Memorial Day (The Weekend) (Part Two)

Posted on by Jordan

Even after cutting back to only really talking about weekends, I have managed to fall woefully behind….

Anyway, The second major part of our trip back to McCook was helping Dad build a deck.

The work was really planned for a few weeks later, but the lumber was delivered a few weeks early. We thought it would be good to get a jump start on the project, and at least lay the initial frame down.

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We quickly discovered that the lumber sold as deck building material isn’t particularly exacting with respect to dimensions, so some of our assumptions and plans ended up being derailed. After some minor fussing, we figured our a plan that would work out ok, and finished the frame Sunday night. Dad and I decided to see how far we could get before noon Monday, and actually managed to 100% finish laying out and tacking down the decking.

As you can kind of see in the picture, we pried up the paving stones that would be covered by the new deck. That is going to be another project, but at least we got started re-orienting the pathway to match up with the new deck.

-Jordan

Finished!

Posted on by Jordan

I finished Atlas Shrugged last night!

It took me roughly 34 days to finish, that’s making pretty good time, its a rather long book.

I will spare you the full review, other than to say I enjoyed it. I didn’t find the ending to be terribly satisfying, but it was an interesting read.

-Jordan

Memorial Day (The Weekend)(Part One)

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I headed to McCook for the Memorial day weekend. We packed our bikes, and really didn’t have any plans other than to enjoy being away from Omaha for a few days.

The first interesting thing to occur was that the bike rack didn’t work as well as I had hoped on the back of Heather’s rather compact car. We drove a few miles before deciding that things weren’t looking quite right in the rear view mirror, and then I got to spend my first hot sweaty frustrating minutes on the side of the road fussing with cargo tied to the car as a married man. I hope those minutes will be members of a very small list, but I suppose time will tell. 🙂

I discovered the rack actually worked ok on the car, I just had to place it differently than I was planning to. Once that was done we had an uneventful drive to McCook.

Saturday we had a lazy morning that eventually turned in to doing some yard work with my parents. At the risk of sounding crazy, both Heather and I rather enjoyed doing it, as it is so much of a change of pace… plus we don’t have a yard. Heather got to help my mom prep for, and eventually plant flowers, and Dad and I cut sod out of the location of the new deck, and used it to fill some voids elsewhere in the lawn.

That evening we took the bikes out:

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McCook is a really nice place to ride bikes! They have fewer hills than we have in our neck of Omaha, and less traffic besides. It helped that we had basically the perfect weather I suppose.

I will leave off here, and pick up the weekend soon!

-Jordan

A Pefect Circle…

Posted on by Jordan

…Of buck passing.

I have been vaguely aware of the dumb rules surrounding grilling at apartments in Omaha for a while now, but I finally realized how dumb they are a few days ago. The rules have been the same at every apartment I have lived in, and known of in Omaha.

  • The apartment notes on grills says “We do not allow charcoal grills, but you are free to use propane grills on your balcony”
  • The Omaha fire code allows for charcoal grills near apartment buildings, and propane grills, but your not allowed to have or to store the 20lb propane bottles within 50 feet of the apartment.

What hit me is that its such a perfect dodging of being the final authority. Both the OFD and the apartments neatly avoid banning people from grilling / having grills in apartments, but combined there is no way your actually allowed to have a grill.

There is one detail I left out, is that the little lantern sized propane bottles are ok by every one’s standards, so the little ultra-portable grill we have is fine.

Every spring, you start hearing rumors of Omaha Fire Marshal inspections handing out fines to people with grills, but always from a friend of a friend. I don’t know of anyone who has actually had to pay a fine.

-Jordan

Botanical Gardens Trip

Posted on by Jordan

This isn’t actually a weekend thing, but Heather and I were apart most of the weekend, so you will have to settle for our little Tuesday night outing instead. 🙂

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My parents very thoughtfully gave us a membership to the Omaha Botanical gardens, a place Heather and I went several times while we were dating / engaged. We had been planning on going sooner, but it seemed like we couldn’t get any free time to match up with when the garden is open.

Tuesday night happens to be one of only two nights a week they stay open late (We just found out today that they stay open late Monday night as well, I had thought it was only one night a week)

Heather and I took a little trip down to the gardens, and enjoyed a beautiful walk through the closer half of the grounds. We just didn’t have time to do the whole place before close, stopping for a quick picnic used up too much time beforehand. I really like going there though, there were only a few other people around, and the setting is really peaceful. It would be more peaceful if it was an extra mile from I-80, but even with some noise it’s a relaxing place.

I don’t know if I have mentioned the train set there, its hands down the most impressive train setup I have ever seen. The model rails run through models of most of the landmark buildings in Omaha. Each model is made, as far as I can tell, completely from wood, seeds, nuts, and leaves, all glued together to form the buildings. Apparently whoever it is that does those has branched out, and we discovered an addition, beyond the train area, made up of famous buildings from around the world.

I don’t think I can tell you how cool it was, but I posted a few pictures.

Hopefully Heather and I can make quite a few return trips, we never regret going!

-Jordan

Unit Cost Breakdown

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I were trying to decide how economical the cooking we did on Sunday was. Fortunately I hadn’t thrown out the receipts yet, so I did a little spreadsheet work.

Let me explain a few details here, some things I had to estimate the price of, because we didn’t use the entire package. The “Mexican Blend Cheese” comes to mind, although I think there were some others. Some things, like the fresh parsley, I just counted the entire cost, because we didn’t save the rest. There is also a question of how much the seasonings for some of these items cost, but I didn’t think that was worth the effort to try and figure out.

(Editors note, I just let Excel generate these tables, and they are really ugly, probably shouldn’t look at the source on this one)

Chicken and
Potatoes
Item: Price:
Boneless Chicken Breast $17.40
B Size Red Potato $3.96
Total Price: $21.36
Servings: 10
Unit Price $2.14

Enchiladas:
Item Price
Whole Grain Total Shells $3.19
Ground Beef $2.05
Cream of Chicken Soup $0.88
Enchilada Sauce $1.20
Mexican Blend Cheese $1.84
Refried Beans $1.32
Total $10.48
Servings: 7
Unit Price $1.50

Lasagna
Item: Price:
Ground Beef $2.05
Ricotta Cheese $2.35
Sliced Mozzarella $4.72
Red Sauce $3.46
Egg $0.08
Parsley $0.99
Noodles $1.75
Parmesan cheese $2.00
Total: $17.40
Servings 12
Unit Price $1.45

The conclusion is, not too shocking, but we do in fact save quite a bit eating stuff we pre-made. The challenge is having enough variety that we don’t feel like we are eating the same thing every day for two weeks 🙂

-Jordan

Bikes And Food!

Posted on by Jordan

I think this blog may be more of a weekend thing for a while, as very little post-worthy happens during the week it seems. On that note, this weekend was rather full:

  • Hit the Old Market farmers market
  • Finally managed to see the Con Agra park in the daylight
  • Bought Bikes
  • Rode ~10 miles on the local trails
  • Cooked something like 44 servings of food
  • baby sat for Heather’s cousin

In the expanded view:

The farmers market, every Saturday for the rest of the summer in Omaha’s old market area, was surprisingly active. I was expecting a bit of a slow start considering there aren’t many vegetables ready to eat yet. As it turns out, there were a lot of people selling green onions, green garlic, asparagus, and hothouse tomatoes. Also there were fresh bread and summer sausage type vendors as well. they easily managed to 100% fill the little quarter-block area setup for the market. Heather and I purchased a few things, most notably some amazing multi grain bread. After some time gawking at the different things in the market, we headed a few blocks over to the park.

ConAgra park was beautiful! Heather and I have had the pleasure of walking through the part of the park that is always open during the twilight / dark part of the evening, but never before have we been there during the day. The fountian isn’t quite as amazing in the daylight, lacking its colored lighting effects, but the park itself is really pleasant. The half of the walkway that is on the ConAgra campus was open, so we got to see that area for the first time as well. We spent quite a while setting on a bench beside the lake, watching the fountain and enjoying a beautiful morning.

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Once we left the park we headed back to the apartment for a quick lunch, and then headed out to Bike Masters, a bike shop recommended by my uncle Bill. They were really helpful, and had Heather and I both riding around the parking lot trying out a few different bikes. Sadly I was so occupied trying out the bikes I forgot to get any pictures, but you will just have to take my word for it. We had a lot of fun with that, and finally settled on a bike that each of us liked. Or rather we each found one that we were happy with, we didn’t get matching bikes. I then discovered that my Escape is kind of small inside, and ended up having to make two trips to haul the bikes home, but the shop was only a few minutes away from our apartment.

After hauling the bikes home, and changing into somewhat more appropriate clothing, we headed out to give our new bikes a try! The “Big Papio Trail” runs within a few blocks of our apartment, so we headed to intersect it. Riding on the trail was wonderful, we rode for miles without even noticing the distance we covered. I checked a map later, and we went out about five miles before we stopped in a little park near Center street. The ride back was slightly uphill, and into a slight breeze, making it somewhat more noticeable. It wasn’t painful though, our pace just wasn’t quite as fast.

Sunday, after church, Bethany came over for lunch. I grilled chicken, and we sort of broiled some sliced red potatoes. Counting what we ate at lunch, and what we froze there were ten servings of that meal. We did a large portion by choice just to replenish our stock of quick lunch items. We have been meaning to do a better job of pre-planning the weeks food, and actually got to it this time. Heather and I made up a shopping list, hit the store, and then proceeded to make a pan of enchiladas, a pan of lasagna (we didn’t bake that until Monday) and a big pot of vegetable soup. Needless to say our freezer is very full right now, but we have a variety of lunch options ready to just grab and go for a few weeks.

Baby sitting was interesting, in part because it came at the end of a rather long weekend, and in part because our charge can now walk. He’s still not what you would consider confident on his legs, but being able to pick what part of the house to be in certainly changed how he interacts with the baby sitters. By 8:30pm we had him all changed and put to bed, by 9:00 pm Heather was out cold on the couch. I put a major dent in my book before we were relieved, and I guess did a good job of keeping an eye on the house while everyone else slept? 🙂

I don’t know if we can fill every weekend quite this full, but I think we did a pretty solid job this time around!

-Jordan

It Was A Good Run

Posted on by Jordan

… But I guess it couldn’t last forever.

Gas was over $2.00 at the stations across the street from work today.  I just looked up the archive, It dropped below $2.00 on November 4th.

That means basically six months of really cheap gas. I suppose this is another sign of summer, gas prices climbing again.

Heather and I wen’t to a baseball game not so long ago, but I messed up and wiped the pictures off the camera before I downloaded them, and somehow I can’t bring myself to post about the day without any pictures to post 😦

-Jordan