The Zoo

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I took advantage of the unusually nice weather this spring to make a little trip to Omaha and visit the Henry Doorly Zoo.

Actually, it’s a little bit of a misrepresentation to say that we took advantage of the weather, we did get amazing weather, but we had booked the trip almost a month in advance and were just hoping the weather wouldn’t be too bad.

As it turns out the weather was beautiful! Great news for us, except everyone else thought it would be a great day to go to the zoo… even then it wasn’t too terribly crowded.

We saw Gazelle!

And a rhino under the ski lift Skifari

Then some other rhinos, this time in the mud!

We wrapped up the day in the jungle area, complete with a rope bridge:

The bridge was still pretty cool. I remember it being the highlight of a trip when I was much younger and wasn’t sure how well it would hold up.

As per the plan, we had time left to take a nap before heading out again to walk around the Old Market area. I cannot over state how nice the weather was! We ended up eating outside at one of the sidewalk seating areas restaurants have in the Old Market. Not bad for March!

The next day we were able to attend the Omaha Vineyard, and see lots of old friends there. After church it was on to Lincoln for a family gathering!

It was a sort-of baby shower for one of my cousins on the Nelson side. Well, I suppose I don’t know what does and does not qualify as a baby shower, except to say that I typically don’t attend them. Whatever the case may be, that group doesn’t get together too often, so it was worth making the effort to meet up.

Also, Heather got to hold a baby out of the deal, so maybe it counts as a shower after all?

I really don’t know 🙂

-Jordan

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!

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

Iowa!

Posted on by Jordan

I am still like a month behind in the updates plan, but we have some rather big news!

Jobs are generally not talked about here, but Heather was promoted and transferred to Des Moines!

We didn’t get much warning, so life has been pretty hectic over the past week, and looks to continue for the duration of this week.

Our basic plan is to move to a small town roughly half way between Des Moines and Iowa, and both Heather and I will have to drive quite a ways to work.

As of this posting we have a verbal agreement with the landlord, meaning we have a place to live found. Our goal is to move this coming Saturday, but there are still a few details to hammer out.

j_packing

In the meantime, our apartment looks like a disaster, no decorations on the walls, and huge piles of stuff everywhere. We started packing yesterday, and  made a good dent in what needs packed. Heather and I take somewhat different approaches to a lot of things, and working together to move has been interesting. In the end good, but interesting 🙂

-Jordan

Catching Up!

Posted on by Jordan

Hi there, it still seems to be summer and I just don’t know where my time is going!

I have been meaning to post a quick summary of what Heather and I have been up to, and the longer I put it off the larger the summary needs to be.

First off, Heather and I volunteered to help with an MS support bike-ride. We thought it was going to involved more interaction with people actually riding bikes, but somehow we wound up wrangling chairs and counting votes for “best water stop.” It was a fun way to spend a few hours!

msbikeridethmb

I don’t have a picture for it, sadly, but Heather and I ran / walked in the Blair 5k run / walk. It was an interesting experience, as Heather and I do not actually run or walk at the same speed. I promised to stay with Heather the entire time, and to maintain a good attitude about the whole thing. I had a little trouble at the start when people were racing away, and I felt like if I *could* keep up with them then I should be, but in the end I am glad we kept the pace the way it was. We had a nice morning, and did something new!

Most recently, we went to a College World Series game. Heather’s vacation allotment has finally rolled over to a new year, so we have some time to work with again! We both took a Monday afternoon off, met for lunch then headed to the botanical gardens for a few hours. The weather was perfect, we dodged the hot humid conditions that have landed in Omaha by just a few days! After spending a really relaxing time wandering the mostly empty gardens we drove a few blocks, found a place to park and walked over to Rosenblatt Stadium. The turnout for the game was overwhelming. We felt a little silly, because we really didn’t even know who was playing, or for that matter care too much. Once we finally got inside, we found that they let in a lot more people than they have general admission seats for popular games. Lucky for us we found a place to sit before seats ran out.

cws2009thmb

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we found time to head to Kansas City for part of a weekend,  crash a graduation party, and keep our apartment somewhat clean! 🙂

-Jordan

Engagement Pictures Taken

Posted on by Jordan

We won’t have access to any of the pictures for a while, but Heather and I had a lot of fun taking engagement pictures over the weekend.

Saturday was every bit as unpleasant as the forecast said it was going to be, so we rescheduled the session to Sunday. The change was our photographers idea, and I have to say it was a really really good move. Sunday was still cold, but without the wind and cloud-cover.

Our photographer is Cherie Phelps, I don’t think we have mentioned that before, she has a neat website here:

< http://www.cphelpsphotography.com/ >

If you look around, you will actually see a number of people from church in the featured pictures.

We started out taking pictures near the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Across the tracks, in the very run down part of the old train station. It made for some really cool backdrops, although being in the shade was really cold. While we were there we encountered another photography session, parents and a toddler.

After the train station, we headed to the old market proper. Let me just say that Cherie is a lot of fun to work with, and I think she got some great shots. We worked our way through the old market area using different areas for backdrops every time we went around a corner. It was such a pretty day, I don’t think we could have asked for a better day visually. The temperature was uncomfortably cold, but the pictures won’t show that and so far neither Heather nor I has gotten a cold :). The other downside to the day was that, being beautiful, every block had a freshly-engaged couple and photographer on it. The traffic wasn’t so bad as to keep us from doing what we wanted, but it did kind of make the whole thing seem a little silly.

Ignoring the cold and other people getting their pictures taken, it was an amazingly fun thing to do. I am sure we will have some fun pictures to show for it soon. Hopefully we can even manage to get one of them in with the invitations, but you will just have to wait and see on that.

-Jordan

Picture Location Problems

Posted on by Jordan

I just got word from Heather a few hours ago that we cannot take pictures at the art museum like we had hoped. The museum was going to be a pain to schedule, and I had some doubts as to how awesome the inside was really going to be for pictures, but its still disappointing to loose it as an option.

We looked at the Durham Western Heritage Museum as a picture option, but they also have a lot of hoops to jump through, and really lack anything compelling other than a few old benches. There are some really majestic things there, but they are all 80+ feet off the ground, therefore unhelpful in picture taking.

Our only remaining option now is the botanical gardens. The gardens have some really really neat areas that would make for awesome fall / spring pictures, and given a nice day, some cool winter pictures too. They have an indoor area, but we don’t yet know what the post-Christmas theme in there will be. It may or may not be a nice picture backdrop, and the indoor space is somewhat limited there anyway.

It would be nice to have a few more options for indoor picture locations in Omaha, but so far Heather and I haven’t come up with any. I think there have to be some local hotels or something that might have a fairly ornate lobby. I suppose we don’t need that much, how many people look at the background to a wedding picture? Still it would be fun to have something really cool to use.

If readers have any ideas, feel free to post them in the comments 🙂

-Jordan

The Pedestrian Bridge

Posted on by Jordan

Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.

Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.

Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.

We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.

All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.

Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.

Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.

you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉

-Jordan

Weekend Decompression

Posted on by Jordan

Quite a bit happened over the weekend, so I am going to probably spread that over a few days worth of posts rather than do one huge post.

The primary thing that happened is that my parents and brother came to town! Everyone (Mom, Dad, Bethany, Andrew, and Heather) met up at my apartment around nine Saturday morning. We decided to visit the Omaha botanical gardens as our first action of the day.

I was a little concerned about what there would be to see in the fall, but it turns out that it wasn’t an issue. the majority of the “areas” in the gardens looked amazing. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the truly awesome model train network they have built into a hill midway through our walk. I might have a few pictures of that, but haven’t had a chance to check my camera to see if anything is really worth showing.

I have been to the gardens in Omaha three times now, and every time came away thinking it was really pretty cool. Heather and I are thinking about getting a membership, because we have really enjoyed the trips we have taken together.

We then went to the other side of town for lunch at the Upstream where the rehearsal dinner will be held. It was nice to be able to show my parents the room we have reserved there, and we got to try the food! ( I have eaten there a few times before, but it was a first for a few in our group)

after lunch, Bethany headed back to Lincoln for pre-game festivities, my parents headed back to their hotel for a nap, and Heather, Andrew and myself grabbed my Wii from my apartment and headed over to Heather’s apartment. Heather she needed a nap too, so Andrew and I got some Wii bowling in while everyone slept.

After the naps, my parents came over to Heather’s apartment, and we just hung out for an hour or two, before heading out again to play some mini-golf. Mini-golf with Andrew is always fun! Ironically this was also the first golf related outing Heather and I have been on. I guess all we can say is that the summer has gotten away from us… and fall is slipping fast. I won’t inflict you with a play-by-play of the golf game, sufficient to say nobody did all that well, everyone had fun, and it used up the remaining day.

( other things, like a football game might have happened, but that will remain forever a repressed memory 😉 )

-Jordan

Cake, The Saga

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late because I was slow getting the images off my camera… better late than never right?

Saturday and Sunday Heather and I looked into cake options for our wedding.

First up was Hy-Vee, but after a phone call by Heather we found out the “just drop by whenever” time frame they had given her wasn’t really going to work because the only person who could talk about wedding cakes was going to be gone in a few minutes, but she was nice enough to explain some of the basic details of what they offer, overall cost and cost per serving. The actual sit-down with them is still pending.

Next up was The Cakery, an aptly named specialty shop. They had a really good array of mock cakes showing some of their basic styles. Seven to nine full-sized wedding cakes takes up a lot of floor-space, but it was helpful to actually have something to look at, because translating the idea you have in your head to something you can talk about is surprisingly hard for something as iconic as a wedding cake. We got there a little early so had plenty of time to look at the example cakes before they sat us down to look at their library of pictures from different wedding cakes. Again they had an amazing wealth of examples of cakes, and fairly good presentation in the book. On a tangent, let me say that some people do some ridiculous cakes. I really don’t know how many guests you would need to eat some of those cakes, but I am thinking 500+ for more than a few in that book. Okay, back to the cakery, did I mention they had four small cakes for us to sample? I was the designated cake tester (verdict: “meh, its cake”) so I ate while Heather tackled the challenge of getting herself and the decorator on the same page for a cake design. We left there feeling like we had a really good idea what the cake should look like.

Its at this point that my Escape failed to start.

Our next, and Final stop was Wheat Fields, a destination so legendary among Omaha denizens we recruited additional party members for our expedition.

Or maybe it just worked out that Pam (Heather’s mother) and Elise (bridesmaid) were both in town, but it was nice to have them along. Wheat Fields is a bakery and restaurant, and standing in the bakery / lobby area it was easy to see how it gained the reputation it has. We then stood nearly-drooling over all the fresh baked deserts and breads for almost 20 minutes waiting for the sole cake decorator to appear out of the back room. She was a grandmotherly lady, a little flustered at first, but she knew a lot about cakes, and how to plan one for a wedding. They had maybe 30 pictures of past wedding cakes, mostly bad. At this point things were not looking good for Wheat Fields in the selection process, but then they brought out the cake:

I cannot begin to impress upon you how richly this cake deserves its reputation. Hands down the best cake I have ever had, no question. They were all pretty good but their flavor “wedding cake” is the one everyone is talking about if they say something about a cake from Wheat Fields.

At this point we haven’t technically chosen a cake option, but I can tell you Wheat Fields is the leading contender. When your reception consists of only cake, its hard to not rationalize getting really really good cake for it.

I do wonder what our though process would have been if we had done these stops in a different order. Hy-Vee was helpful because it established what cheap-but-professional-and-good cake would cost. The Cakery gave us a great set of examples to realize the range of options in appearance, and figure out what we actually wanted for a look. Wheat Fields changed our minds from the idea that “cake is cake” to thinking that there was some really good cake out there. We literally finished our interactions with each place thinking we would probably just go with them, but what the heck, lets try the next one.

in closing, you should come to my wedding! There will be cake! 🙂

-Jordan