Quick Hits

Posted on by Jordan

Five weeks left in the “Baby N” countdown…

Heather has a cold, and is starting to feel uncomfortably large. I think we both are a little worried that the remaining five weeks are going to feel very long.

I confiscated my first cell phone tonight! (Yay Scouting?)

I was in Nebraska last weekend looking for deer, but didn’t manage to cross paths with anything worth shooting at.

Meanwhile, Heather was in Florida participating in a wedding. To make a long story short, she did just fine, but wouldn’t advise unnecessary trips this late in the pregnancy game. The important part is, I suppose, that she and the baby are home safe, it was a beautiful wedding, and she really enjoyed herself while she was there.

-Jordan

Zombies? And Other News

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This past week was noteworthy in a few ways, but the headline event was the RRV “Zombaree ” that my Scout Troop attended.

I will continue with my policy of avoiding posting pictures of random other people on here, but you can find pictures of myself and the troop scattered in here, and a deep link to our troop and the bridge that they made here (hopefully that works)

The guys had a lot of fun at the camporee, ahem, zombaree although one could be forgiven if they forgot it was a zombie event… there was a notable lack of zombies. The weather couldn’t have been better and it’s hard to complain about camping on a perfect fall weekend.

I got to pretend to be scoutmaster for the camp out due to a parental shuffle that left the actual scoutmaster at home. I was luck in that the majority of the weekend was being run by the district guys, and we had enough of the veteran scouts in our troop to comfortably lead the troop without too much input.

It’s surprisingly hard to find that balance between letting a bad plan flounder and taking over when your job is very much not to take over. I can’t say that I did a great job of it, but I probably ended up on the side of letting things fall apart instead of jumping in, so maybe it was a change for the guys.

Other notables:

Heather is 28 weeks along! This is apparently a milestone in that if the baby were to come today, odds would be in her favor to make it. Obviously we would like her to wait another three months, but it’s nice to know shes making progress in there 🙂

Also, 28 weeks is when the mom-to-be gets to drink… “glucose-up”… or some near literally named sugar concoction in order to determine if she has pregnancy induced diabetes. We had lots of good news there, Heather isn’t diabetic, and she survived the sugar drink without a massively upset tummy (A frequent problem with her and sugar)

So to recap, no close encounters with the undead, nice weekend, healthy baby, healthy mom.

I think it’s been a good week!

-Jordan

A Sad Week

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I don’t have a whole lot to post about this week.

I can’t really even decide how I feel right now, Heather and I went to this funeral a few hours ago, for a young man from a family heavily involved with the Scout troop I work with.

I can’t really say too much except to say that it’s tragic, and hard to put into words beyond that.

I will end on a somewhat brighter note.

Ever heard of the game Minecraft? It’s a sort of Lego set inside a game, without any real goal other than building whatever you want. I played around with it a little, but found I just didn’t like the time it took to do things. Many of the scouts from my troop seem to love the game though. One so much that he brought his homemade action figures to a meeting:

 

You might be thinking “hey those are just weird square blocks” but… they were surprisingly accurate to what the game actually contains. I typically don’t like to post pictures of the scouts, but I figured this was fairly anonymous, and he was so proud of the kit.

I cannot really say that there is symmetry there, except that Scouting has exposed me to things that are incredibly sad, and things that make me really proud of what young men find themselves able to do (a lot more than carving wood blocks, but it’s a start).

-Jordan

The Actual Day, And Other Events

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I know, the last post already covered my birthday, so I won’t go into much detail, but there are a few highlights I though should be covered.

It isn’t every day Heather does baking, and I don’t think I have ever devoted much blog space to her endeavors in that arena. Also, Heather doesn’t generally make desserts. Apparently turning 30 is enough of an occasion to warrant making a cake though.

I encountered this cake at a Church function about a year ago, and really liked it. Heather took note, and managed to obtain the recipe from the aforelinked blog. The results were every bit as good as I had remembered!

In passing I should mention that I thought it was cool that the recipe used a technique I sort of stumbled onto a few weeks ago. Because our oven’s “broiler” is just turning the top heating element on continuously, I started throwing the oven to broil for the last minute or two when making pizza to produce a more pronounced browning/crispy/almost burnt appearance like you would see from a restaurant pizza.  The cake uses it to more or less rend the butter and cream out of the coconut, leaving a great crispy texture on the top of the cake.

So, enough about food. What else have we been up to?

Well, Heather has taken family pictures for a substantial number of people. It’s still just a hobby for her, and she seems to really enjoy the process of getting to work with people, and produce something to remember this time with. She is really starting to produce high quality results with the camera.

And me? I am still working with the scouts. Just this past weekend I got to sleep in “Fort Pella” a sort of novelty structure standing on the grounds typically used for summer camp, but accessible to Troops during the off season.

It’s distinct in that whenever the troop has the opportunity to use the fort we don’t setup tents, and instead the boys sleep under the roof sections of the tower.

My role with scouts has changed quite a bit over the past few months. I now work directly with a single patrol of younger scouts, and am responsible for helping to provide the opportunities they need to actually advance in rank. The troop works really hard to stay true to the “boy led” philosophy of Scouting, but I had no idea how much of a balancing act that turns out to be. It’s probably more of a challenge to get all the adults on the same page as to what that means than to actually implement with the boys, but I think we are starting to find a good approach everyone is happy with.

aaand I should stop before this gets too introspective 🙂

Suffice to say that I am enjoying scouts more now that I have a more direct responsibility instead of simply being a warm trained leader body for camp outs.

-Jordan

Somehow Fall Snuck Up On Us

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It has been another full weekend, for Heather and I.

I started off camping with the scouts, on a trip that included a bike ride

As you can see we brought a lot of bikes along.

The ride was along the trails north of Des Moines. The same trails that lead up to the bridge we rode over back at the beginning of summer. The only thing was, we rode past red trees, and through piles of leaves blowing along the trail. We were lucky in that the weather was great! It was cold over night, but by the time we had bikes going on the trail it was a wonderful fall day.

I suppose talking about a beautiful ride, and the wonderful colors would be more interesting with a picture or two. The problem is all the bikes you saw in that picture were being operated by scouts… not to say they were getting into trouble, but I wanted to keep an eye on things.

That and the fact that all I had was my phone. It’s a workable camera, but phones aren’t suppose to go on camp outs. Adults get to bend those rules, but the boys complain to no end about their oppression when they see you get your phone out and they realize they can’t.

I left camp early because I was doing sound at church. It was probably a good thing I came home when I did though, because the smoke alarm at the top of our fancy vaulted ceiling had decided it had problems and started beeping earlier that day. Heather was about ready to loose it by the time I got there. It did provide an opportunity to use the big step ladder we bought shortly after taking possession of our new place… although I can think of scenarios were we would have used the ladder for some great purpose that don’t also involve Heather having dangerously high blood pressure… Maybe next time it will just be burned out light bulb.

Sunday we had a few friends over to carve pumpkins!

… yeah pumpkins… I didn’t really think it was time for those ether, but apparently it is.

My artistic vision was somewhat hampered by my absolute lack of manual dexterity or and artistic skill, so imagine the one I am holding looks sleepy. When you consider that the face on mine tilts down and sort of leans… and then add a little imagination it’s a pretty good pumpkin I think.

Oh, on a somewhat related note, I discovered that if you make pumpkin bread, but leave out the pumpkin, the resulting product will be a rather dry spice-bread. Stop by the break room at work tomorrow you might get to try some, its not bad… but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

-Jordan

Camping

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I went camping over the weekend with the Boy Scouts.

Sorry for the terrible picture… I have some much better ones, but I feel like posting pictures of the guys online would not be the best way to endear myself to the troop parents…. Maybe they wouldn’t care, but lets don’t find out eh?

There are a lot of things I probably could say about the trip, but I wanted to keep this post focused. The single biggest takeaway I have is this:

I hate ticks.

Not on me, or even dug into me… just the idea. It is a terrible moment when you realize your going to have to explain ticks to the new guy (or in this case, the new parent)

It’s terrible. I have gotten to explain ticks quite a few times in my outdoor career, and you can just see the, ah, subject start to get the heebie-jeebies and involuntarily start checking their scalp.

it’s hard to be honest and downplay the things:

“oh don’t mind those!”

“what are they?”

“ah, parasitical arachnids… you know, just part of nature!”

“whahh!? are they poisonous?”

“No, no… well there is the lime disease thing, but nothing to worry about…”

So, the conversation is going to be unavoidably alarming, and then, it always turns out I am blessed with whatever trait it is that makes me unattractive to bugs to begin with, so despite the people around me finding ticks left and right, I never had to deal with one. It makes it that much harder to demonstrate the proper stoic response to our spider-like adversary.

Ignoring some minor disappointments I had over the reaction to ticks, I had fun on the camp out. Not quite the laid-back peaceful trip I had been imagining, but I continue to be impressed by the group of boys I am working with… it makes up for not getting much time to read 🙂

-Jordan

Footnote: Heebie-jeebies must be a word, because it’s on Wikipedia!

Topic-O-Rama

Posted on by Jordan

And now, a handful of news I have been meaning to post.

First up, the week before thanksgiving, Heather and I went to Kansas City. The event was a birthday party for her grandma’s 85th birthday. The majority of Heather’s extended family was there, and we had a really good time. We also witnessed one of the best “we are going to have a baby” announcements ever. Heather’s cousin played a video, featuring his son singing happy birthday to Gigi, and then ended it with “and what are you going to be?” …. “a DINOSAUR!” “no, what are you going to be?” “A big brother!” and at that point the room went wild. I suppose it didn’t hurt that there were so many friends and family members packed into the room, but it really seemed like a great way to break that news.

Heather and I may have to wait a year or two, just so we can come up with a creative way to announce something like that… I mean the bar is pretty high at this point 🙂

Then of course there was Thanksgiving. Strangely, Heather and I did not even pack our camera… so I don’t have any pictures to post. The traditional meal and family time was spent with Heather’s family in Blair. We really enjoyed it! After dinner though, is when things got more interesting, somehow the women came up with a few copies of the sale fliers from all the stores doing Black Friday deals. The living room was total chaos as they passed around adds and debated plans for the big day. Next thing I know, it’s 2:30AM and I am sleepily saying goodbye and goodluck to my wife as she slips out of bed to trek to the mall. They got eight hours of shopping in before even stopping for breakfast!

While they were shopping, I went with Heather’s dad to the Nebraska game in Lincoln. We left at a much more reasonable hour than the shopping crew had, but still got to Lincoln with plenty of time to do a little tailgating before needing to find our seats. Being at the game was really enjoyable. It wasn’t a nail-biting game like the Nebraska vs. Iowa State game that Jim and I had gone to earlier in the year, but I can live with a less-exciting win!

I forget exactly where this falls in the chronology, but at some point Heather and I attended a “lighting of the Christmas tree” event at the mall next door. (For those of you who haven’t been to our hose… we really are next-door to a mall). I was a little skeptical of the event, but they had a live band and free cookies, so we decided to check it out anyway. Maybe you wouldn’t have been surprised at the number of people there, I know I was… At any rate they easily had a few thousand people all standing outside around the little courtyard lake area listening to the band and waiting for the lights. It was cold, but not unbearable, all the same I was happy when Santa finally arrived with his wand to light the tree. You didn’t know Santa had a wand did you? Apparently when Santa lights a tree with his wand, there are fireworks involved! I am a little sad to say the mall Christmas  tree lighting fireworks are going to go down as the best firework show I got to see in 2010. I am happy to say I really enjoyed them!

Speaking of Christmas events, Heather and I attended the Waukee Iowa Christmas festival. Waukee is just outside of Des Moines, and actually closer to us than downtown. We again got a free cookie, and got to watch ice sculpting. Probably the most enjoyable part of that little trip was meeting up whit a few friends from Church. It was wonderful to feel like we actually know people here in town. Some days it doesn’t feel like we have made much progress in that department.

The last, and most recent event I should record before bringing this to a close is photography related. Heather and I just returned from taking family pictures for another of Heather’s coworkers. We learned quite a lot on that trip. A good thing for sure, as Heather books these things to give us chances to practice. One thing we learned is that, although we got a beautiful sunny afternoon, 25 degrees with a 15mph wind is too cold to do outdoor pictures! We also learned that although our camera has a tiny integrated flash, it really can’t do indoor photography. Despite the challenges we encountered, Heather has some rather impressive results! As I write this she is behind me wrapping up the sorting and editing process. It appears we will need to buy an external flash if we want to do more pictures indoors.

And finally, a bonus future event! We are going to a Court of Honor for my Scout Troop! It will be the first event Heather has attended related to scouts in Des Moines, and the first Court of Honor I have been to. I don’t think it is going to be significant enough to justify its’ own blog post, but we will get to see the boys get recognition for merit badges and rank advancement.

I am still hoping that December is less exciting going forward 🙂

-Jordan