Sweet Relief

Oklahoma was the hottest state ever on record for the month of July.

And today it is so beautiful outside I just want to sit on my front porch all day long and read. I think I might get pretty close to actually doing that :). I'm also making some banana muffins and I've got some red peppers and tomatos from the farmer's market I want to freeze, so it looks like I'll be periodically checking the oven in between my hours of reading and relaxing. I've just started (okay restarted) the Creative Class. It looks very interesting, but also very much like a college textbook, so we'll see how far I make it!

Do you ever feel like your brain is handicapped? Like you were designed to be able to process so much more than you actually can? Okay I know this is when you all go umm yeah duh the fall is a reality. I think it's just been really clear to me lately that my ability to process and to think through things and to dream is also crippled. I wish I had the energy and the knowledge to think through so many things and yet again my days are made up of limited hours and my brain is oh so limiting. Okay that's very abstract I know. Let's see if I can think of examples.


- I wish I had the time and energy and brain power to get a degree in city planning. I know random. But recently there have been lots of discussions about our neighborhood and how to build community and about pocket neighborhoods and minimizing the effect of cars and encouraging foot traffic and well basically I just wish I knew more about it all! Or at least had the time to learn about it.

- I wish I could understand people better. Understand what makes them upset, understand what makes them feel loved, what makes them laugh, how to help them be more creative, how to help them learn what their callings are in life (okay I wish I also knew all these things about myself haha).

- I wish I could cook healthy meals every day that would only take 5 minutes and no planning and that the food would magically grow in my garden haha.

Okay I know I'm longing for heaven. I think it's interesting how at different times in life you long for different parts of heaven. Sometimes you long for healing, sometimes for no more need, sometimes for no more sorrow, sometimes to see the people you love, and apparently right now I'm longing for a brain that isn't limited by the fall!

Just One of Those Days

So these past two weeks have been crazy. And I know I always say this haha, but seriously I have been running around like a chicken with my head cut off at work. I have a bunch of unanswered - make that unread - emails, it takes me hours to be able to return phone calls, my lattes are cold before I even realize time has passed, and I have a list ten things long that probably should have been done on Friday but 5 oclock was there and it was time to head to the bar to wish a coworker farewell as he heads off into retirement. Odd how life passes right in front of your eyes.

Anyway, so today I have been very worn out and let's just say it was one of those days. It started out fine with a nice trip to the farmers market to grab veggies so I can try out my new dehydrator! Yep yep spencer surprised me with a dehydrator :). So right now I'm trying out a zuchinni and squash chip recipe. I'll let you know how they turn out! Oh right back to one of those days, so we got home from the market and Spencer started carnitas for tonight and I started making a tomato soup recipe to eat sometime later this week (I'm finding I really like cooking on Saturdays; it's relaxing and it makes the rest of the week a little less crazy). So the soup was all done simmering and I went to put it in the blender to make it smooth and creamy and then it all started.

So I went to blend it and all the steam put pressure on the blender lid and even though I was holding it down boiling hot tomato soup went flying all over the kitchen, all over my arm, all over my clothes and well you get the picture. So after washing off my arm and icing it down and changing clothes and Spencer helping me wipe red paste off the walls and counter and floor, we went to try it again (this time with the soup being a little cooler). Spencer held down the lid and I turned on the blender. Disaster strikes again. The little plastic part in the middle of the blender lid fell down into the blender and before we could turn the blender off little chunks of plastic were all blended in with my soup. At this point I cried. Mostly because it all happened so fast and I had to unplug the blender to get it to stop and my soup was ruined and my arm was burned and my blender was broken and well yeah I just cried. So we tried to get all the plastic chunks out but apparently our blender works really well, even on plastic! There are tiny pieces all throughout my soup. So I bought a really fine strainer and hopefully I'll still be able to eat it!

Okay so then it was off to pedicures with my work buddies. That part was nice :). I got home a few hours later and found Spencer in the bathroom washing gasoline out of his eye. Yeah apparently he had been mowing the lawn and it shot a three foot stream of gasoline all over him and into his eye. Thankfully he got it rinsed out quick and it looks like no biggie. But still just add that too the list.

Then Spencer went out to finish mowing and I moved on to cleaning the house. I cleaned up the soup mess and put up the mail and threw Spencer's gasoline clothes in the wash. Yeah well 30 minutes later Spencer came back inside and yep did you guess it? I put his iphone through the wash. So yeah you guessed it I cried again. The verdict is still ou it's sitting in a bag of rice drying, we'll see if he'll move on to iphone number 3.

So yeah one of those days. Too many things gone wrong for a brain already exhausted. Tonight should be better. Carnitas with Dmac and Libby and Gregg :). And hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to each my zuchinni chips and my strained tomato soup haha.

And We're Back!

Okay so I promise I'll put up a bunch more pictures, but I still need to sort through them all and I still feel like I'm living on Zurich time right now, so it might get a little crazy if I try to write a long post now haha. So here's a shorty post :). Oh the other reason I'm feeling lazy is that when we got home last night, I sorted through all the mail to make sure we had no pressing bills and turns out the city wrote us up for our yard being messy!!! Apparently we needed to mow and get rid of trash and clean up poisin ivy?!! Anyway, just to be safe we spent most of the day so far cleaning up the yard in 100 degree weather. I talked to a neighbor about it, and he said it happened to him before, and he called about it and they pretty much said it's an idle threat. They had a 100 complaints in our neighborhood alone and there was no way they were going to come out and actually work on your yard and fine you for having too high of grass. Looks like we just had some not so friendly neighbor who thought we should be mowing while we were on vacation! Anyway enough on that!

So here are some of my favorite parts of vacation:

Staying in this really peaceful chalet on a mountain side in Leysin. The view really was as good as the pictures online showed. Too bad it rained so much!! The rain did make for a really peaceful week though. We did lots of reading and journaling and talking about life goals and watching old Bond 007 movies and cooking lots of yummy food oh and of course drinking dshot coffee and eating lots of chocolate oh and drinking wine and eating lots of chocolate. Haha basically we ate chocolate whenever we felt like it :).

Once we got to Interlaken (okay I know I'm skipping lots of details, these are just highlights for now haha), Spencer and I went parasailing!!! It was really amazing! The sun came out just in time for us to see the famout trio of snowcapped mountians, the Eiger, the Jungfrau, and the Monk peaking out of the clouds and the view from the air was spectacular! Running off a cliff into the air is pretty fun too :). Yes I know I might be crazy, but it was probably my favorite part of the trip!Another great part of the trip?! These people went with us :).

Okay this doesn't really show anything in particular from the trip, I just liked this picture :) and yes it was cold enough that I had to wear my ski cap at least half of the trip!!! No 100 degrees and sunny in the alps!!

Okay so we had a really fun time, but it's also nice to be back in good old US of A where everyone speaks English, and I know what road signs mean, and ice is readily avialable and movies don't cost 30 bucks a ticket!!! (we paid over 60 bucks to see Harry Potter the finale in Zurich!!) and drinks don't cost 10 bucks a piece!! (we paid 20 bucks for an iced tea and a frap from starbucks!!!) and I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm going to get in trouble for getting on a train I don't have a ticket for (umm I'm pretty sure we did that a few times in Italy, not to all fellow travelers, the Italian public transport cannot hold a candle to the Swiss one)! Home is pretty nice :). And so is our little dog, okay okay I know she's not little but I love her.

Alright off to do some laundry!

Countdown!!

We leave in less than a week!!! Let the countdown begin. Okay who am I kidding we've been counting down for at least a month now :). I keep thinking someone is going to call me and say, you can't go on this trip, who are you kidding you're too young to go by yourself HAHA. As if I haven't already traveled half way across the world by myself before! Maybe I'm just nervous because I'm so looking forward to it that I really hope something doesn't happen to ruin it because I'll probably just start balling in the airport if they won't let me get on the plane haha.

Only a couple things left on the to do list like:

- don't forget contacts
- leave numbers of hotels we are staying at with our housesitter and the fam
- don't forget dshot coffee (don't worry we already bought it, and a grinder to take along, I know we are full out snobs on this point ;) ha)
- book one more place to stay in interlaken
- drop off our sad little crushed car at the repair shop
- decide what books to bring!!

Okay that last one is the hardest! I always end up with ten books that I want to read and I really think I'll read them all so I pack them all and hate myself as I'm lugging them through the airport and then I end up reading maybe two of them. But it's better than having no books :). So I'm thinking I'll limit myself to four books this trip. One useful book, two fun books, and the Bible. Maybe I'll actually get through all of those :) well I probably won't read the whole Bible, but you know what I mean!

Alrighty I'm off to make homemade pizza and hang out with my little sister, woo hoo!!

Oh and update, insanity is crazy. My legs hurt everyday! Even after the once a week day off they still hurt! And every time we do a video I feel like I'm going to die at least once and our floor has more sweat on it than I would like to admit. Hahah TMI. But I think it will be worth it, verdict still to come . . .

A Little Time to Think

So this weekend we celebrated our anniversary and took a little road trip to Kansas City in the boss's Mercedes :). Driving in that car definitely makes you feel cooler but also a bit ridiculous when you step out of it. I kept expecting people to ask if we were borrowing our parent's car for the weekend! I was supposed to take pics of the trip on my bday camera to get in practice for our Switzerland trip since I won't be taking the old ball and chain (translation: work owned iphone haha) with me. I took exactly zero pictures. So looks like I'll just have a trial by fire haha. Or I'll have no pictures of our trip which would be HORRIBLE. I'm sure the mountains and lack of phone will inspire me to use it once we get there :).

Anyway, so we basically did what we would have done in Tulsa, but somehow it's so much more enjoyable when you know you can tell people you'll be out of town and unreachable for the day. We ate yummy mexican after walking around for an hour trying to find a less shady mexican resturant. Turns out the shady looking one was delicious and one of the best ones in town! We watched HGTV house hunters international (okay we don't do that at home because we have no cable haha), slept in (which was awesome!! I mean we love Blitzy but she loves 6 am on Saturday mornings alot more than we do!!), went to the City Market where we picked up some yummy looking peaches and mushrooms and grabbed breakfast at a diner, hit up the Broadway coffee shop, drove through some super nice historic neighbors looking at people's landscaping, ate some more mexican at Chipotle and then did some shopping in a fancy pants part of Kansas City, like our Mercedes was one in a million kind of fancy shopping! Okay I'm not sure you would call it shopping haha. We walked around Crate and Barrel for over an hour just thinking about ideas for house and left with nothing. We walked in and out of a bunch of clothing stores and bought nothing and actually the only thing we bought the whole weekend was some fancy tangerine flavored balsamice vinegar that is going to make some amazing salad dressing!!!

So yeah the weekend was nice and relaxing and we got to talk about all kinds of things and dream a little about what we want to do with our lives. No answers yet, just thinking :).

Okay so I did take some pics this week of a sweet garden feast we had with the neighbors and Dmac!! First Spencer made some fresh spicy pesto from all the basil growing in our garden. And it was delicious!! I can't wait to use the leftover pesto on some pasta :).

Then we also made a salad from our fresh lettuce and cucumbers.

Then we finished it off with some yummy fresh squash. Oh and some fish and scallops that were not from our garden :). Okay this is not a picture of the actual squash we ate, but you get the idea haha.

Okay one other random thing, ha I guess I should post more often so my posts aren't so rambly and random :). We started doing the insanity workout a week ago!!! Okay you should just google it. It's a really intense 60 day workout video series that is all plyometrics and crazy jumping and millions of pushups and well let's just say after every workout we have to sit on the couch and recover for awhile afterwards!! We took before pictures, but I am not posting those ;). If we turn out with six packs and dropping 30 lbs a piece maybe we'll post some tasteful after pictures haha.

The Tale of the Rabbit

Ha the pun in the title is making me laugh to myself. Okay so this Friday night we were driving home from wedding number six I think (I'm starting to lose count!). We were cruising down 75 when all of a sudden a deer attacked our rabbit!! Spencer swerved to try and avoid it, but it still managed to run straight into the side of our poor little car, which now looks like this:

Thankfully neither of us were hurt, just more than a little shocked. Also thankfully we didn't hit anyone else or go flying off the road. So pretty much it could have been way worse. But still the whole side of our car is all smashed up!! And the front mirror is useless! We'll see what they estimate the damage too when we get it appraised later this week. It's totally drivable but it looks awful :( .

On a happier note the 95 degree weather we've been getting early this year has been making our garden go crazy with happiness. Oh wait maybe I'm the one crazy with happiness when I see all these little healthy beauties growing in our yard haha. I'm sure if you had to grow your food for a living it would be much more stressful but I still think I would have loved to have lived 100 years ago and watch my food grow all spring and summer long. I guess I'll just expand my garden a little every year :).

We've got a whole bunch of squash:

This baby I finally picked today and I can't wait to eat it!

We've got a bunch of cajun bell peppers that we think are ready to pick but no one is really sure haha. They definitely aren't the size of normal bell peppers but they don't look like they are getting any bigger either. So we'll probably be making some fresh salsa soon!! Woo hoo!!!

Well actually maybe not so soon. We had these lovely 3 almost ripe tomatoes growing in our beds and I was so excited to pick them today and get to try our first ripe produce. Well besides a few snap peas I've eaten for snacks haha. But then someone stole them!!!! One was stolen three nights ago and then the other two were gone when I went out to look at them this morning!!! Sadness and woah. I'm sure someone enjoyed them but I wanted it to be us!!

So I guess we'll be waiting till some of the others ones ripen to enjoy fresh salsa. Till then we'll be discussing security measures for the garden ;).

Edit: My faith in humanity is restored haha. Our neighbor picked them because he noticed one had split and ants were starting to get in it. He nicely brought them over yesterday afternoon along with some ribs and potato salad and a bunch of rib bones for Blitzy!! Man we have the nicest neighbors!!

A Little Memorial Day Rest

So this weekend we took a much needed little trip to the lake with our neighbors. We soaked up sun and watched the dogs play and talked about life and drank cheap beer and roasted marshmallows and I did lots of reading because I'm not so good at sitting still and doing nothing haha. I'm working on it okay! It did make me want it to be July though! Where we could be sitting and drinking coffee, looking at the mountains from our Swiss chalet. Okay okay I'll stop rubbing it in :).

So we went up to the lake on Saturday evening but the whole place was booked! Instead we hit up Spencer's parents last minute for a place to crash and cook our camp food. It turned out to be really nice to just get to chill at their house and get to sleep in the airconditioning and shower, I know , I know we are whimpy :). It also meant in the morning we got to sit in the coffee shop and chill and read and then I got my bday present early after a spur of the moment to Best Buy to check out their sales!! Woo hoo Spencer got me a new digital camera so I can take lots of sweet pics of our trip to Switzerland. So I tried it out some this weekend :).


First on our babies haha chilling out in Spencer's parent's backyard.

And then on some lake shots. Haha chico george loved the water! He would start paddling before he even got to the water :).

Okay alot more has been happening in life besides our trip to the lake, but I'll have to blog on that another time. My brain is too worn out from being on the computer all day everyday!!!