House Of Boy and Girl

Stay tuned

2011-03-03T21:54:00.002-06:00

Hi, I'm Michelle, and I'm a blogging slacker. Honestly, I got burnt out on photo editing so I just quit doing it for a while. Then our computer monitor died. I am now awaiting the arrival of a new monitor, and a new computer to go with it, as new monitors don't tend to play nice with old computers that have old graphics cards and old-school connectors. Never fear, you will eventually get to see the rest of our trip photos, and hopefully that will happen before we go on another vacation and collect another couple thousand photos that I will have to edit!

Chateau and Jardins de Villandry

2011-01-01T09:32:00.015-06:00

Day five wasn't quite over yet. We had another chateau visit to make on our way back home for the night. This time we weren't quite as interested in seeing the chateau as we were in seeing the gardens.

I won't even bother telling you about the history of this place as we skipped right over the castle and headed out into the many gardens. You can see an aerial view of the complex here.

We began in the vegetable garden. If I were to have a vegetable garden, I'd definitely want it to look like this one!

At the entrance to each little section of vegetable garden there was a sign with a map detailing all the various plants used in that garden.

The vegetable garden is composed of nine separate squares, each with its own geometric pattern. There are various places on the property where you can get high enough to see the patterns. These shot was taken from the herb garden, located above and adjacent to the veg garden.

We continued through the Herb Garden and on to the maze. I think we skipped this particular maze and moved right on in to the Sun Garden. It was a little more "wild" than the vegetable and herb gardens. There were two themes in this garden. One was "sun", with red and orange and yellow flowers, and the other was "cloud" with blue and purple flowers.

After the Sun Garden, we walked the border of the Water Garden.

After walked past the Water Garden, we took a path up a hill and into the woods. It eventually led back to a high wall with a promenade area from which you could look over the grounds.

You could see down into the Love Garden from the overlook. The Love Garden is broken into four areas, each representing a different type of Love. Each of the four areas has a different stylized symbol and color. Starting in the upper left in the photo below is Tender Love (pink hearts), then going clockwise, we have Passionate, Fickle, and Tragic Love (red daggers).

And that ended our visit at Villandry. We hopped back in our car and headed back to our chateau via the city of Tours. We decided to stop at one of the huge supermarkets, E. Leclerc, in Tours to do our grocery shopping for the rest of our stay in the Loire. We always have fun exploring supermarkets in Europe. The cheese and bread selections are amazing, and everything else is a bit of an adventure. On this particular trip, we learned that the French don't refrigerate their milk. We drank plenty of it and lived to tell the tale.

Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau

2010-12-26T10:11:00.017-06:00

We left Chinon and drove northeast to Azay-le-Rideau to see this next chateau. This is a smaller chateau, but it has a cool setting on a little island in the middle of the Indre river. It was built in the early 1500s in the Italianate style. It started raining on us when we arrived so we spent some time touring the inside before going back outside to walk around the building.

These fluorescent clad bicyclists kept walking into our photos.

The building had some pretty nifty stone carvings on the facade and on the fireplaces inside.

There were a few rooms inside that were well decorated.

You could walk all the way around the building and the dammed up portion of the river that created the little pond that it sits in.

On our way back to the car park we spotted this house that was completely covered in colorful ivy. All I could think about was, ooh, that's pretty, and wow, I bet their house is full of bugs.

Chateau de Chinon

2010-12-19T13:24:00.009-06:00

We began day 5 of our vacation with a drive over to Chinon. It took about an hour to get there from our little rental chateau. Chinon is a town that developed in the Middle Ages. There is a HUGE fortress on the hill overlooking the town.

We parked our car down in the middle of the town and hiked up the hill to get to the chateau. Like many of the castles in Europe, it has a long history of construction and destruction and reconstruction. This one had a decent display showing the various parts of the fortress and when they were added or removed. Most of the buildings were empty and you could walk through them and explore at your leisure. There was a neat display featuring Jean of Arc artifacts while we were there (she visited this castle once upon a time).

I learned shortly before taking this trip that I had French ancestors, including a couple of Huguenots. The Huguenots were French Protestants who spoke out against the Catholic church. Eventually both sides got angry enough with each other that it turned into a religious war. Anyway, the Huguenots tended to be a bit destructive, and this is one of the sites that they did some damage to during the wars in the late 1500s. It wasn't the last site we'd see in this area that my zealous ancestors destroyed. I was a bit conflicted about whether to be excited when I found something that my ancestors were involved in, or to be disappointed that I never got to see the amazing things they destroyed in their original condition.

We went back down into the town center to have lunch. We found a nice little restaurant and watched the school kids walking home for lunch, and then back to school again. After lunch, we got back in the car and headed down the road to our next stop for the day.

Montrichard and Cave des Roches

2010-12-19T11:14:00.015-06:00

After we'd finished up at Chenonceau, we decided to check out an underground mushroom farm we'd heard about in Bourre, a few towns away. We found the place, but their tour schedule wasn't quite as advertised, and we ended up buying tickets for tour a couple hours later than we were expecting. We debated with each other in the car for a while about what to do in the meantime. I voted "nap in car" and Jeff voted "tour tour tour". Jeff won and I was reluctantly dragged back to the town of Montrichard.

We parked the car and walked around the main street of the town for a while. It was fairly picturesque.

Everything was closed because it was Sunday, but we did luck out and found an ATM that was affiliated with our bank back in the US (no ATM fees) and that saved us a trip into the city of Tours later that day.

We also stopped at a little winery that we'd spotted while driving around. We tasted a few of the local Loire wines, and picked up a couple of bottles for drinking with dinner over the next few days.

Eventually we made it back over to Cave des Roches for our tour of the mushroom farm. There is a huge underground stone quarry located in Bourre that produced much of the stone used to build the great chateaux of the Loire. At some point in the late 19th century, the owners of the facility decided to try their hand at growing mushrooms in some of the many unused corridors underground. They spent the better part of a century growing button mushrooms here, and then they decided to start focusing on more highly prized varieties instead.

The tour was given in French, so we didn't quite catch everything we were told. We were able to understand most of the production numbers and the names of the types of mushrooms produced.

These are Pieds Bleus:

These are Pleurotes Jaunes:

These are Pleurotes Grises:

These are Champignons de Paris:

The best part came when we arrived at the Shiitake growing area. Apparently Shiitake mushrooms are VERY rare in France. The reaction of the mostly French crowd to the rarity of the Shiitakes was pretty funny. Ooooh, aaaah. I was thinking, hmm, I'll bring you guys some of our Shiitakes and trade you for some really good cheese, foie gras, wine, mustard, etc.

We spent about an hour in the underground quarry. It was quite chilly in there, but not terribly damp, and it was HUGE. I'm pretty sure a person could get lost in there for days. We took enough turns on the tour that I was lost by the time we were ready to leave. Good thing we had a tour guide!

Chateau de Chenonceau

2010-12-18T15:13:00.036-06:00

We began our first full day in the Loire with a drive south through the farm land surrounding our little chateau, across the Loire river, and on south through a forest and more farm land to the town of Chenonceaux. Just outside this little town is Chateau de Chenonceau and its extensive network of gardens and grounds.

Chenonceau in its current state was built in the early 1500s. It's been home to many people over the years, but its most famous residents were probably Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici. Diane was the mistress of Henry II, and Catherine was his wife. Diane was kicked out of the chateau when Henry II died, and Catherine moved in. Nice story, isn't it?

We parked in the parking lots near the town and followed a path through the trees to get to the chateau. We decided to start our tour inside the chateau and save the gardens for the afternoon.

This is one of the more feminine or fairy tale-ish castles we've been to in Europe, and it's extremely popular with tourists. At most of the other very popular sites we've been to, you usually buy a ticket and get to wait until a certain entry time before you're allowed to start your tour. Not so for Chenonceau. This place was a free for all, tour as you please sort of place, and it was wall-to-wall bodies inside. Therefore we were only able to get decent photographs of things like the ceiling or objects high up on the walls.

For example... we give you the upper half of the chapel!

and... another ceiling!

This is the gallery over the river. Things opened up a bit there.

We got lucky in the kitchen and managed to get a picture of the HUGE stove in the middle of the room.

I'm not sure which took longer to create, the painting or the frame?

There were extremely elaborate and beautiful flower arrangements decorating many of the rooms, but as Jeff was the one holding the camera during our visit, we didn't get any photos of those. (Boys don't notice these things.) I'd also instructed him to not take photos of EVERYTHING so I wouldn't have to scrapbook 2000 photos after this trip. Anyway, if you want to see more of the inside of Chenonceau, I recommend you look at the 360 degree room tours on their website.

We finished our tour of the inside of the chateau and headed over to the Orangerie building to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria. We were pleasantly surprised to find that they offered some pretty tasty meals there and Jeff enjoyed some nice roast medallions of pork while I had some roast chicken. We split a garden salad and some fresh strawberries as well.

After lunch we went back outside to walk around the castle and tour the gardens.

There is a "small" garden to one side of the chateau that is named Catherine's garden. It's full of beautiful rose trees.

On the other side of the chateau is Diane's garden. It's bigger than Catherine's garden.

For some reason unbeknownst to us, we are frequently asked to either a) take photos of other people, or b) provide directions when we're on vacation in Europe. I guess we look trustworthy or perhaps just not lost all the time. We rarely ask for anyone to take our photo in return, but after we took a picture for another American couple, they offered to take ours, and so we went ahead and let them. It came out pretty nice.

We reached the far end of Catherine's garden and decided to take a different path back through the forest towards the parking lot and our rental car.

As we were walking back, we found this little maze in the middle of the forest. Of course we had to play in it for a while. It wasn't particularly challenging, but mazes like this are always fun to run through.

And so ends our visit to Chenonceau, but the day wasn't over quite yet... stay tuned.

Chateau de la Noue

2010-12-05T13:45:00.030-06:00

We rented a wing of this chateau for five nights during our vacation. It's located a little northeast of the city of Tours, France, close to the little town of Villedomer, and near the Vouvray wine region. We used it as our base of operations for touring the Loire region.

This is the second time we've tried renting a place to stay on vacation rather than staying in a hotel. We love renting. You get more space and better amenities than when you stay in a hotel. We are able to relax in the morning with breakfast at home in our pajamas, and we can come home in the evening and make dinner on our own schedule. We also have a washer and dryer so we can do laundry whenever we feel like it. That really helps cut down on the luggage you have to carry around the world on long vacations. We found this particular place on VRBO. The listing there also had a link to the owner's website. It happened to be available on the dates we were interested in, so we booked it.

The owner, Madame Marie-Christine Miller, spends half of her year living in California, and the other half of her year in France restoring la Noue. The chateau has been in her family for about 200 years. She shared several memories and photos of herself as a little girl at the chateau. Some time between then and now, it fell into disrepair, and so she's been slowly tacking the huge job of renovating it room by room for the last decade or so. She has completed the renovation of the short wing of the house, and that's the part we rented.

The chateau dates back to the 16th century. I think parts of it were added on at different times over the years. It also has some fairly extensive grounds. It's surrounded by a little wood. We asked if we could wander around out there, and Christine said we certainly could, but warned us that hunting season had just begun. We stuck to the edges, though we did take a little hike down a nearby train track one day to see an old viaduct that was near the chateau.

We had two floors of the short wing. On the ground floor there was a little kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a laundry room, and a half bathroom. The kitchen was fully equipped, and the living room had a stereo, a television and a DVD player with some movies to watch in the evenings. The house also had wireless internet so we could keep in touch with everyone
back at home and get some news every day.

On the upper floor were three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. We had plenty of space to spread out! We stayed in the yellow bedroom. The blue childrens' bedroom was attached to our bedroom and made a convenient place to store our luggage. The green bathroom was also attached to our bedroom. The red room was down the hall and had its own little attached bath.

We were given a tour of the rest of the chateau one afternoon. Jeff was walking around taking photographs and he ran into Christine and asked her about part of the chateau, which led to us being invited in to see the rest of the place. Christine and her sister had been out picking mushrooms earlier that day and were busy cleaning and sauteing them in her kitchen. We saw the little chapel that's located in one of the turrets, and then we moved into the rest of the house.

There is a pretty ballroom area in the middle of the long wing that Christine rents out for weddings and parties. She's also finished renovating a few individual bedrooms up on the second floor. The red dog is named Popov. He came to visit us every day. He's very old, and very sweet tempered.

Many of the rooms are still in pretty bad shape, but it was still fun to see them because we were able to see how the house was originally constructed.

Here's another shot of our rental car for the first week of the trip... I know some people like to see the cars we can't get over here. If you ever go over there, be sure to rent a diesel. Gas is VERY expensive in Europe and having a diesel that gets great mileage really cuts down on the gas bills!

Mont Saint-Michel

2010-11-20T14:35:00.028-06:00

The third day of our vacation was a transition day between Normandy and the Loire. We had about a three hour long drive to make, so we broke it up with a visit to Mont Saint-Michel. I'm feeling a bit lazy on the writing front today, so I'll let you read up on the history of the place on your own. It's one of those places that you've probably seen in photographs before, and if you happen to be Catholic, you probably know a little about it already as it's a pilgrimage site.

We stopped at the side of the road on the way towards the little mountain to take some photos.

We eventually arrived at the mont itself along with the rest of the crowds and parked at base on the causeway (you can't drive past the wall around the base of the island, you must walk).

Once inside the town walls, everyone winds their way up a fairly steep and narrow walkway lined with cute little restaurants and souvenir shops until you reach the monastery at the very top.

The monastery did a decent job of satisfying my gargoyle viewing desires. I love gargoyles!

We toured the entire monastery.

And then we walked back down through the town and to our car. I stopped to view this very old cannon dating to the 1400s on the way out.

After a lunch in the town just on the other side of the causeway, Jeff decided that he'd like to get some more photos of Mont Saint-Michel from a distance. He used our Garmin to select a likely looking spot and we headed that way. He got some decent shots, I think.

We spent the rest of the day getting ourselves to our next destination - a small chateau in the Loire countryside that we rented a wing of for five nights. More on that later.

Batterie Longues-sur-Mer and the American Cemetery

2010-11-01T14:18:00.032-05:00

After visiting Port Winston, we ventured a little further up the coast to Longues-sur-Mer to see the remains of the Germany battery located there. The battery formed part of the German defenses during the Allies invasion of Normandy. There are four 150mm guns on the site, along with munitions bunkers, places for smaller machine guns, and a large command post. The site was bombed by the allied air forces, but it remained surprisingly intact.

Not all of them were intact...

You can see how huge those 150mm guns are...

You can also see Port Winston a bit farther up the coast.

We left Longues-sur-Mer and continued on up the coast to our last stop of the day, the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach. This cemetery holds the remains of nearly 10,000 Americans who lost their lives in the war, most of them during the D-Day invasion. It is beautifully situated on a cliff overlooking the beach.

There are several American cemeteries spread over Europe, but this is the first one we've visited. Jeff remarked that the combination of French aesthetics and the American ability to portray the cost of victory was exceedingly powerful. I'd have to agree.

The day wasn't all WWII sightseeing. We did get a bit of French countryside tourism at the end of the day when the tiny road we took to get back to our hotel led us to this scene:

We had to wait about 10 minutes for the cows and the farmer to clear the road, but we didn't mind. The tasty French dairy products are totally worth it!

Le Memorial de Caen and Arromanches-les-Bains

2010-10-24T11:05:00.013-05:00

On the second day of our vacation we decided to tour the World War II sights of Normandy. We began our day in Caen, at the museum and memorial known as "Le Memorial". This is an excellent museum that walks you through the years leading up to the war, through the war, and then finishes with a display on the cold war. You start your tour at the top of a large spiral ramp with displays covering World War I, and you follow the ramp down the years and basically "spiral down into war". At the bottom of the ramp and throughout the basement of the museum are the WWII displays, focusing mostly on the European theatre, the soldiers who fought there, and the people who lived there. The museum also had a really interesting short film called "Le Jour J" (D-Day). It was done in a split-screen style, with one half of the screen showing the activities of the allies, and the other half showing the simultaneous activities of the Germans on that day. I wouldn't say it was a fun place to visit, but it certainly gave us a good background for what we would see the rest of the day, and it did an excellent job of reminding us of the necessity and the cost of war.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat at the museum cafe for lunch, and then headed north to the coast to the town of Arromanches-les-Bains. As we neared the town, we encountered humongous tour buses full of Brits and Germans driven by crazy drivers that were attempting to navigate impossibly narrow and twisty roads. I was pretty sure we'd be squished a few times, but we managed to make it by them with a couple inches to spare.

We eventually made it to the coast where we found Port Winston, one of two Mulberry harbors anchored on the north coast on Normandy during the war. They were assembled in England, then towed across the English Channel to be anchored. "Mulberry A" was anchored on Omaha Beach, and was used by the Americans. It didn't last long as it wasn't very well anchored. "Mulberry B" did much better, and parts of it have lasted to this day.

The artificial harbor featured huge breakwaters made from concrete-filled caissons sunk in the seabed. Those formed a protective barrier around the piers. Some of the piers were light metal stages resting on floats, and others were anchored to the sea-bed. Most of the pieces of the harbor have either sunk or floated away over the years, but a few remain. There's a museum at the beach that I'm sure would have been interesting to go through, but we skipped it in favor of being able to see more sights.

The remains of the piers are in the foreground.

Off in the distance you can see what's left of the breakwaters.

It was a bit windy that day.

This is a section of a pier.

This is one of the anchors.

Le Clos des Matignon

2010-10-18T17:31:00.012-05:00

We finally arrived at our first hotel for the trip at about 6 pm, after driving through a dreadful rainstorm between Caen and Torigni-sur-Vire. Driving in bad weather in a foreign country after having had no sleep for over a day is NOT fun. But, we survived.

Jeff found this bed and breakfast online after we researched EVERY bed and breakfast in Normandy. I'm not kidding. Every one. None of them really caught our eye, but this one seemed acceptable, and it was available, so we took it. It turned out to be a fantastic place to stay. The room was impeccable and HUGE for a French hotel room. It was even huge by American standards. We were pretty pleased when we were shown the room by the very sweet owner who didn't speak a word of English (we managed to get by just fine with our mad Rosetta Stone skillz). When her husband, who did speak English, showed up and introduced us to the powered black out shutters on all the windows of our room, we were thrilled! They really helped us get a couple of good nights of sleep in at the beginning of the trip. Being the only guests in a humongous house helped make it extra peaceful, too.

Here's the bedroom (we had the "Savannah Room"):

This is most of the bathroom:

We were treated to an array of fresh pastries and breads each morning, along with some fruit, yogurt, local jams, and real honey, all served in the super cute French country kitchen. It was all pretty yummy.

Check out the awesome range:

These are the owners, Colette and Daniel:

This is the back of the hotel and the pond behind it:

It was within an hour or so driving distance of all the sights we wanted to see in Normandy, and it worked out really well for us. If you're ever looking for a place to stay in Normandy, check it out.

Abbaye de Jumieges

2010-10-17T20:15:00.014-05:00

The ferry dropped us off on the right side of the Seine, and we drove back down the riverbank to the town of Jumieges to see the ruins of the Abbaye de Jumieges. The original abbey dates back to the 7th century. That one was destroyed by the Vikings. In the 10th century, Duke William Longsword (a good, strong last name) built a new Benedictine abbey on the ruins of the old abbey. The monks hung out there for a few centuries and then left during the Revolution. In 1793, the abbey was bought by a merchant who decided to use it as a quarry, and proceeded to use explosives to blow it up, producing the ruined state we see today. In 1852, a new owner arrived and set about preserving the ruins. As you can see by the scaffolding in our photos, the French are still working on the preservation...

My eyes are closed in this photo because I'm sooooo sleepy...

These cats were busy trying to find a warm and quiet place to take a nap. They had selected some large planter boxes when we arrived.

On our way out, we noticed that they'd moved to a new spot. Perhaps the planters were too damp.

Jumieges was our last touristy stop for the day. We left Jumieges and hit the highway towards our home for the next couple of nights, Le Clos des Matignon in Torigni-sur-Vire. I'll show you photos of that in our next post.

Vernon and the ferry

2010-10-17T10:35:00.013-05:00

On our way out of Giverny, we passed through the town of Vernon. We crossed over the Seine and ended up in the old town portion of the city. We decided to park the car for a few minutes and take some photos because it seemed sort of picturesque, and because Jeff had read about the town in one of our guidebooks prior to leaving on our vacation.

We walked back across the Seine via the Clemenceau Bridge, and ended up near the old mill, which is built straddling two piers of the old bridge across the Seine. The old bridge dates from the 12th century, and the mill dates from the 16th.

Right next to the mill is the Tourelles Castle. It dates from the middle ages.

Walking back across the Seine, we got a decent view of the Eglise Notre-Dame, a church dating from the 12th century. We didn't go in, but rather headed back to our car to continue our journey towards our bed for the night.

With the exception of our first trip to Europe back in 2003, we've always had our Garmin GPS unit with us. For the most part, it does a great job of navigating us through the twisty roads of Europe, around confusing roundabouts, and through both tiny towns and large cities. We are occasionally led through cabbage fields along cart paths, but as those stories serve to add color to our vacation, we don't mind.

Our next destination for the day was the town of Jumieges, another town near the Seine, and another hour or so along our drive to Torigni-sur-Vire. Garmin took us right down to the town, but on the opposite side of the river, and presented us with a "board ferry" command. Hmm. We had a) no idea what times the ferry ran, and b) no idea how much the ferry cost, so we decided to drive up the river a ways to see if we could find a bridge. We drove about five minutes and discovered... another ferry. Hmm. This time the ferry was on our side of the river, and was actively being boarded by another vehicle. We lingered for a minute, and were waved on board by the pilot, who charged us nothing, and deposited us on the other side of the river about five minutes later. As usual, Garmin was right.

That's our black sedan on the left in the photo above. It's a new model for Renault, and we noticed it being investigated by people during the entire week we had it. One day on the highway, the proud owner of new black Renault Fluence passed us grinning widely. It was a bit strange, as generic black sedans are not all that exciting over here in the US, and I'm not sure why this one was that interesting over there. Anyway, it served us well for the week we had it, though I think we were both hoping for something a bit more quirky and "French" for our trip.

Giverny

2010-10-16T14:46:00.019-05:00

We recently returned home from a two week long vacation to France. We didn't find much time to blog during the trip, so I figured we'd blog about it now, sight by sight.

We flew into Paris on September 23rd, arriving at about 9 am. The first half of our trip would be spent in the French countryside, and the first three days of that first week were spent in Normandy.

One of the pains of flying over to Europe is that flights from North America typically leave here in the late afternoon and arrive there in the early morning. In order to get your body switched to the new time zone as quickly as possible, it's important to try and get some sleep on the airplane on the flight over (nearly impossible for me) and then stay awake for the rest of the first day once you're over there. For us, that meant being awake for about 30 hours straight. It's not fun, but if you can find interesting things to see and do for that first day, it really helps.

Our hotel for the first night was in a little town named Torigni-sur-Vire in Normandy. It was about a three hour drive from the airport in Paris, so we made a list of possible sights to see along the way to fill up our first day. Our first stop was an ATM in a business park near the airport, then we hit the highway towards our first real tourist stop, Giverny.

Giverny is the location of the country home and garden of Claude Monet. I have always loved Monet's paintings, and I'd known that I'd like to visit Giverny for some time. So, we did.

We bought tickets to see the house and the garden. The garden was much larger than I was expecting. I was hoping that we wouldn't be too late in the season to see the flowers, and we weren't disappointed. It was beautiful!

Click on the photos to view a larger copy.

We always seem to end up with a lot of photos of chickens. Jeff loves taking pictures of the chickens.

Hot dog/cool dog

2010-08-08T17:06:00.003-05:00

We started a new exercise at the Y this weekend: lap swimming. It's going pretty well so far, but the drying of our swimwear on the deck after we got done today is not going quite according to plan...

Apparently Fang has decided that having a cool belly means he can sun his back a little longer!

Fang's Best Day Ever?

2010-07-11T19:43:00.007-05:00

If not the best, then close to the best...

Errol did get his fair share, he just wasn't interested in competing for it.

Fun in the sun

2010-06-13T19:53:00.006-05:00

We went for a romp in the yard this afternoon. Fang raced a butterfly... and lost.

But his spirits were not dampened...

Errol spent much of his time prowling about the yard looking for things to mark...

Eventually everyone got a bit hot and retreated into the shade to cool off.

Yes, we're still alive

2010-06-05T11:08:00.012-05:00

I have no idea what we've been so busy with for the last two months, but apparently it wasn't writing posts for our blog! We are still here, though, for you loyal readers who wonder about such things.

We had one really good storm in early May which prompted us to replenish our emergency supplies and practice for the possibility of losing our house to a tornado. It fizzled out right before it got to our house, but it was good practice.

Red is not good

Waiting out the storm in the basement

Fang spent some time in May ferociously defending our home from vicious mallard attack.

Grrrrr!

Errol spent much of the last two months doing what he does best...

Why isn't anyone rubbing my belly?

We both got on a genealogy kick a while back, and spent much of our time perusing the internet for clues about our family trees. It's been fun to research the history of each of our families. We talked to our parents and grandparents first, to gather up any information they had, and then we started searching the free websites, and after we'd gathered all we could there, we each signed up for two week free trials on ancestry.com to finish up our research. I, Michelle, was much more successful than Jeff was, but I think that's because parts of my family have been in the US much longer than Jeff's have. We typically ran into dead ends once we found the parents of the person who immigrated to the US. We found some surprises that no one in our families knew about, and collected stories of ancestors who were present at major events in US history. I discovered ancestors who helped found New York, who bought land from William Penn, who came over on the Mayflower, who were Huguenots, and even explorers. Last weekend, we went up to see my grandparents to show them what we'd discovered about their family trees. I asked whether they had any old photographs, and they produced several photos of their parents and grandparents. I've borrowed a bunch of those for scanning so I can make a book for my siblings and cousins some day.

A photograph of my great-grandparents, Amaziah and Lillie Mead

We're also starting to plan another trip for the fall. Jeff had a hankering earlier this year to go back to Paris, and also to go see the chateaux of the Loire, so we're going to go over to France again. We've been watching the Band of Brothers mini-series lately, so we decided to make a trip up to Normandy to see the WWII sites up there as well. We're particularly excited about this Paris visit, because we've rented an apartment there for a week, so we'll be able to really shop the street markets, the boulangeries, the fromageries, the patisseries, and the charcuteries for tasty dinner ingredients this time. I've already made myself a personal map showing all the best places to shop in the neighborhood around our apartment.

Tasty shopping

So that's what's been going on around here for the last couple of months. That, and mowing the lawn a lot. It finally got hot here this week, so hopefully we'll be able to go back to mowing once a week instead of twice a week. :)

Bar stools!

2010-03-31T20:30:00.006-05:00

We've been in our house now for five and a half years. Over the course of those five and a half years, we've half-heartedly attempted to find some bar stools for our kitchen that a) we both liked, b) were sturdy enough to hold people, c) went with our funky decor, and d) weren't horribly expensive. We never had much luck. I finally decided about a month and a half ago that I'd had enough of searching, and that there had to be a bar stool out there somewhere that met our needs. I scoured the internet and came up with about forty that I liked, which we eventually narrowed down to one. We had no idea if it would be comfortable or sturdy, but after successfully living without bar stools for so long, we decided that it probably didn't matter, as they really weren't necessary for our survival.

We ended up ordering four stools about a month ago, and they finally arrived this week. We assembled them and were pleased to discover that they were both comfortable and sturdy, and that they went reasonably well with the rest of our great room. Now we just need to have someone over to watch us cook so they can be useful for something other than terrorizing Errol.

New cars and blizzards

2010-03-25T19:35:00.007-05:00

We took last Friday off work to drive up to Kansas City and pick up Jeff's new car. He ordered it back in December, and it finally showed up last week, just in time because his old car comes off lease in a couple of weeks. We were originally planning to pick it up on Saturday, but then we learned that the entire state of Kansas was expecting a massive blizzard that day, hence the vacation day off work.

We got a slow start to the day, mostly because I insisted on getting my car washed on the way out of town so I didn't have to show up at the BMW dealership in a very dirty BMW. Unfortunately, my best efforts to keep the car clean were foiled when we got stuck behind a de-icing truck on the turnpike. We were only stuck there for a minute or two, but my car was covered in the fluid.

We arrived in KC at lunch time, and headed over to Sweet Tomatoes, a soup and salad buffet, for lunch, after which we washed my car again. :) Then it was off to the dealership to take delivery of Jeff's new car.

We took it for a quick test drive to make sure we liked it. BMW wagons are a bit hard to come by around here (here being the USA in general), and we had never actually been in one before we ordered it. We had driven a regular 3 series sedan with the same engine, and had seen a 5 series wagon, so we were reasonably confident that it would be fine, and it was.

The car delivery took about three hours. After that we headed farther into town to visit one of our favorite wine shops. One of the guys that works at the shop is really helpful when it comes to the Rhone and Burgundy wines that we're trying to explore, and we lucked out because he was there that day. He helped us pick out a few bottles, and we were on our way again.

We had to stop at Crate and Barrel in Leawood because we ALWAYS have to stop at Crate and Barrel when we're in KC. We managed to find a few things there that we couldn't live without, as we usually do (it's my obsession to cover my kitchen and pantry shelves with beautiful glassware and dinnerware, whether we use it or not, which is ridiculous, so anyone who wants to come over and have dinner with us, please do).

After that we hit the road back towards home. By this time, the weather had already turned quite cold and windy, and it was getting a bit spitty, too. We didn't run into any real trouble until we hit Emporia, where we found driving sleet and very sharp winds. We stopped for dinner there, experienced the worst gas getting moment ever in the driving sleet, and then hopped on the turnpike for the last part of the drive home. Our hop on the turnpike quickly turned into being parked at a standstill on the turnpike due to a wreck. Thankfully it only took about ten minutes for it to get moved to the side, and we were on our way again.

The weather continually worsened through the rest of our drive home. We had sleet, rain, ice, snow, and finally blizzard to contend with. We saw several people that had spun off, but we didn't seem to find any icy patches ourselves. The last bit of the drive was the worst - there were a few moments where the blizzarding snow was flying right in our faces and it sort of gave us a weird vertigo feeling. After that, the snow started falling in HUGE chunks, and we both experienced what could best be described as spatial disorientation. That's kind of a pilot term, but it's all I can think of to explain the feeling we had. We knew our cars were moving, but our bodies had no ability to comprehend it at the time. It was weird. We both breathed a sigh of relief as we pulled our cars into the garage, got out, and gave each other a big hug.

February

2010-03-04T21:58:00.015-06:00

I've been a bit of a blog slacker lately... better catch you up on the latest happenings.

We romped in the snow again... fly, Fang, fly!

We celebrated Valentine's Day because we didn't buy each other anything for Christmas and one of us decided it was time for some presents. Jeff got an array of seemingly odd ingredients that eventually made sense (he's been wanting to try some duck recipes from one of his French cookbooks, and we can't get some of the ingredients in Wichita, including the duck, so I tracked them down online)...

Michelle got a watch...

We made some duck and ate it, *yum*...

We became increasingly stir crazy as the weather refused to warm up enough all month to take the dogs out for a walk...

So crazy that we tore the eyeballs off our toys...

And we lounged around after working extra hard at work this month.

That about covers February, and now you're caught up!

Fun in the snow

2010-01-31T10:53:00.013-06:00

We put on our winter coats today and went outside to have some fun in the snow. We begin by cautiously exploring the snow free areas...

and then we dive on in! Notice how Errol has already begun claiming the territory for himself.

At this point, Fang begins to experience a wardrobe malfunction.

Errol, however, remains sproingy.

Fang is now paralyzed and confused. He wonders, "where have my legs gone?"

Errol decides to sample the flavor of the snow...

and proceeds to get more of it on his face than in his mouth.

Fang was temporarily relieved of his wardrobe problems and moved to a new location, but soon thereafter lost his front legs again. He's doing his best to keep exploring with his nose.

Now we are racing towards the camera! Errol gets a head start because he's slower (and less likely to run away from us at top speed).

His ears fly wildly in the wind!

Fang gains on him and they end up tying at the camera.

We are now cold and wet and shivery... time to go inside and clean up. Total time elapsed... 9 minutes!

Lounging around

2010-01-22T21:22:00.004-06:00

Two of my boys, just hanging out on the couch after work.

Chilly, but pretty!

2010-01-12T17:08:00.011-06:00

We woke up to a freezing fog this morning that left beautiful frost over all the trees and other plants in our neighborhood.

Frost on one of our Austrian pines in the front yard

A bird's nest in one of our Pistache trees

One of the grass plants in our yard

Some frosted trees by the stables

A chilly horse over by the stables

Thanksgiving 2009

2009-12-06T13:38:00.007-06:00

We had everyone over for Thanksgiving at our house this year. Grandmother and Grandfather, Nathan and Ashley (and Thor and Ares), and Joella all arrived on Wednesday. Dan came up from Tulsa on Thursday morning. We were also joined by Brian, a friend of Michelle's from work.

Jeff and I decided to go the easy route for the big meal this year, so we grilled a few flat-iron steaks and made baked potatoes in the oven. We had a green salad, and some yummy red-hot applesauce Jello and banana bread brought by Grandmother. We didn't duck out of cooking entirely... we made a fruit savarin for dessert which went over pretty well. We still had lots of dishes to wash, but no real cooking dishes, so it was a pretty quick cleanup.

Cooking, sort of

Michelle, Grandmother, Dan, Nathan, Ashley

Joella, Brian, Grandfather, Jeff

We had a good time together. Jeff and I finally joined the digital age with the purchase of a new television a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, but since we're too cheap to bother to get digital cable, and since our Blu-Ray player hasn't arrived yet, and because we're still participating in the Atari 2600/Nintendo 64 gaming age at our house, Nathan offered to bring down his Wii and his Blu-Ray player to help keep everyone entertained. We all had fun watching Grandmother and Grandfather try out bowling and golfing, and then the rest of us played some tennis and pummeled each other in boxing. We ogled "Planet Earth" on Blu-Ray for a while, and then we all watched Star Trek after dinner.

Nathan explains Wii to G&G

Grandmother tries her hand at golf

Gritting your teeth makes you a more effective boxer

Dan and Joella duke it out

Domestic violence

Dan had to leave on Thursday, and Nathan, Ashley, Grandmother and Grandfather all left on Friday. Joella stuck around until Sunday. She and I had fun going to yoga class at the Y together on Saturday, and Jeff joined us for a trip over to the movie theater to see New Moon. It was a pretty good weekend.

Climate Change

2009-12-06T13:22:00.004-06:00

We swapped out my summer tires and wheels for my winter tires and wheels a few weeks ago. There was a chance we'd get snow right after this, and we did get a little, but none of it stuck. So, I still don't know how the new car will do in the winter. We have another chance for snow this week, so perhaps I'll find out soon.

The summer setup

My husband of excellence

Mounting the winter wheel

Installing the bolts

The winter setup fully installed

I decided to get black wheels for winter so I could have a few months' relief from cleaning brake dust off my wheels every three days. :)

Bye Bye GTI

2009-11-08T20:52:00.003-06:00

We sold my GTI yesterday. I have to admit, that I'm a bit sad to see it go. It was a good car, both practical and fun to drive. I realized last night that it was the first car Jeff and I bought together as husband and wife. Perhaps that's why I'm feeling all sentimental about it. I usually don't get attached to material stuff like that.

We sold it to a 60 year old school teacher from a town about an hour and a half south of us. He plans to auto cross it, and I'm glad to see it will finally have the chance to live up to its full potential. My coworkers have been trying to get me to do that with it ever since we bought it. :)

Our last picture together

Siblings and Cousins

2009-11-07T16:23:00.005-06:00

We had the pleasure of a visit from Nathan and Ashley a couple of weekends ago. They brought Thor and Ares down with them, and we all got to watch as four Yorkies met each other for the first time. Thor and Ares are four and a half years younger than their cousins, Fang and Errol, which was rather apparent by the amount of energy displayed by each pair. We managed to get through the weekend without any major fights, though there were certainly several displays of dominance exhibited (if you have dogs, you'll know what I mean here). Here are a few pictures of the foursome in action.

Jeff surrounded by pups

Waiting for the door to open

Ganging up on Thor

Thor lounging

Dogpile in progress

Ashley giving Ares a cuddle

Thor taking a bite of Errol

Houston/Joella/Muse/U2

2009-10-17T18:01:00.010-05:00

I got to have my birthday present a little early this year - I treated myself to a flight down to Houston to see my sister, Joella, and to go to the Muse/U2 concert with her. She managed to get some great tickets at not too high of a price, and invited me to go along. As we both love Muse, and knew that U2 would put on a great show, it was an easy choice.

I took Wednesday and Thursday off work, and caught a VERY early flight out of Wichita and over to Denver, then caught another from Denver to Houston. I arrived in Houston right at lunchtime. Joella suggested a visit to her favorite margarita place for lunch, and I was all in favor of that, because I LOVE authentic Mexican food, and I've soooo missed having it since we moved back to Kansas from San Diego. It didn't disappoint - I had a delicious shrimp enchilada with my margarita (which really was quite good), and which came with some yummy sides that enhanced the experience. I also got to meet one of Joella's fellow transitional year students who met us at the restaurant. It was nice to see that Joella had at least one good friend down there.

Joella drove me past the huge medical complex where she works on our way back to her apartment. It is a pretty incredible collection of buildings. I can't imagine that there's any procedure that they wouldn't be able to do on a sick person down there. I did have to deal with my "no scrubs in public" pet peeve more than I'd have liked to, because the place was full of doctors and nurses and students running around on the street in their scrubs... but I survived.

We eventually made it back to Joella's apartment where we spent the afternoon just relaxing before the concert. It was about 100 degrees outside with 100% humidity, and we were NOT looking forward to the one mile walk to the stadium for the show. Happily, Joella ran into one of her friends down by the apartment complex pool who volunteered to drive us to the stadium! We had a quick bite to eat at her place before hopping in the car for the ride over to the show.

The stadium was nice and air conditioned, and the roof was closed when we got to our seats. Eventually they started blowing smoke around the stage, and they opened the roof of the place up, but I'm pretty sure they kept the A/C on, because it never got really hot in there. Muse finally came on and played an awesome opening show. We both really enjoyed watching them. I'm pretty sure that most of the other people at the concert didn't know any of their music, but Joella and I happily sang along anyway. They played about 10 songs, and then it was time for them to go off stage, and for the roadies to start setting up for U2.

It took a while, so we went on a popcorn run and had time to eat enough to get our fill before U2 came on stage. It was a bit surreal to think we were in the same building as these people who have all these iconic songs and who we've only ever seen on television for the last 30 years. It was a really amazing show, though, and it was so worth the trip down to Houston to see. The band was fun to listen to, but the thing that really impressed me was the stage. I was thinking how much fun it would have been to be an engineer on that project.

The concert got out at about midnight, and Joella and I walked back to her apartment from the stadium and totally crashed for the night. We both loved the show and agree it was the best concert BY FAR that we've ever been to.

My flight home in the morning left around 9, so we had to get up early again. There was a bit of a traffic jam on the way to the airport, but I made it in time to get through security and on to my flight to Denver. I was in Denver for the whole child-caught-in-a-helium-balloon fiasco, which made my three hour layover there a little more bearable. My flight back to Wichita was only delayed by about 10 minutes, even though it left right about the time the supposed missing child was flying past DIA. I made it back home to Wichita and back to the house before Jeff got home from work. It was a really fun trip, and I'm so glad I got to see Joella in her new city!

Thor and Ares

2009-10-09T18:03:00.008-05:00

I'm a little behind in posting this, but these two are just too cute not to post about. We went up to Hays a couple of weeks ago to attend a late wedding reception for Stacie and Chris Cummings (which was great). We managed to get into town a couple of hours early so we could hang out with Nathan and Ashley for a while. Ashley just adopted two Yorkie puppies about a week before we visited, so as a bonus, we got to play with Thor and Ares during our visit! They we super rowdy for almost the entire time we were there, and they provided quite an entertaining time for everyone. We can't wait until they are brought down here to Wichita for a visit with Fang and Errol. It will be Yorkie pandemonium, I'm sure. Either that or Errol will take one look at them and stalk off to his couch to be left alone.

Ashley and Nathan

Thor and Ares

Ares and Ashley

Thor and one of his toys

Thor and Nathan

Ares, looking all cute with his floppy ears

Ares getting a cuddle

Ares again, being cutetastic

Thor, enjoying his favorite spot on the floor

Sleepy Head

2009-10-04T21:31:00.002-05:00

Errol is a frequent visitor to my lap when I'm working on the computer. He is rarely there to help, but rather takes advantage of me as a warm place to sleep in our often cold house. Apparently I'm quite comfy.

A public service announcement

2009-09-25T19:18:00.003-05:00

Hi everyone!

If you're wondering where our vacation photos went, don't worry, they'll be back soon. We've put some photos of the car we're selling in our Picasa account, and because we didn't want just any random internet surfer snooping through our vacation photos, we've blocked them from view for a little while. Of course, if you just LOVE looking through our photos on a regular basis, the best solution would be for you to go ahead and buy our car so we can put the photos back up. Just kidding. :)

A trip to the Pacific Northwest

2009-09-15T19:21:00.024-05:00

We had the opportunity (i.e. ANOTHER WEEK OF FURLOUGH) to take a little trip up to Seattle and Port Angeles, Washington, to visit some good friends: Mary and Luis, who are about to have a baby, and Stacie and Chris, who were just married. We abandoned Fang and Errol to the capable hands of our new pet sitter, and flew up to Seattle last Wednesday, the 9th.

Mount Rainier

We arrived at Mary and Luis' house in time for dinner. We were pleasantly surprised to find that another college friend, Cress, and her family would be joining us for the meal! Luis cooked up a fabulous three course dinner for the seven of us and we had a great time catching up on everyone's latest news.

Luis hard at work making dessert

Mary, Matt, Ryder, and Cress

First course - new style sashimi

Pasta with mushroom sauce

Our young sommelier

Luis had to work on Thursday, so Mary and the two of us decided to go down to Green Lake and walk around the park. Green Lake is only a couple of blocks from their house, and we made it all the way around the perimeter of the lake. We stopped to take a few pictures on the way. It's really a nice park. We were surprised by how many people seemed to be there on a Thursday morning, though. Apparently no one in Seattle works for a living. Or perhaps they're all on furlough, like us!

Green Lake Wildlife

Right after lunch, Jeff and I drove over to Edmonds to catch the Edmonds-Kingston ferry over to the Olympic Peninsula. The ferry ride across is always fun, and the drive from Kingston to Port Angeles is scenic and relaxing. We arrived in Port Angeles at about 3:00, and went straight to Chris and Stacie's house, where we met Chris for the first time, and we met Gracie, their dog for the first time as well. We played with Gracie for a while, and got a tour of the cute house, and then we all left together to drive over to Chris' family's cabin on Lake Sutherland. Chris showed us around the cabin, then took us out on his boat for a drive around the lake. It was surrounded by quaint cabins and dense trees and little mountains. Gracie went along for the ride, and delighted in spending much of her time switching between all of our laps.

A sailboat near our ferry

Gracie, who never tires of playing Frisbee

Stacie, Chris, and Gracie

After the boat tour, we went back to the cabin where Chris and Stacie whipped up a tasty dinner of grilled brats, and yummy chips and salsa, and macaroni salad. It was great to picnic outside on the deck and be out in nature. It's not often that we can eat outside in Kansas without our food blowing away, so we were happy to get the chance to do it in Washington!

The four of us at the lake

We headed back into Port Angeles by way of a little detour down Ediz Hook Road. It's a neat peninsula that shelters Port Angeles Harbor. We checked out the cool rock piles and took some more pictures of ourselves. After that, we had to get back to Kingston to catch a late ferry back to Seattle for the night.

We just had to take one of Stacie's famous self portraits!

Michelle on the hook

Jeff on the hook

Jeff and I spent the following morning shoe shopping in Seattle, and then met up with Mary and Luis for lunch at Serious Pie, which is a downtown pizza place that serves up some gourmet type pizzas. It was pretty good. After that, we all roamed about downtown shopping for a while, then went back to the house to rest up for the evening. We had an early dinner reservation at Wild Ginger, where we met up with one of Luis' coworkers from Boeing. The food at Wild Ginger is served family style, and we decided to let our waiter choose a variety of dishes for us to eat. It was a great choice - he brought out five different appetizers and five different entrees, and we all got a taste of each. It was a really fun restaurant and the food was outstanding!

After dinner, we moved across the street to Benaroya Hall to hear the Seattle Symphony Orchestra perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was a nice concert, but I have to say (and Jeff agrees) that we could NEVER play for their conductor. He was a mess. I'm pretty sure he was half a beat ahead of the orchestra the entire time, and he was flailing all about in such a manner that you couldn't really tell where the beat was, so it was definitely not the orchestra being behind. The orchestra sounded just fine, and they were all together, just not with him. Anyway, it was amusing to watch, and it was fun to hear the Fifth played live.

Saturday morning was spent at Pike Place Market with Mary and Luis. We've all been to the market before, but this time was a little different. We decided to take a tasting tour of the market through a guide company called Savor Seattle Tours. It was really good. We had a group of about 16 people, and we were led to nine different stalls in the market for a variety of food samples. The tour lasted about two hours. When it was over, we walked back through the market to do some grocery shopping. We picked up a yummy fresh fruit smoothie, some chocolate covered cherries, and some good anchovies. The smoothie was devoured right away, the rest came home to Wichita with us.

The famous entrance to the market

Sampling a Daily Dozen Doughnut

A cutie from Pike Place Fish

Fresh fruit from Frank's Quality Produce

So pretty!

The neon signs at the market are fun

Gorgeous flowers

This is Brett, our illustrious tour guide, at Beecher's Handmade Cheese

Crab cakes at Etta's Seafood

Mushrooms in the market

We decided to visit IKEA for part of the afternoon. We all love that store, and Mary and Luis wanted to look at some baby items, and Jeff and I just wanted to wander around and see all the great stuff we can't have because we don't have IKEA anywhere near us. We ended up buying a little stuffed mouse toy for Fang, and making a wish list of bigger items that we'd love to have to decorate our second guest bedroom. Oh IKEA, please come to Kansas!

After IKEA, we all needed a rest, so it was back to Mary and Luis' house for the rest of the afternoon. Then we went out again for our last dinner together, this time to Dahlia Lounge. After dinner, we went back to the house and shared our vacation photos with each other. Mary and Luis showed us their England and France photos from over the summer, and we showed them our Austria and Switzerland photos. Then it was off to bed for all of us.

The sun sets on Mary and Luis' backyard

We flew home early Sunday morning and arrived back in Wichita in the middle of the afternoon. We were relieved to find our pups were happy and well fed. I don't think they missed us too much. We'll definitely have to try this pet sitter thing again on our next short trip out of town.

A trip to Denver for the Porsche Aircraft Experience

2009-09-03T20:17:00.013-05:00

I (Michelle) got to take a fun little trip over to Denver today. One of my coworkers, Phil, owns a couple of airplanes, as well as a private field with a grass strip. A little while back, he received an invitation to the Porsche Aircraft Experience in Centennial, Colorado, which is just outside Denver. He asked around at work to see if anyone wanted to go along for the ride, and a couple of us thought it sounded like a fun way to spend a day, so we signed up to go with him.

We watched the weather all week to make sure it would cooperate for the trip. Phil called over this morning to say we were good to go, and we'd be wheels up at 08:00, so I hopped in the car, picked up our other coworker, Don, and we all gathered at Phil's airport, Eagle Field, outside Bentley, KS. We piled into his 1970 Piper Comanche and were on our way to Denver in no time.

We arrived in Centennial a couple of hours later, parked the airplane, got our ramp passes, and headed over to the Porsche show. The first thing we did was sign up for our reserved auto-cross times, and then we spent some time looking at the airplanes on display. We grabbed lunch at the show, and then got shuttled over to the auto-cross track for some driving.

Two of us (Don and I) were slightly dismayed that only Boxster S's and Cayman S's were offered for our driving pleasure, but Phil was quite content (he was there for the airplanes, not the cars). We got over it pretty quickly, and each took a turn driving the track with one of Porsche's driving school instructors. Phil took a Boxster S, and Don and I each took a Cayman S around the track. We got to drive a couple of laps on our own, then we each got to ride along with an instructor doing the track. It was fun, but I wasn't all that impressed with the car. It's supposed to be a competitor for my new car, but it didn't really compare. I guess that just means that I'm a happy BMW customer!

After our driving, we went back over to the show again. We finished making the rounds with the airplanes, and I took a few minutes to look over the new Porsche Panamera Turbo that they had on display. We eventually all made it back over to the air conditioned comfort of the FBO, chilled out for a while, checked the weather, discovered that there was a thunderstorm brewing, and decided to head back home.

We had to divert to the north a bit to avoid running into the building storm on the way home, but it didn't add much to our flight time. We made it back to Phil's field at a little after 17:00, and Don and I were both home by 18:00, just in time for dinner.

I have to say that it was pretty cool to get out to the mountains and back in only 10 hours and still have time to have fun in the middle of the day. Thanks to Phil for extending the invitation and for flying us out there for the fun!

ZipZap Attack

2009-08-08T20:09:00.004-05:00

We had some tiny little remote control cars a while back that we used to torment Fang and Errol with when they were little. When we first played with them, they were scared to death of the things, but after a while, they learned how to defend the house from the terror of the ZipZaps. Errol was the first one to figure out that if he snatched up a car and carried it over to a carpeted area, it would essentially be out of commission. Fang eventually caught on, though he still prefers to just carry them around in his mouth until we make him give them up. As you can see, they started to get quite excited whenever the little cars came out. We've never seen Errol move quite so fast as when he is in "kill" mode. It makes us wonder what would happen if we let a rat or mouse loose in the house for him to hunt. I'm also quite proud of the fact that Fang actually minds us when we tell him to "drop it" or "leave it". Those are pretty much the only commands he successfully follows without the added incentive of a treat. We took this video the last time we played with the cars before we had to throw them away due to little parts starting to fall off here and there. Sorry for the poor quality - I had to dial it down quite a bit due to the length of the video.

Couch Time

2009-07-31T19:10:00.005-05:00

I was going through some old puppy pictures because it has been a while since we took any good ones, and I came across these from a few months ago. I was reading a book on the sofa and Fang came over to curl up with me. It was quite comfy and cozy for both of us...

Smoked Salmon Crepes with Cream Cheese and Celery Leaf Salad

2009-07-20T18:31:00.005-05:00

We hosted a small dinner party at our house last Saturday night for Jeff's former boss and one of his coworkers - a little last hurrah before they had to go back to work in new roles after our furlough ended. As we are apt to do, we decided to experiment on our poor unsuspecting guests with a new recipe. It was a hit. These were really tasty, not too scary, and even the suspicious said they were pleasantly surprised by how good they were. We even got some people to try the edible flowers! We used our fun dinnerware set for the evening, and we thought the plates came out looking quite colorful and pretty. The only thing we might change next time would be to add a few artfully placed drops of thickened dressing around the sides, not because the food needed it, but because it might give the plates just a bit more pizazz.

We had one other new experimental dish for the night - a Savarin aux Fruits (fresh raspberries and strawberries). We failed to get any photos taken of it before we cut into it, but it was also really yummy. We might make it again someday and post that recipe as well.

Here's how to make the Smoked Salmon Crepe dish...the recipe came from "Amuse Bouche" by Rick Tramonto:

The Crepes
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 tsp sugar
pinch of salt
1 1/4 cups milk
3 large eggs
melted butter

1. Whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium sized bowl. Make a well in the center of the mixture and pour in the milk. Whisk the milk into the flour mixture until the batter is smooth and well blended. Whisk in the eggs until blended.

2. Strain the batter through a sieve into another medium-sized bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours to give the batter time to rest.

3. Heat an 8-inch nonstick skillet or crepe pan over medium heat. Lightly brush the pan with melted butter.

4. Ladle about 1/4 cup of the batter into the skillet and tilt the pan in all directions to evenly coat the bottom. Cook the crepes for about 30 seconds or until the bottom is lightly brown. Loosen the edges with a spatula and flip the crepe over. Cook the underside for 10 to 15 seconds or until it is set, dry, and browned in spots. Slide the crepe onto a flat plate and cover with a piece of wax paper.

5. Repeat with the remaining batter, brushing the pan with more butter as needed, and stacking the crepes between wax paper. The crepes may be made up to 3 days ahead. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Bring to room temperature before using.

The Filling, The Stack, and The Salad
2 oz cream cheese, softened
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 lb thinly sliced smoked salmon
5 Crepes (see recipe above)
1/2 cup celery leaves
1 tbsp olive oil
Grated zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp finely snipped chives
6 cucumber flowers, for garnishing (we used all different types of edible flowers)

1. Put the cream cheese in a small bowl with 2 teaspoons of the lemon juice. Mix well and season to taste with salt and pepper.

2. Using a 3-inch round cookie cutter (we made ours bigger - closer to 5 inches), stamp out 4 rounds of smoked salmon and 5 rounds of crepes (again, we went a little taller on ours, 5 salmon and 6 crepes).

3. Place 1 crepe on a work surface and top with a salmon round. Spread about 1 tablespoon of the cream cheese over the salmon. Continue the layering, so that you end with a plain crepe on top of the stack. (Our smoked salmon wasn't what we'd call "thinly sliced", so rather than making rounds, we just covered the surface of the crepe with thinly pulled apart salmon. Not quite as pretty, but it worked. We also made two batches of the filling for our larger diameter crepes and our taller stack.)

4. Put the celery leaves in a small bowl and toss with the olive oil, lemon zest, chives, and remaining 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

5. To serve, divide the celery salad among 6 small plates. Cut the stack of salmon crepes into 6 wedges. Arrange a wedge and a cucumber flower on each plate.

The photos from Europe are online!

2009-07-10T19:06:00.003-05:00

We just finished uploading all of our vacation photos to our Picasa account. We had some trouble narrowing them down this time - we ended up with nearly 1000 that we liked and wanted to keep! They're in two albums on Picasa. The first one has mostly pictures from the Austria and Germany portion of our trip. The second one has the photos from the Switzerland portion of our trip. If you have any questions about any portion of the trip that we don't answer in the captions, feel free to ask away. There was so much to absorb that I'm sure we didn't do it justice in our photo descriptions. We hope you enjoy looking at them!

Days 15, 16 and 17

2009-07-06T14:40:00.013-05:00

This is the last post about our vacation. We're back home now, trying to catch up on everything that went neglected for the past three weeks. We had a great trip, and would highly recommend Austria and Switzerland to anyone who has a desire to visit them. They're both beautiful countries full of fun and interesting things to do.

Day 15 was spent touring a museum in Brienz called the Ballenberg Open Air Museum. They've taken a bunch of traditional buildings from all over Switzerland, some dating back into the 1300s, and moved them into this big park outside the town. You can walk through all the old buildings, see demonstrations of all kinds of skills and crafts from the olden days, and check out farm animals from the area. It was pretty neat. They had a wide range of architectural styles from all over the country. We saw live demonstrations of tatting, meat smoking, shingle making, wood carving, charcoal making, and an actual saw mill powered by a water wheel in action. We walked through many old buildings, some quite large, and realized just how lucky we are to have the modern conveniences we have today.

After the museum, we went over to Interlaken to walk up and down the main street, then we hit the grocery store once again for dinner supplies. We spent the evening back at the apartment in Lauterbrunnen making hamburgers for dinner and doing laundry.

Day 16 was spent in the Lauterbrunnen area. We started with a trip up the valley to the Trummelbach Falls. This is a super cool waterfall that has carved its way into the rock and is almost entirely inside the mountain. There is an underground elevator that takes you up about halfway to the top, and then you wander through a series of tunnels, up and down inside the mountain, to catch glimpses of the waterfall. The sound is incredible, and the amount of water falling and twisting its way through the mountain is just amazing to see.

We went back to our apartment for a quick lunch, then took the cable car and train from Lauterbrunnen to Murren. We took a nice easy hike from Murren to Grutschalp and the cable car back down from there. We got back to Lauterbrunnen in the late afternoon, and we proceeded back to the apartment to drop off the car before dinner. We eventually wandered back into town because we had an appointment with a coworker of Michelle's who was scheduled to arrive in Lauterbrunnen that evening. We found him and his wife, passed on our advice on what they should see and do in the area the next day, took them back to the apartment so they could see what a Swiss apartment looked like, and then all drove back into town together. They had dinner at their hotel with their tour group, and we went to dinner at another hotel in town for grilled steak and lamb before calling it a night (they gave us bibs to wear at dinner, LOL).

Day 17 was spent doing mostly end of the trip sorts of things. We had to drive to Zurich, check into our hotel at the airport, then take our new car over to the shipping company so it could be sent back to the US. It was a bit sad to turn it in, knowing it would be a while before we got to see it again, but we managed. After that, we went back to the hotel, where Michelle got in a quick workout and Jeff got in some surfing before we got dressed to go to dinner at Petermann's Kunststuben, our one very fancy meal for the trip. We took the train from the airport to dinner, and settled in for a four hour dining extravaganza. Here are some pictures from dinner:

After dinner, it was back to the airport for the night. We flew back to St. Louis the next morning. We're so glad we had the opportunity to take this trip, and we hope there will be many more to come in the future!

Days 12, 13 and 14

2009-06-29T01:48:00.027-05:00

We spent Friday, Day 12, in Bern and Fribourg because it was clouded over here in Lauterbrunnen, so there was no point in exploring the mountains that day. We got a bit of a late start because we were trying to finish up some laundry that morning, but we eventually got out the door. We arrived in Bern just in time for lunch, so we parked the car, and found a bench in one of the covered shopping arcades on which to eat our picnic lunch of cured meats, Swiss cheeses, tomatoes, rolls, apples, and Gummy Bears. :)

After lunch, we continued down the arcade in the direction of the famous Bern Bear Pits, only to discover that the last bear had died a couple of months ago, and they wouldn't be putting new bears in the exhibit until their new pit, which is currently under construction, is finished later this year. I wasn't too disappointed, because I think making poor bears live in a concrete pit in the middle of the city is a bit sad anyway. After that, we wandered around the city a bit more, found some fountains, found the house where Einstein formulated his theory of special relativity, and found a wine shop to poke about in for a while. Then we swung by the clock tower and decided to end our visit to Bern in favor of moving down to Fribourg.

Our first stop in Fribourg was a scenic overlook spot high above the old city. We snapped a few pictures there and admired the view for a while. Then we meandered our way down through the old-old city, and on into the new-old city, where we stopped to get out and see the cathedral and walk the streets for a while before we decided it was too hot, and we were too tired, and we just wanted to get back to our apartment. I was still battling my cold that day, so I wasn't much in the mood for wandering around. We made it back to the apartment and went out for dinner to a hotel that was having a BBQ night. We had a pot of fondue and BBQ for dinner, and it was good.

Saturday was another cloudy day here in the valley, so we decided to drive to Gruyeres for the day. We took a very twisty and curvy road through a beautiful valley and over a mountain pass to get there. It was a fun drive in the new car. Our first stop once we arrived in Gruyere was at the cheese factory. We watched a demonstration of Gruyere AOC cheese making, then we went to the restaurant for more fondue and some rosti, a potato dish that the Swiss are quite fond of. For dessert, we moved over to the Cailler chocolate factory across town, where we watched funny old movies about chocolate, toured their museum to learn how they make their chocolates, and then consumed copious amounts of free samples.

After lunch and dessert, we went to Chateau Gruyeres up on top of the hill. We walked through the old town area on the city wall, then on in to the castle. They did a pretty neat multimedia presentation about the history of the castle, then we were set free to tour the building and the grounds on our own. It was one of the best castle museums we've ever been to. I wasn't expecting much from their website, but it turned out to be a really good place to visit. After we finished up at the Chateau, we drove back to our apartment in Lauterbrunnen for the night.

We finally had a perfectly clear day arrive on Sunday morning, so we hustled into gear and got ourselves over to the train station for the trip up to the Jungfraujoch, the "Top of Europe". We rode the train from Lauterbrunnen, to Wengen, to Kleine Scheidegg, and then we switched trains to continue the journey from Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch station. The first leg of the trip was mostly over ground, and had spectacular views. It took about 30 minutes. The second leg of the trip was almost entirely in underground tunnels and it took about an hour. We eventually arrived at a very cold underground station in the top of the mountain. We climbed out a tunnel and went up an elevator to a lookout point, where we were pleased to see that it was still sunny outside and we could see the glacier below us and the mountains all around. We walked out on the glacier for some fun in the snow before going back inside for lunch in one of the restaurants. After lunch, we walked through the ice cave, which is a little ice sculpture museum that they've carved out of the glacier. It was pretty fun. Then we got back on the train for the ride down the mountain.

We stopped our train trip at Kleine Scheidegg on the way down, and got out to take a hike across the mountain terrain. We hiked from Kleine Scheidegg to Mannlichen. It was a beautiful trail. We started out with views of the valley where Grindelwald is located, and eventually made it up to a ridge where we could see the valley where Lauterbrunnen is located as well. The clouds started to move in during the hike, but we were still able to take in some amazing views while we walked. We took the cable car from Mannlichen down to Wengen, then got back on the train for the rest of the ride back to Lauterbrunnen.

Only two more days left here in Lauterbrunnen, then we move to Zurich for one day, and fly home on Thursday!

Days 8 through 11

2009-06-25T10:47:00.020-05:00

I believe when we last left you we were ready to move from the Berchtesgaden area of Germany over into Switzerland. We spent much of Day 8 stuck in the car due to very long traffic jams in Germany. Thankfully, the roads finally opened up after lunch, and we were able to test the capabilities of the new car. I managed to hit 135 mph on one unlimited speed section of the autobahn. It was quite fun, and a little scary, but I got my fix. It's something I'll never be able to try legally at home, so I'm glad we had the opportunity to do it here.

We meandered our way to Luzern via a town called St. Gallen, which is famous for its abbey and library. We made it to the abbey about half an hour before the library closed so we made a quick tour of the room to see some very old texts and to check out the nifty architecture in the library. They don't allow photos inside, but you can see a picture of the place here.

We left St. Gallen and continued on to Luzern, and got stuck in yet another traffic jam outside Zurich. It was quite an exhausting day of driving. However, once we finally made it to Luzern, we went straight to dinner at the Mexican restaurant that I'd been looking forward to trying ever since we started planning our trip. It was pretty good, and stupid expensive. 15 Francs for a tiny (maybe 6-8 ounces?) frozen margarita. Hmmph. We had them anyway. :)

The next day was rainy and cloudy, so we decided to go to the Swiss Transport Museum in Luzern, along with what must have been the entire school-aged population of the city. They had some neat displays of trains, cable cars, and ships, along with a couple of interesting airplanes. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the old town area of Luzern, and napping back in our hotel room, because we were both quite exhausted, and because I started getting the symptoms of a cold around then. We eventually went out for what turned out to be an excellent dinner. Jeff found a place with a good wine list, so we decided to try it. We found a great bottle of Bordeaux and both had lamb dishes to go with it.

The next morning, we walked up to the old city wall overlooking Luzern. We climbed up to the top and walked along the wall for a while, then climbed one of the towers for a good view of the city.

After that, we wandered back through some more of the old town area, then perused the wares at Bucherer for a while before getting back in the car to move to our next destination, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

We've been blessed with great weather in Lauterbrunnen so far. When we arrived last night, the tops of the mountains surrounding us were in view, and several waterfalls are currently active. We are renting an apartment here, so we hit the little grocery shop in town for some supplies, then made dinner before taking a short walk up the valley towards Stechelberg before calling it a night. Here's the view from our apartment:

This morning we awoke to another mostly clear day, so we decided to take the cable cars from Stechelberg to the top of the Schilthorn to see the views. We were up in the clouds for part of the time, but other times things cleared up and we could see over the Alps. We meandered our way back down with strolls through Murren and Gimmelwald before coming back to our apartment, then we drove down into Interlaken to stock up on supplies at the supermarket for the rest of our stay here.

It's hard to believe that we only have six more full days here before we fly back home, but I suppose all good vacations must eventually come to an end, and we definitely miss our little pups. I suspect they are quite used to being spoiled and won't want to come back home with us, but they're going to have to. :)

Days 5 through 7

2009-06-21T14:37:00.014-05:00

We have had quite the busy last three days and we need to catch up on our blogging!

On Friday, we drove to Hallstatt, Austria, to see the picturesque town and to tour the salt mine in the mountains above the town. We began our visit with a funicular ride to the top of the mountain, and then we climbed the rest of the way to the salt mine on foot. They gave us funny overclothes with padded hineys to wear on our tour, and they gave us a shot of schnapps to warm us up for the underground tour. We walked into the mountain, then visited a few caverns inside where they used to leach the salt out of the rock with water. We also rode a couple of long wooden slides inside the mountain (hence the need for the padded pants). It was an interesting tour. It was one of the few mines we've been in that actually contained copious examples of the substance being mined - the walls were covered in salt crystals. The tour ended with a train ride through a tiny tunnel out to the side of the mountain.

From there, we walked back down to the funicular, and then rode it back down into Hallstatt. We wandered around Hallstatt for a while and ate a very late lunch there before heading back to our hotel for the night.

Saturday was spent touring the Konigssee, which is the lake right by our hotel here in Germany. It's been very well preserved from pollution over the last 100 years or so, and is quite pristine. We took a boat cruise across the lake to the far side, and from there we hiked to another lake and on around it to see a waterfall. We knew the waterfall was there, as we had seen it through a break in the clouds from the boat, but it wasn't until we reached the other side of the little lake that it appeared to us again. We were glad it finally did. We hiked back to the boat and rode back across the Konigssee to Schoenau. We made a quick stop at the hotel for afternoon tea (ok, no tea, but definitely cheesecake and strawberry shortcake, and doughnuts) for another late lunch. Then we moved ourselves and all our dirty laundry into Berchtesgaden to visit the waschsalon, or laundromat, as we call them here. After that, we went out for dinner at a little local restaurant, and then called it a night.

Today (Sunday), we visited some attractions near the town of Werfen, Austria. Our first stop was the Eisriesenwelt, which is an ice cave. It was a fantastic experience; one that would probably never be allowed in the US due to its total non-ADA accessible-ness. We drove up the side of a mountain to a parking lot. From there, we hiked about 20 minutes farther up the mountain to a cable car, which took us up another very steep and very high amount, and from there we hiked another 20 minutes up to the entrance of the ice cave. Once inside, we climbed another 700 or so steps UP into the ice cave, for a total of about a 1 km trek into the cave, the entirety of which was coated in amazing ice formations (sorry, no photos allowed inside, so check it out on their website). I have no idea how anyone ever decided to try and explore this mountain enough to find this place, but I'm glad they did. It was amazing.

On our way back down, we stopped for a quick bite to eat at a snack stand, then continued over to another attraction in Werfen: Berg Hohenwerfen. The castle itself was cool to look at, but the main feature of this visit was the falconry exhibition. We watched eagles and falcons and vultures and owls swoop over our heads while a four man brass ensemble played accompanying music. It was pretty cool. The birds were allowed to fly all over the place, right over the crowd. The handlers tossed dead mice up into the air for the birds to catch (sometimes they missed and they fell on the crowd, which was hilarious). It was a pretty good show.

After the castle, we headed back to our hotel for dinner. Tomorrow we drive to Luzern, Switzerland, with a stopover in St. Gallen, Switzerland, to see the library.

Day 4 of the trip: BMW in Munich

2009-06-19T14:51:00.006-05:00

We successfully acquired our new car in Munich yesterday. We left Schoenau am Konigssee at about 8:30 am for the drive to Munich and went straight to the BMW Welt near the Olympic Stadium. We parked our rental car in the garage, and proceeded inside to check-in for our delivery.

From the moment we stepped inside, we were amazed by the professional courtesy and kindness extended by the staff of the Welt. We were treated exceptionally well, even though they do this for about 90 customers, on average, every day. We were shown to the private elevator for ED customers, which took us up to the premium lounge, where we signed some papers for our insurance and were given times for our museum tour and factory tour, all included.

We took the museum tour first, then went back to the delivery center where we ate lunch in the premium lounge prior to taking delivery of the car. We met our delivery coordinator, Britta, after that, and she took us down to the delivery floor where she introduced us to our new car. She showed us everything we needed to know about how to operate the car, then turned us loose.

We took the car out of the building, and handed it straight to a valet for parking underground while we returned our rental car (which they repeatedly offered to do for us, but we politely refused because we knew there could be potential issues with the turn-in after what happened in Innsbruck... there were none, thankfully). We then returned to the delivery center to meet our tour guide for the factory tour.

When asking directions for the tour, we also asked if there were lockers in which we could place our bags during the tour, knowing we couldn't take the camera in with us, and the lady at the desk said she would just take them and put them in our car for us. So we let her. And they were there when we picked up the car from the valet after the factory tour. Truly amazing customer service!

We ended the day with the drive back to our hotel in Schoenau am Konigssee. We managed to resist the temptation to exceed the recommended break-in period limits of the car (100 mph and 4500 rpm), but just barely. ;)

Day Three: Salzburg

2009-06-17T14:12:00.010-05:00

We spent our day today in Salzburg, Austria. We began with a stroll through Mirabell Gardens, home of many of the scenes from the Sound of Music movie. We visited the dwarf garden, the little covered alley, and the stairs the kids and Maria hop up and down. We refrained from singing.

After Mirabell, we swung by two of Mozart's houses, and then took a walk down the Getreidegasse, which is a shopping corridor in the old part of the city. We wandered our way past the Residenz, and into the Dom, where we were met with a surprise after a few minutes: the arrival of the Flint Hills something-or-other Choir, with director Reg, from my grandparent's church in Manhattan, Kansas. It was a bit strange to see so many people from home so far away from home. They marched up to the front of the church, climbed on some risers, and began to sing. We didn't get a chance to say hello to Reg, but I'm sure he'll hear that we saw him there when he gets home.

We continued our touring through a couple of other churches, then stopped for a quick lunch before heading up to Hohensalzburg, the fortress above the city. We met and conversed with a cute old British fellow on our way back down the funicular afterwards. He thought Kansas was part of “the South”. We didn't feel the need to correct him. :)

We finished out the afternoon with a visit to Hellbrunn Palace and Water Garden. This place was pretty fun. We didn't tour the palace, we just took the tour of the Water Garden, which is full of trick fountains and water powered mechanical figurines. Our guide delighted in soaking everyone on the tour, usually by surprise.

On our way out of the garden, we walked past the gazebo that was featured in the Sound of Music. They didn't use this actual gazebo for filming, they recreated it in a little larger scale for the movie.

Tomorrow is car-pick-up day! It seems a bit surreal that we're getting a new car tomorrow, so I'm sure it will be an interesting day.

The first two (three?) days

2009-06-16T15:42:00.008-05:00

Well, we managed to survive the first couple of days on our vacation. Three days, if you count the flying, only two if you count the touristing. The flights were on time and relatively pilot error free, which was great. Unfortunately, we were seated in the screaming infant section on our overseas flight, so sleep was really not an option. We managed to get a few minutes here and there and made it through our first day without crashing too early.

We arrived in Zurich, Switzerland, picked up some cash, some train passes for later in the trip, and some Starbucks for breakfast, then hopped in the rental car, a Ford S-Max which is a 7 passenger minivan type thing (why do they always give us such huge cars when we reserve little VW Golf type cars?) and hit the road for Innsbruck, Austria. We side tripped to Vaduz, Liechtenstein, just to say we've been there, and paused for a break in Feldkirch, Austria.

Michelle in Feldkirch

Around this time we noticed that our rental car was behaving oddly, so upon arrival in Innsbruck we went straight to the Europcar rental facility. We will never rent from them again. It took over an hour of nonsense for us to convince them that they needed to give us a car that worked. Long story short, they finally did (a more reasonably sized Golf this time), and we contined down the road a little way to Hall in Tirol and our hotel for the night. We had showers, then dinner, and then we took a little tour of the area around the hotel before calling it a night.

I photographed Jeff

He photographed this

We started our day today with a walking tour of the old town portion of Hall in Tirol. It was pretty cute. Old churches, colorful buildings, narrow alleyways, and a fortress.

Hall in Tirol

After Hall, we proceeded back to Innsbruck to see the Goldenes Dachl (meh), the Helbinghaus (meh), and the Dom, where Maximilian is entombed. We wandered around and found another church, then stopped for a quick lunch and got back on the road.

Goldenes Dachl, Innsbruck

Maximillian's Funeral Procession

Roar!

We drove to Wattens, where we toured the Swarovski Kristallwelt, which was quite possibly the strangest museum ever. I think they let a bunch of semi-known and unknown modern art types run wild in there. Some of the displays were cool, and others were just plain strange and silly.

The Swarovski Giant

Oooh, shiny!

We continued on down the road to our hotel for the next six nights near the Konigssee in Germany. It was a beautiful drive through the Alps and the national park area. We arrived at the hotel just in time for a nice dinner and a relaxing evening. We haven't quite figured out what we're doing tomorrow, but I'm sure it will be fun!

The drive from Innsbruck to Schoenau am Konigssee

We're off!

2009-06-13T09:28:00.002-05:00

We're off on our journey starting today! We're both quite excited, though we haven't had much time to think about it this week. Jeff had to go to Connecticut from Tuesday through Thursday for a business trip, and Friday was a bit crazy for Jeff at work, too. He had four or five meetings, he had to pack up his desk for moving to another location during our furlough, and he had to take his recently laid off employees out for their farewell lunch. Needless to say, he got home a bit late last night. :)

Michelle hung around home all week taking care of our long list of things to do before we leave. The list seemed to get longer, not shorter for a while there, but eventually everything got done and we're ready to go. We're hoping to do some blogging about the trip while we're over there, so watch this space for photos and trip notes!

Joella's Hooding Ceremony

2009-05-18T20:29:00.013-05:00

We traveled to Lawrence this weekend for Joella's med school graduation hooding ceremony. Dan drove to Wichita from Tulsa in the morning, met up with us and Joella, and we all carpooled to Lawrence together. We arrived at about 2:30 and met our Phillips grandparents, our Uncle Don who flew in from Pittsburg, and Nathan and Ashley at an old family friend's house.

Joella and Don

Grandmother Phillips

Grandfather Phillips

Ashley and Nathan

Dan

We hung out there for a couple of hours, then adjourned to an early dinner at Marisco's, where we met up with Uncle Mike and Aunt Robyn, and Grandma Frye.

The hooding ceremony at the Lied Center started at 7:00. We arrived a little early, giving us more time for family photos. An ice cream truck was trolling the parking lot for customers, and someone dared Nathan to chase it down. He gladly obliged. The truck driver didn't seem very amused when he found out that Nathan was just running after him for a photo op, and not for a tasty treat. LOL

Everyone minus the photographer

The Phillips side of the family

Aren't we cool?

Just for you, Stacie

Sisters (I'm glad I'm not the only pale person on the planet)

Nathan in an unusual moment of exuberance (and the Frye side of the fam)

Joella gets ready to go in

Nathan goes for ice cream

The ceremony itself was a little long, but it was cool to see Joella get her hood and her two awards. She was awarded the Janet M. Glasgow-Rubin Achievement Citation for being a woman in the top 10% of her class, as well as the Willard J. Smith, M.D. Award for Academic Achievement for her superior academic performance. She was also recognized for her participation in two honor societies: the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She'll be going on to a couple of residency training programs: a Transitional year to be spent at Methodist Hospital in Houston, and then four years of Radiation Oncology Residency at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. She's very excited about both (they were her top choices for residency programs).

Joella is hooded

Dr. Joella E. Wilson, M.D.!

We drove back home to Wichita with Dan after the ceremony. Jeff and Dan napped while Michelle avoided several suicidal deer on the turnpike. It was NOT fun. Luckily, we and the deer survived our harrowing journey home.

Go us!

2009-05-12T22:05:00.006-05:00

I believe that today is our one year anniversary of joining the Y. I'm pleased to say we are still members, and that we've gotten into a routine of going at least four times a week and sometimes five. We're both definitely healthier now. I've lost over 25 pounds since joining, plus another 10 or so that I worked off at home in the few months prior to joining, so about 35 in all. Jeff's lost a few pounds too, and is definitely more toned than he's ever been. He still complains about going, but not too much. :) Fang and Errol have maintained their diets this year, too. We're just quite the healthy household of late. I'm proud of both of us for keeping it up and I hope we'll be able to continue the healthy exercise habits the rest of our lives!

Visit from Sara and John

2009-05-09T10:57:00.010-05:00

We had the pleasure of a visit from two of Jeff's college friends, Sara and John, the other night. They brought their new daughter, Julia, along with them. She's a little over six months old, and she's a cutie, but no, we still don't want one. :P

Errol was a bit of a monster during the visit. I don't know what's wrong with him, but he just can't deal with children. He barks and them, and jumps at them, and tries to get in their carriers with them. Of course, this freaks the kids out, too, so things just escalate. Errol got to spend some alone time in his crate for a while during the visit, but when John let him out a little later, he seemed better. Julia didn't care at all what Errol was doing, because she has two dogs at home. Errol settled down when Julia was put down on the floor and they became friends.

Julia and Errol

Julia liked playing with the rug - she used it to pull herself when rolling over

Errol gives Julia a sniff - yep, smells like baby

Sara and Julia

Jeff accepts temporary custody of Julia

Jeff absentmindedly scritchy scratches Julia's head

Fang investigates the newcomer

Errol gets some much needed attention from John

Nathan's Senior Recital

2009-05-06T21:18:00.006-05:00

We took a quick trip up to Hays with Joella last Friday night to hear Nathan play at his senior recital. Yes, he's really graduating! He has, after many, many years of schooling, earned his Bachelor of Music degree in Performance. The good part of taking many years to work up to your senior recital is that he has turned himself into an outstanding musician. Jaws were dropping and eyes were welling up throughout the entire performance. We're so glad we decided to go hear him.

He played:

"Abblasen" by Gottfried Reiche
"Vaga Cintia" by Alessandro Scarlatti
"Concerto in Eb" (Allegro con Spirito, Andante, Rondo) by Johann Nepomuk Hummel
"Okna" (Modre Okno, Zelene Okno, Cervene Okno, Zlate Okno) by Petr Eben
"Slavische Fantasie" by Carl Hohne

Here are some pictures from the evening...

Here's a link to the rest of the pictures: Nathan's Senior Recital

LOVE Wichita 2009

2009-04-27T17:52:00.003-05:00

We had a bit of a sad experience on Saturday. It was time again for our semi-annual community service day that we do through our church. The City of Wichita provides us with a list of projects to work on. This year, we invited a bunch of other churches around Wichita to join us, and 26 accepted! There were a total of about 3200 volunteers that served our city that day at over 100 different job sites.

Jeff and I were given the opportunity to be team captains again this year. We had a team of about 40 young adults to help us with our project. The city provided us the name and address of a woman who has been in violation of city ordinances for several years. She's a hoarder, and her yard has been accumulating junk for some time. She's been found guilty on several counts, and was about to be put in jail for this, but the judge decided to give her one last chance to clean up the yard, and we were the ones who agreed to take the job. She had a bunch of other things - dead tree, piles of tree limbs scattered around the property, general landscape cleanup - that we were going to help her with as well.

We knew that she was going to have trouble letting all this stuff go, so we and our team spent the month before the project praying for her. We, and several other people at our church and in the city offices, invested a lot of time trying to get her to return phone calls and let us meet with her before the project so we could get to know her and let her get to know us before the big day. She finally invited Jeff and I over to her house a few days before the project to show us around and let us see the work to be done.

When we met with her, we could tell we were in for a difficult task. She had an excuse to keep everything, even the dead leaves and tree limbs. We decided to go ahead and try the project anyway. We didn't want to give up then and just let her go to jail. We kept praying for a little miracle.

On the day of the project, we arrived early, along with a police officer, the neighborhood assistant, and our senior pastor. The city provided a huge dumpster for us to use to throw everything away. Jeff and the other three starting working with the lady right then to try and get her to let us move her junk into the dumpster. I took the rest of our group and got them started working on the dead tree and the other landscaping projects.

About an hour into the morning, we had to stop. The four people who were trying to get the lady to let us start moving the junk out got to a point where she just said, "don't touch my stuff". The police officer decided at that point that we just needed to quit, so we called everyone off the property immediately, lest she decide to try and charge us with theft or trespassing.

We were all quite saddened by the situation. We knew we were her last chance and that the judge would be sending her to prison at her next court date, after which the city would go in and clean everything up themselves, then send her a bill for the cost of doing so. We know she likely won't be able to pay the bill, and may lose her house and property because of that. It's just heartbreaking, because I know we had the people there to help her fix everything that day. Our team was awesome and we would have been able to get everything cleaned up for her in 3 or 4 hours, but we just weren't allowed to do it.

Our pastor used our project as an example in his sermon the next morning. He was talking about how our church's mission statement is "Being and Making Disciples". The text for the day was the section about Jesus at Gethsemane from the gospel of Mark. He pointed out that Jesus was incredibly lonely and anguished during that time, and that putting ourselves out in the world to do what we're called to do can also be incredibly lonely and painful for us when we're rejected.

We don't think our story with this particular lady is over yet. We're not sure what's going to happen, but we're all hoping that we'll be able to come along side her again someday and show her the love of Jesus again, and that she'll be more receptive to it then.

The good news - our entire team moved on to different projects around the city after ours fell apart, and we were able to help get more work done at the other sites than we had hoped to. So, the day wasn't a total failure. We're also very excited that so many other churches across the city wanted to join ours. We're making LOVE Wichita an annual event, and we're looking forward to seeing where God takes our city in the future. :)

Containment

2009-04-12T09:37:00.007-05:00

We installed the new gate on our deck yesterday morning. This should keep Fang from escaping when something tempts him in the yard below. It should also keep whatever animal has been venturing onto our deck in the early morning to mark our grill away, which should keep Errol from remarking the same spot every morning as well. As you can see from the photos below, Fang kept a close watch on the proceedings.

Hmm, what's all this for?

Make sure that pilot hole is straight!

A quick check of the instructions.

Lining up the bracket on the other side.

Trapped puppies... mission accomplished!

New trip plans

2009-04-05T20:37:00.003-05:00

Our plans for our summer vacation have come together in the last week or so. We're pretty excited about this one. We're going to a bunch of places neither of us has been before, so it will be a new adventure for both of us. Here's a quick rundown of the itinerary:

Day 1-2: Fly from St. Louis (we're leaving Fang and Errol with their grandparents) to Zurich, Switzerland. Pick up rental car, and hit the road. Meander our way to Innsbruck, Austria and see the city. Spend the night outside Innsbruck in the quaint town of Hall in Tirol.

Day 3: See Hall in Tirol, then move on to the Swarovski Crystal factory and museum. After that, we continue on to our hotel in Schoenau am Konigsee. We'll spend 6 nights there, using it as our base of operations for seeing Salzburg.

Days 4-8 (except Day 5, see below): See Salzburg and the surrounding region. We'll tour some castles, an ice cave, a salt mine, and wander through the gorgeous countryside during these days. We'll also be see ALL of the sights from the Sound of Music, and we will re-enact many of the scenes. LOL

Day 5: Drive to Munich, ditch the rental car, and pick up our new car! Yes, we're taking European delivery of a car. It's silly, but it's cheaper than buying it here, plus we don't have to pay for a rental car for the rest of our trip. How cool is that? Anyway, we'll get the new car, and tour the car museum and factory. We're hoping to find time to see the Englischer Garten as well, since it was a bit cold there for that last time we were in Munich. Then we will race down the autobahn and back to our hotel. Or perhaps we'll just take it easy since we'll be in the car's break in period. Sad, but true.

Days 9-10: Leave Austria and go back to Switzerland. We'll spend two days in Luzern. I have already located a Mexican restaurant there so I can get my salsa fix. I could care less about the rest of the city. Just kidding. :)

Days 11-17: We leave Luzern and drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, where we have rented an apartment for 7 nights. We plan to spend the nice days hiking in the mountains and taking lots of pretty pictures. We hope to be able to go to the top of the Jungfraujoch and the Schilthorn as well. We'll take side trips to Gruyere (for the cheese, the chocolate, and the castle), to Bern, to Thun, to Interlaken, and to Fribourg on days when the weather doesn't cooperate for hiking (or when we need to speed down some curvy roads in the new car for a while!).

Day 18: We head back to Zurich. We'll have to give up our car there, and they'll ship it back to the US for us. We have a fancy dinner planned that night, then it's off to the hotel at the airport for the last night of our trip.

Day 19: Back home - sort of. We'll fly back in to St. Louis, and reunite with our furkids.

So, what's the somewhat amusing twist to this little story? We found out earlier this week that our company is going to shut down for two weeks this summer. Which two weeks? Why, the two right after we get back from our three week trip, of course! So, we now have a full FIVE weeks off work this summer. Naturally, we don't have enough vacation time saved up to cover the full five weeks, so we'll get to take a little bit of that as unpaid leave. Oh well. We semi-expected this to happen, and we were prepared to deal with the consequences of our decision, so we're not upset or anything. We're just wondering what to do with all that time off!

A streak of bad behavior

2009-03-23T16:53:00.005-05:00

The pups have been on a bit of a wild streak lately. I guess they must be entering their rebellious teenage years or something.

Exhibit A: We discovered last night that Errol has been munching on the phone cord for our internet connection. It's hidden along the perimeter of the office, behind office furniture and a couch. Last night, Fang started barking furiously at Errol, so I went to investigate, and found Errol chewing happily away on the cord. It wasn't the first time, from the looks of the poor cord. Lucky for him, we found out before he electrocuted himself. He got a nice yelling at, and we've replaced the cord. So far, he's behaving himself.

Exhibit B: Fang has learned he can escape from the deck. Our dogs don't know how to go up or down long sets of stairs. They're four years old, and have never figured it out, and we decided not to teach them. This has been quite convenient for us for several reasons. 1) They can't bother our overnights guests who stay in the basement. 2) They can't get out to the backyard and run away because of the stairs leading from the deck to the yard (they can go right through the wrought iron fences that our neighborhood allows because they're so small). They can't leave the house through the garage because of the stairs there. The only place we've had to watch them is at the front door. Well, in January, we went to visit Jeff's aunt in Kansas City. During that visit, Fang experienced enough separation anxiety from me being on the 2nd floor while he was on the 1st floor, that he managed to run up the stairs to get to me all on his own. That was the first sign of trouble. The second was when Jeff walked down the stairs on the deck last week and Fang followed right along. Jeff caught him at the bottom, but that was the end of unsupervised freedom on the deck for the dogs. We have bought a gate to install at the top of the stairs to the deck. He doesn't seem to have figured out the garage or the indoors stairs yet, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on those.

We can't let something this cuddly escape!

Exhibit C: Errol has started DEMANDING lap time by throwing temper tantrums. Whenever I am at the computer, he will come over and growl at me and paw at my legs until I let him up on my lap. What a brat. Of course, he almost always gets his way. Then he sits there and gloats about it when Fang comes by looking for lap time.

Michelle, expressing how she feels when she doesn't get her way

Exhibit D: (The most obnoxious, but also hilarious new behavior) Fang has started targeting Errol whenever he needs to throw up. Fang throws up about once a week. Lately, it seems that he likes to seek out his brother and throw up on him instead of on the ground. Yes, this is disgusting and annoying for us to have to clean up. Errol has to have a bath right away, which he hates. Fang usually chooses to do this in the middle of the night, which we hate. But the dirty looks that Errol gives Fang after it happens are PRICELESS! Too funny.

Sleepy Boys

2009-03-02T22:02:00.002-06:00

I think this is supposed to work the other way... shouldn't the tiny puppy be on top?

Nathan's Birthday

2009-02-23T17:15:00.006-06:00

Nathan and Ashley were in town for a concert on Saturday night, so Joella came over and we all had dinner and birthday cake (Nathan's was the 20th) together.

The cake sends a message

Nathan and Ashley

This cake apparently sends mixed messages

A crick in the neck?

2009-02-04T15:43:00.001-06:00

How does one sleep this way?

Fang takes a nap

Ripped

2009-01-25T20:08:00.006-06:00

Jeff has a perpetual issue with the elbows of his shirtsleeves developing holes. They eventually tear through, and the shirt gets tossed (yes, I know I should patch them, but I don't feel like it). This is almost always how his shirts go. Strange, but true. Anyway, he had one fail on him last Tuesday morning at work, and it failed BIG time. The tear went from the elbow all the way down to the wrist. Did he come home and change into something else? No, he did what any engineer boy would do - he taped it together and proceeded through the rest of his day. I have to give him credit, he used discreet Scotch tape instead of duct tape or speed tape. I suggested staples... :)

All business from the front...

all party from the back!

Tagged!

2009-01-18T21:04:00.014-06:00

I was tagged by my friend Jackie for this meme. Here are the rules:

1. Go to your documents/pictures files.
2. Go to the 6th file folder.
3. Find the 6th picture.
4. Blog about it.
5. Tag 6 friends to do the same. (See a theme here?)

I had a little trouble following the rules here, as my 6th photo folder only contains two pictures. I requested a rule substitution, and was told to just use my 6th photo overall, so here it is:

As you can see, there's not much to see here. This was one of the shots I took after spending a day decorating our master bathroom. I blogged about that in a previous post. Many of the photos I took that day did not end up in the first post. It should be obvious why - this is an incredibly crummy photo. It's blurry, it's poorly composed, it's not well lit, and it's just stupid. I think my intention for this shot was to avoid taking tacky photos of our toilet, but still show off my amazing decorating skills (ha). That didn't work so well.

The glass block wall on the left is our shower of awesomeness, and over on the right are three photos of our pups that hang over the toilet. Our shower of awesomeness contains multiple showerheads and body sprays, and is quite a relaxing place to go when you're a bit stressed out or your muscles are tired after a workout. I'm a shower girl, not a bath girl, so we splurged a bit on that part of the house. The three photographs on the right feature Fang on top, Fang and Errol together in the middle, and Errol in the bottom. They're all pretty cute photos, and are the only hanging photos of the dogs we have in the house.

So, what's the moral of this story? Delete stupid photos off your hard drive so you don't get suckered into blogging about them someday! :)

I tag:

Emily
Cheri
Charles

and the rest of my friends with blogs have already been tagged, so I'm going to break the rules of this meme again and not tag 6 people. So there. :P

Our holiday report

2009-01-16T19:25:00.010-06:00

We had a little over two full weeks off of work this year for the Christmas and New Year holiday season, and we managed to stay quite productive the entire time. We each had a list of tasks that we wanted to work through and I think both of us came close to completing all of them.

Jeff started with a big project: Basement Storage Organization. About half of the space in our basement is unfinished and has become a collection place of miscellaneous unused and rarely used items over the four years we’ve been in our house. It’s a dumping ground for furniture we don’t like, things we brought home from my mom’s house after her death, extra storage for Joella and Dan who don’t have room at their places for all their stuff, old computer parts, and such and another. Jeff spent the better part of two days going through everything, organizing, piling, and tossing. We had been wanting to get rid of a few large pieces of furniture for quite a while. Our first thought was to donate some of the pieces, but we didn’t really think that any were in good enough shape to do that. We couldn’t take them to the dump because we don’t have a vehicle big enough to do that. So, we decided to list them for sale on Craigslist, and they all disappeared within a couple of days. We listed some smaller items as well, but so far no one is interested in those. Perhaps we’ll garage sale them someday. Anyway, the basement is now in a much nicer state of organization than it had been before the holiday thanks to Jeff’s hard work.

Would you believe that someone PAID us for this thing? Jeff marketed it as "Mid-Century Mod".

During Jeff’s first project, I was working on a couple of things: the scrapbook from our 2006 Colorado vacation, and the completion of Level 1 of my Rosetta Stone German training. I posted previously about my general slackerdom with the Colorado scrapbook project, but with a few days off work and nothing else requiring my attention I finished it. I even had some time to start working on the photo book for our 2008 Europe trip. It will be my first fully digital scrapbook, and it’s going much faster than the all-paper Colorado one did.

The Rosetta Stone program is actually something I’m doing through work. Our company pays for online subscriptions to the program, so I decided to take advantage of that and try and learn some German. It’s going well. I feel like I might even be able to semi-communicate with people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland now without forcing them to try and speak English with me. I also feel more comfortable in my pronunciation of various words and phrases that I already knew before starting the program.

A project we worked on together during the break: Wine Cellar Reorganization. I think this will probably be an annual event for us. We’re up to nearly 400 bottles in the cellar now. We have space for approximately 160 in our wine fridge, and the rest go on open racking in the coolest part of the basement. We have to prioritize each bottle to decide which ones make it into the refrigerator for long term aging and which ones have to suffer on the rack. It used to be fairly easy because we had more bottles that weren’t meant for long term aging than were, but lately our collection has shifted the other way. We implemented our house “Plonk Reduction Program” about a year ago, and have drunk up many of the less exciting stuff and have replaced it with good stuff. This year we’re implementing the “Stop Buying So Much Wine and Drink Up Some of the Really Good Ones to Make Sure We Like Them Before Collecting More Wine That Won’t Be Ready for 20 Years Program” (might need to shorten that program title). Anyway, we’re sacrificing some of the good stuff this year to make sure we’re on the right track with our buying habits. I predict that this year’s wine nights will be much more enjoyable than last year’s! Jeff also made a few modifications to the basement (mostly involving curtains) that make the cellar room much darker, which is a good thing for long term wine storage.

Other little activities from our holiday break:

A trip to Kansas City to see Michelle’s grandma, aunt, uncle and cousin, and our puppies' godmother, Mary. Joella tagged along, and we had fun shopping down at the Plaza in 6 degree weather.

Cooking our first duck at home (YUMMY!!!)

Duck...

a l'Orange, of course

Hemming some pants Michelle bought in KC

Getting a rather bad cold on our 7th anniversary (Michelle)

Many trips to the gym (so nice and uncrowded during the day!)

Going out for a belated anniversary dinner at one of Wichita’s finer restaurants where the food, unfortunately, mostly sucks. Lucky for us, it was nearly free, courtesy of Jeff’s employees, who bought him a gift certificate to the place for his Christmas present. I’m beginning to think it’s high time I start an anonymous Wichita restaurant review blog so I can air my grievances with places like this. Two sympathetic coworkers have already volunteered to be contributors.

Blissful slumber

Christmas Odds and Ends

2008-12-28T21:45:00.015-06:00

Christmas here at the House of Boy and Girl was spent with Michelle's family. Her grandparents, two brothers, and sister came over for the day. We all had a nice dinner - leg of lamb, potatoes, tabbouleh (from the recipe in the post below) and green beans, along with a couple of wines and assorted cookies and ice cream for dessert. This was Dan's first experience with lamb, and I think it turned out ok. A tiny piece at the first pass, and then a heaping pile of seconds.

The table, pre-feast (please note the new everyday use plates we got for Christmas)

Nathan demonstrates brotherly love to Joella

After dinner, we all played Trivial Pursuit, boys vs. girls. Grandmother and Grandfather were so eager to answer questions that they occasionally answered for the wrong team...

Fang and Errol got new blankets from Jeff's family. Fang had plenty of fun ripping into the package. Errol saved his fun for the blankets themselves.

Miscellaneous Christmas decor from around the house

Rick Tramonto's Moroccan Lamb with Tabbouleh and Crispy Garlic

2008-12-23T20:16:00.004-06:00

We spent a day a couple of weekends ago trying new recipes. We picked several out of one of our cookbooks that we love to read, but have never actually cooked anything from: "Amuse-Bouche" by Rick Tramonto. Then we narrowed it down to two recipes and hit the grocery store. The first recipe we tried didn't turn out so well, so we're not going to talk about that one until we get it right. This one, however, was quite tasty and pretty easy. It's broken into three main steps: the tabbouleh, the garlic, and the lamb. We made the tabbouleh and the garlic a couple of hours ahead of the lamb. As you can see from the picture below, we turned it into two main courses for dinner, instead of the six amuse bouche sized servings that the recipe actually makes. It will taste good served hot or cold, I'd do hot in the winter and cold in the summer (duh).

Ingredients:
1/2 cup bulger
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons finely diced tomato
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound lamb shank or shoulder
1 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1/2 cup chopped celery
3 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves
2 cups dry red wine
Vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, sliced paper thin

Instructions for the Tabbouleh:
1. Add the bulgur to a large pot of lightly salted boiling water. Reduce the heat and simmer the bulgur for 10 to 12 minutes or until just tender (ours took closer to 15 minutes). Drain the bulgur in a colander. Allow to cool and then transfer to a small shallow bowl.
2. Add the lemon juice, parsley, tomato, and 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and toss until all the grains are coated with the dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover and refrigerate.

Instructions for the Lamb:
3. Preheat the oven to 350 deg F.
4. Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a medium-sized, heavy-bottomed casserole or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the oil is almost smoking, add the lamb and sear for 8 to 12 minutes or until nicely browned on all sides.
5. While the lamb is browning, add the onions, carrots, and celery to the pan along with the thyme. Stir the vegetables occasionally.
6. Add the red wine and cook until reduced to a few tablespoons. Add enough water to cover the lamb and bring to a boil, stirring the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to dissolve any browned solids into the liquid.
7. Remove from the heat and cover the casserole with a tight-fitting lid. Place in the center of the oven and cook for 1 hour or until the meat is tender and almost falling off the bone. Set aside and allow to cool. When cool, refrigerate the lamb until serving. Discard the vegetables and herbs. (We think we'll reserve some of the veg and broth next time and puree it to make a little sauce to go with the dish.)

Instructions for the Garlic:
8. Pour the vegetable oil into a small, deep saucepan to a depth of 1 1/2 inches. Heat over medium heat until a deep-frying thermometer registers 325 deg F.
9. Fry the garlic slices in the oil for 1 to 2 minutes or until they turn golden. Watch carefully because they fry very quickly. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon to a paper towel to drain. Transfer to a flat plate, season with salt, and allow to cool completely. As they cool, the fried garlic slices will become very crispy.

To serve:
10. To serve, pull or cut the meat from the bone and cut into small pieces. Place some of the tabbouleh on each of 6 small plates along with some lamb. Top each serving with crispy garlic.

(The picture above shows what happens if you turn the 6 small servings into 2 bigger servings. We used an 8" pasta plate for our service. In other words, if you're making this for a family of four, I'd double the recipe, and have an additional side dish ready.)

Decorating for Christmas

2008-12-06T09:11:00.005-06:00

Joella came over on Thursday night to help us put up and decorate the Christmas tree. We had fun...

We did this for EVERY ornament :P

Michelle with one of our ornaments from Germany

Joella with a "warp drive" ornament

Michelle points the flash in the wrong direction while Jeff poses nicely by the tree

One of the ornaments from our wedding seven years ago