Maybe I won’t ever be asking myself, “when did gas drop below $3.00” but in case I want to dig that up I can search the blog and find out it was this week, 10/8/2008 roughly.
also, the tags should make finding the collection of this kind of post fairly easy 🙂
-Jordan
Well ok this might not be *essential* but it seems handy all the same 🙂
and just in case the article isn’t around by the time your saying to yourself “where can I find the best bacon online,” the winner:
Tasters raved that this bacon — which scored a distinct few notches higher than the rest of the lineup — has it all: “Nice balance of sweetness to salt, great deep complex ham flavor, very meaty,” with a “faint fruity taste, sweet and salty.” Extra-big slices and “genuine” smoke flavor were big hits with our tasters. ($13.95 for 12 ounces, plus shipping, www.gratefulpalate.com)
-Jordan
Quite a bit happened over the weekend, so I am going to probably spread that over a few days worth of posts rather than do one huge post.
The primary thing that happened is that my parents and brother came to town! Everyone (Mom, Dad, Bethany, Andrew, and Heather) met up at my apartment around nine Saturday morning. We decided to visit the Omaha botanical gardens as our first action of the day.
I was a little concerned about what there would be to see in the fall, but it turns out that it wasn’t an issue. the majority of the “areas” in the gardens looked amazing. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the truly awesome model train network they have built into a hill midway through our walk. I might have a few pictures of that, but haven’t had a chance to check my camera to see if anything is really worth showing.
I have been to the gardens in Omaha three times now, and every time came away thinking it was really pretty cool. Heather and I are thinking about getting a membership, because we have really enjoyed the trips we have taken together.
We then went to the other side of town for lunch at the Upstream where the rehearsal dinner will be held. It was nice to be able to show my parents the room we have reserved there, and we got to try the food! ( I have eaten there a few times before, but it was a first for a few in our group)
after lunch, Bethany headed back to Lincoln for pre-game festivities, my parents headed back to their hotel for a nap, and Heather, Andrew and myself grabbed my Wii from my apartment and headed over to Heather’s apartment. Heather she needed a nap too, so Andrew and I got some Wii bowling in while everyone slept.
After the naps, my parents came over to Heather’s apartment, and we just hung out for an hour or two, before heading out again to play some mini-golf. Mini-golf with Andrew is always fun! Ironically this was also the first golf related outing Heather and I have been on. I guess all we can say is that the summer has gotten away from us… and fall is slipping fast. I won’t inflict you with a play-by-play of the golf game, sufficient to say nobody did all that well, everyone had fun, and it used up the remaining day.
-Jordan
This program is a ways from being implemented I suppose, but I find the prospect fairly amusing.
Could playing computer games enhance mental agility enough to turn people over 50 into better drivers? Allstate Corp. wants to find out, and if the answer is yes, it might offer insurance discounts to people who play the games.
I have told Heather in the past that our generation will be playing video games in retirement, this may or may not play a role in that future 🙂
-Jordan
Well we aren’t done setting up registries yet, but Heather and I did get started on that project last night.
Our plan was to start at Bed Bath and Beyond, register there, and then head to Target and be done registering in one night.
The lady who set us up at Bed Bath and Beyond had other ideas. I will admit some of the things she told us were really quite helpful, such as the list of things you might want, or her advice about how many things to have on our list vs. number of invited guests. I am pretty sure we did not need 10 minutes of explanation of how awesome the china was. After we finally got the scanner and got turned loose it quickly became clear that even without the fine-china pitch, we were never going to make it to Target. The sheer number of choices we had to make was painful. Even if it was only a few seconds for each item we walked past, it still required thinking “do we have one already, if so is the one we have a candidate for replacing” or “would we conceivably use that if somebody gave it to us” It just got harder if there were options within a class of item (how do you pick between 3 kinds of muffin tins?).
Two hours later, I think we have Bed Bath and Beyond completely covered.
Its kind of hard to know what to put on the list, Heather and I aren’t moving into a house, and storage is somewhat limited in the apartment we will be staying in. Cooking is at least something we have enjoyed doing together, and will definitely work well in an apartment. In the end I think we have a pretty good list of things that would be useful to have, and if I can stop feeling bad asking for half of it everything will be grand 🙂
-Jordan
…and gas is selling for $3.16 per gallon at the station right by work. I will probably never think to dig up this post, but I am guessing that will seem shocking in six months. 🙂
also, labels I feel I should print off and use for something: here
-Jordan
To make Monday even better, I went to the dentist today!
Nothing to report from the dentist, other than the fact that it remains soundly in the “no fun” category.
On the way out, they asked me if I wanted to schedule my 6 month from new appointment. I tried to explain to them that my job is changing dental plans, and I am getting married. I don’t think the idea that I would change dentists due to a dental plan crossed their minds as they blankly smiled at me.
to be honest I kind of want to change dentists so that I can go to one closer to work, given that the one I am going to now moved to the other side of town. Hopefully they wont be too offended if I never call them again… ever
pretty awesome Monday huh? 🙂
-Jordan
First off, lets see how I did on that list yesterday:
Gallery is kind of a maze to figure out how its building pages, I think I have found where it constructs the main page you see when you click the “gallery” link from the front page, I just have to find a way to inject a link back to the main page from there. I am not optimistic about adding text in the unused space, but maybe I will change my mind once I understand its page creation code a little better.
the other things on that list I simply ran out of time for, perhaps because I was being lazy and didn’t get started right away 🙂
I also tackled the frozen chicken I had piling up, for over a month now I had been buying a bag or so each time the store had a sale on frozen chicken breasts. Ever since Heather and I started our workout plan I have been using the approach Heather used, where you cook a bunch of chicken, and freeze it in proper meal sized portions. Buying lots of it raw, and then procrastinating before cooking it meant I had four bags, or eight pounds of chicken to deal with. I normally use a vinegar and pepper marinade, but I didn’t have a big enough container to soak that much chicken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that much in the same style. So after trimming it all, I settled on four different kinds:
starting at the top, and going left-to-right, we have: BBQ, lemon pepper, plain, vinegar-pepper. I was pretty happy with the results. the BBQ didn’t come out as well as it has in the past, but I think I did something differently then, I just cant remember what. After cubing and bagging all of that I ended up with 22 bags of chicken, enough to keep me in quick lunches for quite a while 🙂
Hopefully today I can knock out the rest of the website stuff, and maybe even get my room cleaned a little bit before I completely loose this productive streak I am on 🙂
-Jordan
Yesterday was cake, today is pie, you might think this blog was desert oriented! 🙂
Heather was given some “for baking” apples from somebodies back yard a few weeks ago, and we had said over and over again that we should try making something with them. We never had time over the last two weeks until last night.
I had looked around for a recipe that would come close to being healthy, or at least not loaded with sugar. The best I could come up with was a recipe for “Sugarless Apple Pie,” a recipe that used apple juice concentrate instead of sugar for sweetness. I was a little skeptical, but figured it was worth a try… the worst we could do was ruin some free apples and a little pie crust.
Heather undertook to peel the apples using a “cut them up and then remove the skin” method that I didn’t really think was going to work, but without a peeler I couldn’t say much. It turns out her method actually works really well… faster than my peeling them with a knife and then cutting them up (moral of the story, we need a peeler). Once the apples were cut up, we just followed the recipe for the filling.
The crust came as 2 pie crusts, both in tins. If the directions hadn’t explicitly said you could dump one crust out and use it as a top for your pie I don’t know if I would have figured that out. I guess you can’t be an expert when its your first pie. We did that, but the crust stuck really bad to the foil we thawed it on so it was kind of a mangled mess when we tried to move it onto our pie. We were also worried that, because the picture in the recipe didn’t have a top, we shouldn’t have a top. I wish I would have taken a picture of the pie before we baked it, there were just strips of crust haphazardly tracing across the filling without any symmetry or plan. It was awesome, in a really sad sort of way. 🙂
we baked it setting in the middle of a pizza pan, didn’t use foil to protect the crust, and it came out perfect. I suppose if you tried it right next to another apple pie it might not taste as sweet, but on its own it tasted great and I certainly didn’t feel like I was missing anything.
notes for next time:
-Jordan
So, Heather bought her wedding dress last night. I suppose I knew these things, but two things really hit me as she was shopping, and even more so once she bought it.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to the wedding, but I never expected this would be something on the list 🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 