Friday, December 5, 2008

Current mood: happy!

Woohoo, I am so happy to be done with school for the quarter! When I took my last math test on Wed. night, the professor told me that she wanted me to stay after I took it so that she could grade it and then talk to me. I was thinking "uh-oh." But after she was done grading it, she told me that I did so well on all of my tests (4-100% and 1-97%) that I got to skip the final! I am so happy that I don't have to spend my entire weekend studying. It also gives me a little bit of confidence that I won't completely bomb Chemistry next quarter, as it has never been my favorite or best subject.

~So, yes, this is a little bit of a brag post...but I want to record it for when I'm in the midst of all the hard science classes that I don't really want to take, and am questioning my abilities!

Monday, November 24, 2008

If I never see a fried food again...it will still be too soon.

Sometimes in an effort to be a good wife, I suggest doing things that aren't really my thing, but that I know David will love. That is how we found ourselves having a "Deep Fry Dinner" last night. Looking back, I am not sure what possessed me to suggest this particular idea! haha

Things we deep fried:
potatoes
purple onion rings
calamari rings
shrimp
tilapia
chicken breast
salmon rolls (I made these with salmon, spinach, and cream cheese all rolled into a spring roll wrapper...just like the ones we get at our favorite Thai restaurant)

It took hours to do everything! I don't even know how it could take that long, but it did...and that's not even counting cleaning up the kitchen. But the worst part was that by the time everything was done and we were getting ready to eat, fried anything was like the LAST thing I wanted. I ate two salmon rolls and drank a can of Fresca...and that's about all I could handle. So now we have fried food up the wazoo (we froze most of it), my apartment smells like a fast food restaurant, and all I can think about are carrots and apples. :(

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Bzzz...Bzzz...Bzzz...watch out for the Theo Bee!


The picture above is before his recent haircut, on the day I bought the costume and couldn't wait to put it on him. The two pics below are on actual Halloween.


Sunday, October 19, 2008

So good!



P.S. - This also gives you a hint about Theo's Halloween costume!

Friday, October 17, 2008

Is it mean that I...

just about peed my pants while watching this video. I don't know why, it just cracks me up!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Things that I'm loving lately...

~ This blog post (the Oct. 6th one) from the pastor of the church I used to go to.
~ Getting a 100% on my first math test. Woohoo!
~ How Theo snuggles up with my legs, which happens even more often now that the weather is getting cooler.
~ Trader Joe's white cheddar popcorn.
~ The fact that 3 of my friends are having babies (and I get to host a triple baby shower:)...and that David and I are getting a new niece or nephew in the spring!
~ Finding cute, yet inexpensive, purses and shoes at Target. I got these a couple of weeks ago.

~ My car Vanna. After having her for over a year, I still feel kind of giddy when I get to drive her (plus, she still has a faint new car smell, mmmm).

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

You really feel old when...

you ask a girl sitting next to you in your algebra review class "has it been a while since you've taken a math class too?" and she replies "oh, well I'm still in high school..."

Seriously, shoot me now.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Is it bizarre...

that sometimes I have a burning desire to be like a Stepford Wife?



Seriously...I want to wear the constrictive, but absolutely adorable, little dresses, have my hair coiffed every day, always have something wonderful baking in the oven, and dinner on the table every day when my husband comes home. And surely I would have kids if I could be guaranteed that they would always be clean and well-behaved! It's just too bad that I don't have robotic insides and an un-opinionated temperment. ;)

ETA - I just realized (as I was clicking on another episode) that this newfound obsession stems from watching way too many episodes of AMC's Mad Men on On Demand lately!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

"Camping" by Theo

This past weekend I went on my first camping trip to Lincoln Rock State Park. Mom and Dad were a little afraid to take me for fear I would be a slight pain-in-the-butt at times. They were somewhat right! I was very good at times, and not so good at others. But I had a blast and I can't wait for my next camping trip!

Here I am all packed and ready to go!


This is the view from our campsite. Somehow Mom managed to score us the best site in the entire campground!


Dad and I went exploring that night.


Then when it got dark we watched the wildfires burning nearby.


The next day I went for my first swim! Complete with a lifejacket to make my paranoid mommy feel better. When I got to the small and rocky beach near our campsite, I jumped right into the water...and then quickly swam out when I realized I couldn't touch! I loved splashing in the water and zooming around the beach, but I'm not so sure about the whole swimming thing!



After I had dried off from my water adventures, I spent the afternoon lounging in Dad's chair, drinking my water, and enjoying the shade. :)


That night, after I'd eaten all the extra graham crackers from the smores we made, I snuggled with Dad by the campfire.


The next morning I was rested and ready to greet the day!


We walked around a bit and then we came back, where I "helped" to pack up camp.


What a weekend! I loved camping, but it was exhausting. I slept on the way home...until the curvy roads and the french fries Dad fed me caught up with me. I then urped up straight into Mom's purse! Then I heard them both yelling "sick!" a lot. Oh well, I went back to sleep (though later I did have the punishment of having to get a bath). I can't wait for my next camping trip!

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Whistler...

In June, David and I were able to take a trip up to Whistler for a few nights with his brother Jeff and sister-in-law Jessica. It was lots of fun...we had a couple of adventures, ate some yummy food, and had a good time just hanging out! It was a pretty good time of year to go because it wasn't very busy, so there were no huge crowds and no waits for restaurants (David says during the winter weekends it's just insanely crowded). Thanks to some timeshare points from David's parents we were able to stay in a nice lodge right in the middle of the village. It's such a fabulous location because you can pretty much walk anywhere! David and Jeff stayed there when they went snowboarding in April and I can see how awesome it would be then...it's right near both of the major lifts up to Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. The only thing I didn't like about Whistler was the drive up there! It's narrow and curvy and basically my worst nightmare (though they are in the midst of a huge road project to expand it to mostly four lanes because of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics). It's a beautiful area and worth the drive though!

Here is the beautiful view from our room...



The first night we had dinner and drinks (bellinis!) at a fabulous restaurant called Milestones.




Our first full day there, David and I walked around the village a lot, while Jeff and Jess went mountain biking (brave folks). Then we all went on an ATV tour up Blackcomb mountain. I was sooo stinkin' nervous, but it wound up being really fun. Though I was secretly glad when we got put in a group with an older couple, because I figured they wouldn't be too speedy. In reality, I was the slowest one...slow being relative. Driving up to 40 kilometers an hour seems pretty fast to me when you're on an ATV! Anyway, we saw a bear on our way up and the view at the top was really pretty. Excuse how dusty and grimy we all look in the pictures!






After our ATV trip we de-grimed and went out to dinner at an Irish pub that had some live music that night.




After dinner, we stopped to take a picture. I look like a freak here, but you can see the totally awesome bike park in the background!



The next day is where things got a little more interesting for us (Jeff and Jess were doing more mountain biking that day). It started off nice. We slept in, then David and I walked around the village and got some lunch at a little pizza place. We had decided that our activity for the day would be to do a nice easy 7-mile paddle down The River of Golden Dreams. I had called a canoe/kayak outfitter earlier in the morning to make a reservation and asked whether they would recommend a guided or un-guided tour based on our paddling experience. The guy said "oh, it should be no problem for you both to do an unguided tour. The river is at the perfect level." I thought good, this should be no problem. Plus, it's cheaper to do an unguided tour.

We get there that afternoon and they didn't have any double kayaks, so we were told we'd have to paddle a canoe. David and I, along with 3 other people, then got in a van to be driven to Alta Lake, where we would be dropped off with our boats (The River of Golden Dreams connects 2 lakes, Alta Lake and Green Lake...the outfitter is on the banks of Green Lake). In hindsight, I should have thought there was something amiss when I saw four little old people getting out of some boats on the bank of Green Lake looking like they'd just been through a washing machine. But hindsight is 20/20.

We were the only unguided people being dropped off, so once we got to Alta Lake they got our canoe out, pointed in a vague direction and sent us on our way. We paddled across Alta Lake and it was really pretty. We had a great view of the mountains.



We tested out our steering a bit on the lake and even though we had a few little waves, we didn't feel too unstable. We got to the mouth of the river and paddled into it, thinking how nice and peaceful it all was. The river is pretty narrow, but the water was calm.



Preview of things to come...this is the last picture that my almost brand new camera ever took.



We paddled on for a little bit, enjoying ourselves. Then we had to stop and portage our canoe around this teeny tiny little dam. One of the guided groups got there a little bit after us, and this lady who I could not understand tried to explain to us what we needed to do when we started paddling again. See, a little ways after the portage, there is an area where 2 rivers meet and the water gets faster. She told us we needed to paddle up into the current and then let our boat get carried around to the right and facing downstream again. I was a little nervous, but we got back in our boat and actually made it through this part just dandy. I thought to myself "we're doing pretty good here, this doesn't seem so bad." Then the river started to get faster and more narrow. Instead of nice lily pads and tall grass on the side of the river like before, it was mud and super thick vegetation with lots of trees that stick out and caused you to have to duck so they didn't stab you in the eye. We paddled the way they told us to, with no backpaddling, just using forward paddling to steer the boat (looking back I should have known better). Instead of helping us steer, all it made us do was go faster and faster in an already quickly moving river.

About 150 yards from where the two rivers joined, we lost control of our paddling in the fast current, rammed into the vegetation on the sides and got dumped into 38 degree glacier water (me, headfirst no less). I thought I was going to die! It was sooo freaking cold that I could feel my breath shortening and my limbs starting to stiffen. I called out for David to help me, but he was too busy trying to stop the boat from going downstream. I will say that the river was probably about 5 feet deep at this point, so thankfully we could touch, but the current was so strong that it wasn't easy to get anywhere. My concern wasn't really drowning, but more the fact that when you fall out of a canoe, you ain't getting back in it while you're still in the water (unlike a white water raft, where it's easy to get back in), because canoes are often pretty heavy, they're very tippy, and the sides are usually pretty high. And initially I saw no where on the side of the river that was conducive to climbing onto, because the vegetation was so thick. I floated downstream a little bit, consciously trying to slow down and lengthen my breathing, and finally I found a place where I could climb out. I had to grab onto branches and haul myself up a mud bank (losing one of my brand new Teva flip-flops in the process), then climb over a bunch of tree branches to get to a larger section of river bank. David was still in the water just holding onto the canoe to keep it from going downstream (though luckily he caught it at a shallow point that was maybe 3 feet deep). He wasn't sure what to do because it was full of water and too heavy for him to lift and dump by himself (and I sure as heck wasn't going back in, hero that I am).

Finally, after 5 minutes or so, a different outfitter guide and his client stopped by in their canoe. The guide was able to help David dump the water out and eventually set the canoe up partway on the river bank. Poor David was in the water for about 10 minutes and his feet and legs were just numb. The guide and his client went on their way and we decided to wait for our outfitter's guides and their clients to come by so that we could ask them what we should do. We waited and waited and waited, getting divebombed by gigantic mosquitos in the process, and they didn't come. Probably 30 minutes later they eventually floated by. Every single one of the clients had flipped over as well!! And all three of them were on guided tours (with two girls from England being in a double kayak and their two guides being in a canoe, and another guy was in a single kayak with his guide that was also in a single kayak). What the heck! I had thought this was supposed to be a calm, family-friendly paddle trip. Not a hypothermia-inducing nightmare! The two girls from England that had flipped over refused to paddle by themselves anymore, so they got in the guide's canoe, while one of the guides paddled their double kayak down the river. She is the one who we wound up stopping. While very nice, she had an extremely thick Japanese accent and neither David nor I had any idea what she was trying to tell us we needed to do. Basically we had no idea how much longer the river was going to be going that fast, and neither of us had any confidence in our steering abilities at that point...so we were terrified of tipping over again. But a little bit of luck was with us and where we wound up getting to shore was not that far from a bike path, which led to a parking lot.

Yep, you guessed it, we decided to be weanies and throw in the towel. We were extremely cold and I was caked in mud and hopping around with only one shoe. David was covered in scrapes and future bruises. So we had the lady call and the outfitter came and picked us up and drove us back to our car. I told him everyone had tipped over and asked if the river was unusually fast this time of year. He said "no, that's just the river we run" and then went on to say "that's why we recommend you go with a guide." I could have smacked him!

I'm just peeved that they advertise it as being great for families and seniors. I'm sorry, but if a family was paddling down that river and tipped over, a little kid could easily be swept downstream in all the commotion. Not to mention that the sheer shock of the cold water could give some little old person a heart attack!

That was a very long story, but I suppose our paddle adventure could be summed up something like this:

Cost of canoe trip - $110
Cost of ruined cell phone - $100
Cost of ruined camera - $180
Memories of 38 degree glacier water - PRICELESS!


We went on to recover and have some well-earned and very yummy appetizers at Earl's Bistro, and then a late dinner that night with Jeff and Jess. The next day we left beautiful Whistler and drove back home, picking up our exhausted puppy from his grandparents house on the way.

It was a fun trip and we have some good and eventful memories to look back on!

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Swedish Pancakes and Sprinklers

Our little family had a good Father's Day. Theo and I started off by making David swedish pancakes stuffed with fresh blueberries and topped with whip cream. They were scrumptious!




Then we went up to David's parents house in the afternoon for a yummy bbq salmon dinner. David had fun playing bocce ball with his brother, and Theo and our niece Angelina had fun running through the sprinkler and giving each other lots of hugs and kisses!


Thursday, June 12, 2008

mmmmm....


I made bread today! It was my first time ever making homemade bread...and it turned out sooo yummy. David says I should make it every day. I don't know about that, but I will definitely make it again. It was pretty easy too! See the recipe here.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to both of our moms and grandmas! You are each wonderful and very special to us!





David, Theo and I celebrated "Happy Puppy Mother's Day" today. Theo helped David make me a yummy breakfast of omelette and fried potatoes and then served me breakfast in bed. Theo also gave me a very sweet card and a movie I have been wanting (27 Dresses). It was a wonderful morning with my boys!

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Monday, April 28, 2008

Extreme Makeover: Dog Edition

Before:

After:


Theo got his hair cut the other day and I swear, if I wasn't his puppy mother, I would never know he was the same dog! He looks so completely different, and even his personality has changed a bit since his haircut. I have to admit, I loved his fluffiness, and I cried the first time I saw him with all of his hair gone. I love him just the same, he just seems more "handsome" than "cute" now.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Blog Re-Design!

I was tired of my blog looking so boring, so I re-designed it. It's not exactly professional looking...but it's much more fun and bright now. I'm happy with it!

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

A couple of months ago David and I joined a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, every week we go to a nearby pick-up location and pick up a big box with our name on it, containing 12-14 different kinds of fruits and vegetables (all organic and locally grown when possible). We love it!!



We have been eating so much healthier now because of all the fresh produce we've been getting. And you definitely notice a difference between certain veggies that are grown organically and ones that are not. I sent David to the store to buy green bell peppers the other day because we ran out, and he was rather grossed out by the thick coat of wax covering all of them. It's something that we never noticed before, but now that we've had fresh from the ground stuff it's easy to see a difference. Plus, we've gotten to try things that we've never eaten before and that I would probably never think of to buy...like sunchokes (a little like a water chesnut and yummy in salads or omlettes) and rainbow chard. As the summer gets closer, I'm excited at the thought of all the yummy fresh fruit that will be coming our way!



My biggest reason for wanting to join a CSA is because I really want to support local organic farms. I think it's pretty silly that in our culture that we often go to the store and buy items that have traveled 10,000+ miles to get to us, when we could buy the same item and have it come from a local farm where it only traveled 30 miles to get to us. By buying fruits and veggies that are locally grown we save resources and also wind up getting fresher produce in the process! I will say, that it is a much harder task to buy only local produce items in the winter and spring months. Our CSA is one of the few that even operates outside of the summer season. They get by by having partnerships with other organic farms throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. But, they always try to buy as local as possible while still maintaining quality (which is obviously much easier done in the summer and fall).

Some info on how to find and pick a CSA:
There are so many CSA's popping up everywhere, that it was very hard for me to choose one. I went to the Local Harvest website and spent several days weighing the pros and cons of each CSA. I wound up choosing Full Circle Farm. It is probably one of the biggest CSA's around, which comes with pluses and minuses. A huge plus for me is that each Friday we are e-mailed the list of what items will be in our box the next week, and I can then make up to 5 substitutions from a "substitution list." This is incredibly convenient, because then we don't wind up getting brussel sprouts or asparagus (which David and I both hate) and have it go to waste. Full Circle Farm also operates all year round, which most CSA's dont. Most of the smaller CSA's have a set "growing season" (often 12-16 weeks during the summer/early fall), and often you have to buy what they call a "share" ahead of time, usually in early spring (we pay weekly since ours is year-round). This share entitles you to pick up a box of produce each week during the growing season. A lot of the smaller CSA's also have u-pick flowers, herbs, and oftentimes, berries...which is something I had to sacrifice by going with a larger CSA. I've thought about switching to a different CSA for the summer, because I looove the idea of getting to visit a farm and do the u-pick stuff, but I would miss the ability to do substitutions an awful lot. So we'll probably stick with the one we have for this summer. Anyway, if anyone has ever thought about joining a CSA, I would highly recommend it! There are so many options out there, that you can really choose the one that's right for you and your family.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Being a Christian Democrat...

I've decided that my blog is far too bland. In the past I've been hesitant to ever state any real opinions on certain topics...but now, I'm over that...because this blog is supposed to be about my life and my opinions are a part of my life.

I've been thinking about politics a lot lately, as are a lot of people I'm sure, and I'm finding the whole pre-Presidential election quite frustrating in certain ways.

For one thing, I'm having a very hard time dealing with certain segments of the Christian population that think any true Christian would only vote for a Republican. I don't care who people vote for...vote Republican, vote Democrat, vote for Nader...whatever, as long as you vote. But don't judge me (or others) for having opinions that differ from your own. A person can be a Christian and still vote Democrat, it's not an oxymoron.

I've had several people tell me "I don't believe in abortion and I don't believe in gay marriage so I obviously vote Republican." A certain member of my family has even questioned me in the past on why I don't think that way as well, since I am very pro-life. Umm, because I've done a lot of research on the major campaign issues, more than most people my age that I know, and I've decided on what issues are most important to me and which ones I think will impact my life and my future children's lives the most, and those two issues just aren't it.

No candidate and no political party are perfect in my opinion, and most people (me very much included) probably hold views on different issues that fall on both sides of the political map. But everyone has to choose the candidate that they feel best reflects their overall opinions on how the country should be run. If that's a Republican for you, then great. But for me, it's usually a Democrat...and I don't think that makes me a bad Christian.