Productive Saturday - 300th post!!!

Well, today is Sunday and I have spent all of it in bed with a migraine. This is the worst I have ever had, and I'm currently waiting on an on-call doctor to call me back. This has been the most discouraging day because yesterday was just about the most productive Saturday I have had in years.
The day started out slowly. I got up early, but then proceeded to fall back to sleep on the couch while Joe made pancakes and bacon (side note - Publix brand bacon is not the best, be warned). I woke up to enjoy a plate before leaving the kiddos with daddy so I could make a mid-morning yoga class. It was relaxing and mildly challenging, or at the very least, I managed to challenge myself. Upon returning home, I lured Joe and the kids out to the deck for some water play work/fun. I decided that the picture window, surrounding windows and screens needed a good scrubbing. This started when I began washing the window to the deck door and decided that this wasn't working well enough for the level of filth on my windows.
I whipped up a solution of detergent, vinegar, and water and got to scrubbing with an old kitchen scrub brush. Joe got on top of a ladder for the hard to reach spaces. After several rounds of scrubbing and rinsing, the years-old layers of pollen, the moldy spots, the cloudy glass began to shine and sparkle. A few chunks of paint came off of the window frames, but they got clean.
While we were working, the kids got busy with a couple of buckets and the hose. I heard Nealy proclaim, "Let's take our clothes off!" and before I knew it, I had a couple of naked children soaking themselves with the hose and soaping themselves up with bubble solution. It was quite a sight.
After the deck experience, Nealy came in for a reluctant nap while Jacks camped out in front of a tv show. It occurred to me that it might start raining at any moment, so Jacks's tv time might be increasing at any moment, so I needed to get that kid out of the house. So he and I loaded up our bicycles (after some serious doing from sweet Joe - who needed to put air in my tires, discovered he couldn't make it to a gas station/air compressor in post-game day traffic, so returned home to find a hand pump followed by some manual labor for our outing of bike fun) and we headed over to the bike trail along Shell Toomer Parkway. My big boy is doing really well on his bike, even though he still has training wheels that I don't think he needs. I will say that he has really outgrown his bike from last summer, so we will be looking for a new one for his upcoming birthday! Maybe one without training wheels this time? We'll see....
After about an hour spent enjoying the bike trail, encouraging Jacks to make it up that hill, and taking several juice breaks, he and I made our way back home.
I should probably mention that Auburn won their game yesterday, by the skin of their teeth, so life seemed just a little bit better than usual.
We came home to a wide awake baby girl, which meant it was time for me to get into our bathroom and scrub away the layers of grime that had piled up in there since the last cleaning (longer ago than I care to admit - we seem to clean the hall bathroom more often, which means our own bathroom is woefully neglected.).
When I was happy that it was clean, which probably means it's not all that clean by a clean freak's standards, I got into the kitchen to make one of the best meals in recent history. Here's what I cooked up.....
Earth Fare had a coupon on salmon filets, which means that I grabbed one from the portable cooler and kept on going. How expensive can salmon be? Very expensive, apparently, especially if it's from Scotland. At least I had a coupon! So whatever I made with it better be good, right? It WAS! I stirred up some soy sauce, local honey, minced garlic, and fresh ground pepper to make a little marinade earlier in the day. About 30 minutes before baking, I tossed in the salmon. When it was time to bake, I put it all in the oven (marinade included) at 400 for about 20 minutes. That fish was GOOD, if I do say so myself, and it is kind of my own recipe adapted from one that used maple syrup. I'm not a fan of maple syrup, and I try to use honey whenever I can.
Next up I cubed a couple of sweet potatoes with the skins peeled off. I put them in a microwave safe dish with some butter, salt, and pepper. I microwaved it covered for about 6 minutes, pulled it out and sprinkled a bit more than a sprinkle of brown sugar on top, then put it back in for about a minute.
I also made some steam-in-the-bag haricort verts, which I believe is French for "green beans." Yes, exotic, I know. But the French style was on special at the Publix earlier in the week.
I made a round of my good old French bread, halved and smeared with butter, then heated up and then broiled to a slight burn. (after those last two fixins', I feel like I was serving up that meal from the movie Better Off Dead - shout out to those of you who know what I'm talking about.)
And to top it all off, I made a super fancy lemon cake, which was made primarily from box cake mix, box pudding, and a cool whip icing. That sort of a recipe is a little trailer trash, but we all need a little trailer trash in our cooking now and then.
Joe and I ate like kings! We were so happy with our delicious meal. Jacks and Nealy were, of course, bribed with cake to eat at least a few bites of each food. I was actually surprised at their resistance considering the sweetness of the fish AND the potatoes. Everything was to die for.
I went to bed with a mild headache, which was continued from earlier in the day/week/month - oh, who can count anymore? And I woke up with debilitating pain that I cannot describe. Unfortunately the on-call doctor just recommended a visit to the ER or a walk-in clinic tomorrow as she thinks I need to be seen by a doctor. Well, that stinks and really cuts into my Labor Day plans of grading papers and visiting work to make copies for Tuesday. I might sound in high spirits, but that's only because I'm still living out the high of yesterday's success in my mind. In reality, my head is throbbing and I'm having difficulty getting up.
Here's hoping I wake up healed so I can have a productive Monday. Cheers to 3 day weekends. In an ideal world, every weekend would last 3 days. Of course, in that ideal world, all of civilization WOULDN'T be shut down for the 3rd day as it will be tomorrow, because sometimes you need a business day without work to get things done, you know? Happy Labor Day to all.