Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this past week:

We enjoyed Monday night football on our patio with a nice dinner and a sad Steeler loss.  We will miss this spot when we move.  And if the Steelers don’t start playing better, apparently we are going to miss a winning season as well.

In case you wondered, it takes a really, really long time to drain a pool for repairs in the lining, then to fix said lining (in an unfortunate, not-even-close-to-matching way), then refill said pool with a single garden hose.  Thank goodness Dan got the brilliant idea to hook up the world’s longest hose to the spigot in the front yard, so we had two garden hoses working at the same time to speed up the re-filling process by approximately half as excruciatingly long.

We cooked amazing Korean pork belly BBQ at home this week, made possible by the awesome Asian supermarket (H Mart) that we will sorely miss once we move.  Dan marinated the paper-thinly sliced pork in a spicy/sweet mixture:  gochu jang (spicy Korean pepper paste), soy, mirin (rice wine), brown sugar, sesame oil and pear juice (from a mashed up pear.)  Following the protocol of the (few) Korean restaurants we’ve been to, we served the pork taco-style in Bibb lettuce leaves with green onion tops and a little extra marinade (set aside before we added the pork to the marinade.)  So good.  We’re going to have to find an Asian market in the Chicago area for sure.

Also on the moving front, Holy Clean Garage Batman!  We made really good progress on the de-cluttering this week, while Dan is between jobs.  That pile in the front of the photo is our eleventy-billionth load to donate to Goodwill, and if you squint a bit you can see a couple of sweet, sweet empty shelves in the back.  Special thanks to our suckers friends who are taking some of our old like-new tools off our hands to clutter up their own garages put to good use!

Who knew we had a treasure chest in our garage?!  We found a small bucket of coins from who-remembers-where, added it to the coin receptacle we keep in our closet and carted them (literally — both containers were really heavy so we put them in a shopping cart) to our local coin exchange at the grocery store.  We each estimated the amount of dollars we might receive (I said $87, Dan said $125) before we started the coin loading process, and boy, did we under-estimate.  After about half an hour, dirty coin fingers and a really patient customer service representative who cleaned out the machine for us, we left with a little more than $350!  De-cluttering for the win!