Awkward and Awesome Thursday

Awkward:

• Let's be real, everyone in Vegas is awkward. We went down again last Friday afternoon and I about got clothes lined by some drunk chick pointing at something. It's ridiculous/ridiculously funny that practically everyone wandering around Vegas at 1 o'clock in the afternoon is trashed. 
• Hollister has to be the funniest store ever. I feel like I need a flashlight, a gas mask and ear plugs to venture in, thus making me feel like an 85 year old grandma. "kids these days...." No but seriously my favorite part is the giant poster they have of a 15 year old naked boy in the front of the store. While each store seems to have a different naked 15 year old boy, you can always count on one to be there. Not to be outdone by Hollister, the Abercromie and Fitch in Vegas has an actual 15 year old shirtless boy with his pants dangerously low modeling outside their store in front of their naked poster. Way to go Vegas, making us all feel like accidental pedophiles. 
• Remember the dude peeing outside yesterday? yeah....
• Some small, little boy crying for the entire 2 hours of nursery. Every once in a while he would stop and make a break for the door. Then he would get mad at me for blocking his escape attempt and cry harder. Oh boy. 

Awesome:

• 1 1/2 day workweek. Boom!
• The supermoon. Did anyone else notice the crazy big and bright moon? Chad and I went for a run on Sunday and couldn't believe how huge the moon looked. It seemed so much brighter and larger than usual. 
• Free 10th meal at Cafe Rio!
• The super cute senior in our ward who is taking care of all our dear animals and guarding our house for us while we are gone. One awesome point for our ward! (finally)
• Most importantly... Hawaii is practically here!

Have a great week everyone! We'll see you when we get home!

Well done chips and puppy dog eyes

I just have to start this post with a quick story on how I started my morning. I woke up at my normal time because I was excited to cook today. I got up and walked to our window and opened the blinds to just look outside and see what kind of a day it was going to be, sunny duh. But as I look out the window I can see our neighbor 2 apartments over standing in the corner of his patio.... peeing. Dude, what is wrong with you. This is also the same crazy, giant, drunkard who banged on our door yesterday needing to use our phone because a woman was following him with a gun. Really? What's up crazy neighbors.

It was a busy day today, even though no "real" work was involved :) I went on a grocery shopping mission last night and today went to work putting together a ton of travel food for us. We are hoping not to blow our budget in Hawaii by packing a lot of our own food. This will hopefully keep us away from junk food and keep our wallets happy!

There was only one mishap, the poor apple chips. I'll try again tomorrow, hopefully with better results! Note to self, do NOT preheat the oven for cookies while trying to "dehydrate" apple chips that are currently in the oven.

As soon as I got in the kitchen this morning Penny was nonstop meowing at me. What was my poor little kitties problem? She wanted tuna fish. Spoiled much? And yes, her whining paid off because we're softies and like to spoil our baby kitty!

While Penny cried (and cried, and cried) Rukia napped at my feet and Sunny napped in the sun. Sadly there was no napping for Chad and I.

Her puppy dog eyes just kill me!

 

Tomorrow's plan of attack? Finish making all our goodies and PACK!

Parade of Home

We've been in our lovely little condo for almost 4 whole months now and I thought I would share some pictures of our space! It's nothing spectacular but it's ours and we are still loving it! It sure beats the heck out of our old dungeon of an apartment!

As I've mentioned before, we've got a dishwasher and washer and dryer! A-Mazing! I still get excited that the dishes no longer take forever to do and that we can do a load of laundry whenever we want - no quarter hunting required!

The peninsula in the kitchen is one of my favorite things. There is SO much more room to cook! I no longer dread making dinner (at least not because I'm stuck in the world's smallest kitchen/hole). Bonus: it came with a microwave. Awesome since our old microwave we got for free and it had to have been the first microwave ever made. It was huge, didn't close very well, and didn't really heat anything up very well either. Everything had to stay in twice as long, probably because the microwaves were escaping and killing our brains. You don't need brains to become a Doctor right?!

Another one of my favorite things, all the windows! They let in a ton of light, something we weren't used to. Partly because Michigan is only sunny for 3 month but mostly because the only windows we had looked out into the parking lot. Stupid basement apartment.

We also have a little back patio area that rocks. We can keep our bikes there, let the cats play outside, and we've got room to attempt to grow a garden! I'm loving our little outdoor space!


We haven't had to run our air yet, thank goodness. It gets cool enough at night that our house cools down and stays pretty nice throughout the day. Ceiling fans help too. We've used our upstairs one so much that we burnt out the motor. Maintenance is great here though and it should be fixed soon. Love prompt maintenance! In our last apartment we showered for months with a giant hole in the ceiling directly above us, just waiting for them to get around to fixing it. We moved before it got fixed. Also we had to duct tape the vent closed in our bathroom to attempt to stop the upstairs neighbors cigarette smoke from coming down to us. After showers we would have yellow water dripping down our walls. Classy right? And not just in the bathroom but our whole apartment. Now you know why we invited no one to our weird, dark, drippy yellow apartment.

Chad cleaned up our 2nd bedroom last week. It's too small to really get a very good picture. There's a nice big window that's great and a big closet as well. It was sort of a catch all for a while since we don't have quite as much storage here. We'll be using it as a craft room/office this coming fall. This summer it will mainly house all our fun friends and family coming out to visit! Woot!

Meatless Monday: Quinoa Burgers

 

Is there seriously anything better than a good burger? There are few things that I miss since dropping the meat out of my diet, but every once in a while I crave a big, juicy cheeseburger! As a side note when we were at Albertson's this weekend there were some employees outside with a giant grill, grilling ribs and chicken and all kinds of wonderful smelling things smothered in BBQ sauce. We had to run by them so we wouldn't buy all of it! We've tried our hand at making a few veggie burgers and they've been pretty good. My favorite so far is one that Chad made a few weeks back, his favorite so far? This lovely little quinoa burger!

The original recipe says that they serve it with a tzatiki sauce, and I tried my hand at making some and f-a-i-l-e-d! Horribly in fact. After mixing everything up I suddenly realized that our plain greek yogurt was anything but plain. We buy the big tub at Costco and then mix in our own honey once we get home. So... I had this super sweet yogurt with lemon and dill and parsley.... blegh. I immediately rinsed it down the drain and pretended like it never happened :)

We served up our cheesy quinoa burgers with lettuce, tomato, avocado and some tzatzki sauce ketchup, and fry sauce for me! I thought they were pretty good! The flavors were great. They were nice and cheesy and crispy on the outside. Chad had two in fact. They were still a little mushy in the middle, which is the problem we are finding as we are trying to find a good replacement for our beloved burger. I think they would be great just served on their own with some sauce on the side, that's how I had my second one! At any rate we will definitely be making them again, but our search for the perfect veggie burger continues!

Ingredients:

• 2 rounded cups cooked quinoa
• 3/4 cup pepper jack cheese
• 1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese
• 1 medium carrot, finely grated
• 3 eggs
• 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
• 2 green onions, including white parts
• 1 /2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
• Olive oil for frying

Directions: 

1. In a large bowl combine the cooked quinoa, pepper jack cheese, cottage cheese, carrot, eggs, flour, green onions, sugar, pepper, cumin, salt, and garlic powder.

2. Heat a frying pan and a couple teaspoons olive oil over medium-low heat. Mixture will be slightly sticky, so using a 1/4 cup measuring cup, drop mixture into pan and lightly flatten to 1/2 inch thick. Fry until golden-brown, about 4 minutes on each side. Makes approx. 12 burgers.

I love a two step recipe so that was an added bonus! :)

HAWAII

The countdown is on and in less than a week we will be in fabulous Hawaii! We are stoked! We've never been there before so... for anyone's who's been, any suggestions? Are there things that we HAVE to do? Anything we should avoid? We are in full on packing/planning/cleaning mode this weekend and any suggestions of what to do would be great! Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Awkward and Awesome Thursday

I was going to tell you what an uneventful week we've had but as I was typing it I realized that we've had a great, busy, week! Now as I'm finishing the post I'm realizing this is one of the longest Awesome and Awkwards I've done! Should have saved some up for next week ;)

Awkward:

• Literally as I'm sitting here and writing this some girl comes in looking for a job, (yes I'm writing this at work... but it's lunch!). I tell her that we aren't hiring, they just hired me. Well let me start by saying that she comes in here and looks past me at my office managers office and says she's here to speak with her. I tell her she'll have to wait, she's on the phone with an insurance company, is there something I can do to help? That's when she let's me know what she's up to. Sneaky... So she's determined to speak with her and is waiting and I'm just sitting here, I just told you they just hired me. They aren't going to suddenly fire me on the spot and hire you crazy pants. Finally she gave up and left because my manager was on an insurance call and we all know those take forever. She lasted a good 20 minutes though, which were seriously awkward as she told me all about how she got fired, and her
• We were driving through LasVegas, down the strip with our windows open because the air still wasn't working at this point. As we were sitting at a light Chad say's, "I think a bird pooped on me". What?! We are inside the car! Sure enough some bird flew by and managed to get some poop through the window and onto Chad. LOL. I loved it.
• As I was carrying around the giant jar of pickles last week in Costco, an old cranky man attempting to be funny asked me if I was pregnant. I was totally taken off guard and being such a quick thinker on my feet I responded with a big 'ol smile saying "no" and shaking my head vigorously. I was confused, was it because I was carrying the jar in front of me like a preggo belly? Then it hit me, the whole pregnant women like weird food, pickles and ice cream anyone? Although I don't think that pickles on their own really count as a weird food.
• We love this dollar cone deal going on at the Marble Slab by our house. It's the perfect size and the ice cream is awesome. Whatever could make dollar cones awkward? How about the little teenage girl who dishes up the ice cream who loves Chad. That's right, I get old men hitting on me and Chad gets super cute high schoolers. She gives him almost double the amount of ice cream she gives me and then always asks if we are going to pay together. Every single time.
• Going to get ice cream at the Marble Slab last night only to find a ton of police cars and caution tape all around the paved path that runs next to it's parking lot. This path is awesome and we run it a lot, and I run it alone a lot. The girls that were working let us know that a woman was assaulted under the bridge along the path and was in the hospital. Sweet. Need to find a new running path now or train Rukia to attack rather than lick someone to death.
• Chad attempted to go to mutual last night only to find no one there when he got there at 7:15. No young men or young men's leaders to be found anywhere. Apparently they were going to play basketball but someone was already using the gym so they decided that instead of doing something else they would all just go home. Lame sauce. It was nice to spend the evening with Chad instead of running on the assault trail by myself and finding the caution tape alone, but weird that they all just went home. Awkward Church Moment for the Week, check!
• Finishing the whole 4 pound can of tuna fish in a week.

Awesome:

• Chad finished his finals!!!! WOOT! He is free of school... until he starts his summer classes :) He did ridiculously awesome in both his Biology and Chemistry class and I am super proud of him! He'll be a Doctor in no time ;)
• My hair is once again managable! It doesn't get all matted and gross like some sort of wild animal making it next to impossible to brush. Seriously, it used to take me like a half hour to try to brush out the craziness that was my hair. And then I would just put it in a ponytail or high bun because it's getting way to hot to have a giant mop of hair acting as a blanket over my neck and back. So... back to short hair! And dark hair! Because the blonde, while super fun and cute and all that jazz, seriously destroyed my hair. Hello short sassy hair, it's so nice to see you again!
• My manager at work was watching her neighbors chickens and I got a dozen eggs out of the deal! Awesome eggs, score! Not having to make a Costco run just to buy eggs, priceless!
• I've gotten to go with the Doctor to some nursing homes and the people are great. Some are quite sad but most are really funny and make the afternoon go buy so fast. It's a fun way to break up the day!We finished the 4 pound can of tuna in a week's time.
• Talking with Chad's family this week was great! We haven't seen them all in what feels like forever! It was great to Skype! We are beyond excited to see them when they come out to visit this summer and fall! We've already got lists going of things we are going to do!

You've Been Chopped!

It was a wonderful run. You were lively and bouncy and shiny! Everything that I wanted. When it was good it was oh so good! But then you dulled. And got crazy dry and damaged. And most of the time you were anything but good. And while we made it work for a while, it lasted so much longer than it should have.

Before

 

After