Closing Out June

Posted on by Jordan

Well that went fast!

I probably could have eked a few posts out of the things that happened in June, but we are staring the first of July in the face and I know the new month will have new things to talk about. Rather than letting everything slip past without comment, I will throw a few words at the highlights.

Heather participated in a marathon! Not a half marathon like last year… a real one! Grandma’s Marathon takes place up in Duluth MN every year. Heather found out about it from a girl we know from church who is from there. They struck on the idea of staying at her parent’s house and doing the marathon. Somehow the trip grew in encompass two runners and three walkers. Heather was always planning to walk, and did what appeared to be rigorous training in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the event.

After eight hours of walking, however she decided that perhaps her training did not sufficiently prepare her for 26 miles of walking. Key point is that she finished the marathon! As I understand it she was the last person to finish, but that cannot detract from finishing the marathon! In what can perhaps be called a happy coincidence, she finished the marathon walking with an 83 year old grandma. It seems somehow fitting to complete “Grandma’s Marathon” walking with a grandmother.

To quote Heather on the event: “NEVER AGAIN!” I am still proud of her though 🙂

Wedding season? In contrast to last year, we haven’t had a lot of weddings to attend this year. In fact we almost made it to July before attending our first one.

It was for a family friend, and thanks to some combination of social circles and location the guest list contained a handful of people I went to high school with. I was surprised to find that I didn’t remember names for a few of them. Beyond some distressing gaps in my memory, Heather and I were excited to see another couple enter into married life. It has been a great thing for us and we hope it can be that for them too!

Dave Ramsey!

Well, sort of anyway… As has become a sort of trend for us, we attempted to sign up to participate in the Financial Peace University class that was going to be offered through our church. Participation quickly turned into facilitating… something we were open to, and I think is going to be a really neat experience.  We just had our fist class a mere two hours prior to my writing this, and are both excited to go through the material again, while sharing it with people excited to learn!

I think that will suffice to recap all the news we wanted to share for the month. With only two days left, I can say with certainty there will be at least one more newsworthy event in June, but it will have to wait until after the fact to show up here 🙂

-Jordan

Sunday Afternoon Bike Ride

Posted on by Jordan

While it is Sunday afternoon as I write this, the ride happened last weekend.

Heather had some coworkers who were excited to try out some of the more outlying trails around Des Moines. A plan was put together to have everyone meet at one of the trail heads near “the railroad trestle”

Interesting note about the trail head, it features a bar build specifically to cater to the people using the bike trail. It was also next to a s dormant grain elevator, not too shocking given the trail runs down a recently decommissioned rail line.

Speaking of the rail line, let me tell you, if you want a nice easy bike ride the rail right of way is hard to beat.

We had a group of roughly ten people, and rode together down the trail. Nobody seemed to know exactly how far we were going, except to say that it wasn’t that far. Distance wise, we may have covered more miles than everyone considers “not that far,” but as I mentioned before it was a really easy ride so I don’t think anybody expected to arrive at the bridge quite when we did.

I do quibble with the “trestle” description, but it clearly was a rail bridge, and it does provide a rather unique thing to ride over on a bike. We stayed and enjoyed the view for a few minutes, then headed on down the trail to the next town. I don’t quite know why, but I suppose it made for a more complete ride that way?

Before I forget, here is a map of the bridge, if you are interested as to what part of the lake it covers.

After refilling our water bottles at the nice little pit-stop location waiting for us in Woodward, we headed back to the trail head. We completed the day with a quick stop at the Flat Tire bar I mentioned before and headed home.

This makes our third summer owning bikes, and I have to say they have continued to provide a really great way for Heather and I to get outside together. Tangentially I realized that google maps now lets me show bike trails. It appears that there are a few gaps in the trail network between our house and that bridge… Not to mention the significant distance involved 🙂

I feel like this may not have been the most interesting post ever, but it at least serves the purpose of recording a unique day for us in the summer of 2011 🙂

-Jordan

Strawbery Crepes

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t get many chances to make deserts. The following is a report from a weekend project I undertook while Heather was out of town.

Typically if I make deserts, Heather is out of town… same goes for bacon come to think of it.

In tying to find the recipe I used so I could write up this post I found the article that had gotten me interested in crepes in the first place here: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes. I probably could feed that to Heather, but somehow between the time I got it into my head that I wanted to try making crepes and the time I actually tried it, the healthy filling part had faded leaving me searching for something to fill them with.

I ended up settling on vanilla pudding and strawberries.

Before we get to the filling though, the actual crepes:

The actual recipe isn’t too important, all crepe recipes seem to be about the same, just flour oil and egg mixed aggressively and left to sit for a while in the fridge before cooking.

Speaking of cooking, I was worried about this part, because it has taken me a long time to get to the point where I make a passable pancake and these seemed like they would be less forgiving. As it turns out though, they are easier. Or at least, I found them to be virtually impossible to mess up.

After I made the crepes, it was just a matter of spooning in some pudding and loading the sliced strawberries. In hindsight I wish I would have made the ‘pie filling’ version of the recipe on the instant pudding box because what I made turned out to be too runny to really produce an attractive crepe.

I have been trying to work more on presentation, as that seems to be an area where you can take the same recipe but have it seem way better, just by having the finished result look amazing. I don’t know if I really go there with these… but I gave it a shot:

In a possibly related note, I have found that despite the fact that it sounds acceptable, Strawberry-vanilla crepes do not make a great Saturday lunch… or maybe I am just getting old. I suppose next time I should make up main course filling too, then fill half with something more substantial than pudding 🙂

-Jordan

Memorial Day 2011

Posted on by Jordan

If you remember from last year, Heather and I had a whirlwind weekend over memorial day. The post picture also featured a sort of bridge. I am going to consider that a theme… more on that later.

This year we had surprisingly few plans for the weekend, with nothing going on Monday.

We were eager to take advantage of a free day, even if the weather wasn’t expected to be very nice. After tossing around a few ideas, we settled on Winterset IA, with the plan of viewing all six of their famed covered bridges.

I took some time before we left to load up my phone with map coordinates for each bridge, and a few geocaching locations around the area. Heather packed us a lunch, and we were all set for a little adventure!

Winterset is surprisingly close to where we live, so before we had even settled in for the drive we were in Madison County, and taking our first turn to seek out a bridge.

Two things worth noting at this point. One, the clouds had blown off, and it was starting to look like a beautiful day outside. Two, Heather and I have radically different ideas about what safe speeds on unpaved roads are. I won’t go into the subject in depth except to say I hope we set the high water mark for disagreements in 2011… and I think we gave it a good shot. I let Heather drive upon leaving the first bridge, leaving us with significantly more time to enjoy the Iowa countryside than we might have experienced under other circumstances.

To be honest, the fact that the bridges were out on desolate county roads came as a bit of a shock for me. It isn’t like I thought the bridges were an eighth wonder of the word or anything, but they seemed familiar enough that I was expecting more development. That isn’t to say that they weren’t being visited, they are just kind of out there.

We took a picture in front of each bridge, but they all kind of look alike… so we are going to take the quality over quantity approach and just have one bridge picture.

I tried looking for a few geocaches, but the bad weather that plagued the proceeding weekend made that unappealing at best. Spring rains, combined with the freshly tilled fields surrounding most of the bridges meant that finding a cache was going to involve tromping through some mud. Perhaps I am turning into a city person… but it just didn’t seem worth it. (Although the gravel-road speed question provides some strong evidence to the contrary)

After three bridges, we stopped in Winterset to hit a park and eat our lunch. The park is home to one of the bridges, and happens to be next to the cemetery (pictured at the top of this post). It was a touching sight, a hillside covered in flags gracefully blowing in the wind.

After lunch we only had two bridges left, so we plotted a route to catch them both, then point us home.

A few notes / highlights:

There is still one bridge you can drive over, and we did!

I suspect the trip would be more interesting if you did more research into the bridges beforehand, as there isn’t much on site.

The movie “Bridges of Madison County” does not count… and in the few minutes I lasted isn’t a great use of time.

There is a tower in the Winterset city park, I forget the name, but we skipped it, thinking it wasn’t worth walking down to… saw a picture later and I wish we would have taken the time to see it.

I think that about wraps up the trip! Perhaps not the most enthralling trip we have ever taken, but a wonderful way to get outside on a nice day and see something new!

-Jordan

An Old Knot, Revisited

Posted on by Jordan

It turns out I tie my shoes wrong.

You would think that somebody who, was an Eagle Scout, and is currently working with Scouts would know the basic knots. That’s what I thought anyway.

Then I saw this

The first thing that hit me was “Hey, I have a pair of running shoes with round nylon laces that will not stay tied!” So, I tried the ‘proper’ way to tie the knot for the past two weeks. I can tell you the strong form of the basic shoelace knot is MUCH better than the one I was using before.

I had read about, and sometimes used a technique where you tie the double-knot inverted. That works really well, probably better than the inverted basic bow demonstrated in the video. The downside to that is that the second knot works against the first to tighten each other and the end result can be very hard to untie. For that reason I almost never use the inverted double knot, and now… I don’t have any reason to!

Even after a week I have to stop and think about it every time I tie my shoes, but it is starting to come naturally, so maybe in a few weeks I won’t even know I am doing it!

-Jordan