  • Top 10 Most Fundamental Yoga Poses For Beginners
  • Will My Interior Décor Stand The Test Of Time?
  • Outdoor Furniture- Spicing Up Your Backyard
  • Ensuring You Have A Good Experience Staying At Hotels With Children
  • Mother’s Day Cookies

Recent Comments

  • Bill on Top 10 Most Fundamental Yoga Poses For Beginners
  • [bonus]old school new body-f4x workout on Why does my husband always bring home the wrong stuff?
  • Rodhe Stevens on 5 Little Known Secrets To Finding Cheap (But Durable) Furniture
  • Julia Carlson on How To Install A Mosaic Tile Kitchen Backsplash
  • Humane Raccoon Deterrent Idea on Helped save a baby raccoon last night

Subscribe


Subscribe to our RSS Feed It's FREE!

Subscribe to Tricia's Musings by Email It's FREE!


Follow me on TWITTER

Find us on Google +



Find us on Facebook



I have two mottos-
1. Live life to the fullest; and
2. Don't have any regrets.

Get More Traffic

Visitors since 2006

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Search this site

Tags

blog blogs camera Canada Chris computer crohns dinner dog Family flower flowers Food friends funny garden Gardening Green Thumb Sunday Health and Fitness Health Fitness and Beauty holiday home Home and Lifestyle house husband IBD Inflammatory bowel disease Internet Music neighbors pain photo photos plants puppy Shopping sick sleep spring Toronto TV Video visit website Wordless Wednesday

Blogs I Visit

  • Beautiful British Columbia
  • Organic Gardening Tips
  • Sans Pantaloons
  • LifeCruiser
  • Say No to Crack

Copyright © 2026 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in