More Picture News

Posted on by Jordan

I got word from Heather today that we have a location for wedding pictures!

After nearly a month of persistent calling, Heather managed to talk to the right person at the Durham Western Heritage Museum. We have a reservation there, I don’t know what that means really except that we know they will let us take pictures the day of the wedding.

After being painfully cold while taking the engagement pictures, our sense of urgency about finding an indoor location went way up. The botanical gardens are still an option, but that is still a large unknown because we don’t know how it will be decorated. There is a chance we will really like what they have in January, but my fear is it will end up looking more like a jungle safari if we tried to take pictures using their indoor area. Some of the times I have seen their indoor display setup its rather claustrophobic, very cool to look at, but it just wouldn’t work for group pictures.

Heather and I had initially ruled out the DWHM because its not all that interesting visually. After failing to find anything better we were still pursuing it, but after the cold of engagement pictures, and realizing the average temps in Omaha for January are something like 19f it became a must. I still wasn’t all that interested in it, until after we saw the results of our engagement pictures!

Some of the pictures we took I thought would look cool at the time, but many of them didn’t seem like a great backdrop. I was pleasantly surprised how amazing the pictures came out, and have a lot of faith in Cherie to produce some amazing shots even with what I considered “bad” settings inside the museum.

Its another relief to have that nailed down so far before the wedding, as our initial plan had been to almost wing it if we didn’t like the decor at the botanical gardens. With a fairly short time window, and the possibility of miserably cold weather I am glad we change that.

-Jordan

Slow Day….

Posted on by Jordan

Not a whole lot happened today…. Makes posting hard

If I haven’t mentioned before, having Heather living in Blair kind of sucks. We don’t get to see each other anywhere near as often as we would like. Not to mention the Sprint-has-horrible-service-at-the-Gutschow-farm problem that keeps phone calls short and painful.

oh, and oil closed under $50 / barrel today… We wont even talk about the stock market. Not that I am changing my policy of aggressive investing, but there is a little sticker shock if you do the math on whats been lost over the past year.

-Jordan

A Ring for Jordan

Posted on by Jordan

This is sort of old news, as Heather and I picked out the ring over a week ago, but I hadn’t mentioned it here.

I was waiting to post anything about the ring until I had pictures of it. The problem is that its really shiny, causing the flash to reflect and wash out the picture. I think with a tripod or something to help me hold the camera steady I might be able to get something workable, but I couldn’t freehand it. (As with about 100 other things, the tripod is already on our registry, so I won’t know if I should go buy one until late January) I suppose I could have rigged something, but never mind that….

The ring: Its silver in color, actually made of palladium has curved sides, and no designs or etching. In reality my being unable to provide a picture isn’t to important, its a basic men’s wedding band. Beyond its appearance, I have to say its an interesting thing to have bought. I wore it a little, tried washing my hands etc, seems like its not going to fall off too easily. I don’t know how long it will take to get used to wearing the ring. I was expecting it to be really strange, but based on an hour or two the day I wore it, I think I will adapt rather quickly. Now if January would just get here so I can find out 🙂

-Jordan

Kansas City

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I went to Kansas City over the weekend, to calibrate her dad’s birthday.

As with every trip we have taken to KC, it really felt like we didn’t have nearly enough time, but it was still a lot of fun. I will skip the play-by-play, but I can tell you that we watched a lot of football, and had a lot of really good food.

Some of the football was live, when we attended the Cheifs game on sunday. It was my first pro-football game, and a really fun expereince, even if our team lost.

-Jordan

Engagement Pictures MK. 3

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I, with the help of her family, chose a picture we wanted to send with the wedding invitations.

Our photographer, Cherie, did a great job of getting the changes to the text etc. that we wanted done quickly enough we could order the picture Sunday.

The picture we chose:

It was really quite hard to pick our favorite out of the set.  I am really happy with this one though, and I am excited to have the last thing taken care of so the invitations can go out.

Nearly all of the work for the invitations has been done by Heather’s mom, I don’t want to sound like I am taking credit for any of that… Its just exciting to have that all moving forward, one more thing that had to happen before the wedding almost complete.

-Jordan

Lasagna Update

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a day or so back making lasagna, only I ran out of time to actually bake it. Wednesday night, I went to Blair to visit Heather and her Grandmother. Heather had taken the uncooked pan out to Blair the night before, so they baked it for that night.

the recipe is called: “World’s Best Lasagna.” I don’t know if it lived up to that claim, but it was very good. I have also had it twice as re-heated leftovers now, and its still very good. It takes way to long to make, and I don’t know what changes like using a canned sauce would do to the quality of the dish…. It was a  fun thing to try, but the prep time is a little over the top.

Just thought I should follow up on that 🙂

-Jordan

Pumpkin Pie

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late in coming, as Heather and I attempted the pies over the weekend.

As we have been marching ever closer to Thanksgiving, and holidays in general, Heather and I had talked about wanting to try making a pumpkin pie. They seem like they should be fairly low in sugar, and pretty easy to make.

we shopped around a little for recipes, and got the advice “just use the one on the back of the can of pumpkin pie filling” so that’s what we did 🙂

The only problem was it called for a cup of sugar, shattering our hopes of a low-sugar pie. Our solution was to make two pies, one by the recipe, and one using splenda.

as you can see from the picture (click on the picture for a much larger version), the texture and color of the filling was drastically different using the two sweeteners. I know they sell a version of slpenda for baking that has some brown sugar mixed in, and I think this might be a domain where it would help out, darkening the color etc.

we tried the pies the same day we baked them, after letting them cool in the fridge for a few hours. They didn’t taste the same, but neither one tasted clearly better. I saved a slice of the splenda pie to try after 24 more hours, probably should have saved some of each to really compare. My theory is that splenda starts to taste stronger over time. With nothing to compare to, the slice of pie I saved for another day still tasted pretty good, and certainly didn’t leave any of that diet-soda esque aftertaste that splenda sometimes causes. (If you were wondering, the rest of the pies went to work with Heather).

-Jordan

The Day After Veterans Day

Posted on by Jordan

I had yesterday off, and that somehow translated into not getting anything posted.

What did I do with an entire day off?

Put new tires on my escape, and attempted to make lasagna from scratch! Both tasks took much longer than I expected. The end result was that the time from 1:00pm until 7:00 pm that I had 100% free was not sufficient to complete both 😦

I think the lasagna will probably be good, but I ran out of time to actually bake it, after making the sauce and assembling it in the pan. We are going to bake it tonight, so hopefully setting in the fridge over night wont hurt it too much. Alas, no pictures… I was going to shoot a few, but I was distracted worrying about time and never remembered to grab my camera (that was laying on my desk… mere feet away)

I should also mention that getting a Tuesday off really throws off your perception of what day it is… I still cant tell if its Monday or Wednesday.

-Jordan

Engagement Pictures Taken

Posted on by Jordan

We won’t have access to any of the pictures for a while, but Heather and I had a lot of fun taking engagement pictures over the weekend.

Saturday was every bit as unpleasant as the forecast said it was going to be, so we rescheduled the session to Sunday. The change was our photographers idea, and I have to say it was a really really good move. Sunday was still cold, but without the wind and cloud-cover.

Our photographer is Cherie Phelps, I don’t think we have mentioned that before, she has a neat website here:

< http://www.cphelpsphotography.com/ >

If you look around, you will actually see a number of people from church in the featured pictures.

We started out taking pictures near the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Across the tracks, in the very run down part of the old train station. It made for some really cool backdrops, although being in the shade was really cold. While we were there we encountered another photography session, parents and a toddler.

After the train station, we headed to the old market proper. Let me just say that Cherie is a lot of fun to work with, and I think she got some great shots. We worked our way through the old market area using different areas for backdrops every time we went around a corner. It was such a pretty day, I don’t think we could have asked for a better day visually. The temperature was uncomfortably cold, but the pictures won’t show that and so far neither Heather nor I has gotten a cold :). The other downside to the day was that, being beautiful, every block had a freshly-engaged couple and photographer on it. The traffic wasn’t so bad as to keep us from doing what we wanted, but it did kind of make the whole thing seem a little silly.

Ignoring the cold and other people getting their pictures taken, it was an amazingly fun thing to do. I am sure we will have some fun pictures to show for it soon. Hopefully we can even manage to get one of them in with the invitations, but you will just have to wait and see on that.

-Jordan