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

Cleaning (Not Quite Spring?)

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I had planned to head over to Blair for a Gutschow pre-Christmas event. However our nephew picked up something novel at daycare and decided to share it with the family as a sort of holiday treat. Heather and I were sad to learn that the event was canceled. Then again, given the “up all night puking” stories we were hearing, we thought that a phone call was probably as close as we wanted to be associated with the majority of that group for a while.

We did manage a few Christmas themed events over the course of the weekend, despite the abrupt change in plans. First off we attended a performance of “A Christmas Carol” Friday night. The venue was probably the smallest possible for a semi-pro group to use, but it was a fun event to be at. The audience was seated on three sides of the “stage”.   The stage consisted of the open floor between the chars, and some backdrops on the fourth and final wall. I will say again that it was a really enjoyable show, although the venue probably should have a large sign reading “HIPSTERS WELCOME.” I didn’t quite feel cool enough to be there… but I guess it was fine.

So that was Friday night, Saturday started kind of early as we had planned to help clean the church before heading to Blair. We found out Saturday morning that Blair was off, but still had to meet our cleaning crew bright and early so we headed over. All that cleaning was just a warm-up though as it turned out. When we got home Heather was feeling inspired to really attack the apartment.

She also claims my (purely innocent) pointing out that the show “Horders” was on Netlflix streaming guilt-tripped her into the cleaning spirit. I suppose that may have a little validity, as I may have started an episode playing for her at one point a few weeks back. Whatever the reason, after some generic cleaning Heather dove into sorting through her clothes.

As anyone who was gracious enough to help us move (in ether of the two moves) may remember, there were a lot of boxes marked “Heather’s clothes”. The allocation of closet space here in Des Moines has, at times, been a point of contention as I suppose would be expected.

The process took quite a few hours, and I often heard things like “I didn’t even know I had this!” or (while holding up something I could charitably describe as scanty) “Could you ever imagine me wearing this?” In the end, I have to say, Heather was willing to hold a hard line and parted with quite a few things:

Yes, you are seeing that correctly… FIVE bags of clothes waiting to head out the door. To be fair, my clothes make up some of that total. All the same, there was a lot more there than I ever expected to see go out the door! Strangely enough, our closets in no way seem empty at this point… I guess everything just has room to breathe now. 🙂

-Jordan

A Weekend In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

As I think I mentioned before, this weekend was notable in that Heather and I didn’t have any plans for it.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were bored though!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning… but after being on the go for so long the place really needed it.

I should back up though, Friday night we walked over to eat dinner and go to a movie at the mall we live next to. It only took us a year to actually get around to doing that! Heather and I often walk around the outside mall in the evenings when we want to go for a walk, and frequently we comment that we should take advantage of our location to walk to dinner and a movie, but ether we have been busy, or there haven’t been movies we wanted to see, or other things just kind of got in the way. Not anymore though! We finally walked over to a movie.

Ok then, back to Saturday… We had a wonderfully lazy morning, then cleaned like mad, then had a chance to go over to a friends house and meet a friend of theirs who is starting a mission of sorts in Mexico. It was neat to hear them talk about what they have seen in Mexico, and what they hope to be able to do there. It was also nice to just be together with friends from church in that kind of “around the kitchen table” setting and just enjoy being together.

While talking that night we found out about an annual event in Des Moines, called the “World Food Festival.” We were excited to learn that it was an all-weekend event, so decided to swing through after church Sunday.

As you can kind of see, it was a little crowded there, but there was no shortage of food to be had. Apparently we should have been writing down what we tried, because I can’t remember anymore… It seemed so obvious at the time, hmm…

Heather had some chicken fried rice, and a spring roll, I had a gyro, and then we sampled some Ethiopian rice dish, and some vaguely South-American vegetable pastry:

The pictures are from my phone, as somehow despite our intentions of learning more about photography, we managed to forget to bring a camera with us today. As you can start to see from the view behind me in the first picture, there were some interesting things we could have taken, if only we had planned ahead a little better. I suppose this let us enjoy the food more, although frankly the authentic spring roll, and the rice dish weren’t big hits with us.

I suppose it’s cheating to throw up this post with a few hours left in the day but I can all but assure we won’t be doing anything else blog-worthy today 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I just realized I haven’t ever put up a post about the Farmer’s Market here in Des Moines… despite having pictures and even some video from when my parents came to visit. I guess I should keep that in my idea list… In the meantime this festival isn’t at the same site, and was perhaps a quarter of the size of the farmers market, just to give prospective against something that I haven’t ever talked about directly.

Spring Cleaning

Posted on by Jordan

It is still spring right?

Because we just got around to the first major cleaning this apartment has ever had.

We weren’t exactly living squalor, but somehow being on the run most of the time had gradually let us get farther and farther behind in general upkeep. Much of the past weekend was spent cleaning, with the additional touch here and there after work, things are starting to look darn good around here!

We have a second bedroom. As much as we tried to avoid it, that room became the “everything room” catching odds and ends from the first day we moved in. It has a bed in it, and I think in prior post I may have implied that it was just minutes from being ready to host a guest. Well, it may have taken a little more than just minutes, and it might not be 100% ready yet….

One of the things we discovered while attacking the remaining tasks in said room: Not only were things un-dealt with since the move in there, the prickly disagreement that contributed to them being dropped in there instead of being dealt with properly somehow was still attached! That isn’t to say we had a horrible weekend full of not getting along, it just means we discovered that many of the tasks were far more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Heather and I can both be rather… insistent when we know how something should be done. Sad to think we can discover that much when just cleaning a room, I am sure we will get to put everything we learn now to use a few times throughout the coming years.

In a less personal note, I cleaned out the freezer and found some frozen shrimp. The first half of the bag I had used to make this salad: Asparagus and Shrimp Salad. I forgot to take any pictures, but mine ended up looking about the same. Sadly neither Heather nor I were particularly taken with it, so I wanted to try something else with the remaining shrimp. We also had a number or cups of Greek Yogurt pushing their expiration date, so I pulled together a remarkably convincing Shrimp Alfredo that was at least close to healthy enough to be eating on our last week of this workout challenge! 🙂

Check back soon for my chance to work through the backlog of recipes that weren’t healthy enough for the challenge 😉

Also, I have no idea how this is turning into a 40/60 split between things we do and things I cook… but I guess it gives me something to talk about.

-Jordan

This Weekend, In Staying Warm

Posted on by Jordan

It remains really cold around Des Moines. I think the average temps are about 8-10 below historical norms for the month. Also, I read that we are only a few inches away from having the largest snowfall *ever recorded* in a single winter. I don’t know how close to the record we really are, but the only year we haven’t topped was about 130 years back.

So, that’s the context for why we have been staying inside 🙂

Friday Night: I made another pizza. Rolled some of the things I learned from the deep-dish pizza into a more traditional pizza, to see what I could come up with. I put the stone at the bottom of the oven, a cookie sheet at the top and started the pizza in a cold oven. The end result was a really crisp bottom crust, without burning the top. I think I got kinda lucky with the whole thing as the crust was nearly burnt, but I think I prefer that to being uncooked at the middle.

Saturday: I went to the church mens breakfast. It makes me feel terribly grown up to do that kind of thing. I suppose, given my age, job, wife… etc. I am in fact grown up. Still seems odd. Had a good time there, and somehow ended up cleaning parts of the church before I headed home.

When I got home, Heather and I tackled the second bedroom. I had worked on it a little mid-week, but there was sooooo much still waiting to be done. I have to give a lot of credit to Heather, because she did most of the work, and stuck with it until the room was fully cleaned out! When I say fully cleaned out, it still has two portable coat rack things, and two bookshelves in it, but at least there aren’t any piles on the floor, and it feels like a real room now.

We were talking about good “stay inside and be warm foods” and Heather thought chicken pot pie sounded good. I think maybe to get me out of the kind of small room she thought I should make it :).

I ended up settling on this recipe: Chicken Pot Pie IX

It went together really well, my only problem was that rolling out the crust before I started making the filling meant that the texture of the top crust was really soft. I think I would have had an easier time cutting the “N over N” into the top if I hadn’t rolled it out 30 minutes ago, or maybe at least laying that in the fridge to keep it firm.

That’s filling pre-gravy-ish step. That’s also the last picture I got with my camera before the battery gave out. I somehow lost my charger over the past few weeks. (I ordered a new one a few hours ago, so I should find it any minute now)

The only thing you should note in that picture is I forgot the peas. I was also going to add some corn… forgot both.

Finished product:

That’s a cell phone picture… not quite the quality I normally provide, but you get the idea. The finished product was really good.

Sunday: Heather has gotten really into coupons. I don’t think I have mentioned it here before. She got this Coupon Mom book and has really gotten into the game of finding deals. One of the deals she found is that the local gas station will give you a free Sunday paper if you get more than $10 in gas Sunday. The Sunday paper it seems, is the predominant source of coupons for the western world.  Heather and I both filled our cars up before church so that we could get two papers.

After lunch, Heather clipped coupons and planned a big grocery run, while I put on our Iowa plates ( a sad, sad day 😦 )  This did kind of ruin my “stay inside” plan, but it had to be done. I also stashed quite a few boxes in the rafters of our garage. The garage is really the only way our second bedroom is going to be open enough to get a bed into. I am glad to say we are on-track for that to actually happen now.

-Jordan

Its Been A Little Over A Week…

Posted on by Jordan

And…

  • Heather and I are home
  • The apartment is 99%  cleaned up
  • We have unpacked and stowed every gift and item that recently entered the apartment.

The process of cleaning up and putting away everything did cause some stress between Heather and I. As much time as we were spending together before the wedding, we somehow never really came to terms with our approach to planning chores. We both just took care of things like cleaning and laundry when we weren’t together.

In the end, it was a great week, and everything that we wanted done got taken care of. The process though… 🙂 I don’t want it to sound like we had huge fights over anything, we just had to figure out priorities and planning styles some. I can’t imagine what it would have been like having to move one of us into the apartment over the weekend, much less moving both of us into a house.

Thank you writing will be a challenge we have to tackle soon, and we are just starting to address how meals get taken care of. Laundry and managing the budget are still in there too… Lets just say we still have things to figure out, but the first week has been really great! Not always easy, but not hard ether, just felt like something that took a little thought and effort.

Speaking of food, one of the many great items we were given was a crock pot. I have all kinds of plans for that puppy, and happened to have stumbled upon some fairly straightforward “quick” recipes for them today. Posting them here so I can find them again:  (All shamelessly stolen from The Simple Dollar)

  1. Combine all of this into a crock pot.
  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.
  3. Turn it on low and walk away for eight hours.
  4. Add a quarter of a cup of water for every additional two hours you intend to cook it.

Creamy Chicken Casserole

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (chicken & herbs if you can find it)
1 small can mushroom pieces (a 4 ounce can, drain off the water first)
1/2 chopped red onion
1 1/2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breasts (cut into strips if you’d like)
1/4 cup white wine (optional)

Crock Pot Chili
1 large can tomato sauce
1 pound lean ground beef
2 cans beans (kidney beans are fine, but you can use whatever you like)
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/4 cup diced onion (or onion salt)

Simple Pot Roast
1 2 to 2.5 lb. roast
2 cups chopped carrots
2 cups chopped potatoes
1 cup chopped celery
3 cups beef broth or beef stock

Ham and Potato Casserole
4 red potatoes, sliced
2 red onions, finely chopped
1 1/2 pounds cubed ham
1 can condensed cream of celery soup, diluted according to can directions
2 tablespoons flour

(This one is very good with cheese on top just before you serve it.)

Shredded Beef Sandwiches
2 pounds beef brisket
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 1/2 cups beef broth or beef stock
2 cloves minced garlic
1 chopped red onion

(Serve this on buns – magnificent!)

Breakfast Apple Cobbler
4 medium-sized apples, peeled and sliced (try Honey Crisps)
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 cups granola cereal

I hope to try one or two of these, there are a ton of recipes for slow cookers / crock pots out there, but fast and simple are really good attributes!

-Jordan