First meal outside

It’s not like the weather hasn’t been good enough to eat outside, I just haven’t taken the time to wipe the dirt off of the table.

Those burgers have roasted poblano pepper, avocado, bacon, sharp cheddar, and tomato (mine, anyway). Oh, and a hamburger patty. They were delicious.

Klaus and Ken communing after dinner.

Have I mentioned I hate thinking of blog post titles?

• We are experiencing the invasion of the moths.  My parents live on the banks of a river, so occasionally some variety of bug will hatch and they’ll wake up in the morning to a thousand dead bugs near the windows.  We’re talking a similar quantity of insects.  Clouds of them, in fact, except that at my parent’s house they’re tiny little gnats.  Here they’re 1″+ moths.  I made the mistake of watering the garden and new transplants yesterday and when we took the dogs out before bed the wet ground was literally carpeted with them.  Gross.  Our neighbor said he hasn’t seen the moths this thick for 10 years.
• Klaus took off again last night.  We were both working outside and the dogs were with us.  Usually they stay close, but he was just gone.  Ken walked down to the road to look for him, then our neighbor went out looking for him in his truck.  (Because we have an awesome neighbor, that’s why!)  While our neighbor was still out looking, Klaus came trotting up the driveway.  Sigh.
• Carrots and spinach are peeking up in the garden, and so far I’ve only killed one of the perennials I bought two weekends ago.  Success!
• Ken’s aunt sent us 5 (!!!) boxes of cookbooks that had been his grandpa’s.  We can now eat a different recipe every night for the rest of our lives.
• On Sunday I started crocheting a cardigan on a whim.  I’m not sure it’s going  to fit quite right, but since it’s probably 1/4 done already and I only worked on it Sunday evening, I won’t be too sad to pull it all out and re-try it with a few pattern modifications.
• Ken went to bed super early, which is not something he does.  Hopefully he’s not sick, and hopefully he doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night raring to go.
• I was just thinking about the word predilection.  As in, “I am being ornery and showing my predilection for hymns”.  Good word.  Underutilized.

Christmas vacation 2011

As you may have noticed, we’re back! Let’s do the vacation summary in a different format than usual.

Best meal eaten: My birthday dinner with both of my families, spaghetti, and a delicious home-made ice cream cake.

Worst gift given: Broken dominoes. Sorry Ronnie, maybe I’ll get them replaced this weekend. Don’t count on it…
Best gift received: Having Christmas and my birthday at the same time makes for lots of awesome gifts in a short amount of time, but I think it’s between the cool butter dish Bekah got me and the shirt my sister-in-law, Marie, got me.

Best day of skiing: Silver Mountain with Bekah, Sara, and Ken. Was supposed to be with Mom, Dad, Lauren, and Justin too, but the others were unfortunately indisposed in various ways.
Worst day of skiing: Red River, NM. They need more snow. And although I used my 10 ticket voucher so I didn’t pay their rate for my ticket, $64 is WAY too much for what they had to offer. For $64 I expect at least one high speed lift.
Best lodging: The Gold Pan Motel in Eagle Nest, NM was perfect. It was about $100 cheaper than anything else I could find, it was adorable, cozy, and just great. Go there.
Longest day: Work at 7AM, flight at 7PM, arrive at 12:35 PM body time, rent car, drive to Kellogg, ID, arrive around 2:30AM body time. Then go skiing the next day. I was sleepy.
Vehicles acquired: Ken’s parents gave us their 12 passenger van, since it’s down here anyway. Anyone interested? We need to sell it so we can get a more 4WD truck-like vehicle.
Most anticipated future event: Kristina is coming to visit in the summer. Now it’s public, so you MUST come.
Best (and only) movie viewed: Sherlock Holmes. Highly enjoyable.
Newest apartment visited: Bethany and Ronnie’s. They have a pantry. I must admit to covetousness.
Most amusing lunch: With my friend from college and her husband. We talked for 2 hours.
1st golfing experience: At the country club after lunch. I was forced to putt for 5 minutes for my lunch. I don’t think that golf is my sport of choice.

Only former foreign exchange student met: Nils, from when I was in high school. Still tall, still funny.

Biggest hole in bottom of ski: My poor ski met with a BIG rock at Red river. We will be needing some P-Tex. A lot of P-Tex. We had just waxed them too.
Amount of extra-box cat poop awaiting us: 5 piles.
Sigh.

But it’s good to be home.

Thanksgiving vacation

Look who came over to our house!

I took the week off of work. We climbed to the top of the ridge behind our house on Sunday afternoon.

Grandpa didn’t climb to the top of the hill, but he made a good face.

We went on a hike. It was pretty cool, and the frost was just melting on the bushes.

Then we went to Colorado, and found my aunt and uncle who took us on a long hike.

Hikers!

Our cousin Peter was there too!

Hikers on a bridge.

After our big hike… The food!

Ken putting up Grandpa’s giant leaf after a day of skiing at Loveland of which I have no record because I didn’t haul my camera along. It was fun though.

We came back with my Grandma’s piano, which we managed to get out of my Grandpa’s house and into our house with minimal destruction of piano or other property.

And now I have to go back to work tomorrow. Yay!

Home improvement post!

Over the past month we:

Built a fence for the doggle.

Planted tulips, daffodils, and lots and lots of irises. Not very exciting picture, but it was as lot of work to dig up that rocky dirt and mix in manure! Hopefully next spring there’ll be a comparison picture with beautiful flowers.

Ken using the former artwork to shore up the slope.

Oh, and shrimp tacos with home-made salsa and tortillas. Perhaps not home improvement, but amazing anyway.

Typical evening

Picture of domestic bliss:

Wife in the kitchen making granola bars, lunches, putting away dinner, washing dishes, emptying and filling dishwasher.

Husband sitting on floor of kitchen assembling his new (used) welder.

Wet dog (it rained!) attempting to be a lap-welder-dog.

Cats perched on table supervising.

That was Tuesday night, and you know what? It was pretty good.

Guess the welding torch just needs new fittings to plug into the welder and the grounding clamp needs to be unpacked from wherever it’s hiding, then the welder’s ready to go. It’s very exciting! The granola bars turned out tasty too. The dog even eventually dried out and smelled much better, and it was Ken’s turn to do all the kitchen stuff on Wednesday.

Buying a house is kind of a pain in the butt

The great first house purchase is proceeding as well as house purchases ever do.  Inspections are all done.  Appraisal is done.  The sellers have our imperious demands that they fix the broken fridge and dishwasher and other sundry items.  The title company sent us some stuff to sign.  Ken got us a house insurance agent.  We almost have the lender convinced that I actually have a job.  Etc. There is a never-ending list of details.  Closing is set for Monday, and I have no clue if that’s realistic or not.  Nobody’s told me it’s not…

After closing the hard work starts.  We get to clean the whole place, rip out some lovely green carpet, paint some walls, and move our stuff in.  Then Ken can get to work on stripping paint from beams, painting walls replacing steps, and finally refinishing wood floors while we live  out of boxes.  Anybody want to come help?

It rained today.  I love living somewhere where this is remarkable.

Now it’s time to go return some moldy sour cream to Walmart.  We bought it yesterday, it’s sold-by date is 7 days from now and it was moldy when we opened it last night.  I guess we shouldn’t buy fresh groceries at Walmart.

Friday at lunchtime

I wrote up this beautiful post about my angel food cake, but it’s meant to have pictures in it and once again finding time to get them off of the camera and onto the internet eludes me. Maybe next week? I know you’re all on the edges of your seats.

With Laura as my inspiration, I made grapefruit curd with the egg yolks. It’s really good, but I haven’t quite figured out what it goes best with. So far I’ve tried it on the angel food cake (too sweet), by itself (good, but so rich and sweet you can really only have a few bites), and in malt-o-meal (random? Yes, but that was one tasty bowl of malt-o-meal). I think it would be best over top of a not too sweet vanilla ice cream. Home-made vanilla ice cream would be perfect. Too bad Ken hasn’t found a good deal on the ice-cream maker he wants yet.

I’ve finished first drafts of 2 papers at work, and hope to get another paper to 1st draftable condition this afternoon. I’ve also applied for some more jobs, since I have heard very little back from anybody about the ones I’ve already applied for. I hope whatever job I get won’t require just sitting at a computer all day every day, because I’m getting pretty antsy.

Tonight we leave for Pittsburgh and our second bike-camping adventure, which I’m pretty sure is going to be less intense than our first. I hope so anyway, because I am in far worse shape this year. On the other hand, I now have fancy-dancy clipless pedals on a beautiful old french touring bike so it should make 38 miles of mostly flat riding a joy. The weather is supposed to be nice (only 40% chance of thunderstorms) and we’re going with our outdoor adventuring friends. I’m excited!

Weekend re-cap

I had a very productive weekend. That is what I like in a weekend: productivity.

We:
Made (mostly Ken here, but I helped) and cleaned up from a BBQ for the whole department
Cleaned out (and vacuumed!) the car
Topped off various vehicle fluids
Re-insulated the car’s exhaust hangers
Swept the garage
Stuffed the cats into their carrier for acclimation twice.
Did all the normal weekly stuff: cat boxes, laundry, bathroom, kitchen floors
Returned a non-functioning item to Walmart (on bicycles, so that counts as exercise!)
Fixed my laptop cord by soldering two broken ones together (all by myself!)
Played music for church with friends
Made food – BBQ on Friday, steak and eggs for breakfast Saturday, biscuits and gravy for Easter breakfast at church, angel food cake, mushroom risotto, candied yams, asparagus, fruit salad, ham, and some teensy lamb chops for Easter dinner.
Went for a walk (sorely needed after all that food)
Watched the rest of 30 Rock Season 2 which needed to be returned to the library.
Listened to the tail end of Anne of the Island while looking at pictures taken by sewer/subway explorers. Weird combination of activities, I know.
Talked to Mom on the phone about their trip to come visit (Which is in only 2 weeks!!!!)

Not bad.

Up this week:
Preparing bikes for a bike-camping trip (I got ridiculous new bar-tape for my bike, and I can’t wait to see how silly it looks with it.)
Maybe packing a few boxes?
Dinner with our roommate
Cutting Ken’s hair? It is getting a bit ridiculous…
Orchestra on Thursday (if I get tickets).
Heading to Pittsburgh to go bike-camping!!! Hope it stops raining.

Angel food cake and flowers

I’m going to make angel food cake for Easter. From scratch. Pray for me. On a related note, any suggestions for what to do with 12 egg yolks?

It’s spring, or at least it hasn’t snowed for several weeks, so I’ve been going a little bit crazy taking pictures of flowers pretending I have a macro lens on rare sunny days.

We started with crocus. I didn’t get any pictures of them in the snow, but I could have.

Then these little guys came out. They’re tiny, that flower must only be 1/2 inch in diameter, but they sure are beautiful.

The forsythia are currently in bloom, along with hundreds of thousands of daffodils, but none that are in sunny places in my yard in the early evening, so no pictures.

I bought a lily at Walmart and it’s got the most beautiful yellow flowers.