New Year Wrap-Up

Posted on by Jordan

This post is going up a touch late to be a true new years post, but it’s clearly as close as I am going to get.

Heather and I trekked out to McCook to celebrate the new year, and to catch up with my parents and brother, as this was my first Christmas away from my family.

We really enjoy McCook every time we get a chance to go there. I am sure a big part of it is just being away from the normal grind, plus being at mom and dad’s house, but it ends up being incredibly relaxing. The relax and unwind factor was there this trip, and we ended up with a bonus new years event!

McCook was hosting a special event for new years “First Night.” I won’t go into a ton of detail, but Heather and I had a lot of fun with everything that was going on there.

first_night_10

Due to the wedding, we didn’t really have much energy / time to observe the new year last time around. That was kind of sad because the new year marks a somewhat important date for us. We spent our first new year’s eve at the Gutschow farm, with Heather’s grandmother “Gigi”, and sometime on the drive home late that night decided to become “Facebook official” (Actually we just decided that we really were dating, and the most obvious step was to change our FB status)

The other fun thing about the night is that it’s one of the few that I can keep Heather up past 9:30pm. She did about fade away on me, and I have to admit it was a little cold outside, but Heather made it all the way to the end, greeting 2010 (just minutes after that picture was taken)

Hope the new one is as much fun as the last 🙂

-Jordan

Merry Christmas!

Posted on by Jordan

HerbieTree

Heather and I have a (short) tradition of getting a new ornament every year. Herbie got the honors this year… Heather sometimes talks like I am the only one who feels weird about being in Iowa, but I think we both have strong allegiances there. We have the same little tree from last year, it works really well in our space-limited apartment. We still don’t have many Christmas decorations, but the tree does a lot to make the apartment feel the holiday spirit.

Speaking of the holiday spirit, Heather and I have discovered that we listened to different Christmas music while doing traditional things like decorating the tree…. and I find that I don’t feel as into it without that. Heather’s tradition is to watch “White Christmas” during/after the tree decorating. I know my family always listened to the same albums of Christmas music… I just don’t know what those albums were called. Heather has actually accused me of being “a scrooge” but I just don’t care for some of the more…. artistic interpretations of traditional Christmas songs.

Along with tree decorating, Heather spearheaded baking some Christmas treats. More than spearheaded, I didn’t even help. Not to say I wasn’t willing, but we have found that only one person should work in our galley kitchen at a time. It only takes a few times bumping into the other person when you are trying to quick get something done to think it isn’t fun anymore. After making some amazing cookies, Heather broke them up into a bunch of gift plates:

HeatherCookies

We then worked our way around the building giving them away to any of our neighbors who happened to be home. It was a fun thing to do, and I am really glad she took the initiative to do it. I think about half our neighbors weren’t sure what to think, but it’s hard to complain about a plate of cookies!

I know this is a few days early, but we are looking to slip out of Des Moines before another wave of ice and snow shuts the city down, so I probably won’t get the chance to post closer to the actual day…. Merry Christmas!!!

-Jordan

p.s. I don’t think I ever mentioned before, the ornament from last year was a sand timer… we only had a month until the wedding at Christmas 🙂

Things I Should Not Cook Without A Recipe

Posted on by Jordan

With all the snow, I thought some home made chicken noodle soup sounded really good.

For some reason I have it in my head that I can just throw that together, despite having never turned out a good batch. I am not going to bother with a picture… but lets just say my streak of not very good soup continues.

It is edible in the sense that I have been eating it, but Heather won’t touch it. I am learning how big a factor visual appeal is in cooking. In this case even if it looked ok, the soup has other problems.

Anyway… beyond cooking, Heather and I have really gotten settled in around here. We had the snow day, Where we both had to work some, but were around the house, and then this weekend was our first week with nothing planned that we have had in a long long time.

We still don’t actually have that last box of books unpacked, but we re-organized some left over wedding decorations into a more robust container such that it can go to the garage and free up a little more space. (I have no idea why we have that stuff, don’t ask)

We also solved some of our closet problem with a little board with coat-hooks on it that Target had. Unfortunately it wasn’t 16 inches wide, so I used a heavy duty drywall anchor for the non-stud end… I hope when we move out the wall isn’t too bad. At least we have someplace to hang a coat in the meantime 🙂

-Jordan

Snow!

Posted on by Jordan

I was expecting to get to do a nice little post about the first snow in our new home. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate:

snow

We are more or less trapped at our apartment until the plows roll, and right now that isn’t expected until tomorrow morning!

-Jordan

Podcast Recap

Posted on by Jordan

I have been thinking about the podcasts I listen too quite a bit as of late.

I managed to find a few I really enjoyed over the past few months. During the Atlantic drive, “a few” just wasn’t enough.  I branched out, listening to others that weren’t really what I was looking for, but at least they filled the time.

As of right now, I have about a 30 min each way drive. That creates an interesting problem, in that I now have more podcasts minutes in a week coming in than I can keep up with if I only listen while I drive. I have thought about doing podcasts while in the gym, but I haven’t made that leap.

The podcasts I want to listen to:

Security Now. An information security / internet privacy focused show. The two guys doing this both know a lot about the subject and manage to explain things really well. I like this podcast a lot, although Heather says it makes me annoyingly paranoid (I frequently admonish her to never ever use public wi-fi). I feel like I have to keep listening to this, as I have learned so much already.

The Instance. A World of Warcraft show. I am not really an active WoW player these days, but I like the chance to keep up with game news… keeps me somewhat up to date when talking to people who are playing more frequently. That fact alone would not even begin to keep me subscribed though, this show has some really good production quality. Unlike a lot of podcasts, the host actually owns a radio-grade mic, and knows how to post-edit. Add in a sense of humor and you have a pretty solid podcast.

Extra Life Radio. Done by the same main host from The Instance, it’s a group of guys who get together and talk about sci-fi, video games, and movies. A fun listen, but I think this may get cut.

Gamers With Jobs. I was really taken with the concept of GWJ, guys who still like video games, but are married with jobs so they don’t have the unlimited time some people seem to have for games. As it turns out, they have a lot more game time than I have. They are also active and former journalists in the game industry. This means they know a ton of people actually making games, and as much as it frustrates me to hear them talking about loving every minute of a game I know I don’t have time to touch, I am so captivated by them getting into the nuts and bolts of game design with the actual game designers as guests I can’t stop listening.

Gun Dudes. A few guys talking about guns. I started on this podcast expecting a more informative show. Really, it’s just 3-5 guys (depending on the week) shooting the breeze… more or less on the topic of guns. I find it pretty entertaining. I think it might have something to do with my envy over their ability to drive 10 minutes and be out in the desert and able to shoot. I guess that’s and advantage of living in rural Utah.

To sum all that up…

Other than Security Now, I didn’t really manage to find podcast that really taught me much, I was hoping to use my drive in a beneficial way, but it turns out it’s a lot easier to just find a way to stay entertained as you slog out the drive. I tried out a few other podcasts, but nothing I am even going to bother to mention here.

And… that whole thing is probably the last thing you wanted to read about, but not much else is going on 🙂

-Jordan

Look At All The Progress!

Posted on by Jordan

As I sit down to make this post, I realize it would be more interesting reading if I had taken pictures of people during the move.

The problem is that I was busy when we had our volunteers around to help!

Anyway, I wanted to put these up…

The living room after we got the truck unloaded:

living_room_before

And how it looks today:

living_room_after

For a while there I didn’t know if we could ever get all the stuff out of that room. Moving on, the spare room… well we didn’t fare quite so well there. It started out really bad:

Spare_room_before

And got somewhat better:

spare_room_after

Clearly we made some progress, but we didn’t have any problems filling that room up. I still think we are going to be able to shuffle things enough to fit a workable bed in there sometime soon.

If you haven’t guessed, I am rather excited to be done unpacking! 🙂 I probably went a little overboard, but I took some video too!

Well, thats our place.

On a completely unrelated note, I have been listening to some rather amazing music while I worked on this post! I may have to buy the mp3s up, they would work well with my “drown out my coworkers” non-vocal music  playlist 🙂

-Jordan

(Nearly) Unpacked

Posted on by Jordan

As I write this we have ONE box left to deal with. It is full of books, and we ran out of bookshelf space, so I have no idea when that will happen. I am tempted to call us unpacked for the foreseeable future.

I think the place is mostly decorated, I may learn differently, but we are running out of wall space, and Heather communicated her intent to decorate without adding any new items, so, unless I overlooked something we are basically out of things to hang too.

My biggest concern moving into this place was the rather small closets. The bachelor that was living in the unit when we toured it had overflowed into both closets, a clear sign we weren’t going to fit all that well. We had two free standing hanger bars that we purchased in Atlantic. With those, and one additional free standing hangar, we managed to hang everything we needed to hang. I measured it out, we have 315 inches of hanging space, and it is 100% used. I should point out this place has no coat closet, or anything else, other than the two bedroom closets. All the same, I think our Omaha place must have had about 200% more closet space.

There are worse problems to have I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

A Landmark Day

Posted on by Jordan

One detail of my new job that I don’t think I have mentioned, here or anywhere for that matter, is the fact that I need to wear actual shirts. I have managed to get by with polos for the past few years.

This creates a problem for our old system of laundry, and as I have discussed before ironing isn’t really something we practice around here.

Well, it wasn’t:

Ironing

What you see there is me ironing a shirt with a brand new* iron, on a brand new ironing board. You are probably thinking, “but he has had that job for quite a while, and its mid week already… shouldn’t this have happened sooner?” Yes, yes it should have! I got by using up every single shirt I owned, and then wearing a few that I though looked ok straight out of the wash. The wrinkles caught up with me eventually though, so I broke down and setup the ironing board.

I suppose I would be better off doing a batch of shirts to at least cover a week, but for now I only did enough to get me through to the next night where I will have time to tackle a few more shirts.

I hear rumors of shirts that are more likely to come out of the wash in a wearable state, and plan to research that rumor in detail soon. I will miss the days of polos, but outside of the ironing aspect I think I have adapted well.

-Jordan

* when I say “brand new” I mean the same kit that has traveled with me for years, still in the factory packing 🙂

Done With Atlantic! (Really!)

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made our last trip to the house in Atlantic today, to final-clean the place before turning in the keys.

I will miss parts of living there. The being in a house was a nice change from apartment living. Being able to open a few windows and actually have cross-ventilation is remarkable. We didn’t hear neighbors at all. We had a front porch, with a swing, overlooking a little yard with a huge tree. We could walk all around town any time of day or night and not be even a little worried about safety. We could walk anywhere in town. I loved getting to see farming going on every day, especially harvest. I suppose it is possible I have an overly rosy memory of a lot of that, but I really enjoyed getting to be involved with harvest as a kid.

It reminded me a lot of growing up in Curtis, when I would see people at the grocery store and they knew each other and were just talking. It was kind of sad to know we were never going to have enough time outside of our drive to actually become part of the community. We were living with one foot in Des Moines, and one foot in Omaha… Leaving not much to put down in Atlantic.

On the other hand, there are certainly things I will not miss. Driving 120 miles a day chief among them. Having to hand-wash all our dishes got old rather fast. Living in a place with water pressure so low it wasn’t possible to do any two things with water at the same time had it’s drawbacks. Having to keep our trash for a week in the closet because we didn’t have a garage or a dumpster didn’t end up being as big of a problem as I expected, but still wasn’t ideal. Somehow that house managed to always be freezing cold, even when the thermostat said it shouldn’t be.

And finally, the daily thorn in my side, the thing that annoyed me so much it made me wonder if bathing daily was worth it:

Atlantic_shower

A 360 degree shower curtain! It looked… sketchy to begin with. After the house started getting cold I discovered that the hot air, inside the envelope, rising out of the shower caused the walls to suck in, meaning you couldn’t shower without having plastic clinging to at least one side of you at all times. I know I sound like I am whining, but it really got old after a while.

Somehow we managed to survive though, so I guess it can’t have been so bad 🙂

-Jordan

October Catch-Up

Posted on by Jordan

Have I mentioned how nice it is to have a reduced commute? 🙂

I wanted to take a minute and summarize some of the noteworthy things that happened during the blur that was our last weeks living in Atlantic.

First up: Leaves fell off the trees. While this was expected, Heather and I were living in a house in Atlantic, and they expected us to deal with them.

Leaves

That picture actually shows the full extent of our progress. We managed to get the leaves into big piles, before realizing we didn’t have bags. We picked up bags, but not until the end of the weekend, forgetting that we were never actually in Atlantic while the sun was up during the week.

Luckily, the mowing crew, or our landlady or somebody bagged the leaves for us. I feel pretty bad that we didn’t get it done ourselves, but we were pretty much using all our available energy on other things at that point.

The second noteworthy event happened over the weekend of the first. Heather and I went to Omaha. We left early enough to attend church, and got to see a lot of our friends while we were there. After lunch we stopped for a few minutes at the botanical gardens. I should note that the weather was amazing! Heather and I were both dressed for fall, and got rather warm considering the temperature nearly topped 70.

LG_Fall

After a few minutes enjoying the weather and the colors, we headed to the main event: a Trans-Siberian Orchestra performance that Heather had arranged for us to attend as a birthday present. I don’t have any pictures from the show, and really… No picture would really do it justice. The first half of the show was telling a Christmas story, and while good, not jaw droopingly amazing. The second half contained and abundance of ten-foot jets of flame and fog machines. I cannot begin to tell you how fun it was.

-Jordan