Closing Out June

Posted on by Jordan

Well that went fast!

I probably could have eked a few posts out of the things that happened in June, but we are staring the first of July in the face and I know the new month will have new things to talk about. Rather than letting everything slip past without comment, I will throw a few words at the highlights.

Heather participated in a marathon! Not a half marathon like last year… a real one! Grandma’s Marathon takes place up in Duluth MN every year. Heather found out about it from a girl we know from church who is from there. They struck on the idea of staying at her parent’s house and doing the marathon. Somehow the trip grew in encompass two runners and three walkers. Heather was always planning to walk, and did what appeared to be rigorous training in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the event.

After eight hours of walking, however she decided that perhaps her training did not sufficiently prepare her for 26 miles of walking. Key point is that she finished the marathon! As I understand it she was the last person to finish, but that cannot detract from finishing the marathon! In what can perhaps be called a happy coincidence, she finished the marathon walking with an 83 year old grandma. It seems somehow fitting to complete “Grandma’s Marathon” walking with a grandmother.

To quote Heather on the event: “NEVER AGAIN!” I am still proud of her though 🙂

Wedding season? In contrast to last year, we haven’t had a lot of weddings to attend this year. In fact we almost made it to July before attending our first one.

It was for a family friend, and thanks to some combination of social circles and location the guest list contained a handful of people I went to high school with. I was surprised to find that I didn’t remember names for a few of them. Beyond some distressing gaps in my memory, Heather and I were excited to see another couple enter into married life. It has been a great thing for us and we hope it can be that for them too!

Dave Ramsey!

Well, sort of anyway… As has become a sort of trend for us, we attempted to sign up to participate in the Financial Peace University class that was going to be offered through our church. Participation quickly turned into facilitating… something we were open to, and I think is going to be a really neat experience.  We just had our fist class a mere two hours prior to my writing this, and are both excited to go through the material again, while sharing it with people excited to learn!

I think that will suffice to recap all the news we wanted to share for the month. With only two days left, I can say with certainty there will be at least one more newsworthy event in June, but it will have to wait until after the fact to show up here 🙂

-Jordan

Strawbery Crepes

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t get many chances to make deserts. The following is a report from a weekend project I undertook while Heather was out of town.

Typically if I make deserts, Heather is out of town… same goes for bacon come to think of it.

In tying to find the recipe I used so I could write up this post I found the article that had gotten me interested in crepes in the first place here: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes. I probably could feed that to Heather, but somehow between the time I got it into my head that I wanted to try making crepes and the time I actually tried it, the healthy filling part had faded leaving me searching for something to fill them with.

I ended up settling on vanilla pudding and strawberries.

Before we get to the filling though, the actual crepes:

The actual recipe isn’t too important, all crepe recipes seem to be about the same, just flour oil and egg mixed aggressively and left to sit for a while in the fridge before cooking.

Speaking of cooking, I was worried about this part, because it has taken me a long time to get to the point where I make a passable pancake and these seemed like they would be less forgiving. As it turns out though, they are easier. Or at least, I found them to be virtually impossible to mess up.

After I made the crepes, it was just a matter of spooning in some pudding and loading the sliced strawberries. In hindsight I wish I would have made the ‘pie filling’ version of the recipe on the instant pudding box because what I made turned out to be too runny to really produce an attractive crepe.

I have been trying to work more on presentation, as that seems to be an area where you can take the same recipe but have it seem way better, just by having the finished result look amazing. I don’t know if I really go there with these… but I gave it a shot:

In a possibly related note, I have found that despite the fact that it sounds acceptable, Strawberry-vanilla crepes do not make a great Saturday lunch… or maybe I am just getting old. I suppose next time I should make up main course filling too, then fill half with something more substantial than pudding 🙂

-Jordan

Memorial Day 2011

Posted on by Jordan

If you remember from last year, Heather and I had a whirlwind weekend over memorial day. The post picture also featured a sort of bridge. I am going to consider that a theme… more on that later.

This year we had surprisingly few plans for the weekend, with nothing going on Monday.

We were eager to take advantage of a free day, even if the weather wasn’t expected to be very nice. After tossing around a few ideas, we settled on Winterset IA, with the plan of viewing all six of their famed covered bridges.

I took some time before we left to load up my phone with map coordinates for each bridge, and a few geocaching locations around the area. Heather packed us a lunch, and we were all set for a little adventure!

Winterset is surprisingly close to where we live, so before we had even settled in for the drive we were in Madison County, and taking our first turn to seek out a bridge.

Two things worth noting at this point. One, the clouds had blown off, and it was starting to look like a beautiful day outside. Two, Heather and I have radically different ideas about what safe speeds on unpaved roads are. I won’t go into the subject in depth except to say I hope we set the high water mark for disagreements in 2011… and I think we gave it a good shot. I let Heather drive upon leaving the first bridge, leaving us with significantly more time to enjoy the Iowa countryside than we might have experienced under other circumstances.

To be honest, the fact that the bridges were out on desolate county roads came as a bit of a shock for me. It isn’t like I thought the bridges were an eighth wonder of the word or anything, but they seemed familiar enough that I was expecting more development. That isn’t to say that they weren’t being visited, they are just kind of out there.

We took a picture in front of each bridge, but they all kind of look alike… so we are going to take the quality over quantity approach and just have one bridge picture.

I tried looking for a few geocaches, but the bad weather that plagued the proceeding weekend made that unappealing at best. Spring rains, combined with the freshly tilled fields surrounding most of the bridges meant that finding a cache was going to involve tromping through some mud. Perhaps I am turning into a city person… but it just didn’t seem worth it. (Although the gravel-road speed question provides some strong evidence to the contrary)

After three bridges, we stopped in Winterset to hit a park and eat our lunch. The park is home to one of the bridges, and happens to be next to the cemetery (pictured at the top of this post). It was a touching sight, a hillside covered in flags gracefully blowing in the wind.

After lunch we only had two bridges left, so we plotted a route to catch them both, then point us home.

A few notes / highlights:

There is still one bridge you can drive over, and we did!

I suspect the trip would be more interesting if you did more research into the bridges beforehand, as there isn’t much on site.

The movie “Bridges of Madison County” does not count… and in the few minutes I lasted isn’t a great use of time.

There is a tower in the Winterset city park, I forget the name, but we skipped it, thinking it wasn’t worth walking down to… saw a picture later and I wish we would have taken the time to see it.

I think that about wraps up the trip! Perhaps not the most enthralling trip we have ever taken, but a wonderful way to get outside on a nice day and see something new!

-Jordan

Laminate!

Posted on by Jordan

I really need to catch up to current events, but I didn’t want to skip this one…

So a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help a friend from church install laminate flooring. We were helping out because another member of the church was dealing with life-threatening asthma in one of his children, and needed to get all the carpet out of the house ASAP.

None of that really matters, except to set the scene for why I was standing outside a house somewhere in Des Moines at 8AM on a Saturday, getting ready to work with a carpenter to install some flooring. The only detail is that neither myself, the home owner, or the guy who brought the majority of the tools had ever done laminate flooring before.

It turns out it isn’t that hard, although I am sure it helps when you are under the guidance of somebody who does quality woodwork on a daily basis. While not being really hard, it was time consuming. We finished two rooms a hallway and a staircase over the course of a day, but it took roughly thirteen hours to finish.

I would put a picture in here, except the only picture I took was of the miter saw, and I am guessing you have seen one of those before.

A few takeaways from the day:

  • Laminate flooring is surprisingly straight forward to install.
  • There are some specialized tools just for sliding the slats around with that are lifesavers
  • Having a good miter saw, and a good table saw also made a huge difference
  • (Sub note) I don’t work with those kinds of tools every day, but I have enough to be comfortable with them… watching the homeowner operate a saw was at times heart-stoppingly alarming
  • Estimating the needed materials to finish a job is hard
  • And… A final note (because this was written after the fact) It only took four days for my legs and back to loosen up enough so I could walk normally 🙂

Helping out was great for a number of reasons, not the least of which was learning how to install the flooring, but in the end it was fun just to get to swing a hammer and run a saw… Not something I manage too often these days.

-Jordan

Scones

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably heard about somewhere along the way, there was a wedding a few weeks ago involving British royalty.

It wasn’t a significant event in my world,but the office Heather works in had a different take. They claim it was because of the recent addition of a Canadian to their ranks, what with the whole “Canada still recognizes the Queen” bit. I can’t say I completely buy that. I talk to Canadians every day, and while they may have been a tiny bit more aware of the event than I was, they did not demonstrate the boundless enthusiasm for it that my wife did.

Whatever their reason, Heather’s office decided to have a sort of party on the day of (because it happened on a Friday morning for those of us in CST). Outside the world of TV shows about offices, “office party” just means “bring food” and not much else. Normally I should say… Apparently they designated a couple to dress up as the bride and groom…. Suffice to say they went above and beyond with their plans for the royal wedding.

And this is where I come in. I have actually made scones a few times before, but I don’t think they ever made the blog. They fall into that grey area between sweets and bread, and I have periodically tried them as a way to share a desert with Heather. I have even gone so far as to try a savory scone recipe although it wound up being kind of a tough sell.

Heather apparently remembered the first batch of scones I made well enough to think they would be a great addition to an English themed party at work.

Basically I doubled this recipe, except without the raw sugar crystals on top. Using dried cranberries doesn’t add much sugar so the end result is Heather approved.

Doubling the recipe did involve a distressingly large portion of butter, but I can’t complain about the results. The reports that came back from Heather’s office were equally positive, so I don’t think anybody really missed the sugar sprinkles on top. Although, speaking of the butter, because the method I used to cut each scone involved patting out a circle and splitting it into eights, it made calculating the butter per scone distressingly easy. There ended up being three-fourths of a tablespoon of butter in each scone. It’s better when you are just vaguely aware that there is “a lot” of butter in something I suppose.

One last comment about scones, and then I will stop before this gets any more scatter brained… Scones aren’t very hard. If you can make biscuits from scratch using a recipe, you can make scones. Just you know… use a scone recipe.

-Jordan

Softball 2011

Posted on by Jordan

The calendar says it isn’t summer yet. Actually, having written that… the weather out side says it isn’t summer yet ether.

All the same, Heather and I are both on Softball teams. We are already into week two, seems like I was scraping ice off my windows just yesterday.

We aren’t on the same team, both our respective peer-groups at work wanted to put together teams, and the nights picked for each didn’t work for each other.

The team I play on isn’t coed, so Heather wouldn’t have been able to participate anyway. That might be for the best, we renamed the team this year (this being our second season as a team). I snapped this picture when I picked up my team shirt:

Last season we had a perfect 0-13 record.You might think we had nothing left to aspire to this season, but in our first game we surprised even ourselves by loosing by a record 15 points! We look forward to a great season this year!

Heather was unable to attend her first game, but I hear the team won, so clearly they are on a whole different level.

While Heather and I are not star players, being on a city league has become a sort of summer tradition for us.

And if you know anybody who helps organize the Des Moines men’s slow pitch league, tell them they need a less competitive bracket.

-Jordan

Dave Ramsey Live!

Posted on by Jordan

I seem to be falling behind… lucky for me March ended up being kind of uneventful, so the fact that I am just getting this posted doesn’t mean you missed much.

Heather and I went to see Dave Ramsey in Kansas City. We bought the tickets months in advance, and Heather suffered a small amount of ridicule at work for her excitement over having the tickets. The fact that the event later sold out was somewhat vindicating I suppose.

It did mean that the friends who we talked into going to the event with us were unable to purchase tickets, so we had to go by ourselves.

To be completely honest, I was doing a little bit of foot-dragging in the weeks leading up to the event. I mean, how exciting can it be to see a five-hour recap of the class we took three years ago? Well, the answer to that is, a lot more exciting than you ever would have guessed!

Dave is a gifted speaker, and his team puts on a great event. We really enjoyed it.

Reflecting on the event, I think part of the reason it’s worth doing is that culturally, it’s hard to talk about money and budgets with your peers. It was refreshing to be in an environment where people could say “I am debt free!” Granted, a person could go into the office on Monday and say that, but I don’t know how many friends that would make you… or maybe I am taking too dim a view of humanity… at any rate, it got Heather and I excited to buckle down and focus on our financial goals again, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission.

-Jordan

A Welcome Reprieve

Posted on by Jordan

I know this won’t last, but the last few days have been amazing!

Not only did the temperatures make it into the low 40s, but it was a weekend! I mean… I saw someone wearing shorts yesterday! The snow is melting, the sun is shining… it makes you feel like maybe there will be an end to the winter.

I can’t complain too much, as cold as it has been, this year has nothing on last year when it comes to painful winters.

So, talking about the weather is perhaps a boring blog topic. What else have Heather and I been doing?

We started taking a more proactive approach to keeping the apartment clean It may not sound like much, but trying to keep things clean instead of waiting for the weekend to clean up has made our apartment feel a lot bigger, nicer, and just easier to hang out in.

Our big observance of Valentines day consisted of a marriage conference put on by our church over the weekend. I have to admit I did a lot of foot-dragging beforehand, kind of expecting it to be a really long day. It wound up being rather pleasant, Heather and I got to spend a lot of time talking about “us” something that is apparently waaaaay to easy to forget to do.

We are also averaging slightly over two dinner with guests events a week at our little apartment.  I don’t know if we can keep that pace up forever, but it has been fun to get to interact with friends in the evenings so often.

Having just double-checked Picasa, I can confirm that we do not have any new pictures… not real surprising considering how un-photo-worthy the past few weeks have been.

Maybe we will break out the camera and get some pictures of the muddy puddles where the snow used to be… it seems like a pretty beautiful thing right now! 🙂

-Jordan

Do More Outdoors, PT 2

Posted on by Jordan

Hey there, as you may have noticed… I haven’t posted much.

Well, it has been cold and snowy… and we really haven’t been up to much.

Our apartment is cleaner than it has been, perhaps ever! I have played a fair amount of Warcraft although nothing like I used to.

I have been meaning to post the other half of our day outdoors, I just didn’t want to bring the mood down.

Given the lack of topics to write about… I guess that is my next post!

After an enjoyable time doing various outdoor winter activities, Heather and I walked back to the car. The abundance of people attending the event had overwhelmed the small parking lot at the lodge, so we were partially off the road a few hundred yards down the way. Given that setting, I offered to pull the car out, so Heather wouldn’t have to climb through several feet of snow in the ditch.

When she got into the car, she said “the front tire looked kind of low when you were pulling out.” I took a quick peek at it: Flat, not kind of flat… FLAT.

Ok so, pull off the road so other people can get around us at least… and hmmm…. Well when we were waiting to get our cross country ski boots, I was looking around the shed we were in. It wasn’t really a shed, it was the park maintenance building. I remembered seeing lines for compressed air running down a few beams throughout the room. I hadn’t seen a portable air tank, but figured it was worth a shot.

Walked back to the shop, asked the DRN person there if they had an air tank, and if I could barrow it. She didn’t normally work at the park hosting the event, and had no idea what tools they had on hand. She did say if I could find what I needed it I could barrow it! After a little looking I found the air tank, and ancillary items needed to re-inflate a flat tire.

Walked back to the car, filled the tire. I figured if it was holding pressure by the time we drove the tank back to the shop we might be able to at least make the five miles back to the small town we passed on the way in, before making some phone calls.

At the shop, I returned the air tank, and helped the staff person load some ski equipment into her truck. I must have been a little flustered, because without realizing it, I left my brand-new mittens laying in the shop.

We pulled into a parking lot in Bondurant, and I checked the pressure in the front tire again. Things were looking good, it hadn’t lost any pressure so far! I figured we could probably make it the remaining 20 minutes home before it started to loose much more, and didn’t really relish the idea of finishing off a long day by sitting in a cold car waiting for a tow truck on Sunday evening.

Pulled off one more time, about half way home to take another look, and we were down 2-3lbs, but still above normal operating pressure (I had over-filled the tire about 8lbs). I decided we should push the rest of the way home. I should say that, while ultimately supportive Heather had some reservations about this whole plan, but I don’t think she wanted to sit a few hours in the car any more than I did 🙂

once home, we realized we probably only had a few more hours before the tire was un-drive-ably low again, so we headed back out onto the road, with two vehicles this time, bound for our mechanics lot. The trip there was uneventful, but once there it’s hard to feel 100% comfortable dropping your key, and a note through the drop-slot and walking away. We didn’t have much of a choice though, so that’s what we did.

Once home I checked, and re-checked for my mittens, and well… it was kind of demoralizing. I really considered myself to be more responsible than to loose my stuff like that. I even bought the really nice stuff, because I “knew” I could take care of it for a long time. At this point, Heather jumped in and started making phone calls. It wasn’t a good time of the day or week to catch anyone, but she left messages at a few different DNR offices. She then continued to call over the next few days, until she located the mittens, and then used her lunch break to drive out to an office on the northern extremes of Des Moines to pick them up!

During that same time, our mechanic was able to extract a nail from the front tire of the car, leaving us as good as new!

All in all, it wasn’t the greatest end to what started out as a really fun day… but things worked out in the end.

-Jordan

Two Years

Posted on by Jordan

January 24th marked the end of our second year of marriage.

I just dug around the blog, and found that I never actually put up a post detailing the first year’s activities.

So, on year zero (the honeymoon) we were in Colorado skiing.

Year one, we went to a local “paint your own pottery” place. That wasn’t terrible, but the end results of Heather’s work: cute, my work: sad. I guess they will both last forever, and that’s something. The only downside is, someday our children will ask why we have a plate dad made in preschool arts-and-crafts.

Now that your up to speed, this year we did something outdoors again!

Oh wait, another tangent! When we set our wedding date in January, people often said things like “well at least you can go someplace warm on your honeymoon” or “yeah, but you can go on trips to the beach for your anniversary.”  I have to admit that I did little to kill off those ideas, because saying “Bah, you just need a better coat and to move around a little” isn’t really what they wanted to hear.

Right, so back to this year: Heather found out that the local parks department was hosting an outdoor winter activities workshop this past weekend. We thought it would be a fun alternative to dinner and a movie, so we headed up after church.

They had a really neat program going, and plenty of participants! The first station we encountered was snowshoeing, but they had every single pair of shoes already out, so we trudged on down the trail. Up next was ice fishing.

It didn’t take long to determine that ice fishing wasn’t going to be our thing. I should mention, as you can kind of see from the picture, we had a beautiful sunny day. It was still quite cold, but being outside in the sunlight was a wonderfully refreshing change from our normal lifestyle.

After checking our pole back in with the ranger, we headed over to the cross country ski station. As with the snowshoe station, they had every single item already out in the snow. We were able to put our names and shoe sizes on the board for later that day, letting us wander back over to the snow shoe station.

On the way we found the dog sled team, resting after their exhibition.

The snowshoe station had just a few shoes, but a few is enough for the two of us! Granted, the snow wasn’t anywhere deep enough to really need snow shoes, but we still gave them a try. 🙂

After a loop around the meadow behind the lodge, we headed back over to the cross country ski station. Even having our names on the list didn’t mean it was a painless process, but eventually we had two pair of boots, poles, and skis. We headed down the trail, having no idea what we were doing.

I guess we were just naturals though, because we moved on down the trail without much trouble 🙂 I may have fallen a few times, but that is the price you pay for finding out how fast you can go. Heather stayed on her feet the entire time, although I am sure she doesn’t know how fast she can go yet. We learned that the DNR rents out the skis any day they aren’t offering a free workshop like we were participating in, so maybe Heather can figure that out another day. 😉

-Jordan