Hope 5k

Bryan ran and won the Hope 5k this year. I didn't take many pictures, but here's a few just before the finish.







This year it was nice and not too hot. It rained just after the start of the race. Thankful that this race's after-party is indoors.

Cookbook Review: Bayou Cuisine

This is one I inherited from Mimi. It was published by St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Indianola, Mississippi. I kept thinking it was a South Louisiana cookbook, but I was wrong.

Here's what I made:

Shrimp in Beer - I really liked this concept, but it tasted funny. Not sure if it was the beer or the roux.

Comeback Sauce - I now solemnly swear never to be without this in my fridge for the rest of my life.

Lemon- Barbecued Beef Loaves - just alright. Not very lemon-y which is why I was intrigued by the recipe in the first place.

Garlic Green Beans - good. Super easy weeknight side dish.

I had two other recipes marked to try, but for some reason life got busy that week and I never got the chance to make them.

LuniTECTs Tour: Beale St. Landing

This past Wednesday we were able to tour the construction site of Beale St. Landing. While still in progress, this was a hard hat zone.



This did not do anything for our hair.





Oh well. The view was amazing.





Looking forward to seeing this project complete and how it effects the downtown scene.

Goodbye

On Saturday Bryan and I said goodbye to our sweet baby girl, Bosco. To say that we are heartbroken is an understatement.

We find ourselves amazed at how she effected every little thing in our lives. From where we put things to how we hold a napkin. Our whole life has been turned upside down.

It will take a while for us to adjust to a new routine, the quietness of the house, and absence of such a fun dog.

Childhood recreations and reflextion

I read this article on busy-ness a couple of weeks ago and Bryan and I have discussed it several times since. We talked about it again this morning and I've been thinking about one point the author makes in particular today.

"Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life."

I've been thinking about the free hours I spent a child and what that means for me. Is that who I should be or what I should do? What did I do in particular?

I guess it depends more specifically on the age. When I was small I played with dolls and dollhouses. Making up stories and playing house. Decorating and redecorating the houses (I had several), arranging and rearranging my dolls lives. As I got older I made friends and we rode our bikes around the neighborhood. Playing in ditches, swinging, jumping on trampolines, or just feeling the wind in our hair as we rode along. Sometimes though I would write stories. I guess I was too old for dolls so I wrote down what I would have imagined for them. Horses, camps, boys, clothes.

Does how I spent my free time as a child reflect on who I am or who I should be? Should I find a career making up stories, decorating houses, or playing in ditches? Okay, actually, it sounds kind of fantastic. Besides the ditches part.

But I do a fair amount doing things I avidly avoided as a child. Cleaning the house, gardening and yard work, helping in the kitchen. Some of these things I have to do out of necessity as an adult. I don't like to clean my house. But I do like gardening. I do not like yard work. I like food, therefore I enjoy making something delicious.

One thing is for sure, though. I am eternally grateful for the free time I had as a child. Children these days are not given the freedom that I grew up with. To spend hours on end doing whatever they want, generally unsupervised and the freedom to do it. Children these days seem to have such a structured, safe life. I feel sorry for them. Will they know who they are? What they like to do and what they don't like to do? Will they know how to sit by the creek and just watch the water float by without feeling like they are missing something or should be doing something else?

In our discussions this morning Bryan was talking about one strength of a good leader is knowing what his/her strengths are and focusing on those. I may not know what my strengths are yet in the work place, but I do know one strength I have is to relax. To know when and how to relax. I'm thankful for this skill as I see so many people these days wear themselves out. May I never fall into the "busy trap."

Bathtime

Someone had a bath recently....



And someone didn't appreciate it.

Backyard Update

I'm way overdue for a backyard update. We've been working nearly every weekend to make progress. Hour and hours of sweat, blood, and a few near-tears things are taking shape.

Check here to see some befores.

What we've done since:
- removed a few bushes
- removed a bunch of slate from previous walkways (this is not quite complete yet)
- pulled up boards and railroad ties
- removed tons and tons of monkey grass (okay, so we didn't do this, but Bryan's parents were kind enough to remove it for us so they could reuse them.)
- Tilled garden section
- Rearranged patio furniture











Still to do:
- Finish picking up slate pieces
- Measure and cut boards and put into place
- Set out walkways
- Build beds and plant
- Move purple bushes around the evergreen tree
- Build new beds and plant new bushes according to plan
- Remove wild flowers
- Remove remaining monkey grass
- Throw a huge party to celebrate completion of the project!!!

Big Decisions: Garden Design

We've been working for weeks towards getting the garden ready. We had a plan and we have been working towards getting the area clear. This weekend's project was to get it laid and measured out. Not cuts, just layout. It still took hours, but still... progress people.

As we were laying out, we came into some problems. For one thing I don't think our plan is to actual scale of our yard. For another, half of the space in the plan would be taken up in walkways and boards. Call me selfish, but I want as much garden space as possible. So we improvised.

First we tried to lay out some of our boards closer to the original plan. Use your imagination here and see what we were working with:




This plan would give two rectangular beds in the center and four triangular beds on the corners. We adjusted the corners from the original plan to eat into the pathways around the edges of the bed.

So then as we were playing around with the boards I got the whim to try two triangular beds with a center pathway down the center of the garden area.



We moved things around a little bit more to make things symmetrical. We both decided that we liked this arrangement better and we're going with it.

Still to do:
- Finish picking up slate
- Measure and cut boards
- Set boards and create walkways
- Find decent dirt to fill in beds
- Plant!!! (I have okra and cucumber seeds started to transplant in a few weeks.)

July Funk

One of the things I like about this blog is that I love to look back at the previous years to see how I felt and what we were up to in years past. Since its the beginning of July I wanted to look back to see what we did in July in the last four years. There's nothing. I think in the last four years I have one or two July posts at all. What happened?

I've come to realize that in July I get in a funk. Its so hot that its difficult to do anything. When its over 100 degrees I go into a cooking strike and refuse to make and sometimes even eat a full meal. Its too hot and I have to exert too much energy.

I'm feeling it this morning. At work my part of the office has been without air conditioning for two and a half months. Now that another in the office has blown I have zero patience with my co-workers who are recently without air.

My patience for anything in general is at an all time low. So if you come across me in the next few weeks, its not you. Its the July Funk.