Didn’t Make It to Oz Last Night

Posted on by Jordan

The weather forecast was pretty dire yesterday afternoon. As the evening progressed, the sky to the west started to look rather dire too. Heather and I were setting on our bed, looking out the window while keeping one eye on the weather maps via. the laptop. We have a rather good view looking west, there is basically nothing blocking our line of sight for miles.

At some point during the more exciting part of the storm, I started pondering the fact that our apartment was rather exposed. The complex is named “Whispering Hills” I started thinking of new, more accurate names:

  • Wind-Raked Hills
  • Wind Buffeted Hills
  • Roaring Hills

I am sure there are more, but I can’t seem to think of them right now. In the end, the storm didn’t amount to much more than some wind and rain. I was thinking the entire time that I should take pictures, but the lighting wouldn’t have been great, and wind is remarkably hard to photograph. It would have been ideal to have some sort of web-cam rig doing a picture every five seconds, then I could have stitched together a video showing how quickly it got dark, then light again once things blew over.

-Jordan

Mid Week Updates

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I went to the dentist today! I really don’t have much of a story to post. Its odd though, I went almost six years without going to the dentist, and when I finally went in had a grand total of two cavities. Six months later, I go back in and have two more cavities. The worst part is that I eat so much less of the kinds of things that would encourage tooth decay now. The only consolation is that the cavities were declared “minor” whereas the ones I had before required hours of grinding to remove.

In less dental related news, I feel really guilty about not having pictures posted on the website yet. Heather nearly had the photo set for the CDs ready, and I was going to load the same set to the website. Unfortunelately somehow I broke the smoke and mirrors that Picasa uses to do its “I auto-save as you work, but don’t write out to disk until you click save” as you edit pictures. Lucky for us it only damaged something like three pictures. Between that and the sheer number of thank you cards Heather still has to author, enthusiasm for the photo project has been pretty thoroughly sapped. I still hope we can get something started on that before the end of this week.

-Jordan

Decorating

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Heather claims that we are *done* decorating the apartment now. That statement comes with the implicit disclaimer that once she gets wedding pictures ordered, we will get to take down all the frames on the walls and load them with new pictures.

Not to say that I dislike the decorations we have, or even minded putting them all up, I just didn’t realize we needed so many.

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That’s me, hanging one of a number of stars we just recently added to the walls in our bedroom. The decorations look good now, and will look great once we have pictures of people we actually know in the frames! 🙂

As of this past weekend, I finally found a home for every last wedding present. The weekend before that, I spent a fair amount of time hiding cables and computers. Before I got married I honestly couldn’t think of a reason you wouldn’t want over-sized computer cases, and who cares what color they are, as long as they have good airflow and the internal layout is easy to work with. As it turns out, huge blue glowing PC towers are offensive to the apartment decor. Also, the idea of CAT-5 cable running to all corners of the apartment was a tough sell, I did manage to hide it pretty well. Maybe Heather is just graciously ignoring it…. I wont ask 🙂

I am still trying to track down a replacement TV connector for an NVIDIA 7800, and our media center will be hooked up and running on the TV. Heather has the decorations looking amazing, sans pictures, and we don’t have huge piles of sutff in the corners! It seems like we should have people over to visit just to see how nice it is now, but a two bedroom apartment can get pretty crowded… So I won’t invite everyone over at once 🙂

-Jordan

Mishaps With Sharp Things

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This post started out as just talking about a knife from last week, but my slow posting rate mixed with a slip over the weekend has expand today’s topic.

First off, the knife! Heather and I got a lot of really nice things as wedding and shower gifts. One of those things was Pampered chef knives. Well technically, the knives weren’t a gift, the gift money from the shower paid for them… but yeah, close enough.

I should start off by saying I really like the knives in general. They are really nice! Very sharp and the handles are, for the most part, comfortable in my hand. The problem is with the parring knife, the blade is extremely fine, so thin its like having a handle on a cut down razor blade. It’s so sharp it kind of made me nervous to begin with, and for some reason the thin sharp blade seemed hard to maneuver. I was cutting the eyes out of a potato, and really not too happy with the knife, somehow the balance felt wrong, and it was hard to control. Instead of cutting neat circle-plugs around the eyes I kept having the blade gouge out across the potato as I was trying to turn it. I suppose it didn’t help I was a little unnerved by the fact I was so tired I hurt, and I knew how incredibly sharp the knife was.

I did, however manage to finish preparing things to go into the crock-pot that night. I was washing up the parring knife it slipped out of my hand, fell maybe four inches tip first into the steel bottomed sink, and bent the leading 1/8th inch of the blade.  It was a sad moment, I was somewhat glad I hadn’t tried to grab the knife or something… As tired as I was right then my reflexes would have been bad enough to probably make a real mess of my hand trying something like that. On the other hand I was pretty mad at myself for dropping the knife. In hindsight I am kind of annoyed that the knife could destroy itself that easily.

My second great mishap, again came from a shockingly sharp new kitchen implement. I was peeling potatoes Saturday night, and somehow let my left index finger slip up into the path of the peeler. A few seconds prior to that I had been really enjoying how amazingly fast and easily the peeler was going over the potato. I was thinking to myself “wow I guess peeling potatoes isn’t so bad when you have a nice sharp peeler.” Then it took a bite out of my finger!

I now have one of the deepest cuts I have given myself in years, and from a very sharp implement! It managed to cut its way out as I was reflexively pulling away, so there wasn’t any flap of skin, just a bite gone out of my fingertip. Every time I changed band aids it was still bleeding profusely, even 18 hours later.  It did eventually stop bleeding, but it was a really clean, deep cut.

-Jordan

Workout

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Heather and I have started another workout challenge! As some of you may remember, we did one of these back last spring. I can’t remember exactly when we started it, but I know it was really cold then too.

Two days in, and I think that having both of us in the same bed isn’t going to sabotage getting up early. I was afraid that would make it far too easy for us to talk each other out of going to the gym. I suppose I shouldn’t say too much a few weeks of this and we may feel differently 🙂

It is really sad how quickly I seem to lose my edge with weight lifting and cardio workouts. I am basically starting back at zero for endurance and lifting strength. Time will tell how quickly Heather and I can bounce back up to the level we were at when we ended the first challenge.

There are starting pictures, but I can safely say those will not *ever* be featured here… Unless perhaps Heather and I have dramatic results, and even then… don’t hold your breath.

Ignoring the lack of sleep, it has been nice to get out and doing something… I feel like cabin fever is starting to set in. We had a wonderful few days of nice weather, and now its too cold to do anything outside again. I guess “getting out is kind of a misnomer, but going to the gym is at least out of the house.

-Jordan

Other Projects

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While I have been messing with computers, Heather has been decorating… A lot. Our apartment is really feeling like a home now. One of the really cool things she has done was to find a way to display some of the cards we got from the wedding.

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Using the same glue that was used for the pictures decorating tables at the reception, Heather covered the top of her desk with portions of cards. The resulting surface was anything but smooth however, so we purchased a slab of plate glass to cover the desktop with. it looks really good.

The other major project Heather has been working on is a huge collection of pictures from the wedding. That is basically done, and was previewed at the KC reception over the weekend. It now falls to me to get those lined up to go onto DVD’s and up on the website, but that should go quickly as soon as I find time 🙂

-Jordan

One Month

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Heather and I have been married for one month now.

After one month we have basically figured out how to run a household together. It still feels like we have no time to do anything after work, but it’s been nice to have life slow down a little.

Both of us have been keeping busy with little projects around the house, and I hope to get some pictures posted up here soon to document those. The posts are so much more interesting if I include a few pictures 🙂

Speaking of pictures, we have a DVD containing our wedding pictures finally! Heather has been hard at work sorting and modifying pictures to get a master list of our favorite pictures from the wedding. Several people have asked about ordering pictures, I would recommend not getting them from our photographer’s website (as would our photographer, she just posts them there so people have options). We should soon have pictures hosted here that you can download in a high quality format and print at a photo printing website such as MPix. We have full copy right to the pictures, so any place should be able to take care of printing, although a place like Wal-Mart will probably hassle you a lot.

If you don’t want to mess with downloading the pictures, we hope to get DVD’s cut for people containing all the pictures. I am sure we can make a few more as people request them!! 🙂

-Jordan

Notes

Posted on by Jordan

Well, its Friday the 13th.

The forecast is saying 100% chance of snow today. Walking through the parking lot, nearly everyone seems to have broken down and washed their cars in the last few days of +40f temps. I wonder if the car-washing karma has an exponential effect, and we will have a blizzard today. On the other hand, basically every school in Lincoln and Omaha preemptively closed, so that should mean this storm completely fizzles.

In other news, we still don’t have any wedding pictures. I have some hope they will come in the mail today or tomorrow, but who knows.

-Jordan

The Homecoming

Posted on by Jordan

For no real reason, I have decided to tell the story of our wedding in reverse order. I suppose this does increase the chances I will have a really really good picture of my beautiful bride by the time I want to talk about the wedding day, but that thought had not occurred to me until just now.

Wednesday of the week after our wedding, Heather and I started the day near Tabernash Colorado, in a really awesome little cabin. Packing up took a lot longer than I was expecting. Checkout was slated for 11-ish, and I figured we could beat 11 by at least 30 minutes. We ended up missing by about 30 minutes… welcome to married life I guess 🙂 Our hosts weren’t too worried about our checkout time so it really didn’t matter.

Our drive out of the mountains was somewhat complicated by wind. Wind shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but every night we had gotten one – two inches of powdery snow. The snow was blowing into near whiteout conditions on some of the early areas of the drive. Fortunately that didn’t last long, but the road was fairly slick for the first hour or so of our drive.

Once hitting Denver, we discovered the main route to the airport was closed for the day, but my awesome navigator wife managed to plot a new path to the airport using the dinky little map that came with our rental car. We made it to the airport without any trouble after that. Once in the airport, we managed to get moved up to a flight leaving five hours sooner than our original departure time. (we hadn’t planned on driving straight to the airport from the bed and breakfast, but were ready to come home by Wednesday) The change wasn’t free, but was well worth it.

I am not sure if its good or bad, but we made it back with time to tackle the mountain of gifts waiting for us in the apartment. This picture was taken after we were quite a ways into the process:

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( Sorry about the really small size of these pictures, wordpress is being a pain about squishing the aspect ratio of pictures unless I keep them smaller than the width of the text area. I could post thumbnails and link to images posted somewhere else on the site, but getting the posts up is enough of a project right now)

We had a pretty good system for the gifts, Heather logged items to a master spreadsheet:

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While I opened gifts:

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After a few hours, we had everything unwrapped, and some of it put away. Unfortunately we ran out of energy before dealing with the packaging:

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It was probably bad planning to pile it all in front of the door when we had to go to work in the morning. To be honest I don’t remember what we did… I guess we must have just dug a path and then carried it all down the next day.

-Jordan

Its Been A Little Over A Week…

Posted on by Jordan

And…

  • Heather and I are home
  • The apartment is 99%  cleaned up
  • We have unpacked and stowed every gift and item that recently entered the apartment.

The process of cleaning up and putting away everything did cause some stress between Heather and I. As much time as we were spending together before the wedding, we somehow never really came to terms with our approach to planning chores. We both just took care of things like cleaning and laundry when we weren’t together.

In the end, it was a great week, and everything that we wanted done got taken care of. The process though… 🙂 I don’t want it to sound like we had huge fights over anything, we just had to figure out priorities and planning styles some. I can’t imagine what it would have been like having to move one of us into the apartment over the weekend, much less moving both of us into a house.

Thank you writing will be a challenge we have to tackle soon, and we are just starting to address how meals get taken care of. Laundry and managing the budget are still in there too… Lets just say we still have things to figure out, but the first week has been really great! Not always easy, but not hard ether, just felt like something that took a little thought and effort.

Speaking of food, one of the many great items we were given was a crock pot. I have all kinds of plans for that puppy, and happened to have stumbled upon some fairly straightforward “quick” recipes for them today. Posting them here so I can find them again:  (All shamelessly stolen from The Simple Dollar)

  1. Combine all of this into a crock pot.
  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.
  3. Turn it on low and walk away for eight hours.
  4. Add a quarter of a cup of water for every additional two hours you intend to cook it.

Creamy Chicken Casserole

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (chicken & herbs if you can find it)
1 small can mushroom pieces (a 4 ounce can, drain off the water first)
1/2 chopped red onion
1 1/2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breasts (cut into strips if you’d like)
1/4 cup white wine (optional)

Crock Pot Chili
1 large can tomato sauce
1 pound lean ground beef
2 cans beans (kidney beans are fine, but you can use whatever you like)
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/4 cup diced onion (or onion salt)

Simple Pot Roast
1 2 to 2.5 lb. roast
2 cups chopped carrots
2 cups chopped potatoes
1 cup chopped celery
3 cups beef broth or beef stock

Ham and Potato Casserole
4 red potatoes, sliced
2 red onions, finely chopped
1 1/2 pounds cubed ham
1 can condensed cream of celery soup, diluted according to can directions
2 tablespoons flour

(This one is very good with cheese on top just before you serve it.)

Shredded Beef Sandwiches
2 pounds beef brisket
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 1/2 cups beef broth or beef stock
2 cloves minced garlic
1 chopped red onion

(Serve this on buns – magnificent!)

Breakfast Apple Cobbler
4 medium-sized apples, peeled and sliced (try Honey Crisps)
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 cups granola cereal

I hope to try one or two of these, there are a ton of recipes for slow cookers / crock pots out there, but fast and simple are really good attributes!

-Jordan