Two Weddings And Some Pancakes

Posted on by Jordan

Can you guess where our first wedding of the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend was?

Heather and I drove to Kansas City Friday night, and then carpooled with her parents down to St Luis for the wedding of a family friend. It worked out really well to be able to team drive that leg of the trip. Being able to spend that much more time with our new nephew, during the car ride, was certainly another advantage from Heather’s point of view. The wedding itself was… elegant I think is the best word, the chapel on the Washington University campus, in keeping with the rest of the campus, is just beautiful. Even the newer buildings are designed to project a sort of old stone aesthetic. I suppose I should talk about the actual wedding but I really never know what to say…

We did discover that I don’t remember portions of my own wedding. Heather didn’t find it amusing that I couldn’t remember if we had done unity candles in ours or not. In my opinion there are more memories generated from that day than in most months, so I think I should get some slack when it comes to candles.

So back to the wedding, there was a large block of time between when the wedding ended and the reception began. Large enough we decided we could go back to the hotel, change, and catch the train down to the arch. I can without hesitation say that the arch was the highlight of St Luis for me. I think Heather might be more inclined to mention Holden (The nephew in question… can’t remember if I have used his name before, I was going to leave it out but it’s just cumbersome to leave out all other names). I don’t know if he would feel the same way though. Once I get some time to edit together some more video I can demonstrate in a much more visual way his reactions, but for now lets just say he isn’t sold on the Aunt Heather idea quite yet.

The next day we loaded early up and drove back Kansas City. Being able to do a sort of layover in KC was a lifesaver to try and breakup the drive. Heather took full advantage of the situation, both taking a nap on the drive, and a nap at the house. It had been a kind of late night the night before, so I took advantage of the napping opportunity too!

Then it was on to Lincoln, where my cousin Josh was getting married. They had opted for a very small wedding, and then invited everyone to the reception, so we didn’t actually go to that wedding. The reception was really fun though. Heather and I have been married for well over a year now, and it was the first time she got to meet a number of the cousins on my Dad’s side. I have to admit that I get a little overwhelmed in situations like that. You really want to seize the opportunity to talk to all these people that you haven’t seen in years, but there are so many of them, and then add in the fact I want to make sure and introduce my wife to everyone… and well I think we did ok, but I wish we could have talked to everyone a little more. A quick note about the venue: The reception was held at a country club that had two noteworthy attributes. One, it was really cool. They had done a rather good job of the giant lodge build, I guess you could say it was sort of rustic and classy all at the same time. We will pretend not to notice the fact that we were not anywhere near where trees like they used grow, nor does Lincoln have native stone like they were using. 😉 The second point is that it was the lodge for the home course of the UNL golf team, something that featured prominently in Heather’s life shortly before she met me. It was fun to get to see a place that she had spent so much time!

We stayed as late as we possibly could at the reception, but had to leave before we were completely wiped out as we were spending the night with Heather’s aunt Amy in Omaha. We rolled in a little after midnight, actually beating her home as they were off doing some baseball tournament in KC that day, crawled into bed and passed out. The next morning we awoke to the smell of bacon! Amy had mentioned something about doing a pancake breakfast, but neither Heather nor I had thought about it much. When we walked downstairs Amy was nearly done frying what must have been ten pounds of bacon! After recovering from the initial shock, Heather spoke up to suggest that we probably weren’t going to eat that much bacon. It was at that point that we discovered we had inadvertently invited ourselves to a breakfast party. Apparently the graduation reception for Heather’s cousin Jarred had been in the AM, and breakfast themed. As is often the case with receptions, they had substantial leftovers. The solution Amy had was to invite about 30 people over for breakfast on Memorial Day! Heather and I certainly enjoyed getting bacon and pancakes for breakfast, as well as getting to spend a few minutes talking to so many people from the area.

Eventually we had to say our goodbyes, and headed back to Des Moines. We made it home in time to do a few loads of laundry and get ready for another week of work! (albeit a short week)

-Jordan

Sorry for the lack of pictures, I really had planned to stick a few more in, but I just ran out of time… this ended up being a substantial post even without embedding pictures! If you click on the picture at the top of this post, you should to to the gallery and be able to find a few more pictures from the trip!

Find A Mechanic

Posted on by Jordan

Not so long ago the front left brakes on my Escape started making a sort of rumble when slowing down. The sound started getting progressively worse, adding an air of anxiety to counteract my normal procrastination when it comes to dealing with the hassle of trying to figure out where to take my car.

Heather and I had gotten by using the local “quick oil change” specialty shops thus far in Des Moines. I don’t really like having them change my oil, but the convenience of being able to get in when it woks for me, without having to call way in advance is nice. It doesn’t hurt that they all happen to be fairly cheap too.

I really didn’t want those guys looking at my breaks though.

So I figured I would just go to a dealership. Not the cheapest option, but you figure they will at least do a top-quality job. I started looking online for Ford dealerships, and wasn’t finding too much that was close. They are in Des Moines, but were all going to be a huge trip out of our way, and not practical on the way to or from work. Did I mention how quickly that rumble was getting worse? So I clicked on the sort of close one in Google Maps, and as often happens, the map pop-up bubble had a customer review on it. It was overwhelmingly negative, not really what I wanted to read right then.

Seeing the review got me thinking though, I had been talking to someone who moved recently, and he mentioned how helpful the “Car Talk” website had been in tracking down a good local mechanic. Going to the Car Talk website then wondering around until I realized the “Actual Car Info” tab had “Mechanic Files” that then lead to “Find A Mechanic.” It turns out they have lots of reviews for the Des Moines area!

After a little reading, it looked like West Side Auto Pros was a good option, and they were not too far from Heather’s office. I called first thing the next morning, and when the guy heard I had break problems he shuffled things so they could for sure get me in that day! I was able to leave my car, drop Heather at her office and make it to work without really even being late. I have to say seeing the big signs for “AAA Certified,” “NAPA <something or other>, and “Voted Best In Iowa” was reassuring, as well as the really sharp looking facility.

They were not cheap… not to say I think I got over-charged, but I didn’t walk away from the transaction saying “wow they came in way lower than I expected.” I have to say though, it’s like driving a new car… you wouldn’t think breaks make that big of a deal, but it feels so smooth now.

I haven’t actually gotten around to adding my review to the Car Talk site, but I wanted to share the fact that it really helped in picking a shop to use. Definitely something to keep in mind if you are trying to find a good local shop.

-Jordan

NRA Basic Pistol

Posted on by Jordan

Our move to Des Moines had lead Heather and I to look for new things to do together. One of the ideas I put forward was target shooting. Heather was borderline skeptical of the idea, but thought maybe it could work. I was pushing for pistol shooting because we are basically constrained to shooting ranges, and in the distance you are limited to at most ranges rifles just aren’t that challenging. Somewhere along the line, I also realized that Heather did not have the safe firearm handling foundation that my childhood had provided. As a result of all those factors, I signed us up for an NRA basic pistol class.

The class was held this past weekend at the Charles Olofson Shooting Range, near Polk City Iowa. First Off I should point out that the drive out to the range was beautiful! It took us maybe 40 minutes from the apartment, but most of the time we were in open country and really got to soak up the spring weather we are finally seeing. The range has a nice indoor classroom, much larger than was needed considering we only ended up with four people in the class.

The small class size was nice, as there was a wide range in levels of experience, and I think everyone felt comfortable asking questions. The instructor, Larry Krug, did a really good job of covering the basics and keeping everyone interested. We spent a little over four hours in the classroom covering everything you would need to know if you had never seen a pistol before up to the point where you could hold and fire one properly. After a lunch-break we came back in to take a written test over the information we had been presented. I have to brag on Heather a little, and part of this goes to the instructor too I suppose, but with virtually no prior knowledge of firearms in any form, she managed to pass with flying colors!

After the test we headed out to the range for some hands-on instruction. I should mention that, as this was one of the first truly nice weekends so far this year, I think a large number of people were excited to get out and thought throwing a few rounds down range would be a good way to do that. During the test we really started to notice the increased noise outside, as gunfire has a way of getting your attention. Once outside it really got loud!

I think this is the point where we really started to loose Heather. I often forget that people don’t necessarily feel comfortable around guns, and less so around dozens of them being fired in close proximity. Heather is building a tolerance, but three separate range-areas, all running at full capacity was a little much. She stuck it out, and as you can see from the intro picture, she even tried out a few different pistols!

This was also the point where the whole “shooting pistols would be better because they are harder to be really accurate with” hit home. When it was my turn to shoot I quickly realized how much room I have for improvement. The instructor was able to help me with a few small things, but the final verdict was basically that I need to practice a lot more (oh darn).

We learned so much throughout the course of the day:

  • Heather learned a good foundation of gun safety and basic operation
  • I learned that a busy range isn’t the best place to help someone get comfortable with firearms
  • We learned that the local NRA instructor is really knowledgeable
  • I learned that thinking you should probably clean your pistol isn’t the same as actually doing it (kinda embarrassed by that one…)
  • The biggest thing we came away with was that shooting isn’t something we should pursue as a joint activity!

As much as it may be disappointing to find that shooting isn’t something we are going to do together, I am still glad we tried it. We still created some memories, and spent a day together doing something different!

-Jordan

We Finally Got To Show Off The Apartment!

Posted on by Jordan

I should really be in bed at this point, but I wanted to throw up a quick note to highlight the passing of an important milestone.

Heather and I entertained dinner guests at our humble abode. Calling it dinner makes it sound fancier than it really was. Trying to have guest friendly food sort of conflicts with our ultra-healthy eating plan for this workout challenge we are doing, but I think we managed ok. 🙂

And now I must sleep!

-Jordan

The Snow Is Gone!!!!

Posted on by Jordan

Just a quick note to observe that today is the day that the huge pile of snow beside our parking lot where they piled the snow all winter is finally gone! I honestly had given up hope of it melting before July.

My understanding is that we are a mere three inches from the all-time record for snowfall in Des Moines! The only article I could find doesn’t have the latest snowfall factored in, so my numbers are basically just an estimate. On the other hand we are less than ten inches away from the all time record, and I think that counts enough that we can say it’s been a long cold snowy winter.

Here is to sunshine and green grass!

-Jordan

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

Like Sleeping On A Cloud

Posted on by Jordan

Or, something like that.

The really exciting news around here is that we got a new bed! This news is kind of a holdover from the weekend, but got caught behind my “get sitemeter working” project so is only getting posted now.

Heather and I held off buying a new bed back in Omaha, because we thought it would be nice to be able to transition our current bed into a guest bedroom. If you recall we were really looking at getting a house there for a while. Things changed a little over the course of 2009, and we now find ourselves in a two-bedroom apartment. It was time to upgrade from the full-sized bed we were on.

I had been hanging onto a sort of guide for mattress shopping that I found: here. With a little encouragement Heather read it over too, and we both felt a little better knowing we might have some idea what we were talking about when shopping. As it ended up, nothing we read really came into play, other than giving us some confidence we were probably on the right track. We ended up with a nice pillow-top queen mattress, that looks huge in our bedroom. We momentarily considered a king, and let me just say, it’s a good thing we didn’t do that… there wouldn’t have been room to walk into the room.

After four nights on the new mattress, I can say that we are really happy with the bed. I really don’t know how we were getting by on the old one.

This kind of puts me in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand we are excited because we have a bed in our spare bedroom, so people can come visit! On the other I have to admit it isn’t the best bed in the world.

Let me rationalize that a little… It isn’t like you get a great nights sleep in a strange place anyway. Also we did manage on that bed for a little over a year without any problems. So in the end, you should come visit us, and you will get a reasonably good nights sleep!! 🙂

Just… you know… call first or something.

-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

Shipping Woe

Posted on by Jordan

I had grand aims of pulling together a wedding anniversary one-year retrospective recap thing, but I just cannot begin to think how I would pull that together. Even if I did it would be a massive post, and really I try to avoid painfully verbose posts.

Instead I will tell you about the misadventures I had getting some items here from Amazon.

The catalyst for this was, interestingly  enough, my reflection on the year past and the upcoming year. Heather and I received several copies of the book The Five Love Languages during our engagement and as wedding gifts. We read it eagerly, and I think it was helpful then, but I thought it would be an interesting thing to re-read now that we have a tiny bit of perspective on marriage. Not surprisingly, after two  moves, we couldn’t locate the one copy of the book we had retained from before. I then jumped on Amazon to order a new one, because I felt I had fully torn the apartment up and clearly the book had been lost.

At this point, three things happened.

  1. Heather also bought a copy, because I was halfway wanting this to be a surprise and hadn’t told her about the order
  2. I found our copy of the book
  3. The Amazon shipment was listed by the USPS (United States Postal Service) as “delivered” on their website, but was not in my mailbox.

I should point out that the mailboxes at our current apartment are fairly large as far as apartment mailboxes go, and open with a key. I am fairly confident that the Amazon box would have fit into our mailbox. Even if it had not, there is a large drop box area with a single-use key system that allows the carrier to secure a larger box, and leave the key locked in your mailbox.

I filled out a missing parcel form on the USPS website a day or so later. After three or four days, I started to think maybe that wasn’t going to get any traction. I thought I should contact Amazon, as maybe they could demand a little more attention from the Post Office. I sent an e-mail to Amazon, explaining the missing package, and that I was still waiting to hear from the Post Office. I should point out I did not in any way imply they were to blame, nor that I expected them to do anything, just that I wanted them to be aware of the situation.

I got an e-mail back from an Amazon representative within ten minutes! The e-mail stated that they were sorry the package had been lost and they would be happy to ether re-ship the package or refund my order, and they would do so as soon as I responded to their e-mail.

I replied that I would like to have them re-ship the order (I had several books in addition to the now duplicate Five Love Languages).

The Amazon representative then communicated that they would be unable to re-ship the Five Love Languages as they were sold out, I would be refunded the price of that book and my other books would be shipped over-night express for no charge. The order would have been shipped express even if they had been able to ship all the books.

The next day, UPS dropped of my order, several hours after I got the call from the UPS guy using the entry way system to our apartment, I finally got a response from the USPS regarding my missing parcel. To their credit, they actually sent out a postmaster to check the “large package drop box” and area around the mailbox before responding to me. All the same, I have to point out the incredible speed Amazon had compared to their process.

The end result of the USPS investigation was that the parcel was lost. The recommended I fill out another form on their website for “stolen mail.” I filled out the form just to try and keep their attention on the issue. I don’t know if a package being shipped to the wrong person and them not sending it back is really theft, but frankly the frequency with with which we get mail in our box that clearly has someone else s name and address on it makes me willing to pursue any option I have to try and steer attention to our local mail system.

Three to four days later I got an e-mail saying my report had been processed and would be used for statistical reporting by the USPS. As far as I can tell, they consider the mater closed.

I almost feel obligated to write this post simply to thank Amazon. I never intended to ask them to eat the cost of the lost items, and am amazed that they would do so without hesitation.

-Jordan

Coffee!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are just winding down our first weekend in Des Moines for 2010.

One of the great things I got for Christmas was a coffee maker! Somehow A year ago this time, I didn’t really drink coffee. This meant that we didn’t put a coffee maker on our registry or buy it when we were equipping our new household. I don’t really know how I made the transition, but at this point it seems like I have always liked coffee. This has been a slight problem on weekends, because I really missed having it to start my day off with. Needless to say, I was excited to get the chance to try out making a pot of my own this weekend.

…

Heather always makes fun of my taking pictures for the blog, and just now I realize I didn’t get a picture of that momentous occasion. I guess you will have to use your imagination.

Anyway, the coffee was great, and I think adds a lot to a relaxing Saturday morning.

I did however find that I may be making it all wrong

I just don’t see it being worth all the work those guys go to for a *small* cup of coffee.

-Jordan