♫ I've Got the Whole World...

on my floor. ♫

This was from quite a while back but I just now found the pictures on our less-used camera. I was laying on the floor and was somewhat bored or restless. I ended up creating artwork using the carpet by brushing the fibers in different directions. Here is the result:

Tada!

Toby-zilla!

This one is supposed to be Jeran.

Snow Days

We had a very fun and exciting weekend. Although we didn't get the 6"-12" of snow that was forecast, we did get a few inches followed by the right conditions to turn that snow into a hard shell on everything that wasn't immediately cleared off.

Church was canceled on Sunday and driving was discouraged (because a lot of the people here apparently are idiots when it comes to snow driving). We made lemons into lemonade and had a wonderful friends-, food- and fun-filled weekend.

We ate at Panda Express on Friday night and then played fun games at R&L's.

I didn't realize just how comprehensively I missed the snow until we were driving and fishtailed on a turn and the only thought I had was a wonderfully nostalgic thought along the lines of "Now this REALLY feels like home!"

Saturday morning, Jeran shoveled our sidewalk and then tackled our friends driveway and sidewalk with a square-mouth shovel. We had sausage egg sandwiches and muffins for breakfast at A&M's and then relaxed and played games.

We also got to play with the cutest baby ever (R&L's). She has learned lots of new things recently like crawling and grabbing anything that looks interesting. She had a hard time moving around on the hard floor though.

We also managed to fit in some homework, apparently unnecessary Sunday lesson planning, and a few other things around the house.

Saturday night we went to R&L's and ate delicious Hawaiian haystacks. We played Bananagrams, Pears in Pairs, Call of Duty (blagh), CatchPhrase, and Rock Band.

In CatchPhrase, the girls stomped the boys by being quick-witted and using ESP:

"Uh, This is something Michael Jordan did."

"Moonwalk!"

"Yes!"

"It's a baseball team."

"Orioles!"

"Yes!"

The boys lost. Example:

After having separately guessing the words "laser" and "beam",

"Now put the two words together!"

"Tractor beam!"

"No"

"Tractor light?"

"No no no! The other word!"

"Tractor beam?"

"NO! The word from before!"

"Uh.............."

BUZZ!

Sunday morning, I slept in since our 9:00 church was canceled. At 11:00, R&L and A&M came to our house for Sunday brunch (Biscuit cinnamon rolls, hash brown and sausage breakfast bake, and muffins). Then we relaxed, watched Johnny Lingo (two people had never seen it!) and one or two of the New Testament lesson supplement videos and played Risk. It was my first time playing Risk the real way and apparently it was a non-typical game, since it only took about an hour (with 6 players) with Mary dominating the world in a very small number of turns. I think I still prefer my made-up way.

Then A&M taught me and Jeran how to play Agricola. It was pretty awesome. And not just because I won. :) After wrapping your head around the complexities of the game and it's strategy, it is very fun and interesting and we had been wanting to learn how to play it for some time now.

So all in all, it was a very fabulous weekend. And the snow is still here on Monday - schools are canceled, garbage collection is delayed, etc. but it will probably almost all be melted after today. I can hear it drip, drip, dripping away outside right now...

Pictures from Europe

Some of the highlights from our trip to Europe this month can be seen here.

We had the opportunity to see a lot of Europe with some family members. My sister Lisa and her husband, Cameron, my brother Andrew and his wife, Lindsay, my Mom and Dad, and Jeran and myself, all hopped into a van and went on a fast-paced tour of Europe for two weeks.

We flew into Dusseldorf and went to Cologne and Marksburg Castle in Germany. The next day we went to a few sites in The Netherlands, Zaanse Schans and Amsterdam. Then we went to France and saw the sites in Paris for a few days. Then we went to Normandy and then crossed the channel to England via a ferry. We saw things in London and then some things in the country surrounding London. After that, we headed home. Woohoo! It was a great trip. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Easter Activities

Happy Easter!

Jeran and I did two different things Saturday night for an Easter celebration, of sorts.

Jeran cleared everything out of our shed/storage area and built new, sturdier shelves. There was a lot of stuff in there! This took him all evening but the shelves are marvelous!

















After helping with the shelves a bit, I went to a little Easter egg-decorating party. It was great. There were dyes, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, fluff balls, markers, etc. to decorate eggs with. Everyone did something different; there was a judge, a rabbit, the earth, tourists, a future self- portrait, and others. I decided to do a duckling. Or a chick. Or some sort of bird. Here it is:

Favorite computer games

So I am going to tell you about my current favorite computer games. There are so many! :) There are two main places I go these days to play those little online games when I am bored. First is a wonderful website, Free World Group Games, that is a collection of all sorts of flash games.

There are a lot at this site that I really like but by far the best is Bloons (and Bloons 2 and 3). It is a tower defense game where colored balloons of varying strength, speed, and quantity flow along a course and you try to pop them all with your monkey or dart towers before they make it off the screen.

Another fun tower defense type of game is Ant Buster, in which ants come to your picnic and steal pieces of cake. You place towers to stop them getting the cake back to their hole. You lose when all your cake is gone.

Yet another really fun game at that site is Big Bucks, which is like Monopoly against the computer but faster and more automated and all everything happens simultaneously.

Some other good ones are Garden Inventor, Arachnophilia, QBeez, Beseiged, Orb Attack, Crazy Tracker, Glowstones, Pathfinder, Sprinster, Frantic, Power Pool, Gravity Master, Tiny Trials, Youda Farmer......... I could go on for a good while longer. If you can't find these games, you type in the name on the search box on the right-hand side of the screen that says "Search site" and it should come up.

Another good place for quick online games is an app on Facebook called MindJolt Games. It has tons of easy little games. My favorites are Brain Bones, which is a dice strategy game, and Bubble Spinner, which is really fun and addictive. In Bubble Spinner, you shoot a bubble at a wheel that spins a little when you hit it and when you get 3+ bubbles of the same color, they pop. You can't let the bubbles hit the side of the screen or you lose. It's a good one.

Cooking with Mindy

So I've made a few good things for dinner recently (nothing new or exciting, but still delicious).

We have the old family classic Cheesy Vegetable Soup and Breadsticks. I have not been a very successful breadmaker in my life but this batch of breadsticks that I made was probably the best I have ever made! They were so light and fluffy and delicious. Yumm. I made the dough in the bread maker using the recipe from Grandma Hatch's cookbook. For seasoning I did some with just butter, some with Garlic salt, and some with Garlic salt and Parmesan and/or Romano cheese.

I also made some really good Stir-fry. Almost ever since we first moved here, I have not been able to find water chestnuts in the grocery store. Finally I found some at this store that I never shop at. Woohoo! Stir-fry time! I found a good and easy recipe for some stir-fry sauce online (I can't remember where, but it was probably Allrecipes.com). You simply stir-fry your vegetables (carrots, onions, peppers, broccoli, sugar peas, water chestnuts, etc.) and meat if you want it (the veggies are so good the meat is not necessary in the least) and then mix this sauce through. Serve over hot rice. DE-licious!

Stir Fry Sauce

1/2 cup chicken broth
3 Tbsp low-sodium soy sauce
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp distilled white vinegar
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 1 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp peanut oil (I use sesame again)
3 Tbsp minced peeled fresh ginger
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper

1) In a small bowl, combine the stock with the soy sauce, sugar, cornstarch slurry, vinegar and sesame oil. Stir to dissolve the sugar.

2) In a medium saucepan, heat the peanut oil until shimmering. Add the ginger and crushed red pepper and cook over high heat, stirring, until fragrant and golden. Add the stock mixture and boil over high heat until thickened and glossy, about 1 minute.

Suggestion: Can add some garlic and some fresh orange juice instead of all that stock and 1/4 tsp salt.

A Great Opportunity

Today I got to do something that you don't get to do very often. Some people don't even have opportunity to do this thing in their lifetime, and that is a shame because it was an exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got to smash a toilet with a hammer. It was awesome! Since we accidentally cracked the base of the toilet when remodeling our bathroom, we recently got a new toilet. After an unsuccessful trip to the dump today (they were closed - it's Saturday! geesh!), we decided to smash it into good sized chunks and just throw it in our garbage can. Hence the smashing. It makes me think of those places where people pay to go in and vent their anger by smashing everything and ripping the place apart. And to think, we got to do the funnest part fr free! (minus the cost of the new toilet)

I don't think we appreciate very often that our toilets are most often made of ceramic, the same material that those delicate figurines that always break are made of. Well, apart from being a lot thicker, it broke just like you might imagine those figures breaking if you took a tiny hammer to them. Yep. It was fun. I pity those who don't ever have the opportunity to intentionally destroy something permanent that we all use on a daily basis.

On a different note, we also went today to the nearby fire station for some suthun BBQ pork. Twice a year they host a BBQ dinner and we decided to go for the southern food experience. They had pulled pork BBQ, Beaufort stew, coleslaw and some little fried bread things that looked like little fingers. It's probably some southern food that no one else eats. All in all, I was not very impressed. I didn't like the BBQ! I only made it half way through the meat and I can honestly say I didn't enjoy it for a minute. The stew was pretty good and the coleslaw was typical. I still can't decide what to think of those little fried things. Probably because I don't know what to call them. Anyway, they tasted like onion rings but less good. I guess I will never turn into a good old southern girl after living here.