Mishaps With Sharp Things

Posted on by Jordan

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

Tech Notes

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I have been looking into all kinds of data synchronization tools as of late. My primary goal has been to ensure downloading a camera onto one computer in the house would result in the pictures being available to the other computers.

In my looking around I found Live Mesh Not really the tool I was looking for, because it keeps a copy of the files on an online server. I am really excited about using Mesh to keep a folder synced between my work machine and home for keeping notes handy, getting pictures where I can grab them for blog posts, etc.

Back to the home network, my primary tool is SyncToy. It’s not the most user-friendly tool, so I don’t think Heather will adopt it as something she manually uses, but I have been able to schedule sync jobs from my machine. I hope to have Heather’s Vista laptop doing the same soon. There is a rather large side project involved, where I get to manually merge two huge photo collections before I can actually turn this thing loose with live data.

I turned WinRar loose on Heather’s primary picture collection (there is another one of pre-college pictures), and after a little over an hour of compressing, the .rar was roughly six gigs. That’s just the backup in case something horrible happens when I start merging pictures later this week…

Once that is all up and running, I think there are some cool Windows Home Server plugins that would do web-albums with a lot less hassle than what I am running on this website. I will have to look into that. Not to say its really hard to use Gallery… no I take that back… I don’t find it hard, Heather always gives up because it takes a lot of fiddling with things to make it play nice when you are setting things up or adding pictures. Here’s hoping the WHS plugin will be nicer 🙂

-Jordan

The Kansas City Reception

Posted on by Jordan

The last wedding related event is complete!

And what a fun event it was! I haven’t had time to get any pictures cleaned up to post, but wanted to get a post up anyway…

Heather’s parents did all the work to put together a reception for us in Kansas City. The timing was about perfect. Five weeks after the wedding, Heather and I had time to recover, but were still kind of in the wedding mindset I think.

The only negative was the weather. I suppose you could argue we got lucky with the wedding, but it was still annoying to have the only snow in months land on KC the day we were expecting people to drive in from all over to see us. Fortunately, the snow wasn’t too bad, and to our knowledge, nobody had any trouble outside of having to drive slower.

The event itself was kicked off by loading roughly 30 Gutschow friends and family into a bus, and driving to the location of the restaurant. Heather had expressed some skepticism as to the necessity of a bus before the event, but it turned out to be a really fun addition to the day. The mood on the bus was a lot of fun, and it gave a few more minutes to see people before the official event.

Once on location, Heather scrambled to finish up an epically long slide show of wedding pictures wile I configured a projector to display it. We managed to have everything ready before the official star time.

Once things got underway, everything kind of became a blur. It was so nice to see everyone, and I still cannot believe how quickly time passed. We never had time to talk to anyone as long as we would have liked, and probably failed to get around to everyone we should have. The number of people there was amazing, considering the snow, and the fact that many of the attendees had also been at the wedding. Heather and I were amazed by the dedication and support people showed towards us.

After the official event, we rode the bus back to the house, for more time with family (mostly Gutschow, but my parents and a few others came too!).  I can’t say as I really enjoy being the guest of honor at any event, but it was laid back enough to be rather enjoyable.

Heather and I cannot say how grateful we are to our parents, for everything they did to make the events surrounding the wedding, not to mention the wedding, come of better than we could have ever hoped for. We are also glad its over, as fun as it was, this past weekend left us both exhausted 🙂

-Jordan

note: The slide show from this event will be the core of a web album in the making, coming “soon”!

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

The Media Server

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This isn’t probably the most interesting post I could put up, but I still haven’t pulled the pictures off my camera of Heather’s project 🙂

I have a Windows Home Server running in our apartment! I had planned on it just being large network storage location, and knew the Windows Home Server setup let you do a few cool things. As it turns out its really amazing what it can do, automatic imaging of entire computers for one thing! I haven’t really had time to get it fully configured yet, but I have been really excited about it so far.

now for a little bragging:

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2.37 terabytes! Chances are I will find a way to outgrow that somehow, but it will take a while 🙂 For now the only things setting on the drive are the daily images of Heather’s laptop,  a few MP3s and all the pictures I wanted to backup off my computer.

It looks like I will be able to map a drive from both Heather’s laptop and my PC to have Picasa work off the server, allowing Heather or I to download our camera once and have the same working set both places, also means a picture edited on one computer will be in the new state for both. I think its going to be really awesome! I may find out Picasa hates working off a network drive, or something like that, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it 🙂

-Jordan

One Month

Posted on by Jordan

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

!!! PICTURES !!!

Posted on by Jordan

We have pictures from our wedding!

Well, ok we don’t have them yet, but they are posted on our photographers website. We expect to have a DVD with the full sized versions of the pictures for us to play with soon. For now you will just have to go check out the website, instructions here.

Heather and I are so happy to finally get to see them! There are some really great pictures, and so many we didn’t even realize got taken.

-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 Honeymoon Day Two (Counting Backwards)

Posted on by Jordan

The second to last day we were in Colorado, was our most ambitious day. We planned to ski and go on a sleigh ride.

Our gracious hosts at the bed and breakfast had recommended we try a nearby mountain that was considerably smaller than Winter Park. That sounded like excellent advice, given Heather only had one other trip under her belt and I was planning on trying skis instead of a snowboard.

Let me just say that was some great advice! The ski area “Solvista” only had 3 lifts, small to say the least! It was perfect for our needs though. We got equipment and lift tickets, and headed out to conquer the mountain. The thing I hate about skiing, is that one of the hardest elements happens at the start: getting off the lift. I managed to wobble my way away from the dismount point, and Heather almost pulled it off too.

Neither Heather nor I were feeling too confident for the first run down, so we took our time. I was very glad to have taken skis as they are just so much more maneuverable at low speeds. After two trips down the mountain, we were ready for a break, and it was lunch time. I should again mention how awesome the smaller ski area on a week day was. Our car was parked less than 100 feet from the front door of the main lodge.

After lunch we made one more trip down together, stopping to document our “who can look like the biggest dork” contest:

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Heather thought she had a solid lead, but ultimately couldn’t compete with:

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We had a lot of fun skiing together, but by this time Heather was ready to call it a day. I took a few more quick trips down the mountain, just to see how well I could really do on skis. I still prefer a snow-board, but I found I was comfortable on about the same blue runs in skis as I would have been on a board.

We had just enough time to make it back to our cabin, clean up, and head back out to where the sleigh ride started. The sun had just set when we left the cabin, and it was fully dark by the time we made it to the ranch. The temp readout in our car said -6f. Every other night we were in Colorado the temperature was in the high teens when we went out at night. Suffice to say, the hour-long sleigh ride was perhaps the coldest experience of our lives.

It was also amazing! The sleigh was fully loaded with twelve people, everyone wrapped up with lap blankets, and move slowly through the forest near the ranch. The trees had a perfect coating of snow and, the stars and the moon were beautifully clear through the openings in the trees.

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(note the frozen faces in that picture… we were so cold)

After the sleigh ride, there was a dinner in the somewhat rustic mess-hall. It probably would have been really nice, if the temperature were 20 degrees warmer. The room simply did not have sufficient heaters for the cold conditions. Dinner isn’t quite as relaxing when you eat it while wearing your winter coat and hat. It may not have been a romantic candle lit dinner, but I think it may have created more memories for us to look back on later 🙂

-Jordan