A Weekend In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

As I think I mentioned before, this weekend was notable in that Heather and I didn’t have any plans for it.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were bored though!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning… but after being on the go for so long the place really needed it.

I should back up though, Friday night we walked over to eat dinner and go to a movie at the mall we live next to. It only took us a year to actually get around to doing that! Heather and I often walk around the outside mall in the evenings when we want to go for a walk, and frequently we comment that we should take advantage of our location to walk to dinner and a movie, but ether we have been busy, or there haven’t been movies we wanted to see, or other things just kind of got in the way. Not anymore though! We finally walked over to a movie.

Ok then, back to Saturday… We had a wonderfully lazy morning, then cleaned like mad, then had a chance to go over to a friends house and meet a friend of theirs who is starting a mission of sorts in Mexico. It was neat to hear them talk about what they have seen in Mexico, and what they hope to be able to do there. It was also nice to just be together with friends from church in that kind of “around the kitchen table” setting and just enjoy being together.

While talking that night we found out about an annual event in Des Moines, called the “World Food Festival.” We were excited to learn that it was an all-weekend event, so decided to swing through after church Sunday.

As you can kind of see, it was a little crowded there, but there was no shortage of food to be had. Apparently we should have been writing down what we tried, because I can’t remember anymore… It seemed so obvious at the time, hmm…

Heather had some chicken fried rice, and a spring roll, I had a gyro, and then we sampled some Ethiopian rice dish, and some vaguely South-American vegetable pastry:

The pictures are from my phone, as somehow despite our intentions of learning more about photography, we managed to forget to bring a camera with us today. As you can start to see from the view behind me in the first picture, there were some interesting things we could have taken, if only we had planned ahead a little better. I suppose this let us enjoy the food more, although frankly the authentic spring roll, and the rice dish weren’t big hits with us.

I suppose it’s cheating to throw up this post with a few hours left in the day but I can all but assure we won’t be doing anything else blog-worthy today 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I just realized I haven’t ever put up a post about the Farmer’s Market here in Des Moines… despite having pictures and even some video from when my parents came to visit. I guess I should keep that in my idea list… In the meantime this festival isn’t at the same site, and was perhaps a quarter of the size of the farmers market, just to give prospective against something that I haven’t ever talked about directly.

The 2010 Wedding Season Draws To A Close

Posted on by Jordan

Just thought I would sit down and type out a quick post, as Heather and I just got back from Kansas City, and the last wedding on our calendar for this year.

We closed the year with a wedding that contains a lot of ties to us.

First off, Casey was in our wedding. Second, we met Carson when he came as Casey’s date to our wedding, and finally I put together an awesome website for them! (Looking through the archives, I did the site sometime back in February)

Okay, maybe my making the website wasn’t a major point of connection, and to be honest hacking up a WordPress theme isn’t really much to brag about. The real connection is that Heather and Casey have been friends from early childhood. I have enjoyed getting to see Heather interact with such a great friend.

On a related note, I am glad to be done with weddings for the year! I tried not to be jealous of the wedding couple as they monopolized my wife’s time over the course of the weekend, but there isn’t a ton for a spouse of a bridesmaid to do during all the ancillary activities that take up the proceeding days before a wedding.

The plus side of a KC wedding is that we get to see our nephew on the trip! Heather is enamored with Holden, and complained vocally that I got to see him more than she did this time around. I should really throw up a picture as he seems to change ever time we see him!

I think that sums up another eventful weekend…. now I should go to bed, as somehow Monday is going to be here again already.

-Jordan

Des Moines Habitat, Rain

Posted on by Jordan

Saturday, Heather and I had the opportunity to help provide food to the Des Moines Habitat For Humanity build.

They are doing some sort of large scale build, i think 10 houses in 10 days maybe? At any rate, they are building a lot of houses.

We were simply helping prepare and serve lunch to the crews.

Our involvement was due to Heather’s company providing the food for the day’s meal, and then recruiting staff to come help serve it.

Lunch turned out to be about 300 pork-burgers:

What you can’t really see in the picture is the rain. As has been the trend for September, it was cold and rainy all morning. It never turned into a downpour, but standing outside of the shelter wasn’t ideal. I was more than happy to grill, in part due to the fact I hadn’t brought a coat in my rush to leave the house. Standing by the fire was nice and warm, if a little damp.

The other advantage to volunteering to grill is that I have a defined task, and don’t have to keep wondering around looking for something to do or haunting the one person who seems to know whats going on for another task.

Even on that rather large grill, cooking ~300 burgers was surprisingly time consuming.

After cooking and serving lunch, we cleaned up and headed home. I had just enough time to get a hot shower in before the Nebraska game started. ESPN was streaming video of the game, a trend that I hope continues as we haven’t had a TV for over a year now.

Our plan for Sunday involved helping our friends who have been remodeling their house, to do some painting after church. A phone call from family drastically altered that plan, early Sunday morning.

Heather’s Uncle, the same one I briefly mentioned back in April when we saw him run in the special Olympics, was in the hospital. His remaining lifespan was being estimated in hours when we got the call, and found out that the majority of the family was headed to Omaha. I am not sure if I even know what I think about that day, and I am certain that I cannot refine it into something worth putting here. It was a long, cold, sad, rainy day.

Sorry to end on such a down note, but it ends up being an accurate summary of our weekend.

-Jordan

The Cornhuskers Host Idaho State (And I Was There)

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I don’t know how much there is to say about it, other than I wanted to mark the event with a blog post.

Josh contacted me, saying he was going to be in Lincoln, and that he would probably be able to obtain tickets outside of the student section for a reasonable price.

Corey was also able to come, making it a college reunion of sorts.

(I typically don’t post peoples names in blog posts, but considering they were both in the wedding, their names are already thoroughly posted in other areas)

I think having gone to the ISU game really made the atmosphere in Lincoln feel fresh and exciting.

It’s also worth noting that, while I am proud of the (before the 2010 season) 305 game sellout record, being able to just buy tickets to a football game is somewhat novel. I guess you can’t have a tradition bordering on the fanatical, and have tickets available to the casual fan for very long.

That being said, if you have extra tickets the Texas game… 🙂

-Jordan

Camera Hacking

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I feel a little silly calling this hacking.

Somebody did some really amazing work on the tool I used, but lets be honest all I did was copy a file.

This is really just a step in the path to a fancy camera, but after the photography club I remembered an old Lifehacker post about some software that you could run on some Cannon cameras to do some more advanced things.

What kinds of things?

Well for one, club members were extolling the virtues of “shooting in RAW” instead of JPG. The second reason is getting access to an on-screen histogram.

Why would I want these things? Well, honestly I don’t know first hand, but from what I have read, RAW saves a lot of extra data beyond what is visible. This means you can bring out dark or light parts of a picture in photo shop later. Basically it lets your pictures behave more like film in a developing room. The histogram does most of what having a light meeter would do apparently. (The next step is to read a lot more about how to use the tool, now that I know it works)

Some links:

The Lifehacker Post

The CHDK Wiki (probably more helpful)

I started off following the Lifehacker guide, and was having some problems because the buttons they were telling me to push weren’t working. Then I realized that instructions for the exact model of camera I was using were written up in the section for the Cannon SD800. Using those instructions, I was rather quickly able to get my camera setup with this little program.

I should explain the most amazing part, these changes are 100% in software, and only act in volatile memory, meaning I can always stick in a clean memory card, turn the camera on, and have it be just like it was before I started this process. In the mean time, I now have access to about 500 menu options, about four of which I understand right now.

Learning is fun though right? 🙂

-Jordan

Photography

Posted on by Jordan

One of the topics that has continued to come up as Heather and I search for more things we enjoy doing together is photography.

Until now we haven’t really done much with that information, other than say “we should figure out a way to get more into photography together”

As of a few days ago, we are now proud members of the Des Moines Camera Club.

We attended one meeting to try and get a feel for the club, and were really impressed by how friendly the long time members were. To say that they are more knowledgeable than we are about the subject is an understatement, but they were friendly and happy to talk about their hobby.

The speaker at our first meeting was a nature photographer with an incredible portfolio of work. While he could still be considered amateur, many of his pictures have been published in books and magazines.

I was really impressed by his work. Neither Heather nor I are really interested in doing nature photography per say, but it was still really interesting to have someone that good at the craft tell us about some of his work.

On a tangent, it was hard to ignore that the speaker was retired, and therefore had a much more flexible schedule to work with. I guess the lesson to take away from that is he put in a lot of time learning the skills needed to take good pictures over the years, and now that he has the time to really dig in and wait for that perfect shot he can get great pictures!

I think we are going to quickly find that Heather and I have drastically different interests within the broad scope of “photography” but at least it gives us something to talk about 🙂

We have been putting aside a little money each month to eventually buy a nice camera (did someone say Dave Ramsey?).  After one meeting with this club, I am a little concerned about fast you could burn cash with the hobby. Heather seems committed to the idea of not buying until her talents surpass the cameras we have now, but there seems to be a pretty substantial leap from the point-and-shoot models we have and what most people at the club are running. Maybe we can pick up last years model from somebody or something.

Whatever camera we end up using, and whatever topics we end up photographing, hopefully we can post some interesting stuff here over the next year!

-Jordan

Labor Day Weekend

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What are we doing this weekend?

Are we driving half way across the US for a wedding? Are we attending showers or parties? Are we going on a trip somewhere?

NO!!!!

We are staying home! We are not doing anything really, just sitting around the apartment and enjoying spending some time with each other.

That doesn’t make for much of a post though. Luckily we had a busy week, so I will tell you a little about that. 🙂

Thursday night was the Iowa State University football team’s season opener. Heather had a work event including a tailgate and tickets for the game. Ames is only a short drive from Des Moines, so we headed up right after work Thursday night. We got there just in time to eat a quick sandwich and walk into the game.

As with many teams, ISU did not pick a challenging team for their season opener. It made for a game that wasn’t terribly interesting. It all felt kind of odd, I was surrounded by loyal fans, and I don’t feel any real antagonism towards the Cyclones, but I didn’t really feel much emotion about the game ether. In the end (or perhaps at halftime when we left…) I think it was fun, and I am really glad we went.

Heather and I realized it was our first college football game that wasn’t the Huskers or the Mavericks, and that alone made it kind of novel. Parking was a bit of a problem. Most of the campus was under water just a few weeks ago, meaning many of the grass areas people would normally park were too soft to use. Or at least I hope that is the reason parking was so bad, we wound up parking about a mile away on some random side street.

On the way out, we saw an…. enthusiastic and perhaps geeky fan:

I started laughing, and stopped to take a picture.

It is at this point I discovered something somewhat sad about my wife.

…

She had no idea what that guy was dressed up as. I made sounds of outrage and left her guessing for a few minutes, but it became clear she wasn’t going to all of a sudden remember.

At the time of taking the picture, I had been planning on asking Heather if she thought he was in the 501st. I figured I would have to explain that group, but I thought it would be an interesting topic… I mean we had a rather long walk ahead of us.

I love my wife, but it is clear I have not fully converted her to a sci-fi fan yet. On the bride side, she did like Battlestar! 🙂

-Jordan

P.S. I came *this close* to blurring the faces in that picture of us in the ISU stadium, but I thought that might be taking it a little far. All the same I do feel more than a little conflicted living in Iowa this time of year.

Adventureland!

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What did Heather and I do last weekend you ask?

We went to Adventureland!

For those of you who didn’t know, and it’s probably a lot of you, Adventureland is an amusement park in Des Moines.

It isn’t the biggest park I have ever been too, but we had fun.

We probably wouldn’t have gone, but both our companies happened to have chosen the same day for their company outing to Adventureland.

Heather and I both remembered kind of liking roller coasters, but after two different ones, we weren’t sure they were all that much fun. I am going to blame having eaten some rather greasy food and the heat for part of my upset stomach… but the fact remains I kind of felt old.

The newer areas of the park all focus on water rides. Nearly all the slides require a tube to go down. I didn’t take the time to try all of them out, but the ones I did try were really fun!

They also have a feature called “the lazy river.”  Its an interesting idea, they basically recreated what tubing down a nice calm creek would be like… assuming the creek has concrete banks, chlorinated water and is packed full of strangers. I think the hot day probably pushed more people into the water, but the lazy river was way too crowded to be “lazy.”

We forgot to pack a camera, so I will have to put up yet another post without pictures /sigh.

The final verdict is that, with free admission, the park was well worth our afternoon. If we would have been required to pay retail for our tickets… it’s hard to say, maybe if we had paced ourselves better with the roller coasters 🙂

-Jordan

State Fair Reflections

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have been to the Nebraska and Iowa State fairs.

Iowa has what people consider to be a successful fair, and Nebraska recently closed their fairgrounds.

(Granted Nebraska build a new venue, but the impression is that their fair wasn’t so hot)

Having been to both, I can’t really tell the difference. Maybe I am just not a fair person.

My suspicion is that Iowa having slightly more than double the population density of Nebraska helps a lot more than people want to admit.

Omaha being the largest city, not the capital, and not centrally located, all count against the Nebraska fair.

From what I can see in Iowa Des Moines is basically it. The state appears to have more large towns (large from my prospective having grown up in a town of 1000), without having a real competition for “big events.” A concert tour isn’t going to stop in Ames, or Cedar Rapids, or anywhere else in the state… it is going to be in Des Monies. I am imagining that most people are more willing to travel there thanks to it’s status as the big city in the state.

I don’t know how many people come in from out of town… also I am not going to spend the time doing any research… so this is just my musings. It just seems like geography plays into their favor way more than I would have realized a year ago if you had asked me about the relative fairs.

I guess maybe I should re-emphasize my point both fairs are largely ag shows, with food and some live music. I have no idea what would draw someone to spend more than one day wondering around eating a corn-dog looking at sheep. I had always assumed the “successful” fairs had some amazing special things that made them awesome, and Lincoln was lacking. Unless we missed it, they don’t.

-Jordan

Weekend Grilling

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Heather has been out of town for a few days thanks to a work trip.

A few notes from the odds and ends I stayed busy with:

It is possible to cook bacon on a grill:

If you try it, be aware that your going to have to give the grilling process 100% of your attention, as there is going to be a lot of fire. Maybe have a bottle of water handy or something.

This is exciting because Heathers primary objection to bacon (well ignoring the packing-plant episode) is the fact that it makes our entire apartment smell like grease for days. I may have found a work-around. 🙂

I went to the local gun range for a little target practice. If your like me, and maybe don’t shoot as well as you would like with a pistol, you might feel self conscious with all the other shooters around you. I realized though, if you just keep shooting the same set of targets, eventually you look pretty competent. Also I think I was improving rather quickly as time went on… still nothing to brag about, but improvement.

I thought I had a third point for this list but it seems to have escaped me… Hope your having a good weekend! 🙂

-Jordan