Two Years

Posted on by Jordan

January 24th marked the end of our second year of marriage.

I just dug around the blog, and found that I never actually put up a post detailing the first year’s activities.

So, on year zero (the honeymoon) we were in Colorado skiing.

Year one, we went to a local “paint your own pottery” place. That wasn’t terrible, but the end results of Heather’s work: cute, my work: sad. I guess they will both last forever, and that’s something. The only downside is, someday our children will ask why we have a plate dad made in preschool arts-and-crafts.

Now that your up to speed, this year we did something outdoors again!

Oh wait, another tangent! When we set our wedding date in January, people often said things like “well at least you can go someplace warm on your honeymoon” or “yeah, but you can go on trips to the beach for your anniversary.”  I have to admit that I did little to kill off those ideas, because saying “Bah, you just need a better coat and to move around a little” isn’t really what they wanted to hear.

Right, so back to this year: Heather found out that the local parks department was hosting an outdoor winter activities workshop this past weekend. We thought it would be a fun alternative to dinner and a movie, so we headed up after church.

They had a really neat program going, and plenty of participants! The first station we encountered was snowshoeing, but they had every single pair of shoes already out, so we trudged on down the trail. Up next was ice fishing.

It didn’t take long to determine that ice fishing wasn’t going to be our thing. I should mention, as you can kind of see from the picture, we had a beautiful sunny day. It was still quite cold, but being outside in the sunlight was a wonderfully refreshing change from our normal lifestyle.

After checking our pole back in with the ranger, we headed over to the cross country ski station. As with the snowshoe station, they had every single item already out in the snow. We were able to put our names and shoe sizes on the board for later that day, letting us wander back over to the snow shoe station.

On the way we found the dog sled team, resting after their exhibition.

The snowshoe station had just a few shoes, but a few is enough for the two of us! Granted, the snow wasn’t anywhere deep enough to really need snow shoes, but we still gave them a try. 🙂

After a loop around the meadow behind the lodge, we headed back over to the cross country ski station. Even having our names on the list didn’t mean it was a painless process, but eventually we had two pair of boots, poles, and skis. We headed down the trail, having no idea what we were doing.

I guess we were just naturals though, because we moved on down the trail without much trouble 🙂 I may have fallen a few times, but that is the price you pay for finding out how fast you can go. Heather stayed on her feet the entire time, although I am sure she doesn’t know how fast she can go yet. We learned that the DNR rents out the skis any day they aren’t offering a free workshop like we were participating in, so maybe Heather can figure that out another day. 😉

-Jordan

The Slog

Posted on by Jordan

It’s that time of year again… Christmas is over and the weather just keeps getting colder. It makes it hard to want to do anything except crawl under a blanket on the couch and eat warm carbs.

This isn’t the first winter I have seen though. Heather and I are, distressingly, starting to establish a pattern to deal with this time of year. The initial plan had been to put our wedding anniversary provide some diversion in the midst of the post-Christmas blues. While that helps, we find ourselves feeling way too lethargic by about January 5th.

So for the third year running, we have embarked on a fitness challenge! I shouldn’t take too much credit, Heather is the driving force behind our decision every year… Something I am incredibly grateful for, considering I still lack the drive to start one of these despite the demonstrable benefits they have provided in my life.

That being said, going to the gym when there is an inch of slush in the parking lot and the air temperature is one degree is no fun at all. Also, it seems we aren’t the only people to have decided now is the perfect time to hit the gym, so it’s five times as crowded now as it was a month ago.

All the same, we are working out once again! I never expect the incredible soreness that comes with these things… I guess that means we are making progress 🙂

On the topic of being more healthy, I saw a recipe for pumpkin sloppy joes (aka Sloppy Jacks)

I won’t re-post it here, as you can head over to Cheap Healthy Good for the recipe

I knew I had to try it though, because as a rule Heather loves anything that involves pumpkin!

We didn’t have ground turkey on hand, so I just used beef. The results were… remarkably sloppy-joe-like. I suppose you would be able to see the difference if you had my filling next to a ‘normal’ batch, but I was surprised how unremarkable it was. It was also shocking to find that we couldn’t really taste the pumpkin in the sandwiches.

In keeping with the aforementioned rule, Heather loved them. I think we may have another quick meal on her list of favorites.

(no picture included, because they looked just like sloppy-joes)

-Jordan

Chasing The Dragon — Book

Posted on by Jordan

So before I talk about the book, I have to admit that I remember posting here that I was going to try and do little summary / reviews of books once I finished reading them.

I failed at that plan. There have been a number of things I have read that never made it onto the blog.

Non the less, I finished reading Chasing The Dragon by Jackie Pullenger, and wanted to talk about it here.

I really enjoyed the book! It wasn’t always the most enjoyable read, because the situations she describes are horrifying in many cases. At the same time that was what made the book so exciting to read, was hearing her describe how God was working.

From a practical standpoint, it made it a lot harder to feel sorry for myself about having to sometimes cook food for a bunch of kids at church. I spent a lot of time reflecting on my worldview and relative situation while reading the book, something I don’t typically do… I don’t want to wander too far down that rabbit trail, except to say that it was kind of refreshing.

Going back to the book, it deals with drug addicts within the Walled-City of Hong Kong. It does not in any way sound like a place I would want to be… I find down town Des Moines far too crowded for my tastes. About the time I was finishing the book, a blog I follow had a few Walled-City related items that I found rather interesting.

The first is an old German TV documentary. I will let the linked details fill you in, except to say that most of the commentary that goes with the video is pretty sensationalized, at best, and often directly contradicts situations described in the book. Primarily the idea that “there is no law” because roughly 20% of the book was a Jackie dealing with police and the court system, as they related to people inside the Walled-City.

The Documentary (via io9)

The other item, also Via io9 is a few pictures, and then some sort of informational / layout drawings. They aren’t quite as interesting as the video, but worth linking I suppose.

The drawings

So to sum this up, if you haven’t read Chasing The Dragon, and are looking to pickup some nonfiction (something I always think I should be doing more) you should check it out! 🙂

-Jordan

Winter Camping

Posted on by Jordan

The past weekend saw Heather and I apart for a large amount of the time.

I went camping with the Boy Scouts, and Heather had a movie night with some girls from church.

In the days leading up to the weekend, Heather was making phone calls and sending e-mails to entice people to come over. I meanwhile, was rapidly eating through my Christmas gift money buying cold weather camping gear. The premiere purchase:

A sleeping bag rated down to ZERO degrees! The picture isn’t from the camping trip, but Heather thought she should record my testing the bag for proper fit.

By all accounts, Heather’s movie night went really well… and the camping was kind of cold 🙂

Actually, it wasn’t so bad. We had access to cabins, so weren’t out in the cold the entire time, nor did I really need the ultra cold weather bag when we were sleeping inside. I am prepared now though!

It was my first trip camping with the troop as an adult leader. The trip back in November was a training event and I didn’t camp with the troop.  I had fun, but it was challenging to know exactly how much guidance I should be giving.  Doubly hard when many of my meals were being cooked by 14 year-old boys. In the end though, I think the boys had fun, and hopefully learned a few things.

I had fun, and learned a lot, even if the boys didn’t! I don’t know if I can quantify it as easily as saying “I learned square-lashing” but I am sure I will be better at working with the troop next time we go out.

-Jordan

And We Are Back!

Posted on by Jordan

Hey there!

Heather and I survived the Christmas build-up, Christmas travel, and even the post-Christmas blah that seems to hit once you get back to your apartment after seeing all your family.

Of course, all that happened over a week ago… It seems my posting has been delayed. I think I have been feeling overwhelmed by the idea of trying to recap the holidays in a way that somehow does justice to them, and also isn’t too boring to read.

After procrastinating this task for some time now, I realized it would be best to just put out this token post and then get back to whatever I felt like writing. Feeling obligated to post doesn’t do much for my frequency of posts.

So Christmas was fun! Heather and I spent the time with my family, getting to see quite a few members of the extended family on both my mom and dad’s side.

I want to say a lot more about how much we enjoyed getting to spend time with everyone, and what we did, but this will have to suffice rather than writing up a 5000 word post.

-Jordan