Kicking Off A New Chapter

Posted on by Jordan

I wasn’t actually going for the dumb pun when I wrote that title, but I seem to have made one.  The new chapter, if you will, for Heather and I is doing a fitness challenge with a cardio-kickboxing class.

Heather and I saw amazing success when doing the “Body For Life” program, but we have found that we were only able to stay dedicated to going to the gym every morning when we were meeting each other there. The Atlantic drive, sucked all our free time and energy out of fall, and the cold snowy winter really made working out hard. Both of those have left us feeling lethargic and unmotivated to jump into spring and summer.

We have decided to counter that aggressively! Today, and every day but Sundays, over the next nine weeks, we are planning to be at the gym doing some ridiculously intense workouts… starting at 5:15AM. The early mornings may kill me, but we have too many after-work activities to reliably use any other time-slot.

So, if my posting slows down a little, you will know why 🙂

-Jordan

Done With Atlantic! (Really!)

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made our last trip to the house in Atlantic today, to final-clean the place before turning in the keys.

I will miss parts of living there. The being in a house was a nice change from apartment living. Being able to open a few windows and actually have cross-ventilation is remarkable. We didn’t hear neighbors at all. We had a front porch, with a swing, overlooking a little yard with a huge tree. We could walk all around town any time of day or night and not be even a little worried about safety. We could walk anywhere in town. I loved getting to see farming going on every day, especially harvest. I suppose it is possible I have an overly rosy memory of a lot of that, but I really enjoyed getting to be involved with harvest as a kid.

It reminded me a lot of growing up in Curtis, when I would see people at the grocery store and they knew each other and were just talking. It was kind of sad to know we were never going to have enough time outside of our drive to actually become part of the community. We were living with one foot in Des Moines, and one foot in Omaha… Leaving not much to put down in Atlantic.

On the other hand, there are certainly things I will not miss. Driving 120 miles a day chief among them. Having to hand-wash all our dishes got old rather fast. Living in a place with water pressure so low it wasn’t possible to do any two things with water at the same time had it’s drawbacks. Having to keep our trash for a week in the closet because we didn’t have a garage or a dumpster didn’t end up being as big of a problem as I expected, but still wasn’t ideal. Somehow that house managed to always be freezing cold, even when the thermostat said it shouldn’t be.

And finally, the daily thorn in my side, the thing that annoyed me so much it made me wonder if bathing daily was worth it:

Atlantic_shower

A 360 degree shower curtain! It looked… sketchy to begin with. After the house started getting cold I discovered that the hot air, inside the envelope, rising out of the shower caused the walls to suck in, meaning you couldn’t shower without having plastic clinging to at least one side of you at all times. I know I sound like I am whining, but it really got old after a while.

Somehow we managed to survive though, so I guess it can’t have been so bad 🙂

-Jordan

October Catch-Up

Posted on by Jordan

Have I mentioned how nice it is to have a reduced commute? 🙂

I wanted to take a minute and summarize some of the noteworthy things that happened during the blur that was our last weeks living in Atlantic.

First up: Leaves fell off the trees. While this was expected, Heather and I were living in a house in Atlantic, and they expected us to deal with them.

Leaves

That picture actually shows the full extent of our progress. We managed to get the leaves into big piles, before realizing we didn’t have bags. We picked up bags, but not until the end of the weekend, forgetting that we were never actually in Atlantic while the sun was up during the week.

Luckily, the mowing crew, or our landlady or somebody bagged the leaves for us. I feel pretty bad that we didn’t get it done ourselves, but we were pretty much using all our available energy on other things at that point.

The second noteworthy event happened over the weekend of the first. Heather and I went to Omaha. We left early enough to attend church, and got to see a lot of our friends while we were there. After lunch we stopped for a few minutes at the botanical gardens. I should note that the weather was amazing! Heather and I were both dressed for fall, and got rather warm considering the temperature nearly topped 70.

LG_Fall

After a few minutes enjoying the weather and the colors, we headed to the main event: a Trans-Siberian Orchestra performance that Heather had arranged for us to attend as a birthday present. I don’t have any pictures from the show, and really… No picture would really do it justice. The first half of the show was telling a Christmas story, and while good, not jaw droopingly amazing. The second half contained and abundance of ten-foot jets of flame and fog machines. I cannot begin to tell you how fun it was.

-Jordan

Live From Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have finally managed to move all of our stuff into the new place in Des Moines. 48 hours after we picked up the keys, the majority of our stuff is unpacked and in it’s proper place!

We couldn’t have done it without the help of a few great people! Heather’s parents came bright and early Saturday morning, and recruited her cousin Blake and one of his friends. My friend Corey made the drive from Omaha as well. With an abundance of help, and the fact that Heather and I pushed hard Friday night to get everything into boxes, loading the truck went really fast.

On the unload side, a few guys from my new company came buy and helped unload. They were a huge help!

Having so many people on hand to help with the move made things go really fast. Were returning the truck by 3:30pm on Saturday, leaving us with a good chunk of the day to start unpacking.

I think we are really going to like this place, and I can’t wait to throw up a few new pictures of everything, but I wan’t to take the “after” pictures and we need to wrap up a little bit more of the unpacking 🙂

-Jordan

Creepy Crawlies

Posted on by Jordan

Our house in Atlantic seems to be trying to help get me in the mood for Halloween. I have found two small but still cringe-inducing critters around the house over the last week. I took a minute to look up what they are, and as it turns out the “House Centipede” is somewhat mundane.

All the same, I find them to be incredibly creepy in person. If you doubt me, feel free to follow that link for a better picture. I haven’t mentioned this creature to Heather yet, as she has managed to be out of the room when I found the two invaders. I suppose publishing this will increase the chances she will be concerned about them 🙂

-Jordan

Cooking!

Posted on by Jordan

This ends up being kind of a compound post, summing up most of the interesting cooking I have done from when we moved to Atlantic, up till tonight.

First off, I tried making hash browns:

Hashbrowns

This is actually my second attempt. The first attempt was *amazing* I was really happy with the appearance, texture, flavor everything. Heather felt that my first batch was nothing but butter, so the pictured hash browns have minimal oil. They aren’t as good that way, but still make for some nice variety, we pretty much eat nothing but oatmeal weekdays.

Next up, stuffed peppers:

Suffed_peppers

Red peppers are fairly cheap right now, and I happened to see some remarks on a blog I follow about making some stuffed peppers. Heather and I have talked a lot about how introducing more vegetables into our diet would be a good thing, but haven’t necessarily done a great job of actually executing that plan. This was a step in that direction, these basically just have beans, rice and cheese in them. They took forever to make as I discovered mid-recipe that I couldn’t run the stove-top burners to simmer the onions and cook the rice at the same time as I preheat the oven. The end result was pretty good even then, just a little slow… Something that frustrates Heather I think, but she was happy with the end result 🙂

Finally, something more interesting, “Fettuccine with Sweet Pepper-Cayenne“:

J_Pepper_Chop

Hey look! An action shot! 🙂 I sometimes get complaints about the dis-proportional number of pictures containing Heather vs. me. Hopefully this will be a step towards having a full time photographer for cooking related blog posts 😉

The full gallery of cooking pictures has a few of this recipe in-progress, and a finished product shot, if your interested check: here.

Not to get into a full play-by-play, but basically the cayenne made the sauce splicer than I had really planned, but fortunately Heather tolerates moderately spicy stuff pretty well. The texture and consistency ended up being a lot like stroganoff, but with a lot more kick. I am kind of proud of this one, not that it took any real skill, but it was something new that I didn’t exactly know what the end result would be like, and it came out pretty well.

I suppose if I am going to summarize all the cooking in September I should mention I made chili, but I don’t have any pictures of that. Really though, how exciting is chili? … I guess I have a kind of orphaned gallery I put up a long time ago of probably the last chili I made before my cooking had to take Heather into account. The gallery here has probably more onions than I have used in a single setting for almost two years. That chili is more interesting than the stuff I made last week 🙂 Not to say the new batch isn’t good, just not as interesting. … and now I am rambling

-Jordan

Now Coming To You From Atlantic

Posted on by Jordan

It has now been a full week since Heather and I moved into the house here in Atlantic.

The drive is long, but I think we can handle it. The house is… Interesting… more on that later. We realized that this weekend is the first time we have ever stayed home over a three day weekend. Typically we are on the road to somewhere any time we had a free day off, and would have been this weekend too, but the unpacking and whatnot tied us down.

Going back to the house, I think we have both really liked living in a bigger space. I honestly have no idea how we managed to fit all the stuff we apparently own into the apartment in Omaha, because this house does not seem empty in the slightest. Being able to get by with just open windows has been really pleasant, something you forget is even possible living in an apartment. Atlantic is really quiet, and this weekend has been remarkably peaceful.

The more interesting aspects of this house involve power water and gas. Water was, as the crew who helped us move into the house discovered, slow. There isn’t enough water pressure to do two things at once anywhere in the house. After you flush the toilet, there won’t be much water at the sink until after the tank refills. If Heather is in the shower, I cannot start washing dishes. Speaking of dishes, due to the low water pressure, the house is apparently unable to sustain a dishwasher, so we get to hand-wash everything.

Moving on to gas, I assume, without really knowing, that this issue is more with the actual oven/range we have, and not so much the house, but I have no idea. I found out while trying a new recipe Friday night (hopefully I will get a quick summary and pictures of that up soon) that the burners won’t work while the oven is heating. they sort of sputter fire, and you smell a lot of gas, but they wont burn right. It didn’t cause a huge problem, it just slowed things down a lot as I needed to leave a few minutes to preheat between finishing the stuff in the pan, and putting it into the oven.

Finally, we come to power. There isn’t a single three-prong outlet in this house. The outlet positions are kind of strange too, but it’s and old house and I wont complain too much about that. The really disappointing thing about the power situation is that my heavy-duty battery backup system I run on my PC is not happy. It worked fine for about 3 days, and then something must have prompted it to check if it was really grounded, discovering that it was not grounded, it went into some sort of emergency safety shutdown, and didn’t even send the power-down signal to my PC before ceasing operation. My hope is that if I can plug it into a grounded outlet it will at least revert to a non-panic state.

This post is turning into kind of a novel, and I fear I spent too much time on the downsides of the house, so let me restate, Heather and I are really enjoying living in this little old house 🙂

I will leave you with this picture, and clicking on it should take you to an album of pictures from the move.

atlantic_house

-Jordan

Move Complete!

Posted on 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