Halloween: Are we convincing?

For Halloween this year we decided to go with one of Mark's favorite Canadian tv shows, not to mention the ONLY Canadian show he likes!  Normally he would have been Red, but as Harold is taller than Red, I "got" to be Red Green, and he dressed up as Harold Green.  The picture isn't so great because we took it after our branch Halloween party, so the makeup is a little funny looking, and I just look like a bum.

Them...

Us...

Baking and Stuff

Don't laugh when I say this, but Mark and I would like to someday open our own bakery.  That way we can bake all kinds of great things, but then other people will eat most of it, and we won't gain weight!  What brings this up is that we are trying to avoid watching TV.  I know, what does that have to do with baking?  Well, we mostly watch TV when we get bored.  Sundays, unfortunately, can often fall under the category of boring.  There is only so much scripture reading and Ensigns that you can read on a Sunday, right?  So then we think, let's just watch BYU TV, which is great and all, but about 5 PM they have some pretty lame shows on, so we turn it to a different channel, and thus opens the black hole of television that sucks us in.

Back to the point.  In order for us to avoid watching television on Sundays, we have begun cooking and baking together on Sundays, and we love it!  Not to mention I have found this totally awesome website, AllRecipes.com, that has about a bazillion recipes that are really great, and have ratings from other people who have also tried them, with tips on how to make them even better.  Wow, I am really rambling!

Sunday at church  the Elders reminded us that we were having them over for dinner, again (for the third time in a week, we love feeding the Elders!  Great taste testers.), but we didn't really have a complete meal available without going to the store.  We had half of several meals, but not everything.  The closest we came was to hamburgers, but no buns.  So, we decided to make our own buns!  Seriously, this website makes you feel like you can do anything!  When we got home from church we got busy making dinner. 

My specialty, unfortunately, is dessert.  I made a pumpkin roll, which I LOVED even though no one else did, and I also made some gluten free pumpkin cookies for a friend since we were going to their house to play games after dinner.

Mark is the bread man!  He read this book which I blogged about previously, and he now specializes in bread.  Speaking of which, he made some Pumpernickel Rolls in his dutch oven for our branch's Manly Man cooking contest last year (blogged in the previously mentioned), and on Sunday a member made a specific request for them for the Halloween Party next Saturday.  Holla!

Man, I am seriously rambling!  So, any way.  Mark made homemade (obviously!) Hamburger buns.  They were really good, especially for the first try!  With the exception of the mixing and kneading (the KitchenAid was all over the place!), here's the progression...

And here are my cookies and Pumpkin Roll...

The Pumpkin Roll looks funny because it is wrapped in plastic.

Tonight my culinary skills fell flat, though.  I had 5 Granny Smith Apples sitting on my counter, and decided I would give candied apples a try.  They were candied all right, the candy equivalent to an Everlasting Gobstopper!  We ended up peeling the chocolate/caramel coating off and just eating the apples.  Notice the distressed look on Mark's face...Sad!

I am going to use the other 3 apples tomorrow for an Apple Bread Pudding using some bread that Mark made.  Hopefully that will turn out better!

Frog Legs Anyone?

All I have to say is BARF!  

Although Mark and I have been riding bikes and such, I am still taking the dogs for walks in the morning so that they can get their exercise in too.  Polly, as mentioned in a previous post, is a beast.  My biggest frustration walking them is Polly tugging on my arm, because she is so strong.  She is really good at coming back to me when I tell her to come, and if I tell her to heel she will walk beside me.  The problem is if she sees something interesting, she forgets she is attached to a leash, and takes off after whatever it.

Since she is so responsive to me calling her, I have just been dropping her leash when there aren't any people around, and she usually stays right behind my right leg.  Today she was feeling a little more adventurous, and would run off the trail a little ways, then come running past us (Ros and I).  As we were nearing the Ped bridge, I realized that Polly hadn't been tapping my leg like she normally does.  I looked back, and she was about a half mile back with her head in some brush.

I called her name and her head popped up with a frantic look on her face.  After she didn't immediately come, I called her again, and she buried her head back into the brush, and then came running.  I saw something black sticking out of her mouth, and I figured she was just eating another stick (Yes, she has eaten sticks before) and I was prepared to dig it out of her mouth when she got to me.

As she got nearer I could hear a popping sound, and I just though it was her breaking the stick she had found.  She ran up to me and I grabbed her and lifted her head up, and what I saw was a little something like this...

 Barely able to resist barfing, I decided that a mouth swipe was not the best idea.  This one I would let her have.  Although, I did send a quick text to Mark telling him that his dog had just eaten a frog, and if that was bad.  He responded, "Only if it is poisonous."  My response, "Ummmm."  My thought, "Didn't get a chance to test it before she crunched it down!"  She is still alive, so I assume that it wasn't poisonous, but she has been hopping around a lot more than usual today!

The biggest problem is that I can still see the foot sticking out of her mouth, and I can still hear her crunching on the bones, and all over again I want to barf!  Yuck!

No worries, my afternoon bike ride with Mark went better, he didn't eat any frogs.  Although I do think both of us inhaled some bugs.  We biked out to Lake Manawa in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and we loved it.  The 13 mile part wasn't so great, but the scenery was amazing!  I love Autumn, and Omaha/Council Bluffs does a pretty good job of showing it off!  Not to mention as we were headed back there was a field full of deer running and playing around.  So neat!  It was initially supposed to be an 8 mile ride, but we took a wrong turn, or I should say we didn't turn, and it ended up being 13 miles.  My bum is a little sore, but it was well worth it!  This is kind of what it looked like tonight.  Once again we forgot our camera, so this is a picture that I found that is pretty accurate of what we saw.  We will definitely be doing that ride again!

What exactly does "Take it easy" mean?

Yesterday I donated blood at my former community college.  I try to donate often, and it has been almost 6 months since I last donated!  Not the point though.  When I got my finger pricked I told the guy that he had to squeeze extra blood out to get the right hemoglobin levels for me to donate.  Something about the freshly picked skin mixing with the blood usually results in levels too low for me to donate.  Any way, he got a little carried away so when he finally put the band-aid on it quickly filled up.

He takes me over to the chair, hooks me up, and starts draining me.  The whole time he was standing close by, which is highly unusual, asking me how I am doing.  Because he keeps asking I figure he wants a different answer besides fine, so I start complaining about my finger.  First response, thinking he would laugh, I say "I think I am hemorrhaging from my finger!" To which he quickly starts defending himself, saying "You told me to squeeze it extra.  You told me to."

So then he asks how I am doing again, and I say "well, my finger really hurts!"  He quit asking.  Still not the point. 

The point of this post is, just as I was leaving he tells me to "Take it easy."  I didn't think much of it, until I started trying to take it easy.  By about 6 o'clock I just couldn't stand taking it easy anymore, and I suggested to Mark that taking a "leisure" walk would qualify as taking it easy.

So we head down to the MO River, and start off on our leisure walk with the dogs pulling us.  All is going well, we get across the beautiful Ped bridge, and start heading towards Harrah's, which happens to be a riverboat casino (and no we weren't going there to gamble, that just happens to be where the trail goes). 

For some reason last night Mark decided that he was going to walk fast, and about this point I am starting to realize that for the first time Mark was walking ahead of me, which continued the whole way.  Not to mention I ended up with Polly's leash several times, and she is a handful to keep up with.  She is about 40 lbs of almost solid muscle.  (The nurses at the vets office have mentioned several times how strong she is, usually just as they are sticking a needle in her butt.)

After crossing over the bridge and then under the freeway, there is suddenly this large cloud hoovering around our heads, which I was unable to see clearly because I had once again forgotten my glasses.  Mark starts swatting, and complaining about the swarm of mosquitoes and we start to run, with the swarm close at our backs.  Luckily we were able to get far enough ahead of them that when a jogger came past going the opposite direction they changed directions and went after the jogger.  We made it to Harrah's then turned around.

Then on the way back we were heading up the Ped bridge, and realized just how steep the Iowa side is.  Yikes!  ( Sorry about the bad pictures, but what do you expect from a camera on a phone?)

So I posed Mark the question, "What exactly does "take it easy" mean?  Does running from mosquitoes, being drug around by a dog, and climbing up a fairly steep bridge count?  If so, then I guess I complied with the blood sucker's orders!

Plateau = Biking

Mark and I have both hit a plateau, weight loss wise.  I have been reading up on how to get over plateaus, besides just exercising for 20 of the 24 hours in a day, and the common consensus is to do something different. 
So today I pull our bikes down off the walls, dusted them off, (and there was a ton of dust, sad!) pumped up the tires, and we went for a 9 mile bike ride tonight.  It was tougher than I was expecting it to be.  I guess I just thought that since I used to ride bikes all the time and it was a piece of cake then, that I could hop right on and it would be the same as always.  You know, like that saying about learning to ride a bike, you never forget, or something.  Apparently that only applies to the balancing part.  My muscles definitely didn't remember. 

We rode across the river to Iowa, and north to a park right on the river.  It was a beautiful park, very quiet and secluded. 

As we headed back we began realizing all the things that we didn't have for biking, mostly on my part.  For example, I don't have a helmet or reflectors on my bike.  I was wearing all dark clothes, so I pulled my pant legs up to my knee, figuring that my extremely white legs would be a sufficient reflector under the circumstances. 

Oh, and I forgot my glasses, and at night my vision is especially bad.  Other than that, it was rather a pleasant ride. 

Great New Website

For those of us that need to begin reading the General Conference talks early in order to finish them by the next Conference in April, The Church has a new website dedicated solely to Conference.  Very Handy!