Late Blog Post

So this week we are late posting on our blog because we chose to eat out on a Wednesday. I ended up getting handed the wrong plate, but they were really good about getting me my real order. Fortunately for all you readers out there, I am not going to talk about food for the entirety of the blog this week!

Though, after eating out, I wonder why restaurants can't serve smaller portions. (Or at least offer smaller portions.) I can never really eat more than half of a "dinner time" portion. Maybe other people don't have this problem, but if we are going to say that there is an "obesity epidemic," we should give people the option to order less food.

This last weekend of general conference. It was really fun to watch, and good to hear all of the talks and lessons. I don't think I had a favorite talk or anything, but watching is always a really good experience!

Our Stake is going to preform the first act of Savior of the World near Christmas this year. We volunteered to help out with the choir, and the first practice is this Saturday. We are pretty excited about participating. It should be lost of fun, and something to do!

A Less Warm Day in Austin.

Since this week we had a weekend day that wasn't 100 degrees, Daniel and I decided to go outside! After careful consideration, we decided to try out a frisbee golf course up in Wells Branch (about 5-8 minutes from our house). We pulled out our trusty frisbee and walked along the course. It wasn't as green as idyllic as it looks in the picture to the right. (Like most places in Austin the grass was dead because of the drought )  It was fun to get out and do something, but the course was really confusing. We never actually found holes 5 or 6; we just faked it.

Daniel would also like me to note that we didn't play 'traditional' frisbee golf. We used a regular size frisbee, and we just took turns throwing our one frisbee instead of each having a frisbee (or set of frisbees of our own). Basically, I think he made me explain that last part to see how many times I would type frisbee in one paragraph!

Monday I babysat a couple of kids from our ward while their parents supervised the moving of their belongings from their Austin apartment to their new Austin house. We watched the beginnings of a lot of Netflix shows and the entirety of an animated Stewart Little show. (He goes and learns to survive in the wilderness.) The baby was in a stage where she missed her mom so she cried unless you picked her up, or she fell asleep for most of the three and a half hours. She finally decided she liked being here just before her parents came to get her. The moral of the story is that baby don't like me, and that even human like mice need to learn to live in the wild.

Daniel has been working on his project at work. He says that progress seems slow, but that they aren't behind schedule or anything. He continues to have little classes he takes during the day to introduce him to the company and things. Soon he is starting a month long class that even assigns out of "class" work. We'll see how that goes!

We are excited for Conference and the good weather that is returning this weekend! The weather man always says "Maybe this will be our last 100+ day!" and I always hope that he is right.

Hello World

(Those of you who are familiar with computer programming will be familiar with this title. For the benefit of everyone else, "Hello World" is the first program you ever write in a particular language.)

Many of you may know that I've been working on a nativity set like the one my grandma had made with us when I was little. It's a plastic canvas & yarn project, along with a few other little bells & whistles (none of which are actually bells, OR whistles). Since I was able to finish up this last week, Elissa decided to finally invite me as an author for our blog and have me write an entry in honor of the achievement. That's why there's no food yet.

As I was working on the project, Elissa made sure that we named all of the animals. Some of them aren't very imaginative, but for whatever reason, all of the sheep got European-sounding G names, like Gretchen, Gretel, Gertrude, etc. Also, I'm not sure why they're all girls, but that's ok, because the rest of the animals are 'obviously' boys. The kings posed a big challenge, because I think the craft world has changed what they sell since the pattern was designed. I was supposed to use beads to make little bottle-type things for them to hold, but I could only find sets of like 20 large beads for way more than I wanted to pay for them. So, we got creative and invented boxes for them to hold. We used the one the pattern provided, then decided to make an octagonal box and a treasure chest with a curved lid. We think they turned out nice. The other major change was that we changed the colors so that the men weren't stuck in pastels and pinks. Here's a picture:

We also went to the orchestra this last week -- the Austin Civic Orchestra. We found out about it from my boss, who plays violin for them. The concert was the 'Looney Tunes Greatest Hits' as he put it. We liked it though -- it had classics like "Where's the Beef" (okay, that's an official title), Beethoven's 5th, the 2001: A Space Odyssey opening theme, and more modern stuff like Harry Potter main theme, etc. For a non-profit group, they were excellent. We had a great time.

Provo Visitors

This week was kind of exciting. The BYU football team came down to Austin. Daniel and I got to go to the football team fireside. It was pretty cool. There was a cool musical number where Brian Smith sang a solo, and the team sang "We'll Bring the World His Truth. A couple of team members gave their testimony of the gospel as well as their stories of coming to BYU and becoming missionaries. Bronco Mendenhall and his wife gave the closing remarks.

Sunday our ward literally doubled in size for sacrament meeting because of all the people who came down for the game. Our whole chapel and cultural hall were filled up! We are usually pretty crowded with the pews and the over flow, but this was crazy!

This weekend Daniel and I worked on our craft projects. Daniel is almost done with his nativity set that he has been making for almost a year now. It is pretty cool! He has a few sheep left to make, and then he will need to find a new project to keep him occupied.

Saturday I decided that our living room needed a rug.  I also decided that I needed something to do. So, I started making a rug. I stole some of Daniel's left over yarn and started working. I'm not sure how other people don't have lines from when they change colors, but I guess it gives my rug a little character or something. I was pretty excited, so I posted a picture of it!

This weekend we are hoping to go to the civic orchestra on Saturday. It should be really exciting!  

To the Church and Back Again

This last week hasn't been super exciting,but we did do a few things. One of the first things we did was make fresh tortillas. I had never done it before and neither had Daniel, but we decided that if we neededh to live on food storage some day that tortillas would be a necessary item. They turned out pretty well.  I just made half a batch or so which makes about 10 or so Tortillas because Daniel and I didn't need 20 tortillas this last week!  I followed the recipe on this website /http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2009/10/29/whole-wheat-tortillas/ but I just used multi purpose flour instead of whole wheat flour. This is the recipe:

Whole Wheat Torillas
4 cups of whole wheat flour (fine)
¼ tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
1 cup of warm water (may need a little more – I usually do!)
¼ cup cooking oil

We also ended up going to the ward building several times. Wednesday we went to the building for recommend interviews. In case anyone was worried, we both passed! Afterward, we stopped at the grocery store for oatmeal (which was half off) and ice cream (which was on sale, and we had a coupon) The ice cream was a little disappointing (I think it was on sale because it was a little old.) But, I made some stove top granola with the rest which turned out pretty well.

Thursday I went to our Relief Society activity which was an "episode" of Food Storage Jeopardy. I won two cans of tuna fish as a door prize. Most of the ladies had a good time, and the presentation was informative. I think the storage coordinator was right in saying with disaster so close to home this week that most of us have been thinking about getting our food storage together. (Oh, in case anyone was worried, we are just fine. The Austin fires weren't near our apartment, and we didn't have to evacuate or anything.)

Sorry our blog is late this week, since I went to the meeting last night and came home a little late, there wasn't much time for blogging! I'll do better next week!

To Next Week and Beyond!

This week was not a very exciting week for us. I know I start my blog off every week saying that it wasn't an exciting week and then somehow come up with a bunch of things that we did. This week is going to be different, but I'm going to come up with something for you to read since you came all the way to the blog to read about our week.

Last Saturday we finally finished setting up our new checking account and closing our old checking account. We have been slowly working on moving over payments and things from our old card, and Saturday we finally were able to close our other account. (That is right crazy, mean Internet people, that account information you may or may not have been gathering and intending to use is now useless.) The whole thing was a vaguely frustrating experience because if things were left up to us, we would have gotten to keep our free, no strings attached account, but things were not left up to us. We had a really nice banker named Alison, though, and if you are ever in our part of Texas and need a banker, I would suggest her. We also ended up talking to the branch manager, who treated us like we were twelve or something. It is okay because we are younger and she probably has way more knowledge and experience being a "grown up" way longer than us.

Daniel and I also decided to start exercising in the mornings because I'm home all day and Daniel is at a desk. I mean it probably still isn't enough steps for me to not be living a sedentary life style yet, but we will maybe work up to that. Mostly we have gone on walks around the block and played some Wii sports. We just finished our fourth morning, and I'll say that I've been sore for four days! Hopefully it gets better, but even if it doesn't I feel better getting out and doing something every day.

Our title hopefully means that next week we will have more exciting things to share, maybe even pictures. . . We might even try making our own fresh tortillas this next week. So tune in next week for our next post!

Park, Pizza, and French Fries

This week we didn't do a whole lot of things, but we did do a few, so we are going to blog about those. Saturday we helped one of the members of our Sunday School class with his Eagle Scout project. It was a pretty cool project. They were laying small cement pads to keep in granite 1/4 mile markers along a walking trail in a Round Rock park. It was good to get out and walk around (We set wood frames in pre-dug holes along the path.) It was pretty hot outside by the time we got done with that job. Daniel and I felt really hot and tired by that point, and we slowly got back to the car. But all in all, it was fun to help with a project,and to move around a little bit.

Sunday we taught Sunday School, and we decided to make treats for the class as a part of our lesson. We made a fruit pizza crust at home and then had the class mix up the frosting and put on the fruit. A 1/3 of the class was not interested in eating the treats, but there were plenty for those who did want them!

This week we also tried out the Five Guy's down here in Austin. (Daniel would like to note that we do talk about food pretty much every week on this blog. That is true, but our food adventures are more exciting than our sitting around the apartment adventures.) The burgers were excellent juicy and fresh. The potatoes were from Rigby Idaho, ( I always check to see where the potatoes come from when we go to five guys) but the fries were not well salted so they were a little disappointing. We were also sad to discoverer that they do not have any fry sauce down here at the the one we visited. Maybe next time we will ask for some extra mayo since they don't seem to have the fry sauce.