…and gas is selling for $3.16 per gallon at the station right by work. I will probably never think to dig up this post, but I am guessing that will seem shocking in six months. 🙂
also, labels I feel I should print off and use for something: here
-Jordan
To make Monday even better, I went to the dentist today!
Nothing to report from the dentist, other than the fact that it remains soundly in the “no fun” category.
On the way out, they asked me if I wanted to schedule my 6 month from new appointment. I tried to explain to them that my job is changing dental plans, and I am getting married. I don’t think the idea that I would change dentists due to a dental plan crossed their minds as they blankly smiled at me.
to be honest I kind of want to change dentists so that I can go to one closer to work, given that the one I am going to now moved to the other side of town. Hopefully they wont be too offended if I never call them again… ever
pretty awesome Monday huh? 🙂
-Jordan
First off, lets see how I did on that list yesterday:
Gallery is kind of a maze to figure out how its building pages, I think I have found where it constructs the main page you see when you click the “gallery” link from the front page, I just have to find a way to inject a link back to the main page from there. I am not optimistic about adding text in the unused space, but maybe I will change my mind once I understand its page creation code a little better.
the other things on that list I simply ran out of time for, perhaps because I was being lazy and didn’t get started right away 🙂
I also tackled the frozen chicken I had piling up, for over a month now I had been buying a bag or so each time the store had a sale on frozen chicken breasts. Ever since Heather and I started our workout plan I have been using the approach Heather used, where you cook a bunch of chicken, and freeze it in proper meal sized portions. Buying lots of it raw, and then procrastinating before cooking it meant I had four bags, or eight pounds of chicken to deal with. I normally use a vinegar and pepper marinade, but I didn’t have a big enough container to soak that much chicken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that much in the same style. So after trimming it all, I settled on four different kinds:
starting at the top, and going left-to-right, we have: BBQ, lemon pepper, plain, vinegar-pepper. I was pretty happy with the results. the BBQ didn’t come out as well as it has in the past, but I think I did something differently then, I just cant remember what. After cubing and bagging all of that I ended up with 22 bags of chicken, enough to keep me in quick lunches for quite a while 🙂
Hopefully today I can knock out the rest of the website stuff, and maybe even get my room cleaned a little bit before I completely loose this productive streak I am on 🙂
-Jordan
With Heather gone this weekend its a good time to make a final push to wrap up the website. I figure if I publish my to do list here I will feel obligated to stay on it and maybe overcome the Saturday-afternoon lethargy that sometimes kills these projects. 🙂
things that still need done:
The sad thing is I am sure there is a fair amount I can’t remember right now, but the list as it stands should give me something to shoot for at least.
-Jordan
Yesterday was cake, today is pie, you might think this blog was desert oriented! 🙂
Heather was given some “for baking” apples from somebodies back yard a few weeks ago, and we had said over and over again that we should try making something with them. We never had time over the last two weeks until last night.
I had looked around for a recipe that would come close to being healthy, or at least not loaded with sugar. The best I could come up with was a recipe for “Sugarless Apple Pie,” a recipe that used apple juice concentrate instead of sugar for sweetness. I was a little skeptical, but figured it was worth a try… the worst we could do was ruin some free apples and a little pie crust.
Heather undertook to peel the apples using a “cut them up and then remove the skin” method that I didn’t really think was going to work, but without a peeler I couldn’t say much. It turns out her method actually works really well… faster than my peeling them with a knife and then cutting them up (moral of the story, we need a peeler). Once the apples were cut up, we just followed the recipe for the filling.
The crust came as 2 pie crusts, both in tins. If the directions hadn’t explicitly said you could dump one crust out and use it as a top for your pie I don’t know if I would have figured that out. I guess you can’t be an expert when its your first pie. We did that, but the crust stuck really bad to the foil we thawed it on so it was kind of a mangled mess when we tried to move it onto our pie. We were also worried that, because the picture in the recipe didn’t have a top, we shouldn’t have a top. I wish I would have taken a picture of the pie before we baked it, there were just strips of crust haphazardly tracing across the filling without any symmetry or plan. It was awesome, in a really sad sort of way. 🙂
we baked it setting in the middle of a pizza pan, didn’t use foil to protect the crust, and it came out perfect. I suppose if you tried it right next to another apple pie it might not taste as sweet, but on its own it tasted great and I certainly didn’t feel like I was missing anything.
notes for next time:
-Jordan
This post is a few days late because I was slow getting the images off my camera… better late than never right?
Saturday and Sunday Heather and I looked into cake options for our wedding.
First up was Hy-Vee, but after a phone call by Heather we found out the “just drop by whenever” time frame they had given her wasn’t really going to work because the only person who could talk about wedding cakes was going to be gone in a few minutes, but she was nice enough to explain some of the basic details of what they offer, overall cost and cost per serving. The actual sit-down with them is still pending.
Next up was The Cakery, an aptly named specialty shop. They had a really good array of mock cakes showing some of their basic styles. Seven to nine full-sized wedding cakes takes up a lot of floor-space, but it was helpful to actually have something to look at, because translating the idea you have in your head to something you can talk about is surprisingly hard for something as iconic as a wedding cake. We got there a little early so had plenty of time to look at the example cakes before they sat us down to look at their library of pictures from different wedding cakes. Again they had an amazing wealth of examples of cakes, and fairly good presentation in the book. On a tangent, let me say that some people do some ridiculous cakes. I really don’t know how many guests you would need to eat some of those cakes, but I am thinking 500+ for more than a few in that book. Okay, back to the cakery, did I mention they had four small cakes for us to sample? I was the designated cake tester (verdict: “meh, its cake”) so I ate while Heather tackled the challenge of getting herself and the decorator on the same page for a cake design. We left there feeling like we had a really good idea what the cake should look like.
Its at this point that my Escape failed to start.
Our next, and Final stop was Wheat Fields, a destination so legendary among Omaha denizens we recruited additional party members for our expedition.
Or maybe it just worked out that Pam (Heather’s mother) and Elise (bridesmaid) were both in town, but it was nice to have them along. Wheat Fields is a bakery and restaurant, and standing in the bakery / lobby area it was easy to see how it gained the reputation it has. We then stood nearly-drooling over all the fresh baked deserts and breads for almost 20 minutes waiting for the sole cake decorator to appear out of the back room. She was a grandmotherly lady, a little flustered at first, but she knew a lot about cakes, and how to plan one for a wedding. They had maybe 30 pictures of past wedding cakes, mostly bad. At this point things were not looking good for Wheat Fields in the selection process, but then they brought out the cake:
I cannot begin to impress upon you how richly this cake deserves its reputation. Hands down the best cake I have ever had, no question. They were all pretty good but their flavor “wedding cake” is the one everyone is talking about if they say something about a cake from Wheat Fields.
At this point we haven’t technically chosen a cake option, but I can tell you Wheat Fields is the leading contender. When your reception consists of only cake, its hard to not rationalize getting really really good cake for it.
I do wonder what our though process would have been if we had done these stops in a different order. Hy-Vee was helpful because it established what cheap-but-professional-and-good cake would cost. The Cakery gave us a great set of examples to realize the range of options in appearance, and figure out what we actually wanted for a look. Wheat Fields changed our minds from the idea that “cake is cake” to thinking that there was some really good cake out there. We literally finished our interactions with each place thinking we would probably just go with them, but what the heck, lets try the next one.
in closing, you should come to my wedding! There will be cake! 🙂
-Jordan
So, Heather bought her wedding dress last night. I suppose I knew these things, but two things really hit me as she was shopping, and even more so once she bought it.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to the wedding, but I never expected this would be something on the list 🙂
-Jordan
Maybe this seems mundane, but personally I have found it to be really really cool this morning.
The fog was unbelievably thick on the way to the gym around 5:30 today ( we started a little later because our schedule was a little more flexible today). Easily the thickest fog I have ever driven in, I honestly thought the streetlights were out on the next block almost the entire way there. Visibility was maybe 40-50 feet and then just black.
I probably wouldn’t have posted anything about that here, but the fog was just as thick almost 3 hours later when I was driving to work! Sometimes visibility dropped down below 50 feet, it was honestly a little scary considering how heavy traffic was… you really couldn’t see much.
-Jordan
I am still a little concerned this site is all just an elaborate ploy of some sort, but all the same I can’t deny my first thought was “HA!, at least its something other than WoW people are mad about”
-Jordan
Heather and I ran a few errands Saturday, including the first part of our three stop cake testing extravaganza (more on that in a later post). Unfortunately my Escape had different ideas, and refused to start when we were leaving a tux shop.
I will say that AAA pretty much sold us on getting a membership once we are married. The free tow would nearly make it worth it, and the addition of an extremely helpful tow truck driver pretty much sealed the deal. There was no question he was willing to go miles out of his way to drop me off at the church for an engagement, or for driving heather back to her car after dropping my Escape off at the shop. He also spent almost an hour trying different things to get us going before resorting to towing.
Now the downside is, from what the mechanic tells me this morning, he was completly miss-diagnosing the problem. The symptoms were that the dome lights came on, and the automatic locks were fine, but when I turned the key *nothing* happened. No clicks, no fans, nothing. Even putting the ignition in the “run” position wouldn’t let you roll down the windows or turn on the radio.
The theory the AAA guy was working under was that the on board security system had tripped, preventing the power from being engaged for ether the “run” or “start” positions. Everything he tried was related to tricks to reset the security system (apparently a problem he sees quite often). The last thing he tried was unhooking the battery for 5 minutes, and while he was at it he tested the battery and cleaned the terminals.
The shop told me over the phone that I just needed a new battery. Completely plausible considering the one in there is at least 6-7 years old. The symptoms don’t quite seem to add up to a weak battery, but its hard for me to know given I didn’t see the tester when the AAA guy checked it. If a new battery fixes it great, I just hope its still not some weirdness in the security system that just reset after setting outside the shop all day Sunday
-Jordan
Nelsons 