A Week At Home

Posted on by Jordan

This past week, like many weeks this summer, we didn’t go out of town. To be honest I have really enjoyed it. Once the baby comes we may feel like we don’t have a choice in the matter, and maybe I won’t feel the same way, but for now it is really relaxing.

This is not to say we were bored!

Heather and a neighbor who is also expecting around the same time attended some sort of baby themed open house at the hospital where both of them will be giving birth.

I shot in my second ever pistol match. Not particularly well, but I had fun.

Heather and I walked over to the mall to listen to the  Dueling Piano act that was playing in the little amphitheater area there.

It was a really nice way to spend Sunday evening!

The only other thing of note this week is that the construction across the street demonstrated what it looks like when you hit a water main:

We were only without water for a few hours, so I can’t complain too much 🙂

-Jordan

 

 

Creamy Huevos Rancheros

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so I don’t really know if “creamy” is the right word, but I need to preface this recipe with something, because it isn’t like any other huevos rancheros recipe I have been able to find online.

Why was I looking online for those recipes? Because I had these memories of my mother making this amazing dish that had eggs, cheese and a chili sauce in it. I also remembered calling it “huevos rancheros.” Every recipe I could find by that name ended up being basically a fried egg topped with Mexican-esque toppings.

I had basically given up, and decided I had imagined the whole thing when I was looking through the cookbook my mom gave Heather before our wedding: More-With-Less. It had a recipe for huevos rancheros  that matched my memories! Not only that, but my mom had even added a note next to their version saying that it was one of my favorites growing up!

At this point I did some adapting, because the recipe called for six eggs and cooking down two large tomatoes!

The results are every bit as good as I remember. I left the Mozzarella cheese in the recipe, and it’s what I used in the picture, but next time I make this I will probably switch to using cheddar or cheddar blend as I feel it would go better with the Mexican theme, and the remaining slices in the package are more useful 🙂

Here is what I ended up with:

 

“Creamy” Huevos Rancheros:

(Adapted from the More-With-Less cookbook)

  • 1/2 can diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 can tomato sauce
  • 1/3 cup diced onions
  • 1/3 cup diced green pepper
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1T Chili powder
  • 1/4t cumin
  • 1/4t oregano
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 slices of mozzarella cheese
  1. Saute the onions, pepper, and garlic, with some olive oil until softened.
  2. Add tomatoes, tomato sauce, and seasonings.
  3. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes
  4. Crack eggs into the sauce, cover with cheese slices, then return cover to pot
  5. Leg eggs poach over low heat for 4 to five minutes

 

-Jordan

 

 

 

State Fair 2012

Posted on by Jordan

Another year at the fair and another failure to capture a picture of noteworthy food on a stick!

The fair featured a whopping fifty-seven items on a stick!

While we didn’t get any pictures of the food on a stick, Heather and I did go to the fair. Not for a real long trip, but long enough to eat some festival type foods and to remember how overwhelming that many people wandering around can be.

They also had a moose made of chocolate:

I mean, that’s worth the price of admission right there! 🙂

In other news this week:

  • I finally fixed the HeatherAndJordan.com front page.
  • Heather took baby pictures for a friend
  • Heather took two-year pictures of a friend’s child
  • I ordered a compound miter saw from Amazon  — best “I can help you with this project if…” deal to date! 🙂
  • Heather was, for the first time 100% sure she felt our baby kick.

 

It’s been a fun week!

-Jordan

It’s A Girl!

Posted on by Jordan

As I write this, we are just over 20 weeks into pregnancy. Apparently 20 weeks is the traditional time to do the in-depth ultrasound, including the discovery of gender.

I was really excited for ether a boy or a girl, but I have to admit that everyone assuming I wanted a boy, and then the ultrasound tech strongly implying that I must be feeling disappointed, but could cheer up soon… it all started to make me second question what I was suppose to be feeling.

After a little reflection I can say with certainty that I am 100% excited 🙂

I will include an ultrasound picture here, but won’t pretend it’s amazing… seeing these in motion was considerably better than a few stills. I should also note that this will not be the last picture of our daughter to appear on this blog, although hopefully this is the only one produced via medical imaging technology.

As excited as we are by the news, and by the feeling that we have crossed yet another milestone, it seems like waiting the next 20 weeks is going to take a long long time.

Probably longer for Heather than for me, but long none the less. 🙂

-Jordan

Java!

Posted on by Jordan

I have a personal goal to not post with apologies regarding my lack of posting, sadly this may veer distressingly close to that line…

Interesting things have been happening in our lives, I just haven’t had a lot of time to pull together posts on such.

Things eating into my time include the fact that our church is in the process of moving to a new location. The new location just needs a near total demolition and remodel before we can move! I have had the opportunity to smash drywall and disassemble an industrial grade HVAC system that has been hanging from the ceiling for several decades 🙂

Most recently I spent the weekend at a Java developers conference here in Des Moines commonly referred to as “No Fluff”

The event lets you pack about  eleven 90-minute sessions plus a keynote and some breakout time into a single weekend. The majority of the sessions I attended were what you could call information dense. I learned a lot about subjects as specific as Spring configuration, as “hey look how cool this is” as a tech-demo of Spock or Ratpack, or as theoretical as a talk entitled “The complexity of complexity.” I can honestly say every single session was worth my time to attend.

While I can’t begin to pass along what I gleaned from the sessions, I can share a video made by a speaker and MC of the event. I don’t know how much context will help this make sense, but “Maven” is a tool used by programmers to automate the process of taking all the little pieces of code and “building” them into an actual program. It’s a useful tool, but like most tools in this space it has it’s detractors.

 

-Jordan

Three Gun Match

Posted on by Jordan

I think I mentioned a few weeks back that I was hoping to participate in a shooting competition.

This past Saturday the event finally took place!

I did not do well, but had a lot of fun all the same. The other guys there were all very helpful and prevented it from being too intimidating.

It was a “3-gun” event, meaning you shot a rifle, shotgun, and pistol. I think at the more formal events they actually combine multiple guns into a single stage, but here we just had one long rifle stage, one shotgun stage, and then several pistol stages.

Given that pistol is by far my weakest skill, there wasn’t much chance of my taking home any bragging rights.

on the other hand my so called “better” guns weren’t real hot. I managed to talk someone into running a camera for me during the shotgun, and you can see that I kind of fell apart on the back half of the stage.

(The guy following me holding a box is the range officer, keeping time and making sure that nobody does anything unsafe during their turn)

The event wasn’t super competitive, so even with my less than optimal performance, I was able to make the top third in shotgun. I think it mostly gauges long neglected muscle memory in a few dozen guys who said “oh, they have a shotgun event?” and dug a gun out of the back of the safe. Had a few more people been drilling for this and I don’t think my fumbling with shells the entire time could have looked anything but sad.

The pistol stages were a lot of fun, but really drove home the fact that I don’t have great accuracy, nor do I transition between targets with anything that resembles speed or grace.

At the very least though, I had a lot of fun, and have a reason to practice now!

-Jordan

A Tour, And Some News

Posted on by Jordan

First up, here is the video as promised:

And, for those who haven’t heard via other channels… We are expecting a child!

We just have to wait until December 26 🙂

You have no idea how hard it has been to come up with posts that didn’t involve tails of coping with first trimester woe etc.

Now that the news embargo is over, I suppose the prospect of parenthood and everything that goes with it will be a frequent topic around here 😀

-Jordan

Heather’s Birthday

Posted on by Jordan

We celebrated Heather’s birthday over the weekend.

I may not have converted Heather completely over to my views on the outdoors, but I am starting to worry that I have ruined her.

She not only cheerfully got up at 6am on a Saturday, but she requested we get a canoe!

It was a beautiful morning, and we really enjoyed the time outside, as it has been far too hot to enjoy being outside evenings as of late.

We were on the water shortly after 8, and were able to stick to shady little coves the entire time we were out.

I wasn’t able to go with my Scout troop up to the boundary waters this year, and I really hope to go someday. As much as we enjoyed our time on the lake, I don’t think Heather and I are quite ready to do a family trip on that scale yet 🙂

 

The rest of the day was spent inside, and I shot some video of the highlights… so I won’t summarize it here until I can get the video up 🙂

-Jordan

Weekend Plus One

Posted on by Jordan

What did we do over this past weekend?

Well, I moved furniture! Remember all that craigslisting I mentioned? It has paid off!

The down side to paying off is that it means I had to haul the things that sold out, and the things we bought back up.

On the bright side, we aren’t repainting this stuff, so it still isn’t taking up as much time as last years campaign 🙂

And then there was Independence day; a Wednesday this year so it wasn’t an obvious choice to extend into ether weekend. So what did we do?

Painting!

That is the before picture, and what you can’t really see is the places where the vinyl wall decals lifted the paint off the wall. Given the size of the damaged areas, it made sense to paint the entire wall.

This meant I got to buy a paint tray and full-sized roller! (ahh the simple joys in life)

The end result was perfect in the sense that you cannot tell that it was ever done. 🙂

Sorry, the photography isn’t the best, and I have been trying to include Heather or myself in the blog pictures more… maybe the next iteration of the room will lend itself to an action shot!

 

-Jordan

 

Anticipation

Posted on by Jordan

What did we do this week?

Well… not everything we wanted to.

Heather has gotten back into Craigslist with a vengeance, and I would like to say she has gotten great deals on everything she liked, but it has been more negotiations that fall through than transactions so far. On the bright side, at least from my prospective, at least half the attempted transactions are us selling things instead of purchases.

I finally got around to signing up for a shooting competition that was scheduled to take place over the weekend. Unfortunately there was a major thunderstorm blowing in that morning and they called the event off on account of lightning risk. Maybe next month I guess.

So, the short version is we haven’t done a whole lot yet, but boy do we have plans. 🙂

-Jordan