What is he thinking?

He's got a delicious dinner sitting in front of him: t bone steak from a grass fed cow, grilled squash from the farmers market, a nice glass of wine. We're sitting outside to eat because a cold front came through and it's currently a comfortable 70 degrees. And there he sits on the phone. Crazy. Anyway, I'm blogging from my phone because our internet has been given away temporarily. It's in Vegas, where I could be too, actually, except that i'm a good employee. Curse our need to pay the mortgage/my desire to have health insurance! I keep hearing splashing, doesn't sound loud enough to be a dolphin though. If only alfred weren't on the phone, then you wouldn't be reading such drudgery. Thank Phil.

Crime doesn't pay

Just a little update to our burglary case. Alfred found a screen that was bent and popped out of a window frame on Saturday morning, so I called the police again to report it. When the officers came to check on it, they told me what they had been able to determine had happened. Apparently our "painter" had robbed someone earlier that day and had 2 guys coming after him. The police think he just came to our house randomly, trying to find either a place to hide, a weapon to defend himself, or just something else to steal. After he left our house, the guys found him and beat the crap out of him, trying to kill him, really. Like, they slit his throat. All 3 were found and arrested that night, with our little breaking and entering pal ending up in the hospital. If he lives, he'll be charged with several counts of burglary. Apparently there have been a few robberies over the past couple of weeks in the area, and the police think it was all him. The bike and cell phone he had here were both stolen. An officer is coming over on Wednesday night with a photo lineup for me to ID him.

So now at least it's less scary being home alone, knowing it was just some random thing and the dude's in the hospital and then likely heading to prison (assuming he gets out of the hospital alive, the police said he's in really bad shape.) So the take home message: crime doesn't pay. Stay in school, kids.

what a day

The day started out great. My bosses are out of town for a wedding, so we ordered lunch at the main downtown office and I managed to kill 2 hours there. The problems began when I left work. I wasn't more than 2 miles away, stopped at a red light, when I got rear ended. Luckily my Hyundai is a freaking tank, so the bumper isn't even dented, just a couple of tiny scratches. She hit me hard enough to knock all the stuff out from the little storage area under he dashboard and make the sunroof cover slide open, and dent her SUV's bumper, but my car's just fine. We exchanged info, I gave them directions to the place they were trying to find (which is why she was distracted), and continued on my way.

The next issue came about 5 minutes after I got home. The doorbell rang, and by the time I got downstairs to open the door there was no one there, just a bike in the driveway. I went back upstairs to look out the windows and see if I could see anyone, and heard someone knock on the back door. Then they tried to open the door. Then I heard a man on the phone, telling someone to meet him down the road. By this point I was freaking the F out, considering grabbing Alfred's shotgun, but instead called my neighbor's house. His daughter in law answered, I asked her to look and see if she could see anyone, and then saw from the bedroom window that the garage door was open. She said she and her husband would be right over. They came over, he knocked on the window of the garage to get the guy's attention, and this weird dude came out of the garage with a paint can. Long story short, he said he was supposed to give someone a paint quote and thought this was the house. He finally left, after giving us a business card and saying that we should call him if we needed any work done. When I went into the garage to close the door, I saw that my car door was ajar and stuff had been moved around. So I decided to call the police. They came pretty quickly, which was nice, and the neighbor and I filled out statements. They found his bike and said they had an idea who it was. Hopefully they find him.

All I know is, they say bad things come in threes, and I've had 2 so far. So everyone just take care of yourself tonight, ok?

bonus birthday pics

Alfred's back home tonight, with both the internet card and pictures. So here are a few more photos from his birthday weekend. First up: Wilbur! This was taken about 2/3 of the way through the smoking process. His head is on the left. Note the arm bone poking through his skin.

Then, Bessie's head. This is just after it was taken out of the smoker. Its teeth are towards the right, that big black hole towards the left is the eyeball.

Another shot of the cow's head, this time with its mouth open, meat being torn off.

The birthday boy, happily loading his plate.

A shot of some of the non-meat based food.

And, for good measure, an upside down baby!

Sorry, Alfred

I'm watching the Emmys and was just on the phone with Alfred. The following is a true conversation.

Me: this montage is reminding me of all the people who died this year.

Alfred: like that judge from America's got talent.

Me: what? Which judge died?

Alfred: you know, that one from all the movies in the 70s. He just died a couple weeks ago.

Me: really? I don't know who you're talking about. (montage continues) oh, Patrick Swayze! Yeah, he's not on America's got talent. That's David Hasselhoff.

Have you ever seen the Saturday night live commercial for the mom celebrity translator? I feel like I need that with Alfred sometimes. If I can find a link tomorrow I'll post it, since I'm writing this from my phone right now.

happy birthday Alfred!

And just like that, he's 30. Our feast yesterday went off without a hitch. The meat was all smokey and delicious, the rest of the sides were awesome (the beans especially), and the pies turned out great. We ate some cow brain. I think about 20 people ended up coming, so it was a good turnout. Good thing, since there was so much food. We're hanging out at Alfred's parents' house for a bit today, recovering from our food comas, then back home since our house sitting gig is over. Back to real life...

preparation

Alfred's birthday is on Sunday, but since everyone we know is too busy to celebrate on his actual birthday, we're doing it up tomorrow. We're smoking an entire pig, a couple of pork shoulders, a couple of chickens, and a cow's head. Yeah, not sure whose idea the head was, but we'll see how it goes. They just cut the tongue out and are prepping the rest of the head. It's huge! (That's what she said!)

Alfred and I are house sitting this weekend still, so we're over at his parents' house tonight to help get things ready for tomorrow. Mercedes and Ilya came over too, and we've been working (more or less) for the past few hours. I made 4 (yup, 4) pecan pies, Mercedes tackled the fudge, Robyn and Alfred collaborated on the cole slaw, Robyn's been making some secret sauces, and Alfred and Max have been seasoning meat. There's a massive pot of boiled peanuts cooling on the stove. The gigantic smoker that we're borrowing is heating up outside. We're putting the meat on tonight and smoking it all night long so it's done in time for lunch tomorrow. It's going to be a heck of a Cracker (Florida pioneer) feast!

We've also been doing a bit of eating and drinking tonight. Alfred has discovered the wonders of Bold City brewery and bought a growler today for us to all sample. He also got to open his gift from Ilya and Mercedes: 27 pounds of peanuts! The boy's a peanut eating fool.

Tomorrow should be pretty exciting. We're going to have enough food to feed an army. Good blog fodder!

my visor

Our whole trip, all I wanted was a visor. We borrowed one for me from Ellery, but it was too big for me, so I decided I was going to buy one from somewhere as a souvenir. Everywhere we went, I looked for a visor. I was hopeful about buying one at an In-N-Out Burger in Las Vegas that had a hard core gift shop next door, but Alfred wouldn't let me. Nice, huh. I finally found the visor of my dreams in Ithaca. It's blue and says Cornell in red letters. I love it. I wore it on the rest of my trip whenever it didn't clash too horribly with my outfit. It was especially good for days when we didn't get to shower, it kept the little hairs on the sides of my head from sticking up too much. Also, it gives me special powers. It's like an amulet. Let me give you some examples. Here my visor has stopped a bus in its tracks, saving my life:

Here my visor is giving me the power to command the ocean:

Today it gave me the power to jog in September in Florida at 6:30pm. It's still really hot and humid in September in Florida at 6:30pm. But with the protection of my visor, I could do it. It wasn't even sunny out, but when I tried taking it off I just felt so naked. I needed it. And it helped me jog for (almost) half an hour tonight. And so, I love it. The end.

return of the weekend cooking fest

This was supposed to be our first weekend home together since about June. So of course my boss called me at about 3:00 on Friday afternoon and asked if I would come in Saturday morning to meet a bigwig who was coming to see the museum with his wife and kids. So of course I had to go in. I was only there for a few hours, which wasn't too bad, and my job ended up being to entertain their twin 3 year old boys. They weren't too sure of me at first, but after showing them an alligator and letting them play a drum, we were old friends. I went in at one point to get everyone bottles of water and the boys followed me, even though my boss tried to lure them away. I didn't get invited to lunch with them, but I got a three year old high five at least. Not bad.

We made sure to get up early enough to go to the farmers market and stock up for the week. After I got home from work, we came up with meals for the week, made a shopping list, then started moving furniture. Obviously. I think it was sometime around then that Alfred got a text from Billy's wife asking if we would house sit all this coming week. It's been awhile since we house sat for them, but it's pretty standard for them to ask us about 24 hours in advance of when they need us. So I guess this was more notice than usual, actually! However, it meant that our week's worth of meals was going to have to be prepared this weekend. So that's what we did today.

We started this morning off by shopping, then got to work cooking. We had a whole mess of vegetables and defrosted meat to use and needed to be as efficient as possible in our recipes. So we ended up making an arm roast in the slow cooker, an oxtail stew and roasted red pepper soup on the stove, and cucumber salad. We just ate the soup for dinner (pretty good), wrapped up the cucumber salad, and are still cooking the other two. Hm, it felt like a lot more work when we were actually doing it. Unfortunately we sort of forgot about taking pictures, so this one is from our first dinner of our trip, in Mobile. Also, we discovered at some point of the day that we somehow get Bravo, so I recorded a couple episodes of Top Chef, which we're watching now. What a foodie weekend!

getting back into the swing of things

So we've been home and back at work for a couple of weeks now. It still kind of sucks. I keep waiting to settle back in and for everything to get back to normal, but it's not quite happening. We were gone for so long that it's been really hard to go back to everyday life. At the same time, it's like the trip never happened, like someone else just told us about it. For 6 weeks we were constantly on the move, seeing new things, always doing or planning something exciting, lots of adrenaline and stress. Now we're back to grocery shopping, cleaning, going to work every day, and sitting at home watching TV every night. We've both been kind of depressed, which is apparently a fairly common thing after a vacation. We also unfortunately gained a few pounds on the trip, so it sucks having to go back to exercising and watching what we eat after, well, not for so long. It's really just no fun overall. In addition to all that, we've had to back out of going to our friend Katie's wedding in Germany next month. Between money (or more accurately, lack of it), Alfred's passport being about to expire, and my bosses not being too thrilled about me taking another week or so off of work so soon, it's just not going to happen. So not only can we not go, I also feel rotten for having to miss the wedding. Ugh. No, we're not happy to be home, in case that hasn't come through clearly enough. At least we have lots of good pictures to look at.

back to the wilderness

First of all, happy birthday to Mason, who turned 5 last Thursday. I proved myself the worst aunt in the world by not calling him on his birthday. I tried calling the next day, but didn't get to talk to him. I figure I'll call this week and talk to Ella about school, too. Poor Mason, having such a tool for an aunt. At least I got his gift to him on time. Better than nothing, I guess.

We were out of town this weekend with Ilya and Mercedes. We went to Ichetucknee, which is a spring in FL that's sort of like a lazy river ride from a theme park, but in real life. The three of them talk about how fun it is every summer, but I've never been, so finally this year we managed to go. We got to our campground around 8:00 Friday night, set up camp like pros, and cooked some burgers for dinner. We went to bed at a reasonable hour, since we had to be at the park early the next morning. There are multiple entrances to the river, but only 750 people are allowed to start at the northernmost entrance per day. Since it was a holiday weekend, we got to the park at about 7:30 to make sure we were able to do the whole river. Luckily we were able to rent inner tubes from our campground, so we didn't have to make any stops on our way. It was fun, even though it was a little cool at 9am to be in 70 degree water. It warmed up by the end of our first run though. We stopped for lunch, then went back to the midpoint and went down the river from there twice more. We swam for awhile (except for Mercedes, who is far too sensible to do such things). I kicked a branch underwater and hurt my toes. They're all bruised and they hurt to walk on. But still had lots of fun.

After our day on the river, we headed back to the campground and started in on some drinking. We had Kahlua, vodka, white and chocolate milk, and beer. Ilya and I got pretty drunk on various color Russians (and apparently both snored that night after passing out). Alfred cooked us some massive burgers for dinner. Mercedes made friends with a cat. I found a frog. We made smores. I sat in Bisquick and made a giant mess. Ilya played with his new oil lantern. In other words, a fairly straightforward night.

The next morning we packed up and headed back home, stopping for a nice greasy breakfast at a Huddle House. We dropped Ilya and Mercedes off at their house, then went to go see Alfred's family. I haven't visited since we got back from our trip, so it was nice to see everyone. Alfred had to change his oil, too. Eventually we made our way home, unpacked, and pretty much just crashed. Busy weekend.

who's that girl

Yes, I'm going to resume this blog. It's just been kind of nice not having to worry about posting the last several days. Plus I've experienced a sharp decline of blog material in my life over the past week. Luckily I should have pictures to post for a long time, whenever I don't have anything else to use I can just put up pictures from our trip! Like I said in one of my wrap up posts over there, we took almost 6500 pictures on our trip, and only shared a tiny fraction of that on the blog. Like these gems. I was waiting for Alfred to set up the tripod and lighting. These were taken in Sunset Crater Park, with the painted desert in the distance behind me. Hard to believe we were there over 6 weeks ago. Our trip already feels like we just imagined it, or like someone else went on a trip and told us all about it. Good thing we have our blog and so many pictures! By the way, Alfred fixed the map over there. I don't know if anyone noticed, but there was a gap in our drive from Ithaca to Vermont. Alfred thinks it happened because he waited too long to upload the file from the GPS. Anyway, just wanted to check in here, I hope no one has given up on me yet! And if you need something else to read, go check out Mike's blog. I'm such an inspiration.