long time no post_2: less big updates, but no less IMPORTANT

These are not as life-changing (as far as we know), but they are updates nonetheless.

• We participated in a ward Iron Chef activity (the ingredient was ginger, and we made a pear ginger upside-down cake. It was good, but one thing we learned was that neither of us really likes ginger that much.) We're hosting the next one, so we got to choose the next ingredient: balsamic vinegar. FYI: a little strawberry balsamic vinegar is an AWESOME addition to strawberry smoothies.
• Jon and two of my BYU roommates from the Bay Area threw me a surprise birthday party. I was completely surprised and we had a great time hanging out, swimming, grilling, and getting quizzed on all things Joss Whedon. (I wasn't allowed to participate in Name That Tune. Too bad, I so would have won.) Also, my face was photoshopped into many Whedon production posters, which was hilarious.

• I started my first quilt. It's made out of fabric samples from a fabric sample sale. Hopefully it will be awesome. I don't love quilts, on the whole, but the fabric is pretty and it's not a big quilt, so hey! Three of my favorite things: easy, pretty, and custom.

• I showed Jon "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." He had never seen the whole thing all the way through. That is a classic.
• I read a lot of Wheel of Time and some other stuff too. I started Carrie Fisher's autobiography and "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."
• Our new complex has a pool, which I can't use by myself because POOL SAFETY, but I do sit out and read sometimes.
• I took a prenatal yoga class. Turns out I can move in ways I thought were over for me for awhile yet, but only if I work up to them. Also, WHAT is the point of pinching one side of your nose shut while you breathe, and then switching it up a bunch? The only thing that does is make me have to blow my nose. I usually fake it and breathe through my mouth during that part.
• We have a meyer lemon tree at this place. That juice makes really good lemonade and also is really rich. I was unaware.
• I got an old sewing machine from my grandma. She hasn't used it much and definitely not for a long time, so it needs to be oiled and cleaned. YouTube and I are going to try it on our own, since it's kind of expensive to get it done. If I give up, I'll take it somewhere, but so far I'm optimistic.
• Did you know you can make sauces out of mascarpone?
• We had some people over to play Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game we learned about from one of Jon's friends. It was fun but the more boring part of the game took FOREVER and the more fun part was a snap. Maybe next time it will work out the other way.

long time no post_1: life updates

Heyyyyy. We have been totally neglectful of this blog for the last little while. Sorry, no reason. We just were.

We've done some fun stuff, though:

• We had an impromptu weekend in Vegas, sort of by accident. (I've got a whole post partially done on that, so no details now.)

• We moved (yes, again.) We are living in a big ward in Mountain View, CA, now. We found an apartment managing gig that was too great to pass up - free rent in one of the most expensive areas in the country, only a short commute for Jon? Yes please. We have a fair amount of turnover in our complex, which does make for some work, but our residents are great for the most part. It's a pretty tiny apartment compared to what we're used to, but the space is very usable and we're making it work. Our new ward is gigantic and full of people in our same demographic. We're enjoying getting to know people, though it goes a little more slowly when there are different people at every activity. Edit 6/8/14 - I started this post a few days ago, and since we moved in we have often said we wouldn't be surprised if they split the ward sometime soon, since it seems sort of full-to-bursting. Sure enough, today in Sacrament Meeting they announced that the stake is going to rearrange ward boundaries, adding a ward. Apparently, the last reorganization they had was when they consolidated the wards - in 1992. Wow. Also, check out the view from our front porch! It's a pretty complex.

• Jon took a welding class. He made us a coat rack out of a long chain and some tow hooks. It is awesome. Now we have our twin "big projects" in our apartment - the bookshelf I made and the coat rack he made. Someday we will live in a warehouse and make more stuff. Yay!

• We went to Hawaii for a babymoon. We loved snorkeling with sea turtles, visiting the Blowhole, and driving the Road to Hana, and we think we have figured out a pretty great copycat recipe for the awesome fish tacos at a restaurant in Kihei called Coconuts. Yum. It's not exact but it's still super tasty. Perhaps we will post some pictures someday. Perhaps we will not get around to it. OK, fine, here are a few just in case we never post more.

 

 

 

 

 

• We took maternity pictures. Our photographer is totally neglecting her editing duties by taking exciting mountain climbing vacations in Thailand and moving away from California (the nerve! :) ), so we will post a few when we have them. It was fun.

• I cut my hair some. It's not drastic but it was a fun change. I was trying to grow my hair out and I finally realized that my hair grows only so long and then it just stops. so I decided to embrace it. My hair in the Hawaii pictures is the new, shorter length.

OK, that's enough for now. Happy Sabbath!

A baby? For us?

So in the nearly six months since we last posted, some kind of life changing things have happened.  First off, we got an apartment managing job that allows us to live rent free much closer to my work.  Second, and waaayyyyy more importantly, we're having a baby!!!!

After a limited release on Facebook, we are happy to introduce the world to Admiral "Flippy" Ackbar Evans (the name was selected through extensive polling, research, and the fact that he is apparently doing backflips in Brooke's abdomen).

Halloween 2013

Let me begin this post by saying that Brooke likes Halloween.  A lot.  As in, one of her goals in life is to be able to build and run her own haunted house.  We had plans to make some really awesome Halloween costumes this year.  However, with getting a new job, moving and all of the associated craziness there, we didn't really have time to work on them.  I won't say what they were going to be in case we end up making them for next year.

Instead we went with an old standby, one which we used the first Halloween we were together:

 Abe Lincoln and Cinderella!

These costumes stem from the fact that Brooke really does look like Cinderella (and happens to have a Cinderella-style dress from her cliff diving days), and the fact that I can pull off a relatively convincing Lincoln.  I grew out my beard for about 6 weeks for this.

I know I did the same costume last year, so I promise this will be the last time I'm Lincoln.  However, this was the first time anyone at my new job had seen it, so I feel justified.  I didn't win the costume contest, but I think that's because they didn't have a dead historical figures category.  I couldn't quite compete with the guy who wore an actual pumpkin on his head.

Our ward had their trunk-or-treat on Halloween, so after getting all decked out, we went over to the church to hand out candy.  Brooke grew up with this interesting tradition (they do things differently in Iowa), where you had to tell a joke at each house you went to before you could get any candy.  She made the kids at the trunk or treat tell jokes for their candy.  Many of the kids seemed pretty confused when she asked them if they had a joke, but eventually she got jokes out of most of them.

She also won all the hearts of the girls in her primary class by dressing up as a Disney princess.

After the trunk or treat we went back home and handed out more candy while we watched movies.  We bought way more candy than we needed.  We had heard that this neighborhood gets a lot of trick-or-treaters, but either other people's definition of "a lot" is different than ours, or we missed the biggest crowds when we went to the trunk or treat.  Also, Brooke got a bunch more candy the day after Halloween for 75% off.  Her mom would be proud (about the deal, not the amount of junk food).

It's been a good week.

I am grateful for finding lost things

Halloween is over! That means a lot of people are doing thankful lists on Facebook now. I saw them this morning and thought, "That's nice." and then I moved on.

Specifically, I moved on to trying to find my driver's license. I tried to use my credit card on Monday and my DL was magically not in my purse. I could have said I lost it on Monday and then tried to retrace my steps from there, but really I have no idea when I used it before that and had pretty much no time frame to go on. I was supposed to meet someone at 10am today, and the clock was slowly (quickly) moving past that. Still, I was feeling fairly chill about things, but I definitely put in a few prayers. After 45 minutes of searching, I called my friend and she came to pick me up instead.

When I arrived back at home, I resumed my search. As I ruled out more and more places, I felt more and more frantic, and of course my prayers took on a more frantic note, too. I have specific reasons to need my license soon, and I didn't really want to spend a whole day at the DMV trying to replace it. However, I kept feeling like if I would just clean up the floor right around my bed, I would find it. My panic mode search system went like this:

1. Hang up a sweatshirt from off the floor by the bed.

2. Eat Halloween candy.

3. Look in a stack of papers in the living room that came out of a box of things from two years ago.

4. Eat yogurt.

5. Let the dog outside.

6. Recheck some coat pockets.

7. Check which local DMV offices have available appointments within the week (none of them).

8. Hang up another sweatshirt from the floor by the bed. (It gets cold, okay?)

Clearly, this was going well. After more of this productive cycle, I finally buckled down to really finish hanging up that sweatshirt collection, and as soon as I did, lo and behold! My driver's license! Luckily, I was already kneeling because I was going through things on the floor, and my thank-you prayer was just about as giddy as I had been frantic before. I wanted to tell everybody how blessed I was. So I pulled up my Facebook page and thought about how sometimes God likes to trick me into doing important-for-me things that he knows I'm not paying enough attention to do on my own.

I am probably not going to post a thankful thing every day, but Extra Gratitude Month definitely has my attention now. Thanks to my lost driver's license, I'm focused now on counting my blessings. The re-centering was needed, and that deserves another thank you prayer.

we're cooking what?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Krista introduced me to a cooking blog called The Bitten Word. They were doing this thing they call the Cover-to-Cover Challenge, which she told me about with a blithe "Link. You should enter." She and our friend Chase were both participating, so Jon and I decided to do it, too. The deal is that they choose an issue of a cooking magazine and farm out all the recipes (you know ... cover to cover) to their readers in a special game of "recipe roulette." Everybody makes their assigned thing and then reports back. Jon and I specified a couple of dietary restrictions and chose "challenging" for the recipe difficulty, and then sat back and waited while they loaded the chamber.

A week or two later, we received our assignment and were preetttyyyy sure we lost that particular roulette when we saw what we were cooking: beef tartare, which translates to "raw beef." (See also: Mr. Bean.) From the challenge site: "...the September issue of Bon Appétit. It’s their restaurant issue, and it includes a ton of dishes we were eager to try ourselves. Some of them are straightforward fare. Others are completely bonkers." Clearly we ended up on the "completely bonkers" side of the scale.

"I thought this was a cooking challenge," I said. "There's no cooking at all in this recipe! I call foul!"

"We asked for a challenging thing to cook, not a challenging thing to EAT," Jon concurred.

I know what you're thinking: "Guys, this is no time to flake! Wait, this is exactly the time to flake!"

Alas, in the spirit of being good sports, we began collecting ingredients. Step #1 was to, you know, pickle our own Asian pears (nbd). That turned out to be pretty easy, and disgusting. The night before, we heated up the rice vinegar with the mustard seeds, stirred in some sugar, and let it sit for just long enough to exceed the hood fan's capacity to get rid of the smell. Then we submerged the chopped pears in the vinegar and popped it in the fridge. So far, yum! We saved one pear out so that we could eat it and feel less sad about soaking the other one in vinegar.

That done, we began collecting the rest of the ingredients. We went to the spice shop for gochugaru (turned out to be kimchi chile, and all they had was a mild one - whew), swapped out the Chinese hot mustard for regular mustard powder (I do not do spicy), failed in our search for brown mustard seeds, and chatted up the grocery store butcher about the beef eye round.

"It needs to have no connective tissue," I said. "It's for tartare. I don't want to die."

"That package there should be good," he replied. "...You're eating it raw? I'm not sure that cut will be tender enough. It's really for roasting."

"Don't worry," I assured him. "We're probably only going to eat like one bite. Um, what would be better, though?"

"You could get a filet mignon. From ... not here."

I bought the beef. When Jon got home from work, we set to work. The aioli was the most fun - I drizzled vegetable oil into an egg/vinegar/gochugaru mixture Jon made, while he whisked and whisked and whisked, until it magically became a pretty tasty homemade mayonnaise. I toasted pine nuts and picked watercress leaves off the stalks, one by one, which took forever.

Jon cut the beef up into little cubes. "Do you think that's a quarter inch?" he asked me.

"Cut it a little smaller so we don't have to chew as much," I said.

Finally, it looked like we had everything ready to go. We had baked a pan of brownies so we could get rid of the taste in our mouths if it was really terrible, so we pulled that out to an accessible spot. We had some adventurous friends come over to help us taste it, so we'd have some sickbed company if we got food poisoning. We assembled everything and passed out the forks.

We were informed we had to try it first, so we bravely brought our forks to our lips. And guess what! It was awesome! We were totally shocked. Even the pears were good - they were still crunchy, which added a super great texture. Jon said he was surprised by how not-meaty it tasted (probably because of the texture of the meat, which reminded us of more of gummy bears than beef). Also, props to him, because I did most of the organization of the experience, so he didn't really know how it was all supposed to come together. I just said, "We need these ingredients," and he figured it out as we made it. (For example, he said, "When I made the soy ginger dressing, I thought it was supposed to be a vinaigrette, but there was no oil and only a little bit of vinegar. That made me a little nervous.") He did most of the heavy lifting, and did a great job of it.

SUCCESS!! Here's us with our dish:

Then we passed it on to our friends, who also liked it. After we tried it raw, we stir fried a little of it, too. (Don't worry, the pregnant girl in the picture below is eating the cooked version.) Surprisingly, the flavor TOTALLY changed. It was still good, but it was completely different. Jon liked the cooked flavor better, and I liked the raw flavor better. The marinade was really stellar, and we're going to keep that in the rotation. Thanks to The Bitten Word, for making us jump so far out of our comfort zones. And go us!