Hello, Mr. Dillinger. Thanks for coming back early

Tron debuted in 1982 as an animated sci-fi movie about a programmer who was sucked into a computer and had to battle the Master Control Program (MCP) in order to come back. They may or may not have intended the movie to be funny.

It was funny.

And classic.

We had a Tron party this weekend complete with Tron food. Jon and Michelle Cook, Amanda, and Erik and I got our nerd on and watched both Tron and Tron Legacy. We stayed up until 2am but it was worth it!

Here are some pictures of our awesome nerdy tron food.

Tron cookies - yes those are circuits (good and plenty circuits!). Made by the Cooks

Tron cake with edible silver fondant and glowsticks on top! Made by the Cooks

Motherboard wheat crackers made by Erik

Motherboard brownies (notice the tootsie roll capacitors). Made by me! Note: those graham crackers got nice and stale very quickly - yum!

Prior to our Tron party everyone (minus me) in our family got really sick. Jenna and Sarah both missed school, Matthew was sick, and Erik was lying on the couch for a day moaning. 

It was bad.  There was a lot of  sickness. Luckily I did not get sick. We think Erik got so sick because the steroids he was on due to the poison ivy weakened his immune system.

Sarah, home from school sick, lying by the fire taking a nap.

 This week (in the midst of the sickness) we got a cord of wood. Here it is in our driveway. Now we have a lot of wood to burn over the winter to stay warm.

cord of wood

65 points on quiddler today!

Maybe I'm the talkative one

Our little Lady bug is now 7 years old. She had a fabulous birthday party with 11 talkative 7 year old girls in attendance. So talkative that Erik had to hide in the computer room for awhile.

At Jenna's birthday party the girls did a lady bug craft from Oriental Trading Company. The craft was fun but required a lot of gluing. Thus it was a little messy.

Now I am one of three people in charge of the nursery/toddler ministry at church. When I went to Oriental Trading I went a little wacko and bought a ton of crafts for the nursery/toddler ministry. They really have tons of cheap, cute crafts for little kids.

Hard at work on the crafts

The girls loved the craft

Jenna's Birthday cake - red velvet cake with chocolate frosting (so it had lady bug colors!)

In other news:

1. Our Coo* book club finished the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and we are now currently reading Catching Fire. This series is really good and Erik and I have been discussing our theories about what we think will happen. This is a great read!
2. I am also reading Watcher of the Dead by J.V. Jones. This is book 4 of the Sword of Shadows series and I highly recommend this series.
3. Finally Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan came in from the library. When I reserved it initally I was number 700 something so it took a long time for me to get this book. Just like the first Percy Jackson series, I'm enjoying this series as well (this is book 2 in the Heros of Olympus series).
4. I'm also reading the Case for Christ as well. This is well-written and engaging.
5. So those are the books I'm currently reading. I'm also debating another series. Erik is reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. He thinks I'll like it.  I just don't know - the first book was so broad I'm not sure if I'll like it. I'm still deciding. Erik keeps saying "but Tim is reading it" since he thinks I'll read whatever Tim reads.
6. Matthew is now walking, however he is not talking. Help Me Grow is an organization that will give him free speech therapy starting February 1st. I hope he will start talking soon. Now he does the "more", "all done", and "shoes" signs but that's it. The girls were basically talking in full sentences at 19 months and he is not saying much at all. I hope they help him.
7. This semester has been tough and I'm barely keeping my head above water. I wasn't sure how I was doing since I am teaching 4 new classes!  However one of the online deans called me today and said I was doing an awesome job and wants me to talk about my experience to all the online faculty in Engineering and IS on a conference call in a few weeks. Wow! That is pretty exciting. So I guess they like me :).
8. And I'm on the committee planning the faculty symposium in Chicago in April.  I'm excited about this since I'll get to meet and work with faculty across the system.
9. Our church has changed their name to Gateway Community Church. I'm pretty excited about our name change. We even had a big party to celebrate. We changed the lighting during our worship (pretty colored lights!) and got fancy TV's and touch screen computers out in the main area. It is pretty awesome.
10. We are starting a 6 week series on the End times in our Tuesday night Bible study. We've had so much discussion from doing the Heaven series by Randy Alcorn that everyone wanted to study the End times.
11. This weekend we are going to have an awesome Tron party with friends.  We are going to stay up late and watch both Tron movies and eat Tron food. It should be a blast!
12. I had a lot to say!
13. 76 points on Quiddler and I got to make the word "teasing"

Chopped Basket 1

Chopped is a TV show on the Food Network in which 4 chefs compete for $10,000. They get a basket with all kinds of crazy foods in it and have to make a coherent dish out of it.

I thought this would be fun to do. So I got a Chopped Basket for Erik. It contained:

• Tilapia
• A pomegranate
• Crunchy potato topping
• An onion
• Mike & Ike candy

Now you may look at that list and say "HUH?" But that is exactly the kind of crazy things in chopped baskets on the show (well maybe not exactly - they might have squid and chocolate covered raisins but believe me the combinations are weird).

Erik's chopped basket

 Erik transformed this odd assortment of food into a really good dish. He encrusted the tilapia with a mixture of onion, potato topping, and crushed up gold fish crackers (yes this is Erik remember).  Then he made a sauce out of pomegranate seeds and Mike&Ikes. He put this mixture in refrigerated crescent roll dough to make a side dish. Then garnished the plate with more of the sauce. 

The sauce was surprisingly good. The whole dish was actually delicious. The tilapia needed a little more salt but other than that I thought it was great!  I am looking forward to doing more chopped baskets - this was fun!

Erik's dish plated for us!

On Friday Erik's poison ivy had gotten so bad that his right eye was swollen shut. It was all over his face and hands and he had trouble doing simple tasks with his hands.  This was not good.

So on Saturday I pulled the car out of the driveway to go to church and the tire blew.  Bummer. I drove it back into the garage slowly and carefully. Erik really couldn't change the tire because of his horrible poison ivy. And I can't budge those lug nuts to save my life (Gina != strong)

So Erik took the other car to the emergency room and got a steroid injection in his butt. Yes his butt. His poison ivy was so bad they couldn't put it in his arm because the dose was too strong. Wow! Now he is on steroid pills for 15 days. He looks and feels so much better. His hands hurt but today we were able to put the spare tire on the car.  It required some fancy maneuvering for both of us since his hands still hurt but he was able to loosen the lug nuts enough for me to get them off.  Hopefully they are tight enough to drive the spare to the tire place!

Note: we did the chopped basket last weekend before the poison ivy attack

93 points on quiddler today!

The FIRE!

Last Friday I came home from Zumba with Sarah and Matthew in the car. I pulled in the driveway as Sandy my mail lady was delivering a package. She said "I hope you get something good!". I said "it's probably for my husband since he is always ordering things."

Little did I know.

Erik looked at the package and said "you're going to like this". It was from J.Cooper. Huh?  Erik said it was an early birthday present. Apparently waaaay early since my birthday is in July.

I opened it.

Oh my!

It was a brand new Kindle Fire. Awww yea! 

We have been addicted to our new device. Actually Sarah has been addicted to it. Fortunately she hasn't installed any apps yet .  The girls call it an ipad because they are used to Uncle Dave and Aunt Becca's ipad.

Thank you Joel! 

What should I get Joel for his birthday?  A trip to Europe? A bugatti veyron? Head reduction surgery? Lifetime supply of reeces peanut butter cups? The sky's the limit!

I got some pictures from Becca from our time at the in-laws for Christmas I thought I'd post. David has made a cross stitch for every one of his nieces and nephews. He finished this really cute one for Sarah.  I didn't get a good picture though. If I was awesome at photoshop I'd fix it up.



Cross stitch created by David for Sarah



Uncle David and Sarah making Christmas ornaments

Me and Jenna making Christmas ornaments

Grandpa's 3 level train set. The girls love it!

Uncle David reading a Weird Al children's book to the girls

My favorite picture. Grandma's reaction when she saw the ultrasound of Dave and Becca's baby!

Since Erik has been crazily chopping wood for our new fireplace, he's been outside a lot. Touching lots of vines and things. And now he looks like a monster. His face and arms are completely covered with poison ivy. Every night he wakes up in the  middle of the night unable to sleep because he's so itchy. So he takes a bath in baking soda. I feel so bad for him.

I haven't been sleeping either but that's because my classes are killing me this session. I have 4 classes with 2 new preps. Three of them are an obscene amount of grading. Just trying to stay on top of them I'm up until after 1am every night. Yikes!

Please note: Jenna starts selling girl scout cookies on the 14th Please order soon :)

39 points on quiddler today. Not good :(

Grapefruit and Brioche

For Christmas Joel and Megan got me the Bread Bible. David had previously got me The Bread Machine Cookbook by the same author and I loved it so much I wanted the other book.  From the Bread Machine cookbook I've made many recipes (usually I just use the dough cycle and bake them in the oven so I can control it better and prevent the funky hole in the bottom of the bread). Anyway, I've made brioche several times from my bread machine book. In the Bread Bible, the recipe for brioche rolls requires the dough to rest 16 hours. Wow! I was curious as to why the dough would need to rest so long and what difference it would make.

Oh my!

These were the best rolls I've ever made! Restaurant quality for sure. They melted in your mouth. While you can't really taste them from the picture - they were truly divine.

Also in the picture you will notice the MASSIVE bag of grapefruit.

Brioche = Yum, Grapefruit !=Yum

Erik found this bag of grapefruit at Meijer for only $5. He is not on the grapefruit diet. However he has been eating 1-2 grapefruits every day. He's a little obsessed.



I don't like grapefruit.

In fact, I actively dislike grapefruit. This is how I feel about grapefruit (I wouldn't use the bad word though).

Every year we decorate a Gingerbread house for Christmas. We decorated this one after Christmas but it was still fun. Jenna and I love to decorate the house but Sarah spends the whole time asking if she can eat the candy....

Our Gingerbread house

 Matthew has reached 18 months now and is not talking. We had him evaluated by the Delaware County Help Me Grow and he qualified for speech and physical therapy. So we will have therapists to our house once a week helping Matthew talk. I wonder if they could get our girls to talk less....

If you are wondering if he's walking, check this out :).


Daddy reading to all the kids



93 points on Quiddler today

3 ways to reuse and recycle in your home (assuming you have a wood stove)

1. Make your own fire starter. To easily start fires for our wood stove, we bought a box of fire starter. Seems like a good idea right?
Can we make it ourselves though? Turns out we can.

Erik researched fire starter and realized you can make your own fire starter by putting dryer lint in a dixie cup then melting wax on top.  He melted some broken crayons (surprisingly with 3 kids we have broken crayons!) on dryer lint to make a fire starter.

We used it this morning to get our fire started and it worked perfectly! Even for someone as fire-creating challenged as me. I tend to forget about the fire and let it go out :(. We've only had the wood stove a few weeks so I'm sure I'll get used to it.

2. Use wood ash to make soap. Our fire everyday makes a lot of ash. While we could just throw it away we wanted to find a good use for it. You can use wood ash to make lye, then mix it with tallow (or fat) to make soap. To gather fat, I *had* to make some bacon and we saved the fat in a tupperware. When we have enough ash we are going to attempt to make lye. I'll let you know how this goes. I'd like to wait until it's warmer. Bacon soap - nothing better :).

3. Composting (you don't need a wood stove for this). We bought compost for our garden last year. This seems a little redundant since you can make your own compost.  So we got a compost bin and are now composting.

It seems wasteful to throw away dryer lint when we can reuse it for fire starter or throw away old lettuce and veggies when we could compost them.  It is especially wasteful since we turn around and buy those items!

We are looking around for more ways to reuse and recycle and reduce our trash!  Hopefully we are more environmentally friendly now.

101 points on quiddler today. I made the word "watering" and the word "hm". I didn't realize hm was a word but now I know!

New Gifts

 Merry Christmas!  We had a fabulous Christmas and New Years. We spent a week in West Virginia with Erik's parents and visited with Joel and Megan and David and Becca. I forgot my camera so no pictures will be forthcoming. Bummer.

We found out really exciting news over Christmas though. We will have a new niece or nephew next July! Yipee! 

Dave and Becca are expecting a new little one next year. They were very sly about telling everyone too. We had no idea until we were unwrapping gifts. Becca casually (I could never pull this off by the way) handed a gift to my Mother-in-law and when she opened it, there was an ultrasound picture inside.

How cool is that?

For our next baby I'll use that tactic.  Of course, there needs to be another baby for that to happen :).

Instead of a new baby, for Christmas this year we spent a lot of money on a flat screen TV we mounted on the wall and a wood stove. Here I have before and after pictures (although you can't really see the TV in the after picture).

Before



After

Our wood stove is so amazing! It is warm and cozy to have a beautiful fire in your living room. Now we actually have a hearth! Erik gets to be manly by chopping wood in the backyard.  Bonus! Now he is always on the lookout for dead trees to cut down for our stove.  Hide your trees!

Since I can not stop modifying recipes. I've decided to modify the brown butter sea salt cookie recipe I've been using. I added cocoa powder, sugar and cut the flour and salt to make dark chocolate brown butter sea salt cookies. They tasted fantastic but Erik thought they were too puffy. I'll be cutting the cake flour in the next batch and see how that works.  When I get it right I'll post the recipe.

Dark Chocolate Brown Butter Sea Salt Cookies

 On Dec. 23 we celebrated Sarah's  4th birthday. We had a bumblebee themed party complete with bumblebee suckers, coloring pages, and crafts. Everyone had a blast and Sarah received tons of polly pockets as gifts. Now we can suck up polly pocket items in the vacuum play with polly pockets to our heart's content!

Happy Birthday Sarah!

An action shot

Bumble Bee craft we did at Sarah's Birthday party

94 points on Quiddler today!