Sleepy girl

Emi has met her match. This is what happens after spending a week with a golden retriever and two toddlers....

She must have played hard because we picked her up Monday night after we got back into town and this is pretty much all she did for the rest of the night and the next two days after that. I was also told that she was pretty much dead out before we came to get her. She was one pooped pup!

A Rockin' Party

Last night was the annual volunteer party for anyone who volunteers at our church. There is always a theme for the party, and this year it was a murder mystery dinner. This year was by far the best Quest volunteer party that we have been to. Everyone got to dress up as a Rock or Country star to go to an awards banquet for Quest Records. Justin and I, of course, chose to be rock stars and were assigned to be Elvis and Pink. For me, this worked out very well because I coincidentally had a hair cut scheduled right after we found out our characters for the dinner, so I used Pink as inspiration for my new 'do (my hair stylist was thrilled; I think she has been hoping that I would do something a little more edgy for a while now). Anyways, it was awesome to see so many people get into their parts last night. I think that's what made the dinner such a success.

As for the murder mystery part of the night, Elvis, Jon Lennon, and Aretha Franklin were up for the Quest Legend Award and during the dinner someone killed Jon Lennon. To add to this, Quest Records is caught up in the economic crisis and can no longer support both the Rock and Country divisions of the business so they are going to have to chose a direction to go in for the future. Naturally, Pink wants them to stick with Rock because that's the foundation of the company (I also got to be suspicious of Mick Jagger all night... he turned out to be an accomplice). Elvis wants rock to be chosen too, but he was a little more proactive about it because it turned out that he and Suze Orman (Quest Records' CFO) were the masterminds behind the murder of Jon Lennon.

The murder mystery plot line was fun to act out and try and figure out who all the masterminds and accomplices were. The group I was in at the end of the game was lucky to have Justin since he knew that Elvis and Suze Orman were two of the masterminds (unfortunately, he remembered his information wrong and thought that it had said that they were 2 of 5 masterminds, but what he remembered was still helpful and we managed to get a lot of points). I still think that the best part of the night was seeing everyone's costumes and how they acted out their character. Everyone's character seemed to have been chosen thoughtfully, since I felt like pretty much everyone fit their character in some way or was able to act out the character such that they embodied (Jackie and Canaan as Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, and Jon and Celina as Jon Lennon and Yoko Ono were particularly awesome). I hope the pictures go up on the website soon so I can post a link!

Festive Turkey Day Pup

Thanksgiving 2009

We had a lovely Thanksgiving once again this year. My immediate family and Justin's father, step-mom, and youngest sister joined us for dinner this year. This was the third time that Justin and I have hosted Thanksgiving dinner and I am sure it won't be the last. We have found that cooking and cleaning is way more fun and less stressful than traveling all over Illinois for the long weekend. Besides, if you do most of the prep work on the day before Thanksgiving, then you get to just relax with family and watch football on the day of. I decided to try a new turkey recipe that involved brining the turkey before roasting - a process that is highly recommended by Alton Brown and my Uncle Kurt. The brine is supposed to keep the turkey moist and flavorful during roasting. Alton Brown explains why this works on Good Eats.... you can see the clip below (this happens to be the same recipe that I used).



And here is the rest of our Thanksgiving menu with links to some of the recipes:

Appetizers
Frog Eyes (pickles wrapped in cream cheese and ham)
Cheese plate
Shrimp Cocktail
Veggies with creamy horseradish and dill dip

Main Course
Roast Turkey
Mashed Potatoes
Best Ever Green Bean Casserole
Cranberry sauce
Stuffing (Maggie's dad)
Maple glazed carrots with dill (Maggie's mom)
Corn dish (Joan)
Rolls (Joan)

Dessert
Pumpkin pie (Maggie's mom)

Halloween Party

Justin and I decided that it might be fun to have a Halloween party this year. So... we did and it was. At least I thought it was fun, I hope everyone else would agree. It was awesome that almost everyone came in costume too. I guess dressing up never really gets old. Here are a couple of group pictures. More pictures can be found here.
This is everyone who came to the party.

This is the C-U contingent of Midnight Massacre (our WoW guild... yes, I'm a nerd). This is also the only picture I got that had a decent view of Justin's and my costumes - he was a blindfolded knife thrower and I was the target... he missed.

Buzzed Brothers

We visited Justin's family this weekend for Nick's going away party and this is what happened...
My sister-in-law, Michelle, gave both Nick and Justin buzz cuts. Nick's haircut was planned; Justin's wasn't. I wasn't sure how Justin would look with a buzzed head, but it's actually kind of cute. I'm not sure what made him do it though. He did need a hair cut, but I wonder if part of it was motivated by wanting to support his brother or as a reaction to his brother joining the Army?

Nick decided that he was going to join the Army after he finished college this summer and he left for basic training yesterday. He's not going to have much contact with the outside world for a few months so we're going to miss him, and of course we are going to worry about him for the next few years while he's in the service.

Good luck, Nick! We love you!

Veggie Garden Update

Now that fall is here and I'm pretty sure there is going to be a frost any day now, our garden is nearing the end. The project wasn't a complete success, but wasn't a total failure either. We got a lot of tomatoes out of it which we used for a fantastic pasta sauce, salsa, BLTs and a caprese salad or two. Unfortunately, with all I planted, tomatoes were really the only thing that made it... I knew it was a bad sign when the herbs in my Aerogarden died. I originally thought I had killed everything except the tomatoes, but the pepper plants somehow made a miraculous recovery and we've gotten a couple of small green peppers off of those. I would say that the garden this year was a learning experience, and now I know of a few things to do differently next year:

1. Get better supports for the tomatoes. There was a tomato-plosion in the garden, which is good, but all the plants are falling over and take up way too much space - they needed to grow up more.
2. Plant less. I could have kept the variety of veggies, but used a few less plants. I think more would have survived this way. Before they all died to something (I blame those pesky Japanese beetles) I had 4 zuccini plants - this was way too many for the space.
3. Build a better anti-bunny fence. Ours ended up being kind of flimsy and was a pain to deal with, although we didn't have any bunny problems so it did its job.
4. Don't ignore the garden for the first few weeks after planting. I didn't really mean to do this, it just happened that we were busy many weekends early on in the summer. No excuses, though. If I had just taken 5-10 minutes a couple times a week to pull weeds and make sure the plants were supported properly and had enough space then the garden wouldn't have been such a mess.