Nelsons

Fuel Numbers

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Jordan

This is semi-random, but given the amount of driving I am expecting to do now, fuel economy is fairly interesting to me.

It has been somewhat interesting to me from back last year when gas was so high. I have been keeping a spreadsheet with every tank of gas I put into my Escape, and the miles driven. Not too long ago I found a website that makes keeping track of that kind of thing a lot easier.

Fuelly

I had big plans to ether go back and re-enter an entire years worth of spreadsheet data into Fuelly, or to at least work up some summary numbers to post here. That may still happen, but in the mean time, my profile on Fuelly is publicly viewable, so check out what I have so far!

Jordan’s Escape on Fuelly

-Jordan

Move Complete!

Posted on August 31, 2009 by Jordan

Just a quick note, Heather and I got moved into a little house in Atlantic IA.

We don’t have internet hooked up to the house yet, so I probably won’t be getting a full-length post about the move up for a few more days.

The short story, the combined efforts of our parents, my siblings, some amazingly helpful friends, and a cousin made the move as painless as I think a move can be.

-Jordan

Iowa!

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Jordan

I am still like a month behind in the updates plan, but we have some rather big news!

Jobs are generally not talked about here, but Heather was promoted and transferred to Des Moines!

We didn’t get much warning, so life has been pretty hectic over the past week, and looks to continue for the duration of this week.

Our basic plan is to move to a small town roughly half way between Des Moines and Iowa, and both Heather and I will have to drive quite a ways to work.

As of this posting we have a verbal agreement with the landlord, meaning we have a place to live found. Our goal is to move this coming Saturday, but there are still a few details to hammer out.

In the meantime, our apartment looks like a disaster, no decorations on the walls, and huge piles of stuff everywhere. We started packing yesterday, and made a good dent in what needs packed. Heather and I take somewhat different approaches to a lot of things, and working together to move has been interesting. In the end good, but interesting 🙂

-Jordan

4th of July!

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Jordan

I was told in the comments that recaps were required… I guess that means I will start at the top of the month and work my way back to current.

Heather and I went to Kearney to celebrate Independence Day with my family. In talking about the holiday sometime during the lead-up, I discovered that not only is the 4th not really Heather’s favorite holiday, but that she had it in her head that our children would not play with fireworks! I have informed her that there is no point in having kids if I cannot teach them to blow things up.

The first day we were in Kearney we mostly just hung out, getting to interact with a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Later in the day my dad, Brother and I went out to buy some fireworks. I am amazed how much money you can spend on fireworks, but at the same time I found some really cool things without feeling too broke :). Even later in the day Heather and I went for a bike ride, and got to see some of the UNK campus.

Finally, that evening the entire family went down for the big town fireworks show. I don’t think I will ever get tired of seeing the annual fire works shows done like that! It’s just so much fun, the noise, light, smells… just the whole experience!

The next day we lit more fireworks, ultimately concluding with an all-cousin show at dusk.

Heather actually had some fun watching, although I couldn’t really get her to light much in the way of fireworks.

Sometime between the day-fireworks and the night-fireworks, the family arranged a composite birthday celebration for Heather and cousins who had birthdays close to the 4th. Heather even got to unwrap a few presents!

Both the sprouting jar and the bowls in that picture have been enjoyed as much as Heather expected they would be when she opened them.

The next morning, we cleaned up fireworks for quite some time, but managed to have things looking almost civilized by around lunchtime. I realize at some point the cousins also cleaned out several hundred pounds of boxes from the attic, but I can’t seem to place when we did that. Wherever that all fit in… we had a lot of fun, and certainly were not bored all weekend!

-Jordan

Where Did That Month Go?

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Jordan

And we are back!

well, I guess Heather and I never left, it’s just that work got kind of demanding there for a while. Generally speaking I don’t talk about work here, and I will keep that trend going, with the exception of saying that the end of a project ended up being massively time-consuming.

I don’t quite know what my plan for the blog is yet, I hope to get back into the swing of posing. I have debated trying to recap the last few post-worthy events, as I have pictures and everything. On the other hand it might be less guilt inducing to just try and cover the things as they come up instead of trying to catch up.

I should have something figured out within the next few days, so check back soon 🙂

-Jordan

Closing Out June With Cooking and Cleaning!

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Jordan

For the last weekend in June, Heather and I spend Saturday with her parents at a family friend’s house on a sandpit lake. It was amazingly relaxing, but owing to the fact that we are both “fair skinned” we spent the entire time setting in the shade and reading. That kind of activity didn’t produce much in the way of photo opportunities.

On Sunday we had a lazy morning, went to church, and then decided we should restock our freezer. We had completely depleted our stock of easy lunches to grab to take to work.

I started off making meatballs:

The meatballs are the only thing I even attempted to figure out the cost per serving on. I had planned to do it for each item, but I forgot about it and threw away the receipt. The meatballs produced six servings of five meatballs each, and each serving comes out to be roughly $0.90. Drop the frozen meatballs in with some cooked pasta or rice, and some sauce and they make a great lunch.

After the meatballs I made some Italian sausage pasta and bean casserole stuff…

( An in-progress shot)

it probably has a better name than that I can’t think of right now. At any rate, it was very good. We had some for a rather late lunch, and then ended up with five servings to freeze.

After the late lunch, I started trimming chicken.

Twelve pounds later:

once the chicken was trimmed, I made chicken noodle soup with some, grilled quite a bit, and Heather loaded a crockpot to make chicken and rice.

I kind of messed up the soup… I haven’t quite figured out how to avoid having really bland chunks of chicken in the soup. I guess the Campbell’s answer is to grind the chicken up into small pieces. My plan next time, if I remember, is to saute the chicken with some garlic and olive oil before I add the chicken stock. I could try looking at a recipes or something too I suppose.

The soup made seven servings and, the two types of seasonings I used on the grilled chicken made seven and eight servings respectively.

We didn’t start the chicken and rice meal until the next morning. Unfortunately we didn’t anticipate how much water the rice would soak up over night, or the fact that our work day is two – three hours longer than the recipe said to cook it for. The end result was eatable, but not great. I have the remains in the fridge, but Heather informs me she will not be taking any of it for lunches.

I should also point out, Heather was cleaning most of the afternoon. If it sounds like I am taking too much credit, it’s because Heather was doing other things. I could have taken pictures of her, but I don’t think she felt it necessary to document vacuuming. 🙂

-Jordan

Catching Up!

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Jordan

Hi there, it still seems to be summer and I just don’t know where my time is going!

I have been meaning to post a quick summary of what Heather and I have been up to, and the longer I put it off the larger the summary needs to be.

First off, Heather and I volunteered to help with an MS support bike-ride. We thought it was going to involved more interaction with people actually riding bikes, but somehow we wound up wrangling chairs and counting votes for “best water stop.” It was a fun way to spend a few hours!

I don’t have a picture for it, sadly, but Heather and I ran / walked in the Blair 5k run / walk. It was an interesting experience, as Heather and I do not actually run or walk at the same speed. I promised to stay with Heather the entire time, and to maintain a good attitude about the whole thing. I had a little trouble at the start when people were racing away, and I felt like if I *could* keep up with them then I should be, but in the end I am glad we kept the pace the way it was. We had a nice morning, and did something new!

Most recently, we went to a College World Series game. Heather’s vacation allotment has finally rolled over to a new year, so we have some time to work with again! We both took a Monday afternoon off, met for lunch then headed to the botanical gardens for a few hours. The weather was perfect, we dodged the hot humid conditions that have landed in Omaha by just a few days! After spending a really relaxing time wandering the mostly empty gardens we drove a few blocks, found a place to park and walked over to Rosenblatt Stadium. The turnout for the game was overwhelming. We felt a little silly, because we really didn’t even know who was playing, or for that matter care too much. Once we finally got inside, we found that they let in a lot more people than they have general admission seats for popular games. Lucky for us we found a place to sit before seats ran out.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we found time to head to Kansas City for part of a weekend, crash a graduation party, and keep our apartment somewhat clean! 🙂

-Jordan

Windows Media Center Movie Project

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Jordan

This is going to be kind of technical, but I have to document the process somewhere….

I have a Windows Media Center PC, hooked to our TV. We don’t have cable, so its not acting as a DVR. I have been planning to setup a plugin called “My Movies” that does a nice graphical browser of all movies stored on a Windows Home Server box, which I happen to have.

I actually had most of this setup months ago, but had run into some problems coping movies to the server. My motivation for all of this is the fact that Heather owns *hundreds* of DVDs. To save space we threw out the cases, and put all the disks into a book. The problem is, its hard to even remember what the movie is about sometimes if they have a generic printing on the disk. The My Movies plugin gives you a picture of the box, and a synopsis, as well as actor list, etc. All really cool, but it was being stubborn about working.

First let me outline the problem:

My Movies is a free* tool that will do everything I mentioned before, and auto-add any movie placed in a folder it is watching.
It also provides hooks to copy movies using AnyDVD.
AnyDVD is kind of expensive for a hobby project of questionable long-term value.
there are a number of other cheaper tools that do the same thing as AnyDVD, ranging all the way down to free
none of these tools seem to work with My Movies, in the sense that you can just hit the “copy” button
I am starting to suspect the My Movies people did this on purpose, as there is no discernible reason the other tools wouldn’t work the same way.
Trying to find a work-around was painful, as nobody wants to host the entire tool-set to go from factory DVD to playable files on your hard drive, lest the incur the wrath of the MPAA

After something like 12-18 hours of fussing with it, I finally found a system that’s working. I did have one DVD fail to read so far. I have some ideas for that, but I will come back to it after I have worked through the majority of our library.

The system that works:

have dvd43 running, this will allow other applications to read the disk
use dvd Shrink “backup” option to re sample the disk, set the target folder as the movies folder on the server

I think that I may be able to use “superDVDRipper” to get a usable video out of the one disk DVDshrink failed to read, but its slow and kind of finicky… so I will deal with that later.

-Jordan

Our New Summer Hobby

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Jordan

House Hunting!!!

I think we are a ways from decided on when it comes to buying a house, but Heather and I decided to take a serious look at what is for sale in Omaha.

What you can’t really see in that picture is an incredible view out over the Missouri River that house had. We went on our first house visit Wednesday May 27th, and I think we learned a lot. It was a neat house, but the repairs, updates and upkeep were a little more than we were expecting.

We continue to scour the online listings for the perfect house, and you can rest assured we will have news of other house visits throughout the summer.

-Jordan

Memorial Day (The Weekend) (Part Two)

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Jordan

Even after cutting back to only really talking about weekends, I have managed to fall woefully behind….

Anyway, The second major part of our trip back to McCook was helping Dad build a deck.

The work was really planned for a few weeks later, but the lumber was delivered a few weeks early. We thought it would be good to get a jump start on the project, and at least lay the initial frame down.

We quickly discovered that the lumber sold as deck building material isn’t particularly exacting with respect to dimensions, so some of our assumptions and plans ended up being derailed. After some minor fussing, we figured our a plan that would work out ok, and finished the frame Sunday night. Dad and I decided to see how far we could get before noon Monday, and actually managed to 100% finish laying out and tacking down the decking.

As you can kind of see in the picture, we pried up the paving stones that would be covered by the new deck. That is going to be another project, but at least we got started re-orienting the pathway to match up with the new deck.

-Jordan