If there were a video game of my life over the past few weeks, it would be called “Ultimate Slacker.” I haven’t written a blog entry in ages, as several people — including my mother-in-law — have pointed out. Updating my Facebook status? Yes. But not much else. The Facebook thing makes is that much harder to blog, because I frequently have roughly two sentences that I want to share, not a full epic story. (My proudest status this week — and possibly ever — was “John Mackey finds it satisfying to click “Remove from Friends” after somebody posts something ignorant and homophobic. If only there were a “Remove from Earth” button.” No less epic was “John Mackey is watching Liz Love eat.”) The result, though, is that instead of accumulating enough stuff to warrant a blog entry, I end up with nothing.

Summer is like that. There are few, if any, performances, at least that I attend, so I don’t have any performances to write about. Stories like, “today, I shipped a set for an honor band performance” aren’t likely to keep you coming back for more updates.

The kitchen, like I showed recently, is very nearly done. I’ll post a few more pictures once it’s really, truly finished, but it’ll be a few more weeks. (We’re still waiting on the cabinet front for the dishwasher, but in the meantime, we still have a big black plastic front on the dishwasher. It’s not so slick.)

So what has been dominating my time for the past few weeks? Mostly, it’s cooking in the new kitchen. We’ve made couscous, grilled lemon chicken (twice), sesame noodles, humus, and a bunch of other stuff. Over the weekend, we made a baked omelette for two. Holy crapunzel, that was delicious. (Thank you Ina Garten, the source of almost all of these recipes.)

We also took a day trip to Houston last week. Our friends Sarah and Cory Meals recommended a restaurant called Mark’s American Cuisine. Holy HELL this place was great. We started, as we’ve started most of our festive dinners since our wedding dinner, with some pink Champagne.

First we ordered the appetizer special: Carpaccio of Prosciutto with summer melon and figs. That little bowl in the middle is a melon soup with a broth of Riesling and ice wine. (We love Riesling; we can’t help it. We’re not very wine-hip.)

Our other appetizer was the sliced vine-ripened tomato, roasted pepper, and arugula with two kinds of mozzarella, aged Balsamic, and a green peppercorn vinaigrette.

For her main course, AEJ had the steak.

I went with the pork chops.

If you go to Mark’s, you have to get dessert — even if you’re far too full. We were barfingly stuffed, but how could we turn down one of my absolute favorite desserts, tres leches cake?

And why stop with one dessert? Who the hell only orders one dessert? Wusses, that’s who! We are not wusses (well, not since high school at least), so we also ordered this trio of lemon cake, a lemon curd square, and donuts. That’s right. Donuts.

What else is happening? There’s been a lot of baby deer playtime here at the house — often right outside my studio window.

There’s really been enough slacking, though. At the beginning of next week, I’m going to start writing a new piece. I have three pieces coming up, back-to-back, but I think I’m going to start with the march that I’m writing for Midlothian High School. If you have any thoughts about what this march should do, let me know, ’cause I’d appreciate the feedback.

First, though, it’s time to start dinner! Tonight we’re having roasted red pepper and herb goat cheese sandwiches! Mmm…